And it felt like there was no light left inside Robb, either.
He felt like the carcass of those burned Iron Shrines, once filled with grandeur but now nothing but ash. He sank to his knees at Jax’s bedside, and kissed his knuckles, and whispered with the intent of all of the words he had never gotten the chance to say, “Ma’alor.”
Jax
This was not a dream. But he wasn’t awake, either.
Last he remembered, Di, in the XO’s body, had him cornered and there was no way to escape. But then . . . then what happened? It was all a blur. He was scared to die, even though he knew this was where he did—but . . . something had happened. The scene hadn’t gone the way it had in the vision. Something had changed.
He remembered pulling the sword out of the window. It fractured—one moment a sound and then nothing at all as space swept in. He knew he’d only be out in space for a few moments, so he hadn’t been worried. He’d been spaced before.
But then Di had reached out to him, touched him, and then—
So many stars. So many souls. Thousands of them. They invaded his head and showed him so many fates. Paths not taken and paths that were. Lives twisting, braiding, in an intricate web of should haves. That single touch drained his light, like a candle snuffed out—
Oh.
Every time he read a fate, a little more of his light vanished, a little more of his life drained away, and in the span of a moment he had read thousands.
He was dead, that was simply it. He had to be.
But . . . if he was dead, he expected darkness—a void, perhaps? The Moon Goddess welcoming him home, a land of bountiful fruits and gold and . . . he didn’t know. The Solani didn’t believe in an afterlife. When they died, they became stardust again, and the cycle continued.
He didn’t expect . . . to be here.
Wherever this dimly lit hangar was. It stretched endlessly on both sides, the halogens above casting sickly white light across the makeshift medical stalls. The sounds of people moaning, sick and diseased, clogged the cold air, making it hard to breathe. He’d heard about these Plague hospitals—they still sat on Eros, falling into ruin where no one dared to go, fearing that the Plague might still cling to a gurney or hospital robe or food tray. But he never expected to see one, and he never expected it to feel so . . . so wrong.
Because these Plague hospitals were twenty years gone, but it seemed like time had no meaning here, and even the noises felt like they were trapped, rebounding back against each other, quieter and quieter, until they were nothing but whispers.
He pushed back the white cloth to the first medical stall.
There was a young man not much older than himself sitting on the edge of a hospital gurney. He wore a white hospital shift, his left wrist tagged with a plastic band that read his patient number and allergies. His hands were blackened, and Jax could feel how much they hurt—twisting, excruciating pain, as if he was being devoured alive.
He was reading a book. There were dozens of them piled up on the makeshift half shelf behind him. They looked dirty and old, having been read a hundred times. Jax tilted his head to the side a little to read the title. The Swords of Veten Ruel. An old classic about as enjoyable as watching paint dry.
The young man seemed to be enjoying it, though.
His hair was shorn short, the color of blood to match his thick eyebrows. It was startling, how much he looked like the Metal he and Robb had found on the Tsarina, though his eyes were a gradient of browns and reds. Rust colored.
Still, he looked like . . .
“Di?”
The young man glanced up—and through—him.
No, he wasn’t D09. He couldn’t be. What were the odds that the person D09 had been actually looked like the body Robb had uploaded him into? This was the boy—the original one—who looked like Di’s body. This was the real version of that mold. Human—
And very much dying.
There were footsteps behind him. He turned to watch a girl come down the aisle toward them. She looked around sixteen, in a ratty gray shawl and a hood that covered half her face. The tail of a straw-colored braid curved down her shoulder, and she played with it around her finger. He recognized this girl from Robb and Ana’s stories of her. What was her name—Mellifare?
Quickly, before she could see, the young man hid his book underneath his pillow.
“Hello, Dmitri Rasovant,” she greeted him in a feathery voice.
Dmitri Rasovant—this was Lord Rasovant’s late son?
So this was the past, then.
Quickly, Jax glanced around the hangar again. Now he could see the threads of light between one gurney stall and the next, the places where one fate ended and another began, stitched together to create this illusion of the past. He had never seen the past in the stars before, but it wasn’t unheard-of. Time flowed like a river, and the past was just a bit upstream.
But why am I here?
The redheaded young man, Dmitri, shifted uncomfortably at her knowing his name. “And who’re you? You’re not supposed to be here—and I’d appreciate if you didn’t get closer. Or you’ll get the Plague, too.”
She cast an amused glance at the other Plague victims. “I cannot contract it.”
“You’re immune?” he asked doubtfully.
“Something like that.”
“Did Mari—Marigold—send you? I told her not to. I told her to forget about me and—”
“No,” Mellifare said softly, warmly, a pleasant hum in her voice, “I am here of my own accord. To see you. To offer a proposition.”
Simply being near her made Jax’s skin crawl. Ripples of something terrible slushed off her, so heavy it made his mouth taste like ash.
It seemed like the young man felt the same, and he shook his head. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I can’t do anything—”
“But you can.” She tilted her head, her eyes drifting down to the young man’s blackened hands. “Are you afraid of dying, Dmitri Rasovant?”
The question seemed to surprise him. “. . . Y-yes?”
“Would you do anything, if I said I could save you? If your own father could save you?”
Dmitri’s eyebrows furrowed. “Save me? How?”
She smiled. “Your father is a brilliant man, and I wish to give him all the knowledge I possess to save the kingdom—and to save you. You see, I am not from this kingdom. I am from far, far away and I have lived a very long time, and I need his help.”
“You are delusional,” Dmitri replied, and his heart monitor began to beep sporadically. “Leave before I call a ward—”
As he reached for a buzzer to summon a nurse, she grabbed him by his blackened hand and jerked it toward her. Her eyes widened, pupils to irises flooding with a brilliant red light. He stifled a gasp and stopped struggling against her. “Now do you believe me, Dmitri Rasovant? I can save you. I can save you all.”
“Don’t,” Jax murmured under his breath, because even though he was in the past, he saw the future unfurling like a tapestry of fire and darkness.
Ana had said that Metals were once human, but he didn’t believe it until just then. How could Rasovant have uploaded people into machines? But Jax knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, that with the knowledge Mellifare had given him, Rasovant had done just that. Taken their souls and made them ghosts inside metal shells.
And this was where it all began.
Was this what the stars wanted him to see?
Dmitri Rasovant studied Mellifare as though it was too good to be true—and it was—but there was desperation written into the way he bit his bottom lip.
From the top of the row of sickbeds, a doctor stumbled down, dragging his left foot behind him. Jax thought it pretty strange that a doctor would be in a Plague hospital—until he realized the doctor was infected, too. Could all of these souls be the Metals who’d been HIVE’d? That was a terrifying thought.
The girl quickly looked at the doctor and then back at Dmitri Rasovant. “I
need your answer. Do you not want to see your friends again? Do you not want to go home? What would you give if I granted you that?”
“Don’t,” Jax pleaded. “Please, don’t.”
But the boy glanced down at his terrible rotting hands, and then back to her. “Anything,” he replied. “I’d give anything.”
“A heart will do.” She grinned, and suddenly everything slowed to a stop. Noises echoed until they sank into whispers—
And then silence.
Jax glanced around at the rest of the hospital, but everything was so still it looked like a photo. He turned back to Dmitri and was susprised to see that Dmitri saw him, too.
“Why did you do that?” he hissed, wanting to punch him. The young man scrambled to the back of his gurney, frightened. “Was it worth it? Did you give her your heart? You probably ended up dead! Forgotten in the body of some HIVE’d M—” His words caught in his throat, and his tongue tasted ash.
I’m lying?
This boy hadn’t been forgotten. But how did he know him—from where? He studied him for a moment longer, shorn red hair and brownish eyes, and the realization dawned. What were the odds of it?
A thousand to one—a million.
But as he said his name, his tongue tasted sweet. It was truth.
“. . . Di.”
“How do you know my name?” the boy—Di, Dmitri—asked, and then his eyebrows furrowed. “Don’t I know you?”
Di. Dmitri Rasovant. Lord Rasovant’s son.
Oh, of all the people Ana could have fallen in love with. Of all the thousands of Metals, hundreds of thousands of Solani, millions of Erosians and Cercians—she had to fall in love with the son of the man who tried to kill her?
The boy who let the Great Dark into the kingdom?
He took a step back.
“I know you,” Dmitri went on. “I feel like I must.”
“Why did you do that?” Jax snapped. “Why did you sell us off to the Great Dark? You—”
“I was afraid!” he replied. “I didn’t want to die.”
The anger in Jax cooled into a dull, aching throb. Because if Dmitri had never sold out the kingdom, he would never have become a Metal. Never met Ana. Never met him. In two strides he came up to Di and took him by the shoulders. He was so thin and gaunt and sick. Jax hated to see him like this. “Look, metalhead, I don’t know if this is a dream or a memory or what—but you have to remember her.”
The young man looked confused. “Who?”
There was a sharp sound, and one of the fate threads above them unwound, tearing the rooftop open like fabric, to a deep, unending darkness. Seams began to unravel down the walls, across the floor, picking apart the scene thread by thread, swallowed by a darkness so loud it rattled his bones.
He turned his gaze back to Di as black tendrils swooped down and ate the privacy sheets, the hospital bed, the floor, and began to pick at the edges of Di. “You’ll know her—you’ll always know her, I promise.”
Piece by piece, the darkness took him. He tried to grab ahold, to keep him a little longer—
Because this was Di, their Di, and Goddess he wanted him to remember the rounds of Wicked Luck he lost—and he wanted him to remember Ana and Robb, and Siege, and Talle, and Wick, and Riggs, and even that bastard, Barger—to remember him. To remember all of them.
But most importantly, he wanted Di to do the impossible—
He wanted him to come back from the HIVE.
Because he was family. Jax’s family.
And Jax had never thought he’d have something like that.
One moment, he had his fingers curled around Dmitri’s arms, and the next Dmitri had unraveled into a string of light, and snaked away, up and up, like a streamer caught in the wind—and vanished.
Jax fell into the darkness.
And fell.
And fell.
So far, and so fast, he soon forgot he was falling at all. The warmth in his chest where his light once resided was gone, replaced by a deep and hollow emptiness. Bit by bit, the darkness began to take him, too. First a speck, then another, until he was disintegrating like a statue of sand. His hands gone, his arms, his legs . . . fading into a nothingness.
And he was so tired.
In the distance, he heard a voice. It was familiar, but he was so tired, and the nothingness in his brain felt so comforting.
“Ma’alor.”
He held on to the sound of Robb’s voice like a light across a vast and dark sea.
Emperor
Wynn Wysteria was going to be a problem—especially if she began comparing notes with Erik Valerio.
He drummed his fingers on the desk of his vanity, staring at the broken silver stitches across his cheek. Erik Valerio liked to run his mouth, and Wynn Wysteria poked around in places she should not. He could not just dispose of them; the families they came from were too prominent. He would have to get rid of them some other way.
Absently, he plucked the suture pen from its stand and began to restitch his cheek—
“Careful—do not sew them too close together. Do you want me to do it?” a voice, grating and metal in his head, asked.
With a jerk, something snared him by his coding with so much force he bent forward, dropping the suture pen. He gripped the edge of the vanity.
It felt as though his chest was on fire—the stifling, terrible need to breathe—
It was an image—a memory. In that old and rusted medical ward.
A young woman—fifteen, with unruly black hair braided atop her head—glared at him. Golden eyes. It was the Empress. “I said no. I can do it.”
“On your own leg? Just allow me.”
“C’mon, let me try it for once.”
“Why?”
She looked him defiantly in the eye. “Because someday you might not be around to stitch me up.”
“I doubt that.”
—And then he was sitting on the stool of his vanity again. The reflection in the mirror looked back at him, eyes the color of moonlight, and said, “You were wrong.”
He screamed and lurched off the bench, stumbling away from the mirror, and fell flat on his back. But as soon as he looked back at the mirror, it was vacant.
It had been an illusion.
A virus that bot had injected into him.
A—a glitch.
He curled his hands into fists of rage and slammed them against the floor. And again, this time with a scream. Again, and again, until the skin on his knuckles cracked, revealing the silver veins of his metal skeleton underneath.
That damned can opener did something to him, and he could not zero out the virus quickly enough. It was leafing between his programs, as soft and subtle as water between his fingers. Some sort of malware—but every time he tried to isolate it, the program disappeared. Then reappeared elsewhere. He felt constantly distracted. Constantly unmoored, dredging up memories that were his but not.
And it had something to do with that girl—
“Your Excellence?”
The voice startled him, and he glanced behind him at the herald standing in the doorway. He quickly got to his feet, brushing off his pants, and cleared his throat. “Forgive me—is there something you need?”
The steward went on as if he had not just seen the Emperor banging his fists on the ground for theoretically no reason at all. He was very good at pretending. “Your Grace, Erik Valerio is scheduled to see you today. He is very adamant.”
“Of course. Tell him—tell him to meet me in the library. I have a book to return.”
“Very good, Your Excellence,” said the steward, and then he added, “It is very nice to see the library visited. It is one of the best in the kingdom, I must say so myself. It even has copies of my great-grandfather’s research on the Cantos for the mad Emperor.”
That gave him an idea. “There is a section on the Cantos?”
“Oh! Yes, Your Excellence. The palace’s library has the most extensive collection of scholarly essays, as well as the origin
al text. I must say it is quite a resource.”
“Thank you. I think I will go explore it.”
“Oh—you’re—you’re welcome,” the steward replied in surprise, and bowed as he left.
Was thank you really that odd of a phrase for him? He rubbed at his mouth and went over to his wardrobe, picking out a pair of black gloves and fitting them over his ruined knuckles. Now there was another thing he had to hide. He put a flesh-colored bandage over his cheek, grabbed the book he had finished in the garden, The Swords of Veten Ruel, and left to meet with Erik Valerio, knowing that if he had to kill him, there were enough corners in the library to hide the body.
Ana
Ana stood in the garden, looking up at the Spire.
It had been an hour since Robb had disappeared into it, and Siege and Talle had retreated to the other side of the garden. Ana had survived the HIVE—and she had learned what it was looking for, some sort of heart, but all she could think about was Jax, and all she wanted was her captain to come over and comfort her, and tell her that he would be okay—that he would get better. To give her permission to get back in the fight—to save her kingdom.
Siege always knew what to say. Ana needed that now more than ever.
But Siege never came over, and so Ana stood alone on the other side of the garden, torn between her love for Jax and the end of times. When Di had been crowned six months ago, she hadn’t thought he would be in power for so long. The Emperor blamed rogue Metals for the world’s ills, and the citizens listened. It seemed like fear was a motivation that, stoked like fire, could burn down an entire kingdom.
And oh Goddess, was the kingdom burning.
Ana was pacing back and forth between lavender flowers and a patch of moonlilies when a Solani swept out of the garden gates to Siege and Talle and told them they could see Jax now.
Ana bristled as she quickly came over. “And me?”
“The ma c’zar said the child should wait out here,” the guard said.
“She does know I was put in charge of a kingdom, right?” asked Ana, but the captain made a motion for her to calm down.
“She’ll wait,” Siege said, and then she told her quietly, “Don’t—just don’t do anything while I’m gone. And when I return, I . . . I need to tell you something.”
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