“Estimate for me,” I said.

He sighed. “We should be gone in three hours.”

That cut it rather fine. “How far away is the Viper from here?”

“If you wish to make it safely, you should leave within the next hour,” he told me.

“The Minister ship is docked right next to the Viper. One way or another, you’ll have to leave at the same time as me.”

The screen finally loaded. I leaned over the little box like proximity could make translation easier, and began to parse through the sentences.

“We can broadcast,” I said at last. “But not very far; the Nameless itself is shielded against radiation. But the three ships docked on the Nameless—the Minister ship, the Republican ship, and the Viper—they should be able to pick up the data if we broadcast it to them.”

The sound of Indigo’s pacing didn’t pause. “Are you certain this is the correct data?”

“I’d feel pretty stupid if it wasn’t,” I agreed, and left that screen behind for a moment to go look at the files preserved on the computer. The screen shivered, resistant to change.

“I’ve seen many humans die,” Indigo said suddenly, while I tried to cajole the computer into letting me leave the broadcast screen.

My fingers faltered. Was this his prelude to killing me? Some sort of slow, immortal apology?

“I am over three hundred years old,” Indigo continued. The slow sound of his steps was almost hypnotic. “You vanish like sparks. After a while, it stops meaning to us what it means to you. We struck hard and fast on Kystrom. The goal was to prevent prolonged bloodshed, and it worked: the planet folded after your city fell. An unconditional surrender. A brief strike, not a drawn-out war.”

The screen in front of me had finally, sullenly, loaded, but the letters blurred in front of my eyes. I could not have translated Ameng then, not even if Indigo had put his knife to my throat.

“We believed the Republic had a more significant foothold on the planet than they did,” Indigo said. “We believed the only way to excise the Republic was to strike decisively, and we anticipated resistance nonetheless. But there was no resistance. I did not destroy your planet—there was no need to; it fell after one battle that was more a slaughter than a fight. The rest of Kystrom lives still, mostly unchanged, under Ministerial control. But I wiped out your city, thinking I was carving out a tumor and instead carving healthy flesh. The planet fell. The Republic lost its advantage, one way or another. I see the greater purpose, but I can’t condone the cost.”

The screen had loaded. Blindly, I opened the first document I saw, but I didn’t read what was before my eyes. I could feel Indigo behind me like a light on my back, a trial and a test. Eight years ago, all my suffering, all my grief, all the suffering and the fear and pain of those I’d loved—that had been him who had caused it, him, this person in the room alone with me. There was no forgiveness for that. There couldn’t be. Even if I somehow forgave him, which I could not, I couldn’t forgive him on behalf of Brigid, or my mother, or my father, or Liza or Kenny or any of my old friends who now lay dead in the fields and houses where we’d lived and played.