Then . . .

Perhaps Di wasn’t lost. Not yet.

“Then we need to talk,” she quickly said, unable to keep the desperation out of her voice. “I need your help. Or I need Starbright’s help. And I am definitely not going to discuss anything while hanging from the ceiling.”

“Then it looks like you’ll be up there for a while,” came a soft, annoyed voice.

A glowlight flickered on, and Ana turned her face just enough to find a young woman leaning against the doorway, holding the light. She was around Ana’s age—eighteen, maybe—with shoulder-length silver hair that partially shadowed her sharp face, and wide violet eyes rimmed with kohl. Her lips were painted black to match the rest of her wardrobe. She was short and curvy, with wide hips and thick legs that tapered into knee-high gravity boots. She was a Solani like Jax, but her skin was darker, reminding Ana of the cold deserts on Cerces. There was a wire that looped from her right ear down into her collar and disappeared. A hearing apparatus.

“Who’re you?” Ana asked.

The young woman ignored her and stepped to the edge where the magnetic plate began, studying the scars on Ana’s face. Her long tassel earrings levitated, rising with the magnetism. “You do look like the image Koren Vey showed me. Are you the Empress?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Ana snapped, and tugged—gently this time—on her sleeves. Her cuff links could be torn off easily enough, and she could feel that if she shifted she could slide out of her pistol holsters. Her boots were magnetized only by the daggers in them, but the magnetism was surprisingly weak through the synthetic material.

Thanks to the glowlight, Ana could make out the rest of the store now. There was a small cot rolled up in the corner, along with a few days’ worth of takeout containers. It had been a hiding spot, but not a very permanent one. The magnetic trap she was currently stuck to was junk-engineered on the fly, sheets of metal taken from the roof, probably, hooked up to a ceiling outlet to make an electromagnet.

It was brilliant, and that infuriated her a little more.

The Solani girl cocked her head, and something dark flickered across her deep violet eyes—much darker than Jax’s. “Leave her, Xu. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Wait! You can’t leave me up here!”

“Can’t I?” the young Solani woman scoffed as she turned to leave. “If you are the Empress, you left your kingdom, your people, your duty. You’re nothing more than a coward—”

With Starbright’s back turned, Ana jerked her arms away from the magnetic plate, and with a snap her cuff links popped off. She swung her feet forward. As she fell, she twisted her shoulder enough to slide her arms out of her pistol harness and caught it by the straps, jumping on top of the Solani. She pinned her to the ground.

“I am no coward,” Ana snapped, shoving the girl facedown into the floor, her knees on her shoulder. She slid a dagger out of her boot and pressed it against the back of the girl’s neck. “And you will help me.”