“Really,” Tamara said flatly.

“Are you going to choke me out again if I sit up?”

Her glance flickered. Then she sat back a little, giving me the space to sit up.

And sit up I did. A quick glance around the room showed that Tamara had dragged me into a closet. There was no way out, unless I suddenly gained the hand-to-hand combat skills necessary to bludgeon Indigo and Tamara both into unconsciousness. There was very little subtlety in the way Indigo stood in front of the only door.

“So that’s it, then?” I asked, eying the blocked door. “I didn’t think I’d be the first one down.”

“God damn it, Sean, we didn’t drag you here to execute you,” Tamara said. “And if you expect me to believe that you threw away your only advantage by telling us the location of the Philosopher Stone, then stood between us and certain death because you wanted to end the arrangement and beat us to the Philosopher Stone because all of this has been one big fuck-you, then—”

She caught herself, jaw working. She almost could believe it, I realized. She almost could believe the story I was trying to sell her, and that frightened Lieutenant Lantern-Eyes, who wasn’t scared of anything.

Indigo’s steady regard bore through my defenses by the sheer weight of it.

“We thought you were dead, Sean,” Tamara said, and somehow her being so matter-of-fact about it made her words drive into me more deeply than any emotional confession could have done.

My paper-thin resistance to their presence crumbled like, well, paper.

“I am dead,” I admitted.

CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO:

The Whole Truth

“Explain,” Indigo said.

It was the first word I’d heard him speak since he’d lay dying, discounting the nightmare versions of him the Dreamer had made me hallucinate. His voice was rough, dry. Massive blood loss would dehydrate you, I reflected.

“After we got you to the saferoom, I went out to clean up the blood trail,” I explained. Tamara nodded; she knew this part. “I didn’t want something to follow us in. While I was in the hallway I heard the Dreamer-bots. I knew we couldn’t run… you were unconscious,” I said to Indigo. “If they didn’t find someone in the server room, they’d keep looking, and they’d find you. But if they found someone in the server room, I gambled they’d stop. So I let the Dreamer-bots find me.”

“But you’re not dead,” Tamara said.

“Not yet. They’re still inside me.”

Tamara recoiled; Indigo stepped forward, hand outstretched towards me and pain on his face.

“Don’t.” I didn’t recognize my own voice when I spoke, but Indigo did stop. “Don’t touch me, Indigo.”

He blinked and pulled back, lowering his hand to his side.

Tamara spoke to the floor between her knees. “I don’t understand how you’re conscious.”

That was Lantern-Eyes, rigorously hammering the details out of my story. “The Dreamer-bots induce vivid hallucinations. The only way out of them is to convince the AI you don’t have any interest in taking the Philosopher Stone. None of the prior infectees could do this, because the AI only knows Ameng and none of your crew spoke Ameng. I convinced the AI to let me go, but the nanomachines are still inside me. I don’t know how long before they kill me.”