“Get to the back,” Tamara directed us, hard. She was backing into the room behind us, club upraised. “It will take some time for the gas to take effect. If we’re too close to the door, they’ll still be able to kill us.”

I could hear a hissing sound from some unseen vent. The trap had been triggered.

Indigo staggered suddenly, and when I braced him, he refused to move. We weren’t even halfway across the room yet. “Come on,” I said, and I could’ve dragged him, but I was afraid of hurting him worse than he already was. “Indigo, come—”

“The Ministers are dying,” Indigo said, through gritted teeth. “Sean. Tamara. The Ministers are dying.”

If this was some sort of metaphor, it was badly timed. “You’re gonna be all right. We have to get deeper in the room.”

“The Ministers are dying,” he insisted, but he moved when I did this time. I could smell that weird metallic tang now, stinging my nose. “There’s something wrong in our genetic code.”

Like an electric shock, it hit me. Mara Zhu saying: I sabotaged the shipment.

She’d meant the Ministers.

Mara Zhu had poisoned her own creation.

CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN:

The Shedding of Blood

Indigo was heavy against my side, a physical reminder of his mother’s crime.

“We need the data to save ourselves,” he said. Indigo’s voice was fading in and out; he couldn’t quite find his footing. “We need the Philosopher Stone.”

I glanced back at Tamara but saw only her hunched shoulders, guarding the door.

“We need the data,” Indigo told me, and I finally understood what he was asking.

“You’ll get the data yourself,” I told him, instead of the promise he wanted, and then the first of the manikins came through the door.

Tamara shouted behind me, but it was rage and not pain, so I didn’t look back. Indigo was heavy under my arm and the air smelled like sour metal and we were still not quite at the back wall when he folded.

I carried him the last few steps. He was gasping like a beached fish, eyes glazed over. “Tamara—”

She had backed up to stand over us, facing the manikins that were still coming into the room. “Put pressure on his stomach.”

The ground was dirty; I didn’t want to put his head down. I looked around wildly for something to put beneath him, one palm under his skull, reaching out to his stomach.

There was not one wound there, there were several. Claw marks that had scored home. When I pressed down against them, lacerated flesh shifted wetly under my hand. Behind me, I heard Tamara shout.

“Do you need help?” I asked. My own voice sounded weirdly far away.

“Stay with him,” Tamara said. “Make sure he keeps breathing.”

She’d said the gas would only knock him unconscious! “Is stopping a possibility?!”

“He’s bleeding out and drugged on top of it! Make sure he’s breathing, and put pressure on that wound,” Tamara said, and drove another staggering, hissing manikin away from us.