It wasn’t the cona I thought of now, though, but the owl. For a moment, when I’d stood underneath the tree branch over the baby cona, the owl had looked at me instead of the cona. And even as inhuman as the bird was, I’d read consideration from its body language, the calculation it was doing in its head: the length of its talons, the depth of my neck.

The ultraviolet Minister approached. I tightened my fingers behind my back, where she could not see, but somehow I was sure that she knew I was afraid.

She stopped less than a foot away, so that the light that illuminated us was the terrible jewel-dark violet of her collar light, not the downed flashlights or the lanterns the Ministers had placed around the room.

The ultraviolet Minister said, “What is your name, boy?”

“Sean Wren,” I said.

“You’re Kystrene,” she said, as certain as I had named myself.

My accent slipped every time I said my own name. I could have changed it, if I’d liked; I had the ear for phonetics, and I could speak Sister like a native. It had been eight years since Itaka had been destroyed and I’d left Kystrom behind forever. I knew how to mangle the sounds of my own name into a Republican accent, but then it was no longer my name.

The Ultraviolet Minister looked at me like she knew all of this. “You speak Ameng fluently, then?”

“Of course I do,” I said, and in that instant, I realized two things.

The first was that none of these Ministers could read or understand Ameng. This was strange. It was a fact that Ministers did not die of old age. New Ministers must be born, to replace the ones who were killed, but their species had appeared in human history at the same time as this ship had been lost—meaning that the oldest of them probably spoke Ameng fluently. I had taken this ancient-eyed Ultraviolet for one of those oldest—and yet, if she could speak Ameng, she would not waste her time testing my knowledge. The Ministers had implied they had received the same transmission the Senator had. They must have known that there would be Ameng aboard the Nameless. What it meant that this race of immortals had not sent one of their own who was old enough to speak the language of this ship, I didn’t know.

The second thing I realized was that, for whatever reason, the Ministers wanted something on this ship—and that something was, almost certainly, the Philosopher Stone data. If all they had wanted to do was finish the job from a thousand years ago and destroy the data, they could’ve blown the ship from orbit, not boarded it and shown interest in a translator.

“It’s a useful skill,” I said to the Ultraviolet, “but I don’t do it for free.”

She tilted her ancient, ageless head. “And what do you think that skill is worth to me, Mr. Wren?”