Another glimmering cloud hummed out from inside my hand, beaded red with blood. These drifted over to the wall and settled on it, sinking into the cracks like water into soil. I waited.

When I was pretty sure they’d done what they could, I reached out and began to break off the wall covering. It came off in flaking panels, metal splinters and dust on my palms. I looked in at the exposed wire mesh, then, carefully, held my palm close to the mesh. No static raised the hair on my arms. I set my hand on the mesh and did not get immediately electrocuted, so I cracked the wires and peeled them aside, forcing an opening.

When I was done, I’d managed to make a very tiny opening in the wall, scarcely large enough for me to get my shoulders into. But through that hole, I could see the other side: the suite of labs that made up Lab 17.

I’d been through smaller tunnels in my time on this ship. I reached into the wall and crawled through.

CHAPTER SEVENTY SEVEN:

The Republic

Nothing had come through this wall in a thousand years. The silence in Lab 17 was the silence of the grave, and the dust was as thick as snowfall on the ground.

And there was no telling how big this suite of labs was. It was time to try something new. I held out one hand, cut palm up, and willed some Dreamer-bots out.

They hummed free, tiny and glimmering, and then dispersed to the four corners of the world. Fly, my pretties, fly. I kicked some dust around until I’d cleared off a little spot of floor, and then I sat down and waited.

It was a while before they returned, long enough that I started to get worried my plan had failed, and considered getting up and looking around the old-fashioned way. But those little glimmering machines came humming back towards me, and I had to hold myself very still, eyes wide, while they landed on my skin and crawled into my eyes.

Images flashed over my retinas. I dreamt, briefly but vividly, of the layout of the Lab 17 suite, just as I’d directed the nanomachines to record.

At the very center of the maze, guarded behind doors locked and barred and sealed, there was a room. And in that room, there was an empty space, a void the nanomachines couldn’t see or understand. The scientists had guarded the Philosopher Stone even from the AI. That void, I knew, was the data we all so badly wanted.

I also saw, through my dreaming machines, that Benny was at the far end of the outer wall slowly breaking through, having shaken the machines I’d sent to inconvenience him. The Ministers had broken through the outer wall not too far from Benny, and the ancient-eyed Ultraviolet stood in snowy dust up to her shins. Indigo was a somber shadow at her back, glowing underwater-blue. He’d gotten a new sword from his old comrades, slung across his back in the place of the old one. A group of Republican soldiers had come through the outer wall between me and the Ministers, and were already working their way through the labyrinth, Tamara directing them with sharp, decisive gestures, her uniform jacket closed up to her collar and her gun now holstered openly on her hip.