“Brain damage?” Tamara wondered to Indigo. He met her gaze with equal concern.

“I’m not brain damaged,” I tried to tell them. “There’s something wrong with you.”

Tamara’s palm landed over my mouth. “The Dreamer is gone, but if you keep shouting like that, they might come back.”

I licked her palm to get her to recoil. She tasted normal, salty and a little sour with sweat and whatever else she’d gotten on her hands. But she sure as hell wasn’t acting normal. Lantern-Eyes couldn’t speak Ameng, so why was she speaking Ameng now? And how the hell were both she and Indigo sitting in front of me when I had watched Indigo kill her, and then her kill Indigo, and now here I was waking up again?

“What’s in my eyes?” I asked her, asked Indigo. “Is there anything in my eyes?”

“There is nothing in your eyes,” Tamara soothed me.

She hadn’t even looked. “Check my eyes,” I said. “Indigo, put your hand over my eyes. Is there anything in there? Dreamer-bots? Anything?”

He laid his palm over my eyes. I waited for something—itching, or crawling, or pain; anything. Nothing happened. When he pulled his hand back, his palm was clean.

“There’s nothing in your eyes,” Tamara said. “Are you having trouble seeing?”

“No,” I said. “No, no. There must be something.”

“Okay,” Tamara said, but not to me, to Indigo. “Let’s get him up and get the Stone and get out. The sooner the better. He needs a doctor.”

“You have to be joking,” I said.

“Not about medical care. Up, up!”

Indigo hauled me up this time. I did nothing to help him; frankly, I’d rather stay lying on that floor for a little bit longer. I’d already lived this twice before, and it had ended badly both times.

Indigo dragged me forward. Having carried him in the recent past, I knew how light he was compared to me, but his strength was terrifying. There was absolutely no resisting him.

We entered the little room and stopped at the far end where, as in the past two times I had had this nightmare, the door was clearly marked LAB 17.

“You can read that,” I told Tamara. “You can read that because apparently you can speak Ameng now.”

She glanced at Indigo. “Brain damage?” she asked again, in an undertone. He nodded somberly.

“I don’t have brain damage! Listen, Lantern-Eyes, don’t open that door!”

Lieutenant Tamara Gupta, Lantern-Eyes, that Republican son-of-a-bitch, slid the door into the wall.

Lab 17 looked much the same as it had the last two times I had been here, only this time it looked even more like Brigid’s bedroom. If I wasn’t looking directly at where the wall met the ceiling, I could see rafters.

“This is fucked up,” I said, but they were both ignoring me. “Something’s wrong. This isn’t right.”

The first time I’d been here, Indigo had killed Lantern-Eyes. The second time, Lantern-Eyes had killed Indigo. Someone had died both times I’d been in here, but I didn’t know anymore who to protect from whom. Tamara stalked through the shadows, eying the dusty Stone on its little pedestal. Indigo drifted around to the other side of the table, quiet as a night breeze.