“But your friends back there might reach the Stone before the sun goes.”

“It’s not worth dying for! Benny, we can still get off this ship! You can still get off this ship!”

“You know what Quint told me before she died?” Benny said, and he said it strangely, like he was telling it to the air, and not to me.

“What?”

“The Senator was going to kill us anyway, even if we got the Philosopher Stone. And it was going to be Quint who pushed the button.”

Words faltered in my throat. I could remember Quint so clearly, how indifferent she had been to me, neither care nor hate. Had that been a deliberate indifference? The attitude of the farmer to the meat cow?

And then another troubling thought came to me, a quiet seed of suspicion grown to fruition by the odd way Benny held his scalpel. “Benny,” I said, “what happened to Quint?”

“She died.”

“How did she die?”

He looked at me finally, bringing his attention away from whatever phantom he was seeing in the empty air. “Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” I told him, my heart filling my throat. “It matters.”

Benny shrugged.

My image of Quint changed. I no longer imagined little Quint lying limp in the corner of a ship, Children’s bite-marks on her leg and cheek, but I saw Quint lying discarded with a throat slit by a rusty little scalpel, murdered by someone she’d known. I hadn’t even known if Quint had been a first or a last name.

Perhaps Benny and I had never been family, never even been friends. Perhaps after this we would go our separate ways and never speak again. But we had lived in each other’s pockets for almost a decade. That had to mean something, if only because in looking back at my life, there would always be a part of it that was defined by him. Maybe we had no affection between the two of us, but we had to have something. So many years couldn’t pass unmarked. No matter what he thought. No matter what he’d done.

“Benny,” I said. “Please trust me this once. Let me make up for everything. I can get us out of here.”

“I don’t care what you do, Sean. But I’m going to the Philosopher Stone, and I’m going to destroy it.” He turned his back on me.

There was a buzzing in my skull, like a thousand bees, or Dreamer-bots swarming. Did Benny really think I could stand here and watch him die? It was my fault that our friendship had failed, by spending years doing what I thought was right regardless of what he wanted. I saw that now. It was too late to apologize—but it wasn’t too late to save him.

Since whatever we’d once had was already lost, there was no reason for me not to do what I thought was right, one last time. No matter what he wanted.

“Benny,” I said, while that humming and swarming filled my ears, my eyes, my hollow chest, “Remember this word: No. That is how you say ‘no’ in Ameng. If anyone asks you if you want the Philosopher Stone, or if they ask you something in Ameng, or if they offer you a stone or a gem or a rock, you say No.”