“We have the technology,” Indigo told me. “Better technology than the Republic. But we do not carry that kind of technology with us. If what the Senator told you is true, you would be dead before my people could save you.”

Weirdly, that hit me harder than Tamara’s plea. I’d already known there was no help for me from the Republic; Tamara’s offer was treading familiar ground. But Indigo was a step removed from magic. So long as he was in the room with me, I was safe from anything else; the Ministers, too, had technology that I didn’t know of and could barely imagine. So if Indigo said I could not be saved, I knew that there was no known technology in the Sister Systems that could save me and Benny from the bombs inside our skulls.

“You see why I left,” I told them.

“Two lives instead of billions,” Tamara said, bitter. She was still staring down at her clasped hands.

“Is that what the Republic thought when they gave up Kystrom to the Ministers?” I snapped. “Just a few million lives instead of a billion? Watch how you tally it up, Tamara.”

She glowered down at her palms. I turned to Indigo. “What about you? Have you got anything to say? Disappointed I’m just a selfish, ordinary smuggler?”

My voice broke, horrifyingly, on the last word. Neither of my companions reacted, but I swallowed like I could force the cracked edges of my voice back down into my lungs, cutting my windpipe like metal splinters as they went.

Indigo said, “One of the reasons I stayed with you, and not my own people, when your Benny blew out the hull was because I had seen that you were kind.” Indigo was as calm as if Tamara and I hadn’t spent the last few minutes lashing out at each other with the broken-bottle edges of hurt. “I trust your heart. I have to do what I have to do, regardless of whether it is right or wrong, but I believe that if you believe what you are doing is right, then it must be so.”

I’d never heard anything like that spoken aloud, certainly not to me. The words almost didn’t seem to make sense in that combination, echoing around in the enormity of their meaning while Indigo looked at me like living as long as he had had eroded his ability to feel embarrassment.

Tamara said, “God damn, Indigo.”

Her incredulity punched a laugh out of me, shaken up from deep in my sternum. I pressed the heel of my hand to one eye, then the other, until my laughter had shaken itself away.

Tamara was looking at me again, her fingers still clasped but expression no longer stormy. “If you truly believe in what you’re doing, with no reservations, then I respect that,” she said to me. “I have to do what I have to do, but I wish you the best of luck, I really do.”