A divine warning or my brain putting together a pattern in my dying moments. Was there a meaning to it? I’d been wrong to trust a Minister; my sympathy had been taken advantage of, but just because he’d been in pain didn’t mean he was on my side. Tamara had been taken in by it, too, but I wouldn’t let that trust cause her death. I’d watch Indigo now, more closely than I had before.

I was so lost in my thoughts I didn’t immediately realize why Tamara had stopped. She’d led me across the little room and to the far door, where she had stopped.

“Lab 17,” Tamara said.

The door was the same one I had seen in my dream. I went cold.

Something wasn’t right. “That’s written in Ameng,” I said to Tamara. “How did you read that?”

“I’m not a total idiot. Half the doors in this ship are labeled Lab Something, and the numbers are easy to learn,” Tamara said. She was gazing at the door with a strange, rhapsodic expression. “Come on. It’s right through this door.”

Before I could stop her—before I could summon a reason to stop her—she gripped the handle and slid the door into the wall.

The room beyond was similar to the one I’d seen in my dream, though not quite the same. It was medium-sized and dark, but the shape of the walls was different—different, yet somehow familiar. There was a little alcove in the back, draped in shadows. The size and layout of the room reminded me, weirdly, of Brigid’s bedroom back on Kystrom.

In the center of the room, covered in dust on a rotting old table, there sat a crystal. The Philosopher Stone.

The déjà vu was making me nauseous. How had I dreamed this? Had I dreamed it, or was this the brain damage from the nanomachines making me think I had dreamed it before? I would swear I had seen this room, seen that crystal, before.

But the crystal now was dull, covered in thick dust, the way it should be. The room had more details, corners and odd edges, not a shapeless shadowy space.

Indigo paced in behind me, silent and dark, a shadow and a wind.

I turned to watch him. I’d been distracted before, in my nightmare, or my vision. I’d been distracted and I’d missed the moment until it was too late and Lantern-Eyes was dead. I wasn’t going to miss it this time, if there was going to be a this time. I was going to stop—

The crack of gunfire split the air and Indigo’s head jolted back on his neck before his whole body went limp and collapsed to the floor, dark-blue blood spreading in the light of his glowing collar-stone.

I looked over his corpse and found Lieutenant Gupta lowering her one-shot gun.

“Good thing I saved that last bullet,” she remarked, and tucked her empty gun away.

I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t feel anything. But it wasn’t the absence of feeling, it was the moment before the train car hits; nothing but the wind and the sight of solid metal coming towards you down the tracks.