The last time he’d threatened me seriously, I remembered, had been after he’d rescued me from Benny’s explosion; he’d held his knife to my throat while I struggled for breath to defend myself. And I’d watched his expression change, and then he’d taken his sword away and saved my life. I thought maybe that was the last chance he had to kill me. I thought maybe that, even if I pushed him as far as I could, he would not be capable of killing me now.

I didn’t forgive him. I couldn’t. But some of my black anger drained away.

“You told me that you trusted what I decided to do would be right,” I said to the man who had murdered my people, who now looked at me like I had the power to tear him apart and he intended to let me. “This is what I’ve decided. You can decide whether you’re going to kill me later. Right now, we’re almost at the Philosopher Stone, but we’re not the only people looking for it. Let’s go find it, yeah?”

He took a breath, short and sharp, like he had not been breathing before. “You know the way.”

“I don’t,” I admitted, “but I know who does,” and I held my hand palm-up in the air. Nanomachines pulled themselves free of my skin, glinting in the glow of Indigo’s collar-light before vanishing into the shadows like sparks going out. Indigo watched their progress with an expression on his face I still could not name, but felt closer to understanding now than I had before.

The Dreamer-bots returned a moment later, crawling over my eyes, between my lids, before lazily drifting away to return to their home with the AI. I opened my eyes to meet Indigo’s gaze.

“We’re only a few rooms away,” I told him, and couldn’t stop my smile because this was it, the center of the maze, the end of it all. He followed when I led.

A few minutes later, I pushed open the door to the center of Lab 17.

CHAPTER EIGHTY TWO:

The Philosopher Stone

The center of Lab 17 looked nothing like the setting the Dreamer had constructed for me. Indigo’s blue light diffused into the thickness of dust like a flashlight underwater, and in that weird sunken-ship light I saw that someone had erected a fragile barricade of desks and lab equipment, ancient glass filmy, stacked atop the rotten bones of old desks and metal bars. Wordlessly, we cleared this final barricade away, putting the pieces to the side.

The rest of the room was square, larger than I’d expected but not oversized. At the back of the room, weirdly connected to the wall through a sequence of wires like moss hanging off a tree, there was a box balanced precariously on a scaffold of metal that had maybe once been a desk.

The box had a screen on one of its faces, filmy with dust but visible. Indigo said, “That’s a portable computer.”