“I have some medical training.” The lieutenant carefully picked up the bowl by the rim, blowing on the liquid inside. “You can’t communicate with those things. They don’t have any logic or reason, just instinct.”

I remembered that manikin in the gas-trapped room, the expression on her face before she’d curled around my throat. That hadn’t been mindless instinct. That had been deliberation—and hatred.

Perhaps Lantern-Eyes was partially correct, anyway. The manikins couldn’t be communicated with. She was just wrong about the reasons.

I took the bowl she handed me, unthinking, by its base, and pulled my hand away sharply with a hiss. She held it, waiting, while I shook the excess heat from my hand and sheepishly took the bowl by the rim the way she had held it. The food inside was a thick, chunky brown sludge.

“What is this?” I asked, accepting the fork as an afterthought.

“Never ask,” Lantern-Eyes said, and set another bowl onto the campstove, pouring another box of rations inside, followed by a bit of water. I wondered how many of these battered little bowls she had. Had her team brought extra, or had there been only one per person? Did she have a set of bowls like tombstones, each one belonging to a different dead soldier? Whose bowl was I using now?

As foul as the food looked, it was better than a cockroach would’ve been. The first slippery forkful of unidentifiable meat-paste sent a surge of endorphins through my body. I shuffled up my legs to rest the bowl on my knees and took another forkful. “Hey, Lantern-Eyes. You said—”

“My name is Tamara Gupta.”

It was a nice name. There were a lot of ways you could say Tamara, in anger or fear or affection or exasperation. Not like the one or two ways to pronounce lieutenant. It was the kind of name a real person would have, not a faceless Republican soldier.

“So you can stop calling me by that ridiculous nickname,” she added.

“Sure thing, Lantern-Eyes,” I said. “Are you a doctor?”

She snorted. “I studied medical ethics.”

“Ah,” I said, around another mouthful. “That’s why they sent you here.”

“That’s why they sent me here.” She pressed some button on the side of the campstove, turning it off. The heat radiating against my shin immediately decreased.

“How much did the Republic know about what they would find on this ship, before they sent you here?” I was actually going to kill that Senator if it turned out he’d known all this and sent us here anyway.

“Nothing,” Lantern-Eyes said. “Just that the Philosopher Stone should be here, and the Philosopher Stone experiments were about unlocking the secret to immortality. It wasn’t a hard leap from there to assuming there’d be some ethical concerns surrounding the data. We just assumed the ethical concerns would be hypothetical, not alive and tearing people apart.”

Like Lantern-Eyes’ team. I watched as she scraped her fork around the sides of the bowl, gathering up the residue, and licked it off her fork. Then she reached over for a water bottle and poured some of it into the bowl, swirling it around with the fork to clean it. Solitary little gestures, well-practiced.