The simplicity of the appeal shook me. I’d expected Lantern-Eyes’ rational demands—she would want a detailed explanation—but I didn’t feel that I ever knew, really, what to expect from Indigo. Now here he stood, asking nothing more of me than the offer of his outstretched hand.

Nanomachines squirmed beneath the skin of my leg, hot around my bleeding gash. I realized abruptly that I did not know what the Dreamer-bots inside me would do if I brought them near to Indigo.

“I’m not falling for that,” I said to him, and knowing that he could not run with his abdomen torn open and barely held intact, I stood up and walked away.

CHAPTER SEVENTY:

Sympathy for the Devils

I found Benny when he nearly stabbed me in the face.

“Whoa, whoa!” I shouted, leaping back, a rusty scalpel slicing through the air inches from my nose.

Benny’s flashlight clicked on a second later, revealing him standing in front of a rugged section of the Lab 17 wall. “Sean,” he said.

“That was pathetic,” I told him. “You couldn’t even stab me; you’d better not try to take on Indigo or Tamara.”

His glance kept bouncing past me. “Where are they?”

“Where do you think? I lost them some while back.” Lost Tamara looking shocked, abandoned on the wrong side of a locked door, and lost Indigo alone and gleaming with one hand outstretched in mute appeal. Guilt roiled in my gut, stupid and inappropriate. We’d always known we would part ways when we reached the Stone.

“Are they looking for you or for the Philosopher Stone?” Benny demanded.

The question jolted me, like a wheel going over a stone. “The Stone. They just care about the Stone.”

Tamara needed the data as leverage against the Ministers, to protect the Republic. Indigo needed the data because his people were sick, and the Philosopher Stone was the only hope of saving them. Billions of people in the Republic, billions of Ministers. Billions of lives on either side.

I was just trying to save one.

My leg ached. I reached down to rub at the skin above the cut, feeling suddenly very tired. The ache in my head surged, almost enough to blind me. Maybe that was why I spoke without thinking. “I left them behind to kill each other.”

“So?” Benny had already turned away.

So when I’d seen them, Indigo had been wearing Tamara’s uniform jacket. “I feel bad,” I admitted.

“The Republic and the Ministers fucked us, Sean. Why would you feel sorry for them?”

“I don’t control who I feel sorry for or not,” I said, annoyed. He was always like this, yelling at me about not agreeing with him exactly all the time.

“You need to face the real world,” he snapped at me. “If someone fucks you over, the only thing to do is to fuck them back.”

“All right, forget it,” I snapped back. “Let them stab each other; who cares? We’ll get the data, we’ll get out of here and we’ll screw over that Senator somehow, happy?”