Later, as it turned out. Here I sat, a thousand years later, listening to Mara Zhu yearning for the star to explode and atomize her and all her works.

“The others are holed up in Lab 17 with the data,” she said. “I can’t get in to them, but they can’t get out with it. I’ve made sure of that [guaranteed it]. If you find this ship, if the star doesn’t go nova soon and you find this log, please. [I beg you.] Leave the ghosts here in peace. The final log of Doctor Mara Zhu.”

The screen went black with finality, absolute and unrelenting. No one on this ship had ever spoken again, at least not that the computers had recorded.

So, then. I had my answer. The truth, the secret that everyone aboard this ship wanted so desperately:

The Philosopher Stone was in Lab number 17.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO:

Sins of the Father

I sat in that darkness for a while, the screen black on my lap. There was a hollow-eyed horror on Mara Zhu’s face that I knew well, that I’d seen on Benny and in the mirror after Kystrom. For a fierce and lonely moment I wanted to reach out for her, across the thousand years, because she had addressed this video to me a thousand years later, and I wanted to reach back. I’d seen something horrible, too, like her.

But what had Mara Zhu seen? Her final message had been cryptic, alluding to things she assumed I already knew. But the implications of what she’d said made me uneasy.

I had a source of water now, and a dubious source of food if I got truly desperate, and there didn’t seem to be many monsters in this part of the ship. The smart thing to do would be to look through the tablet for some sort of map, or a clue to where Lab 17 might be from my current location, not squander my apparent safety sifting through extraneous data out of curiosity.

So, obviously, I went to the personnel files first. Mara Zhu had said something about volunteers.

Nothing caught my eye in the personnel files, and I nearly gave up there, but an uneasy impulse took a hold of me. It was a weird suspicion, too awful to look at directly, but born out of the horror and anguish in Mara Zhu’s face, out of the strange tomblike doors I’d seen, the ones long enough to lay down inside, and with shelves so that you could stack person atop person… Instead of looking for floorplans, I checked the cargo lists.

From there, the whole story unfurled with horrific clarity.

An impossible number of people were brought onto the Nameless during its days of operation—more people than a ship this size could sustain, and yet each document showed more and more coming aboard, and none leaving. I tracked these ‘volunteers’ progress from the cargo hold to the labs, where scientists’ notes assigned them colors and numbers and charted their progress from their arrival to their deaths in neat, tidy script. The Philosopher Stone experiments had been conducted on living humans.