He withdrew his hand. “No nanomachines,” he reported, and I saw that his palm was empty.

If there had been Dreamer-bots in my eyes, they would’ve flocked to him. You have something in your eye. There was nothing in my eyes.

It was suddenly impossible to just keep lying there. I pushed myself up and found myself caught by two separate sets of hands.

“Rest for a minute,” Indigo told me. A trick of the light made his dark eyes warm.

“You were dead just a minute ago,” Tamara said, sounding angry. “Not comatose, Sean, not unconscious, not sick, dead. We revived you but no one just comes back from that. So sit still a minute.”

Dead.

But I hadn’t been. I’d seen things—no, I’d lived things. I’d felt and smelled and heard things. But I couldn’t have. Tamara was alive in front of me, and there was no Philosopher Stone.

In a sick way, it made sense. The Dreamer-bots had killed every human they’d come in contact with, at least as far as Tamara had seen. They must have killed me and then flown off, leaving my body behind for Lantern-Eyes and Indigo to find and revive. But then what was it that I’d seen while I’d been dead? A nightmare? Dead men didn’t dream.

But dead men might glimpse what came after death, if they believed they could remember it on waking. I said, “Do either of you believe in Heaven or Hell?”

There was a terrible little pause.

Carefully, Tamara said, “Sometimes, in extreme moments, the brain… hallucinates. That’s what near-death experiences are. If you… saw something, Sean, it was just your brain firing unrelated synapses.”

That would explain the weird, surreal vision warps; seeing Brigid’s body lying dead where the Stone sat. And yet so much of what I had seen felt horribly real, and horribly true. “You don’t think it meant anything?”

“Maybe your dying subconscious put together a pattern that you hadn’t consciously recognized,” Tamara said. “But was it a message from beyond? No.”

Indigo watched me over her shoulder, impassive inhuman face.

“Okay, up you get,” Tamara said. “I think the sooner we find what we’re looking for, the sooner we can get you out of here and into medical care.”

Her words rang through my mind like an ominous bell, tolling through my body. She didn’t seem to notice, and as soon as she had helped me up, she walked off, leading the way again, out of the server room and into the little room nearby. Indigo lingered.

My imp prodded me with a devil’s pitchfork. “What do you think, Indigo?” I asked. “Do Heaven or Hell exist?”

He gazed back at me with his dark-water eyes, currents flowing beneath I couldn’t recognize. And I’d thought he’d been so transparent to me when he’d been dying.

“I believe I will never know,” Indigo said at last.

It was too hard to keep looking at him directly, and seeing overlaid my vision of him cold and cruel, murderer holding the Stone. I turned away and followed Tamara.