Indigo had already risen. I saw the scratches on his jaw as he looked out towards the hall.

In the instant Tamara’s hand closed around my wrist, hauling me up, my vision warped again. The room in front of me—the same room where I’d passed out, server room with a working computer not far from where I lay—became an odd mosaic of disparate pieces. Indigo was feathers, talons, manikin claws and blood on the sidewalk. Tamara was a swirl of Mara Zhu’s horror-struck face and the photographs of the smiling scientists, in weird tessellation with the Republican ships in the clear blue sky leaving Kystrom behind. My eyes struggled to recognize Tamara and Indigo’s now-familiar forms in the noise.

Just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. I blinked black dots out of my vision from the sudden change in elevation, and pressed my palm against my pounding skull.

Tamara patted my back. “Okay? Anything else wrong?”

I lowered my hand. “I’m fine.”

“Okay. Now, if you can walk a straight line, I’m ready to tell you that there’s no brain damage at all.”

She steered me towards the little room. The door was open. I thought I saw the lock panel intact, but when I blinked my gritty eyes, it was still broken—smashed, like I’d done before the Dreamer-bots had arrived. I wondered how Tamara had gotten the door open.

There was a stain of dried blood on the floor of the little room where Indigo had lain. When I blinked, that violet blood became red, not on the floor of the Nameless but on the floor of my parents’ kitchen back on Kystrom, a trail leading deeper into the house.

Then I blinked, and it was just a dark stain on the floor of the Nameless again. Whatever was wrong with my vision was starting to freak me out.

“Here we are,” Tamara said, and stopped at the far end of the little room, where the second door was located. I blinked until my vision cleared, looking at the door, and realized that inscribed upon the front was the Ameng words LAB 17.

“No way,” I said. “It was right there all along?”

The center of the labyrinth. The one thing everyone on this ship was looking for, that we were all fighting to get; the thing Mara Zhu had died trying to destroy and the other scientists had died trying to protect—and we’d stumbled there by accident, looking for a temporary haven. Tamara, Indigo, and I had almost died on the doorstep of immortality.

It was curiously unreal to be here at last. Getting here had been hard—almost fatally difficult, in fact, for all of us. And yet it seemed abrupt that we should be here, with no final obstacles to clear. Nothing but us and the Stone.

“Some good luck at last,” Tamara said.

And then she pushed open the door.

Lab 17 was… not what I’d expected, insofar as I’d expected anything. On my first step into the room behind Tamara, my vision warped again. I saw… fragments, little repeated fragments of things I’d seen before. I recognized the three solid tomb-like doors I’d seen on the other side of the ship, and there was a huddled shape in the middle of the room, distorted but still, blonde hair and BRIGID—