“These,” Benny continued, still muffled through his shirt, but now pointing at the weird lumps of material, “are bombs. I don’t know if they’ll still go off after so long, but I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of radioactive material packed in and around them too. Plutonium, I think.”

“Why do you think?” I couldn’t see anything distinctive about those lumps.

He pulled his hand back, holding up his handbrace for us both to see. He tapped one of the bars. From this close, I could hear it vibrating slightly against his skin. A miniature Geiger counter.

He’d always been a great inventor. “Brilliant,” I said.

He drew his hand away, shrugged his shirt higher up on his nose. “Plutonium has a half-life of something like six, seven thousand years. There’s still plenty of it left in there. It’s safe enough, unless you eat or inhale it.” Very carefully, he pushed the wall panel back into place.

“Dirty bombs,” I realized.

He nodded. “And if you cut through that wall, you’ll electrocute yourself, or trigger one of those bombs.” He lowered his shirt from his face. “How close do you think we are to the actual Philosopher Stone?”

“The data itself? Probably pretty far away,” I said. “The lab complexes are huge. And I don’t think they’d set up bombs close enough to the data to destroy it—plus, if that would work, Mara Zhu would’ve just blown up the data a thousand years ago. They really didn’t want anything to get through this wall.”

Benny nodded slowly, flashlight back in hand, trained on the solid wall before us.

Something scratched from far away, back the way we had come. I had grown so attuned to that particular sound that I picked it up out of a thousand other small sounds, the quiet groans of a dying spaceship.

Next to me, Benny flicked his flashlight off, and we were thrown into dark.

In that dark, I heard another scuff, a scratch, from down the distant hall. “Benny,” I said. “Do you have any weapons?”

He shifted beside me in the dark. “I have a rusted old scalpel I looted out of one of these creepy labs.”

That was… the phrase ‘bringing a knife to a gun fight’ came to mind, but that was worse. It was like bringing nail clippers to fight a pack of wolves. “Come this way, quiet. Let’s hide.”

I drew him aside, moving through the darkness with an ease that would have made Lantern-Eyes proud. We clambered over a pile of debris at the very far end of the room, and there I drew him down, behind that sheltering mound, and we crouched small and silent in the dark.

The light came in first. A pale blue underwater-glow, as familiar to me now as a friend’s voice.

On the other side of the room, glowing faintly, Indigo and Tamara stepped in together.

CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT:

Sean Wren’s Special New Skill

Indigo still wore Tamara’s jacket. It fit him even worse than it fit her; at least when Tamara had been healthy and not half-starved, that jacket had been her size. It hung off Indigo’s shoulders like a too-narrow hanger. In the blue of his light, the faded red was further softened to a dark violet. Tamara herself seemed particularly agitated, club swinging, circling Indigo twice as she scoped out the room. She was holding a little flashlight, probably the extra from my old pack, which was now slung over her shoulder.