More crashing behind me, and someone cried out in pain. Indigo.

I spun around, leaving Benny lying against the wall, and saw Indigo on his knees on the floor, holding a bloodied wrist to his chest. His sword was on the floor, out of his reach, and Number One had one of her slender flight-feather blades held to his throat.

He looked up at her while she removed the blade from his throat, raising it up to her shoulder level—drawing it back for a fatal blow. I shouted, rising to my feet and lunging for them even knowing that I’d never make it across the room before One completed the swing.

A crack split the air, deafening me, ringing through the dust-thick air. Number One jerked, a red splash appearing on the wall beside her head. Then she folded, to her knees and to the floor, owl-eyes staring sightlessly out and collar-light still glowing a rich dark ultraviolet.

Lieutenant Tamara Gupta stood in the open doorway, gun still held up, the muzzle still aimed in the direction of the two Ministers.

A shadow pushed past me. I turned dumbly to follow it, ears ringing, and realized it was Benny, running for the computer that held the Philosopher Stone.

He would destroy it, destroy it easily. I reached out one hand after him, useless, and willed him stopped.

Pinpricks bit my hand, skin splitting, as a swarm of nanomachines drew themselves out of my veins and spun in a glittering cloud to swirl around Benny’s face. He stopped a few steps from the Stone, hands flying up over his eyes, lashing out wildly at the swarm. I stepped forward as he collapsed onto his back, hands grabbing uselessly at his eyes.

It was just an infestation, I told myself; he’d come out of it in a few hours with the implant gone; really, I had saved Benny’s life. But when I stood over him, when I saw his face in the dimly reflected glow of the flashlight he’d dropped, I saw red between the roiling glitter of the nanomachines over his eyes.

No, I thought, but I couldn’t move, standing over Benny as he opened his mouth and made a horrible choked sound that was maybe a scream, muffled by the nanomachines that I could see crawling into his open jaw. There was blood coming from his ears where the nanomachines had burrowed in.

The ground struck my knees with jarring force. Benny twisted, mouth open in soundless agony, while the nanomachines burrowed through his skin and into his brain. Not like this, I wanted to say. Not like this.

The blood from his face had spread across the floor as far as my knees by the time he stopped seizing, and the only other survivor of my home and my past died.

CHAPTER EIGHTY FOUR:

Sean, Tamara, and Shay

I should’ve let him destroy the Stone, I thought. I’d killed him instead.

My world broadened from Benny’s corpse as I turned around to see Indigo still on his knees, One’s body in front of him, and Tamara in One’s place with her gun held to Indigo’s head.