“You make it sound like a breakup,” Benny muttered, and turned his attention back to the wall.

I stared at his shoulder, the side of his head, the place where, if his hair were parted a little at the back, the implant would be. Where the implant still was, on him.

“Benny,” I said, while his scalpel scratch-scratched on the wall. “My implant is gone. They repaired me. The nanomachines weren’t killing me, they were repairing me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Senator can’t kill me anymore. Benny, we don’t have to steal the Philosopher Stone.”

“Sean,” said Benny, “what are you talking about?”

He knelt, flashlight on the floor, scalpel in his good hand, dirty face. Familiar face, the last one from my hometown Itaka. I felt a surge of fondness for that Kystrene face. “We can leave.”

He studied me. “Have you lost it?”

“I’m not crazy. Listen.” I sat down beside him, crosslegged, and held out my arm. And then I willed a Dreamer-bot to emerge, to fly to the wall Benny had been examining, to repair his little scritch-scratches.

A tiny cut on my hand bulged, split. A miniscule glint of metal emerged, glimmering with wings. It flew through the light of my flashlight away from my hand and to the wall, where it landed on the scratchmarks Benny had made on the metal.

Benny threw himself backwards, shoving himself across the floor away from the wall, the machine, from me. “God of Blood,” he gasped.

I closed my hand into a fist, hiding the dot of blood in my palm. “I was infected by the ship’s self-repair system,” I explained to Benny. “It’s happened to other people before, but they all died. But I didn’t. I thought it was killing me as we went, but it wasn’t. It was repairing me. And that meant it was dismantling the implant in my spine.”

Benny stared at me, chest heaving, something like horror in his eyes.

“They can repair you too,” I explained. “You’ll hallucinate a little bit, first—I’ll walk you through how to pass that test, teach you some Ameng. And once you’ve passed it, the nanomachines will repair you, too. The implant will be gone. We can leave the Philosopher Stone, get the Viper and go.”

“The Ministers have the Viper,” Benny said, numb. He was still staring at me like I was something frightening and strange.

“You think we can’t steal it out from under their noses? Come on, Benny.” I grinned at him and flexed my wrist. The cut in my hand had already closed back up. “We’ve got to get to the Viper anyway, or we’ll get stuck. How were you planning on getting off this ship anyway?”

I had spent so long preparing for a worst-case scenario I’d forgotten what it was like to hope for the best. An unexpected aid had come to us, and we were free. We could get off this ship, get some revenge on the Senator maybe, but it didn’t matter, because we were free.