“Mara Zhu was subtle in how she murdered us,” Indigo continued. He faced away from me as he spoke, nothing but profile, like he could not stand to look at me directly. “The disease does not manifest until later in life, and never at a set time. A Minister may die at nine hundred years, or ninety. There is no predicting when. The first symptom is the dreams—we lose the ability to enter slow-wave sleep first, and our sleep is restless and full of dreams. Then we lose the ability to sleep at all. We have no way of curing it—some misfolded protein kills us, no virus or cancer. Our own body creates the protein. We poison ourselves. Only this data can tell us which gene Mara Zhu altered so that it creates the fatal disease. You wondered why the Ministers didn’t send anyone who could speak Ameng. That is because any Minister who remembered how to speak Ameng has already died.”

And died horribly, from the sound of it. I asked myself, in the depths of my heart, if this was a death I could wish on my worst enemy. The answer came quick, and simple: No. I couldn’t wish that kind of suffering on anyone, not even the people who had taken my family from me.

“I’m still going to give you the data,” I said.

“You will give the Republic the data, too. You would allow them the ability to kill my people.”

That was rich. “Would you have attacked Kystrom, if you’d known we could defend ourselves?”

All that I could see of Indigo’s profile was expressionless: smooth cheek and the straight brushstrokes of his brow and eye. “I can’t allow you to give the Philosopher Stone to the Republic.”

“What are you going to do, then?” I demanded. “Kill me? Benny’s already tried. He wants to destroy the data, you know. I don’t. I just want to help everyone, and I don’t care that you and One and Tamara all think that’s stupid. I’m not going to stop and if you want me to stop, you have to kill me.”

He turned around then to look at me directly, the same dark remoteness as I’d seen when he’d first arrived on the ship, a killing shadow.

“Come on, Indigo,” I said, my good old imp of the perverse telling me to push, push, push until it snaps. “You didn’t have any trouble killing everyone else on Kystrom. Do you think sparing one Kystrene now would make up for what you did to the rest?”

The way he looked at me was something worse than I’d ever seen him look, even dying on a dirty floor. Indigo looked at me like an open wound, the bandage torn off, and the flesh exposed sore and weeping and open down to bone. Indigo looked at me like his mother, Mara Zhu, gazing angry despair into a thousand-year-old recording.

But even with all that killing terror written all over his face, Indigo did not draw his sword, made no move against me.