“How do you know they’ll kill you?” Indigo asked.

I felt almost embarrassed to admit it. “My head’s been killing me, Indigo.”

I saw Tamara’s jaw flex. Indigo sank down, until he was sitting with us on the floor. “It’s a horrible perversion of something that was designed to protect and repair,” he said, “that instead, they’ve been made to kill.”

“Benny found me after I woke up,” I continued. “You’ve both met him, but you don’t know… Benny is the only other survivor from my town on Kystrom. He’s the only one left. He’s the closest thing to family I have—I had to go with him.”

Indigo looked stricken. It was a strange reaction to have, and I was on the verge of asking him why he should look so horrified when Tamara lifted her head and said, “And that’s why the two of you are out to find the Stone? So you can get rich together?”

Those jack-o-lantern eyes of hers were unfriendly. I glared back. “I didn’t sell the two of you out for money, Tamara.”

“So why did you run away? Explain it to me, Sean. We want to understand.”

“Benny and I made each other a promise,” I said. “Like the arrangement the three of us had, but forever… We had nothing after Kystrom. No family, no friends, no money, nothing. We promised to be each other’s family, to keep each other alive, to always put the other person first. You understand,” I said, and Tamara nodded curtly.

I took a breath, and continued. “Benny and I made our money by smuggling,” I said. “We were a good team. I could speak the language of whoever we needed to speak to, and Benny could rig up new ways to avoid Republican scanners. And since we weren’t citizens, we weren’t people to the Republic—we were a lot harder to track, and there was nowhere to extradite us to, if we did get caught. So sometimes the authorities didn’t want to put in the effort.

“On our last job, we almost got caught. There were cops chasing us, and one of them followed to this old house on Parnasse… Benny wanted to kill him, so they wouldn’t pick up our trail again, but the cop was just a kid. Younger than us. You understand?”

Tamara didn’t speak.

Indigo said, “I understand.”

It was more of a relief to hear that than I could’ve expected. I’d known I’d made the right choice, done the right thing; I knew that, if I did it again, I would make the same choice even knowing what would come of it. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d let Benny kill that boy. But I’d spent so long suffering the consequences of it, listening to Benny berate me for it, hearing Quint speak of my choice as a moment of weakness. Indigo’s understanding came as a relief after all that.

“So I let the guy go,” I said. “And he came back, faster than I expected, before we could get away. And they arrested us. I think the cop was some politician’s son. They were going to charge us with smuggling, theft, and attempted murder, because of how much Benny had talked about killing him.”