“Is she all right?” called a voice from the top of the stairs, and Viera took them down two at a time. “Lenda, did you get her?” The guard captain paused in the doorway to the medical ward, her eyes settling on Di. Her lips thinned. “Are you sure this is wise?”

“I wasn’t going to leave him,” Ana replied, curling her fingers tightly around the midnight black of Di’s cloak. “I won’t leave anyone else behind—”

The ship veered again.

“But he is HIVE’d,” Viera argued, “and there is no way out of it.”

Ana replied. “There is, though.”

“Love will not save him,” she went on, and the words felt like a poker twisting her insides. “Love will not save anyone. It did not save me.”

“I didn’t know you were alive, Viera. If I had—”

“If you had, then what? I guess I should have been in love with you, then, to have have been noticed,” Viera snarled.

The Dossier gave a shudder as an explosion rattled the screws in the old ship.

Ana caught herself on the side of the gurney as the lights crashed to black and the red emergency neons dimmed on. Through the intercom, Jax cried, “Stations!”

For a moment longer, Ana and Viera glared at each other, until Lenda put herself between them and said, “We can discuss the metalhead later—the Messiers are after us, and they won’t stop until we’re dead.”

“We are as good as dead anyway,” Viera ground out between her teeth. “How many people are going to die before you finally give up on him, Ana?”

The words were like a slap. How many people? echoed that bitter part of her brain, because so many had already died. Riggs and Wick and Barger and Lady Valerio and the Grand Duchess and—and so many others during her coronation. Jax had almost died, and Robb, and herself, multiple times.

And Di . . .

Ana bit the inside of her cheek and looked away, because she didn’t have an answer for Viera.

Jax

“Get us out of here!” the captain roared.

He was trying. He gripped the controls tighter, and he could feel his gloves growing moist from the sweat of his hands. Which was, above all else, the second-worst part of this entire fiasco.

The first being that they were being chased by the Great Dark itself.

Three more warnings flared up on his screen, the computer charting the missiles’ trajectories, and he dipped to the left to avoid them—barely missing the explosions. He brought up the windows for the ship’s solar core, the speed of the solar winds, the tautness of the riggings to the sails. Goddess, it would’ve been nice if he’d had a chance to give the Dossier a tune-up before getting into another firefight.

Think—you have to lose them. You’re the best pilot in the kingdom, aren’t you? But his mind was a mess.

The light inside him fretted and pulsed, and he could barely control it—never mind ignore it. He used to be able to sense the stars gently orbiting around him, but now everything felt weirdly visceral, and the more he tried not to think about it, the worse it got.