She sat down on the bed, lifted the gun smoothly and calmly, pressed the barrel to her temple—

And stopped.

Across a thousand years, through a dreaming machine, Mara Zhu looked at me. “You have something in your eye,” she said.

And soon, I was sure, my eye would burst. “I know,” I managed.

“The others all died.”

“I know. Did you program the nanomachines to do that?”

Mara Zhu spoke calmly, the barrel of the gun still held directly to her temple. “Yes. We deserve to die for what we’ve done. We all deserve to die.”

“Nobody deserves to die,” I said. Nausea was rising in my throat, and my skin felt hot. It was hard to speak, to speak Ameng, to speak clearly. “What happened here was evil. But you’re still hurting people even after you’re dead. How is that helping?”

“You want to take the data,” Mara Zhu said.

My head was cracking open. Like Brigid, I thought. Splitting down the skull.

“I don’t want anything to do with your data,” I said.

I was going to die here. I’d known I was going to die the minute I faced down the Dreamer-bots, but it was taking longer than I’d hoped. I was going to die here. I could feel my head splitting.

Mara Zhu’s voice cut through the agony not like a sound heard, but like a thought.

“You have something in your spine,” she said.

I blinked open half-blind eyes to see her sitting on the bed, a little above me now—at some point, I had fallen to my knees. The barrel of the gun was still pressed to her temple, and an instant after I blinked my eyes clear she pulled the trigger. The side of her face shattered, blood and brains and torn ragged flesh. Like Brigid, I thought. Like Brigid.

Her body fell to the bed like a puppet, limp limbs; the gun fell to the floor and rolled beneath the bed. Somehow I knew she’d had only one bullet in that gun.

A thousand years passed by in an instant as I watched, my brain spinning feverish. Mara Zhu’s body bloated and blackened and rotted, from skin to bones until it was nothing left but a stain on the wires of the rotted bed, and the Ministers standing around it solemn and radiant like angels of death. Number One and her followers had survived the destruction of the hull, then. They’d reached Mara Zhu’s office—and found nothing inside.

And then the humming got louder and louder, in my ears, my eyes, my skull. Something was burning inside my head, seizing through my face, melting my bones. Brain damage? I wondered, Tamara’s voice in my head, and I would have laughed but I was too busy gagging up chunks of my own insides.

I came to face down on the floor of the server room with a ringing head and a solid ache in the back of my neck, radiating down shoulders and over the top of my skull. There was something sticky on my face and ears, and when I reached up to find out what it was, my hand came away red. I’d bled from my ears, my mouth and eyes.