“That wasn’t a rescue, it was a requisition,” Lantern-Eyes said. “You do speak Ameng?”

“I speak a little of everything.”

She got two fingers beneath the pad and tipped it up, pushing it towards my face. “Then I need you to translate that.”

Outside of running or fighting for our lives, she was oddly reluctant to meet my eyes directly. It was a bit weird after spending time with Indigo, who tended to hold my gaze for a few beats longer than was customary or comfortable. “What am I translating?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you.” She left me to it, though, going to the far wall and starting to fuss with the weapons, hanging her club back up and exchanging one knife strapped to her thigh for another. I hadn’t even seen that knife until she was drawing it.

“The data comes from the bridge computers,” the lieutenant continued, sliding a few smaller knives up her sleeves. “One of my late colleagues spoke Ameng, but she didn’t finish translating before she died.”

Another Ameng-speaker? There weren’t many of us around. “What was her name?”

“Whose?”

“Your translator’s. I might know her.”

“I don’t care if you’re her brother. What I need is for you to translate that data, and find out where the Philosopher Stone is.”

“I don’t even need to translate for that.” I lowered the pad. “It’s in the head scientist’s office. Mara Zhu’s office.”

“It’s not,” said the lieutenant. “We looked.”

We looked. Five years, she’d said. She had been here for five years, and with colleagues for three of those years. Of course they’d looked—Mara Zhu’s office had probably been the first place they checked.

Much like it was the first place the Ministers intended to look.

Which meant that Number One and the rest of the Ministers were looking in the wrong place.

Lantern-Eyes seemed to have finished messing around with her weaponry. She leaned back against the wall, beside the terrifying array of clubs, and folded her arms across her chest. The pale and flickering light washed the pumpkin-orange out of her eyes, made them ordinary and brown.

“What have you been doing since you realized it wasn’t there?” I asked. “Sitting around, waiting for a translator to fall out of the sky?”

The angle her eyebrows made was dangerous. “This ship is huge. There are about fifty different labs on this ship, give or take, as well as living quarters, supplies, storage, machinery. My team mapped out over fifty percent of this ship in detail. On my own, I’ve mapped out maybe another twenty percent. That still leaves about a quarter of this ship unmapped and unexplored—and it’s the most dangerous part of the ship. It took me almost two years to explore that same amount of space, with a lot fewer dangers. Now the sun will go nova in just a few days. We don’t have time to search room by room anymore. I know the Philosopher Stone must be hidden in that last quarter of the ship, but I need a more detailed location than that, so that when my reinforcements arrive, we can go in and extract it.”