“You shot him,” I said.

Tamara Gupta strode over to the table, plucked the Philosopher Stone out of its nest of dust. She blew on it, sending an ancient cloud drifting through the air. The Stone gleamed clean. “What did you expect me to do?”

The lieutenant turned the Stone over in her hand, admiring its facets. Admiring the data stored inside the crystalline structure.

The Republic was just as bad as the Ministers, I remembered, breathing out in the space before that freight train of grief reached me, inexorable and inescapable and absolutely crushing. They’d summoned the Ministers to Kystrom like Tamara had summoned the Ministers to the Nameless, and both times me and mine had gotten caught in between.

“You made him a promise,” I reminded her. Her aim had been precise. Indigo’s body had a neat little hole between his brows.

“I kept my promise,” Tamara said. “No Minister will be taken alive. Other than that, Sean, it was me or him. What’s done is done. No point in regret.” She lowered the Stone and stepped towards me, walking towards the door.

I moved, without thinking, to block her.

She stopped short, gazed up at me with a wary eye. She was a soldier trained to kill whose instincts had been honed by five years alone on this ship, as merciless and efficient as Indigo had been. But all that seemed to matter right now was that I was taller than her, broader. I knew, somehow, that if I attacked her, I would win.

Lieutenant Gupta said, “So you want the Stone.”

I’d almost forgotten the Stone was there. “No. I want… Why did you kill him? Enough people have died already!”

“Toughen up, kid,” Lantern-Eyes said. “The worlds are at war.”

“I can’t keep watching people die,” I begged her.

“You can. You will. You can’t stop it—unless you have the Stone.”

She held out her hand, palm-up, between us. The Philosopher Stone was a milky crystal between her face and mine.

“With the Stone, you could become immortal, and make the people you love immortal, too,” Tamara told me.

Indigo had been immortal. It hadn’t stopped Tamara from putting a bullet through his head. And taking the Stone now wouldn’t take that bullet back out, or reassemble Brigid’s skull.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

Tamara said, “You’ve got something in your eye.”

It was at that moment, and that moment only, that I realized she and I had been speaking to each other in Ameng this whole time.

“What?” I said.

CHAPTER SIXTY ONE:

What Must Be Seen

I woke suddenly and panicked on a hard floor.

“Calm down, Sean, calm down!” Tamara shouted at me, in Ameng, while Indigo pressed my shoulders to the floor, worry in his dark eyes. “Sean! It’s all right!”

“It’s not all right!” I shouted at her, but now that I knew I was speaking Ameng it was harder to speak, and the words came out translated wrong.