In the center of that group, still clearly recognizable despite the decay of data, I saw Mara Zhu. She was smiling, and looked ten years younger and much less oddly familiar.

I stood surrounded by a dead man’s friends and family, all the love he’d had, left here on this tomb of a ship. A lump sat in my throat, as thick and painful as it had been twenty minutes ago, before I’d gotten my fill of water.

Slowly, mesmerized by the memories of happiness left eternal on the walls of this ruined ship, I reached into my pocket and pulled out Lantern-Eyes’ tablet. I needed to know what had happened here, in the final days of the ship. I needed, at last, to find out how this ship had ended up hidden beside a dying star, why the creatures inside were so full of hatred, what had happened to these smiling scientists—and what had become of the Philosopher Stone.

Mara Zhu’s face filled the little tablet screen, starkly lit and terrible. I let the video play.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE:

The Last Words of Mara Zhu

Part one

It took me a while to translate the video Mara Zhu had made, the last recording on the Nameless’s logs. Listening to a native speaker talk was a lot harder than reading an official text, especially when that native speaker was as emotional as Mara Zhu was in her video. I did not dare to turn the sound up particularly loud, either—there were many things on this ship, and I was afraid that some of them might hear.

And so I translated Mara Zhu’s final words slowly, piece by piece, like putting together that old clock in Quint’s office.

She began, “The only excuse I can offer future generations is that the human race was going extinct. The harsh environments of the new planets [scientific choice of word; not homeworlds, but planets. She was scientific, Mara Zhu], the hostile alien species—they were killing us. [Alternate translation: they were murdering us. They were slaughtering us.] They might still kill us, but I don’t think so. Those four billion embryos we sent out will take care of the threats, just like they were designed [built, made, constructed] to do.”

She looked even more oddly familiar in motion. Something about the shape of her cheek. A horrible grief kept dragging her mouth down like she wished to cry out with it, face frozen like a tragedy mask, but she would swallow and straighten her head and look at me with dark and solemn eyes.

“They were volunteers,” she said, “at first. Then they were volunteered [willing, then made willing]. We’d stopped thinking of them as people long before then. I don’t know when I—I didn’t know—

“What happened here was evil. It must be forgotten, it can never happen again. I’ve done what I can. I’ve sabotaged [broken, ruined, poisoned] the embryos. I took this ship as close to a supernova as I could before the others stalled the engine—I can’t fly us into the sun, but they can’t fly us out. Sooner or later the sun will explode and turn all this to dust.”