God was punishing humanity, the Chosen believed, because we had created the Philosopher Stone.

All that humanity could be or ever had been was encapsulated by the Philosopher Stone experiments. Right before the alien Ministers had appeared and subjugated us, our ancestors had been at the peak of their brilliance—a level of technological advancement that we were only beginning to reach again now, with the invention of FTL and art-grav. No one knew precisely what the Philosopher Stone experiments had produced, but it was said that they had revealed the secret of eternal life.

The Chosen believed that the Philosopher Stone had not been the victory of humanity. It had been its downfall. We had reached too far, they said, and God had sent his immortal Ministers to punish us. So now, once a week, they took a day to remind themselves that immortal life was denied to us, and one day we all would die.

I supposed I could believe that the God of the Chosen, or the God Who Shed His Blood For Us that my family worshipped, could have sent the Ministers. The Ministers had swept through my hometown Itaka like a plague of locusts, and left the eerie hollow stillness of stripped fields and burnt-out houses and dead things behind. They were humanoid, but not human. Ancient, but unageing. Alive, but not mortal. It was said they could be killed, even though they did not die of age, but in all the horrible things I had seen while fleeing the massacre in my hometown, I had not seen a Minister die.

The ash was soft and powdery against my thumb. I marked the Chosen woman the way I had seen other Chosen marked, a bar across her brow.

“Ash to ash and dust to dust,” she murmured as I did, in old dead Ameng; distorted by the years but still recognizably Ameng. Philosopher Stone was an Ameng phrase, too. In modern Sister it meant something like Thinker Rock. The Chosen were right that we all died one day, but even dead languages left traces.

“You did a good thing today,” the Chosen woman told me as she took the ashes back, dust on her skull like the dust she would become just a few years later, when the Ministers came, just like the Chosen always warned would happen. “May God guide and keep you.”

There was one major problem with Quint’s incredible theory.

“The Philosopher Stone experiments were destroyed,” I said. They’d gone missing at about the time of the First Ministerial War, destroyed by the Ministers to ensure humanity remained under their control.

“Not destroyed. Only hidden,” Quint said.

“Why would anyone hide it? That’s the most important knowledge humanity has ever had.”

“We don’t know. Perhaps ancient humans wanted to hide it from the Ministers to preserve it. Then, when the Ministers won the war, its location was lost.”

“How are you even sure the data is there?”

“The limited historical records we have of the ship where the Philosopher Stone experiments took place match what we’ve been able to observe of the salvage vessel.”