I blinked and the weird distortion was gone again, leaving my heart pounding in its wake. Instead, I was standing in a medium-sized room, dark and empty, except for a table in the center of the room upon which sat a stone.

The ancients had stored their data in crystals, I remembered, gazing at that filmy white stone in the middle of the room. How ironic that their Philosopher Stone was, in fact, a literal stone.

There was no dust on the table. “Careful,” I said to my companions. I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling, like this was all far too simple. “There might be traps.”

“The scientists who hid the Stone wanted it to be found,” said Tamara. She was hidden in the shadows. “The Stone wants to be taken.”

Indigo passed into the room behind me, a shadow and a wind.

I opened my mouth to say something else when Indigo moved, swift and decisive, hurling something that glinted through the air. It buried itself in Tamara’s throat and her hands came up around it, red spilling out over her collarbones, beneath her thick dark hair. The gun she had half-drawn flew out of her hand, skidding over the floor to rest at my feet.

Indigo had thrown the knife Tamara had given him, and with it split her throat.

Tamara dropped to her knees, choking around metal and blood in her windpipe, then collapsed to her side to bleed beside the table that held the Philosopher Stone. My head was pounding, brutal. This couldn’t be real. Indigo hadn’t just murdered Tamara. It had to be, it had to be fake—

I saw, suddenly, with my damaged eyes, the first thing I had ever seen of Indigo. On the ground with Leah beside me, his expression cold as he drew his knife through her throat. My knees hit the floor with an impact that rattled me while Indigo, serene, stepped up to the center table and picked the Philosopher Stone up in one hand.

This was all too simple, I’d thought. No final obstacles. How could I have forgotten that the last and worst obstacle the three of us would face was each other?

Tamara’s gun was cold under my palm, but light when I lifted it. Only one bullet, I remembered her telling me. Indigo, holding the Stone, gazed down at me over the barrel.

“You want this Stone,” he said, with the flat calm that characterized a Minister, the absolute indifference to a human life.

Tamara had tried to warn me about the monster he was. I’d known from the moment I’d met him what kind of monster he was. I’d seen him and his people destroy my planet, slaughter millions.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, over Lantern-Eyes’ body.

“That was our bargain,” Indigo said. He was unmoving, watching me with the calculating, hungry eyes of a bird of prey. “If you kill me, the Stone will be yours.”

I could. It would be easy. Not even Indigo could outrun a bullet, and it would be justice, even, for Lieutenant Gupta’s murder.