“The Philosopher Stone is in Lab 17,” I said, and before she could speak, I shut the door. It sealed shut, and I locked it. Then, for good measure, I grabbed a bit of debris from the floor and slammed it against the controls until they shattered. It would take her longer to break through the door that way, but I knew she wouldn’t try. Lieutenant Lantern-Eyes was clearheaded and pragmatic, and she had Indigo to care for. She wouldn’t waste three lives failing to save one.

Then I went and sat in the center of the room, cross-legged, eyes shut. No point in running, or in hiding. All I had to do now was wait.

The humming sound got louder and louder, approaching as relentless as rain, as inexorable as… well, as Death. I’d have a great story to tell Brigid when I saw her again. She’d be astonished by all the wild things I’d seen. Or maybe she’d be mad, that I died saving a Minister and a Republican soldier, the very two monsters that had murdered her—

The first of the Dreamer-bots landed on my spine, a light touch I barely felt through my shirt. Then the rest descended, a humming, glittering swarm, crawling over my neck and into my mouth and my eyes.

CHAPTER FIFTY NINE:

Something in My Eye

I jolted awake like I’d been shocked back to life, gasping for breath on a cold hard floor.

Voices warped the air, familiar but scarcely recognizable. “Is he awake? Is he all right? Sean!”

I blinked and blinked again. My eyes felt dry and gritty, and my vision was weird; colors and overlapping patterns with no obvious point of reference. I swallowed and blinked and blinked, and then the space before me settled, colors wiping away like water down a drain, and I found myself staring up at the Indigo Minister.

He was about as pale as he’d been when I’d last seen him, a troubling blue-white. His expression was set and hard, and he stared down at me as unblinking as an owl. I reached up one hand for him, half-expecting my fingers to pass through his skin like a mirage, but as soon as my fingertips brushed his cheek something weirder happened.

My vision glitched. There was no other way to describe it. In the weird mosaic that was Indigo I thought I saw One, and Kystrom, and bodies in the streets.

Indigo’s fingers curled around my wrist, removing my hand from his face. The patterns slipped away again, like a puddle of water soaking into a towel. Indigo looked normal again, though pale. My mouth was dry.

“Sean?” said the familiar voice again. Tamara. Suddenly she crowded beside Indigo. “Mother of… Are you okay?”

She was weirdly hard to understand, like she was speaking a language I wasn’t very familiar with. When had speaking Sister gotten so difficult? “I’m fine,” I said, then admitted, “I can’t see right.”

Tamara shouldered Indigo further out of the way to bend over me, her worried face filling my whole field of vision. She pressed her fingers to my face, turning my head this way and that, examining my ears, making me open my jaw. Then she spread one palm over my head and pressed the other to my cheek and peeled my eyes open as wide as I would go.