The vision of my two companions blinked at me. “Don’t want it?” Tamara echoed.

“Think of the power it would give you,” Indigo reminded me.

“I don’t want it.”

“Think of all the good you can do,” Tamara said earnestly, and she had the same hungry eyes as the scientists in the photo.

It was like the Senator all over again, insisting I take his generous offer. “But what’s the cost?”

CHAPTER SIXTY FIVE:

The Last Words of Mara Zhu

PART TWO

“The only excuse I can offer future generations is that the human race was going extinct,” said Mara Zhu.

I did not wake up on the floor of the server room this time. I opened my eyes to a small bedroom, lit only by a computer screen in one corner of the room, the light of it partially blocked by a woman’s figure.

“They might still kill us, but I don’t think so,” Mara Zhu said, seated in front of the computer, recording her final words. I walked carefully around the shadowed edges of her bed until I could stand beside the desk and watch the side of her face as she recorded the very video I’d watched several days ago.

She looked more like Indigo in person, or maybe she only looked more like Indigo because now I knew what Indigo looked like when he was dying.

“What happened here was evil,” Mara Zhu said. There was a handgun resting on the desk beside her hand, out of the view of the computer’s camera. “It must be forgotten, it can never happen again. I’ve done what I can. I’ve sabotaged the embryos,” and that was it, that was why the Ministers had come here, that was the darkness in Number One’s eyes, “I took this ship as close to a supernova as I could before the others stalled the engine,” and that was why here and now, a thousand years later, I waited on the edge of extinction.

“I can’t fly us into the sun, but they can’t fly us out,” Mara Zhu said. “Sooner or later the sun will explode and turn all this to dust.”

“Later,” I said, but the hallucination, or recording, or whatever, she didn’t react. “Much later.”

“The others are holed up in Lab 17 with the data,” she said. “I can’t get in to them, but they can’t get out with it. I’ve guaranteed it. If you find this ship, or if the star doesn’t go nova soon and you find this log, I beg you. Leave the ghosts here in peace.”

My head was pounding, a pain so deep it stopped feeling like pain. There were claws in the base of my skull.

“The final log of Doctor Mara Zhu,” Mara Zhu whispered, and shut the camera off.

The light in the room dimmed, but the hallucination did not end. Instead, Mara Zhu stood up from her desk chair, picked her pistol up from the desk, and walked back around to her bed. I pressed a hand to my skull and tried to track her progress through the lightless flashes in my eyes.