“Guys, please,” I begged, but it was like they did not hear me. Lantern-Eyes drew her gun as Indigo drew his knife, and the crack of her gunshot was followed by the sick wet sound of the knife going into her neck. She choked wetly, grabbing at her throat; on the other side of the table Indigo fell to the ground, hemorrhaging blood he couldn’t afford to lose from a hole in his chest.

They were too far apart for me to go to them both. Indigo bled to death on my left while Lantern-Eyes suffocated on my right, blue blood and red blood spreading over the floor on either side.

On the table, untouched and free for the taking, the Philosopher Stone shone, uncanny.

I wasn’t holding a flashlight or anything. Nobody was; just Indigo with his collar-light. Yet I’d never had any trouble seeing anything in the hallway or the room without a source of light.

This wasn’t real. None of this was real.

I sat in that room between their bodies, feeling half-removed from mine, until the uncanny light from the Philosopher Stone dimmed and went black.

CHAPTER SIXTY TWO:

Third Eye

The fourth time I awoke it became clear to me that there were two distinct possibilities. The first was that I had died and been sent to a very specific, possibly ironic version of Purgatory. The second was that infection by Dreamer-bots had some effects that Tamara Gupta hadn’t been aware of. Like detailed, wild hallucinations in the hours before death. Given the aching in my skull, which seemed particularly physical and therefore unlikely to exist in some kind of afterlife, I was leaning towards option two.

I opened my eyes to Number One bending over me, owl-eyes cold, collar-light gleaming a cruel violet. “Oh, this is new,” I said.

“Get up, Mr. Wren,” One said, and leaned back away.

I sat up. My head was killing me, the low-grade ache that had been present in the last three… nightmares… fast on its way to a full-blown migraine. Surrounding me in the server room was not just Number One, but numbers Three through Seven, and Benny and Quint huddled together in the back like the world’s sulkiest captives.

“I don’t suppose you know where Indigo and Tamara are,” I said.

“We found Number Two and a Republican soldier dead a few rooms away,” One told me. “It appeared that Two had bled out from a wound in his abdomen, and the Republican had been savaged by some sort of beast. Her throat had been bitten out. If you’re hoping for rescue, give up your hope.”

I’d watched Indigo and Tamara die twice each now, and I was pretty solidly convinced that this hallucination was about as real as the last three had been. Still, grief hit me, all the more powerful for being unexpected. I could imagine them travelling around the door I’d sealed, trying to get to me; being attacked by something and Indigo tearing open his wound trying to protect Tamara but them both dying anyway.