“You said you didn’t mind,” I said. “You said we should help people—”

“No, I said we should get our affairs in order first, then help people,” Benny said. “How could you give away things we needed? And when you did, after I told you not to, whose job was it to make sure we didn’t starve or get shot? It was mine, because you don’t realize there’s a problem until it’s already happening.”

I felt helpless. “We were doing the right thing.”

“According to you, Sean! Why should you get to decide?”

There had been a sapling in my parents’ backyard. One summer, when I’d been about nine and Brigid eight, we’d peeled the bark off the trunk. Sapling bark was more supple than a grown tree’s bark, and we could bend and shape it into little plates and bowls and teacups. My mother had seen the stripped wood of the tree and our misshapen menagerie of kitchenware and she’d scolded us. I hadn’t understood why she’d been so angry—the tree had looked fine, only a little naked, but the leaves still green and firm. But over the weeks that passed, the leaves had shriveled and gone brown, the branches brittle, and, before autumn, the sapling had fallen. The tree had died on the day Brigid and I had torn the bark off, but it hadn’t shown the damage until weeks later. My relationship with Benny had ended long ago, only I hadn’t seen it until now.

The strangest thing was that it didn’t really hurt, not like hearing the truth from Indigo and Tamara had hurt, not like watching them walk away had caused me pain. Benny’s anger hurt the way the loss of Kystrom hurt: a low, dull ache. The pain of an old scar, not a nanomachine-sutured wound.

“So what will you do,” I asked, “if you won’t let me help you?”

“I’m going to destroy the Stone.”

“Why?”

“Because the Ministers and the Republic want it,” Benny told me. He sounded strangely calm, for someone with such a pinched expression. “I’m going to make sure neither gets what they want.”

The Philosopher Stone had medical data that could help millions of people, even leaving aside that the Republic intended to use it as a shield and the Ministers as an antidote. It had been made out of suffering and horror and death, sure, but it was going to be used for good. Benny wanted to destroy it?

“Spite?” I said. “That’s your grand plan? That’s what’s worth dying for to you?”

“What else do I have left? The Ministers killed our families, Sean. I’d die before I let them get what they want.”

“It doesn’t have to be your problem,” I told him.

“It isn’t your problem either way,” he told me.

I ran my hand through my hair, tugged at the strands. I wanted to shake him, but I didn’t think he’d let me touch him. “This ship will be destroyed in a matter of hours anyway!”