“You never went to trial,” Tamara said. She sounded, somehow, like she knew the ending of this story.

“No. While we were waiting to be tried, someone approached us with an offer. He was a Senator, but I never met him and he never told us his name. If we stole the Philosopher Stone, he’d clear our names and let us go.”

“You’re here to steal on commission,” Tamara said.

“I told him no.”

She looked at me for the first time since I’d told her that the Dreamer-bots were still inside me. She and Indigo were both so terrifying, in such different ways. When Indigo looked at me, it was all veiled, dark-water currents, powerful and unseen. When Tamara looked at me it was as bare as bones in a desert, sand-scoured and painfully open.

“He didn’t take no for an answer,” I told them. “He put an implant in our skulls—mine, and Benny’s, and Leah’s. It can’t be removed or deactivated, and if we don’t do what he said, he’d kill us.”

My hands were shaking for no good reason; I clasped them in my lap.

“I don’t want the Philosopher Stone,” I told Tamara and Indigo. “And I’m dead anyway, with or without the implant. But if I don’t find the data, Benny will be dead, too.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE:

The Breaking of the Fellowship

Tamara Gupta said, “You’re only telling us this now?”

“Excuse me?” I said, baffled.

“I could find this Senator—I have contacts, in the military, in the government. If you offered to help the Republic—the real Republic, not that Senator—to find the Philosopher Stone data, you could name your reward. My superiors would remove your implant as soon as they learned of it, and they’d have no problem wiping your record clean. Sean. Why didn’t you ask me for help?!”

She ceased, breathing hard, glaring at me with those jack-o-lantern eyes on fire.

As if it could’ve been that simple. “What did you expect me to do, Tamara? Trust you? You’re the same people who got me into this situation to begin with!”

“I could’ve—”

“Could’ve what? You can’t perform surgery on me here. The Senator would probably detonate my skull by the time you could get me to a doctor who could figure out how to get that thing out of my skull—if it could even be done. Who’s got more power in the Republic, Tamara? A lieutenant who’s been away from home for five years, or a Senator with something to hide?”

She sat back hard against the wall, her expression mulish and angry. Emotional, I realized. Pragmatic Lieutenant Gupta was reacting from pure emotion.

Softness, for her and her metal-boned strength, hit me like a wave. I said, as gently as I could, “I know you don’t like to hear this, but this is something you can’t control.”

She laced her bony fingers in her lap, squeezed them tight.

Indigo was still watching us, glowing softly. I said to him, “I don’t guess you could tell me that the Ministers could get this thing out of my head.”