Mellifare took out a flashlight and shook it. The warm yellow light illuminated the steps that led down to a small and cramped room. There were no decorations of great battles, unlike the grander tombs they’d destroyed—as though whoever was buried here was meant to be forgotten. Ancient dust and cobwebs hung from the corners, draping across the walls like curtains. There was no coffin. It was empty of everything.

He had the fleeting thought that he had been here before, led by a brown-skinned girl with fiery wires in her hair, hoping they would find the—

He blinked, and the thought vanished.

“Oh, Anaaaa,” Mellifare called, “have you found the bottom yet?”

Mellifare’s light crept across the walls and found her at the far end of the tomb.

“Memory cores,” the golden-eyed girl began, her voice strangely calm. “They’re designed after your heart, aren’t they?”

“I taught Lord Rasovant how to build them,” replied Mellifare, “to trap souls in them, so that I could harvest their light without my heart.”

“And the people inside the cores? Those souls?” Ana asked.

“They are easy enough to overwrite, as you well know.”

He winced as she said that, a spark of pain in the back of his head—and a memory of the Iron Palace, grabbing a small worker bot out of the air and pushing a command into it—a little of himself—the voice now lodged in the back of his head. That same can opener that had attacked him on the dreadnought.

The one that had made him glitch.

Mellifare raised the glowlight to illuminate the girl. Eagerness thrummed in her song, infectious and loud.

The girl stood facing the wall, staring down at a hunched-over skeletal figure, knees once drawn to its chest. The white bone and cloth had decomposed so thoroughly it was almost dust. The person had died pressing something against their chest.

The heart—

But it was gone.

All that was left was the faintest outline—a square the size of a plum—in the decomposing leather of the corpse’s skin.

When Mellifare realized, the song twisted like an errant wind into a harsh, discordant cry. He winced against it.

“Where is it?” Mellifare hissed, rushing up to the skeleton, shoving the girl aside. She picked at the bones, defiling them, as the skeleton crumbled, skin turning to dust. The rest of the bones lost their shape and fell into a pile with an exhausted tremble. She whirled around to the girl. “WHERE IS IT?”

The girl stood her ground. In the glow of Mellifare’s light, her eyes looked liquid. “It isn’t here,” she said calmly.

“WHERE IS IT?” Mellifare roared, and took her by the front of her coat.

“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But it’s not here. It seems the Goddess beat you to it.”

“The Goddess?” Mellifare’s voice crackled and quaked.

He winced again against the song. It was screeching now, angry and desperate.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? I’m not the Goddess, Mellifare. As you said, I couldn’t even save the Metal I love.”