My arms were shaking, and the gun had gotten very heavy at some point between when I’d picked it up and now. I lowered it to my lap. “I don’t want it,” I told Indigo. “I don’t want it.”

When he did not kill me, I looked up again. He watched me over the table, the Stone in his hand.

He said, “You have something in your eye.”

A weird horror climbed its way up my spine, like a thousand little needle-sharp feet marching under my skin. “What?”

“You have something in your eye,” Indigo repeated.

Blinding pain hit me in the back of my skull, right below the implant. The world went black.

CHAPTER SIXTY:

Eye for an Eye

I opened my eyes to the Indigo Minister bending over me, a worried expression on his bloodless face. I recoiled into hard metal at my back. The floor, I was lying on the floor.

“Is he awake?” Tamara Gupta’s voice echoed, out of sight. “Is he all right?”

Hard to speak with a knife through your throat. “What?” I said, and my voice came out hoarse and dry.

Indigo sat back. The open worry on his face had vanished, leaving expressionless impassivity behind. I regarded that calm mistrustfully. I’d last seen him standing over me with the Philosopher Stone in his hand, and Lieutenant Gupta’s blood underfoot.

Tamara Gupta herself shouldered her way into my line of sight, shoving Indigo back. Beyond her head I could see the ceiling of the server room. I wasn’t in Lab 17. I was in the server room, where I’d already woken up. Where I’d dreamed I’d woken up?

“Hey,” Tamara said. “Sean. Can you understand me?”

It was still weirdly hard to understand what she was saying, like she was speaking an unfamiliar language. That wasn’t nearly as weird, though, as speaking to someone who a minute ago had had cold steel driven directly through her windpipe.

A thought jolted me. “Do I have anything in my eye? Tamara, look!”

“Okay, okay!” She pressed me down with a hand on my collar and used the other to peel my eyelids back. It was exactly as uncomfortable as it had been before. Had seemed before? I’d already been here and done this. What was going on?

She released me. “I can’t see anything. Why do you think there’s something in your eye?”

I’d watched you die. “Because I saw… I—”

“You did get attacked by the Dreamers, I guess there could still be traces in your eyes,” she worried.

It was difficult to breathe. Maybe there were Dreamers in my lungs? “Could they cause visions?” I asked. “Could they make me see things?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Indigo pushed past her suddenly, close to me—too close. I tried to flinch back again, unable to shake the image of him expressionless and cold with the Stone in his hand. His palm laid over my eyes, cool and solid. I exhaled and tried to control my instinctive need to flee.