Tamara was breathing so hard she almost couldn’t speak. “This is it,” she gasped. “Listen, when we go in, Indigo, the gas will affect you too. It won’t hurt you, but it will knock you out.”

“What is this?” Indigo’s voice was ragged. “What trap?”

“I’ll explain everything later,” Tamara said. “Trust me.”

“There shouldn’t be a trap on this ship that would work on a Minister,” Indigo said. He was shaking under my arm and I really didn’t understand how there was any blood left in his body. The manikins’ scratching was getting louder; catching up. “There weren’t any Ministers on board when Mara Zhu tried to destroy the Stone, so there shouldn’t be any traps that work on a Minister unless they have been added recently. What trap, Tamara? Why is it here?”

Lantern-Eyes looked at us, still breathing fast, but that old familiar hardness settling back into the bones of her face. She said, “Because I was ordered to catch a Minister alive.”

CHAPTER FIFTY SIX:

Trust Me

PART THREE

“My mission wasn’t just to find the Philosopher Stone,” Lieutenant Gupta said. “It was also to capture a Minister alive. The Ministers were supposed to find this ship. But the years passed, and my team died, and you still didn’t show up. If the Ministers saw Republican military arrive to rescue me, they would’ve finally noticed this ship—but they would’ve been on their guard. So I didn’t call for rescue. I set off the SOS instead, to lure you in.”

The SOS. That’s why the SOS had gone off, why the ship had only been found now, after a thousand years. Lantern-Eyes’ lure hadn’t just caught the Ministers. It had caught me.

“And now you have me,” Indigo said.

“No,” Tamara said. “This isn’t a trap, Indigo, this is the only way we can survive—”

“What will I be used for,” Indigo rasped, speaking over her, “a test subject? Like Mara Zhu? You—”

“You think you can say something I haven’t thought already, after all this? I swear to you, Indigo,” Tamara said, and breathless as she was it came out harsh and hard, “that if you go into this room now, and we all survive, no Minister will be caught by me or my traps, I swear it.”

Indigo sagged against me. I adjusted my grip on him and found Tamara gazing appeal at me.

I thought about Lieutenant Gupta’s bare-bones pragmatism, the dispassionate way she’d spoken of the ancients’ choice to commit human experimentation on this ship. That, however indirectly, it was her fault I had been sent here.

The scratching of manikin claws was closer, and I could just see them down the hall, eyes glimmering. “I stay with Indigo,” I said.

“So you’ll die together,” Tamara said, but she said it to Indigo, not to me.

“We go into the room,” Indigo said, just as harsh as Tamara, and I had to move with him or risk his collapse.

There was no chance to question his sudden about-face. We were already in the room, and the manikins’ nails scrabbled down the hall, closer with every second that passed.