It struck me then that she, and Indigo a moment before, was saying goodbye. It seemed rather sudden—yes, our arrangement had to end; yes, I’d rushed to its end, skipping past the negotiation and the speeches, but now that they’d caught me, surely the whole thing should take a little longer to dissolve?

And what would happen once it had? I couldn’t help but remember the nightmares the Dreamer had shown me. “What now?”

“Indigo and I talked about it already. We’re going to split up.” Tamara shifted, straightening her spine, a little more soldierly and familiar. “He’s gotten back into contact with the Ministers, who have re-docked their ship not far from here.”

Re-docked their ship, and re-docked the Viper with it, according to Benny. Indigo had told me once that his collar-light could function as a radio somehow, but only over very short ranges. The Ministers must be quite close—and the Viper, too. I squirreled that fact away in my skull. That was Benny’s way out.

“As for me, the Republic will arrive within the hour.” Tamara’s fingers flexed against her leg, then relaxed, deliberate. “I’ll rendezvous with them.”

So they would send each other off to opposite ends of Lab 17. “And after that?”

“What do you want to happen after that, Sean?” Tamara asked, and her question scored me down to the bone.

It wasn’t as if I could ask them not to kill each other. That was the way things had been from the start, and we’d all known it. And I’d gone off with Benny, after all. I was as much their enemy as they were each other’s. I had no say in their choices, and at some point in the next day, it was just as likely that I would find myself at the end of Tamara’s gun or Indigo’s knife, or that I would have to decide whether or not to let Benny use that rusty little scalpel.

“The wall’s booby-trapped,” I warned them. Indigo took off Tamara’s jacket and shook it out, the deep red of it dirty and faded. “Watch out.”

“We know, Sean,” Tamara said, and shrugged her jacket back on.

I couldn’t let them leave. Not with things ending this way; not when there was a chance we might all have to kill each other in a few hours. “Maybe we can figure something out,” I started to say, but Tamara lifted a hand.

“There’s something you should know,” Tamara said. No apology, just explanation. That was Lantern-Eyes. “What the Senator did to you is inexcusable. Coercion isn’t acceptable to the Republic, and attempting to hire you to steal the Philosopher Stone out from under the Republic’s nose is reprehensible. The details of how and why you were chosen and sent weren’t known to my superiors, I can guarantee that. But the Republic did know that someone was being sent here.”

That was a hell of a disclaimer. It was hard to see around it. “What?”

“That Senator,” Tamara said, “had strict instructions to find some civilians willing to undertake a risky trip for their government. Willing civilians—volunteers. These volunteers would fly a civilian vessel to this ship, they would land, and they would leave again once the Ministers had noticed their presence.”