I eyed my companions warily. Tamara and Indigo were thin skins over running code, nothing more than programs. Hell, the whole room was. Tamara and Indigo weren’t any more real than the walls or the floor. If you could peel off the skin, you’d find the same abstract code behind; they were indistinct from their surroundings, just different textures projected on a wall.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself from meeting their eyes when they spoke, from trying to read their expressions. “You keep asking me about the Stone,” I said, wary of the implications, but slowly beginning to understand, “as, what—a sort of password prompt?”

The avatars of the AI smiled at me benevolently. “The Dreamer cannot give you the data until after you enter the correct password,” Tamara said.

“And the correct password is…?”

“Do you want the Stone?” Tamara asked, and gestured down at the pristine crystal, gleaming on the table between us.

I stared down at the crystal. “It can’t be that simple.”

“It’s that simple,” Indigo said. He was still smiling at me, beaming, showing all his teeth.

It was surprisingly unsettling. “I, uh, I’m not sure I understand why everyone else has been dying,” I said, eying those teeth with suspicion. “This seems like a really simple test.”

But it wasn’t, I realized. It was only simple if you could understand the question being asked of you. There was an ache in my head that had grown steadily worse and worse with each cycle of dreaming; I could see how that ache could grow until it killed me. If the only way to break the cycle was to give the AI the correct answer—well, you’d have to understand Ameng to understand what question was being asked.

Aside from Tamara’s translator, none of her teammates had spoken Ameng. Her translator, probably, had been killed by a different monster—or had given the wrong password.

And yet, the ache in my head was powerful enough to almost blind me. It was centered around the implant at the base of my skull. I didn’t know how long I’d been here, on this ship. For all I knew the world outside was on the verge of destruction in a dying star.

I’d given up on the Philosopher Stone already. Maybe I could get it through the computer, by answering the password prompt correctly. But the data would be stored in a physical location somewhere on the ship, and that place was Lab 17. Indigo and Tamara had already headed there. One of them, or both of them, would get the data they needed.

The real Indigo and Tamara had, anyway. These photorealistic shells were here with me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to let that comfort me, but the strange thing was that it could.

I’d made my peace with what would happen to me the moment I shut the door on Tamara. It was done. At least in dying, it wouldn’t seem like I was alone.

“I don’t want it,” I told them.