It did break.

It was breaking as he watched the moment, lips pressed against her ear, relishing her smell. Of honeysuckle vines and dusky sunlight falling across her cheeks. His hand shook with the sword pressed to her stomach.

—DOSSIER. SIEGE. ROBB. JAX. TSARINA. NEVAEH. CERCES. D-DI. A-A-A-AN—

“I should have let you burn.” His voice. His body. His hand pushing the sword into her. He heard her gasp, felt her wilt, his heart breaking, breaking.

And she looked at him with molten golden eyes—a color he had seen so often, in so many different shades of light, at dusk and dawn and midday and midnight, stitching him together again.

And he remembered.

—ANA.

IV

Starcrossed

Di

Somewhere in the distance, emergency sirens wailed.

The floor was cold and hard against his cheek. His head throbbed as he slowly came to, programs flaring back to life one by one. His optics focused, and he blinked and pushed himself to sit up. Deep red lights bathed the room—a medical ward? It looked familiar, but his head was so jumbled he could not think of it. Absently, he dragged his finger along the stitches on his cheek, one, two, the rest broken, and tried to think—at all, really.

His head was so quiet.

“Lenda, steady on that dreadnought!” shouted a voice as strong and striking as a bell. “Hold course!”

He knew that voice.

And—and he knew this room. The medical ward. Pieces came back to him slowly, like figures through a fog. He pushed himself to his feet, scrambling to the door. This was—this ship was—

The ship tilted so fast, he lost his balance and slammed face-first into the doorlock. It bleeped and slid open to a hull he knew well. To a skysailer he had driven before. To a rusted and antique Cercian-7 transport vessel.

This ship was the Dossier.

Was—was this a nightmare? The HIVE playing a trick on him?

He took a step out as the ship shook again, and he gripped the doorway tightly.

Those are explosions, he realized. They were in space—that he could feel—somewhere deep in the kingdom. There was a beacon pinging the Dossier over and over again. It was the call of a Messier ship, as loud as a foghorn.

COME BACK TO ME. YOU ARE MINE.

The code was familiar, the song so sweet it curled his teeth.

The HIVE—no, the Great Dark.

Mellifare.

Someone was on the gunnery in the back—Lenda, he guessed? And a Metal was in the engine room—although he did not recognize them. A woman with platinum hair climbed the stairs. The royal captain from the palace, but every time he thought about her his mind went fuzzy—like a radio signal gone out of tune.

This was the Dossier.

Somehow.

He shoved off from the doorway and stumbled up the stairs to the first floor, but the woman was gone. He skimmed his hand across the rusted wall to keep himself steady as he made his way to the cockpit, the pain in his head intensifying until he could barely see straight. There were all of these memories—moments he half remembered and could not possibly. Flashes of playing Wicked Luck in the galley, but then a memory of dying in his father’s lab and the Plague eating up his skin, and then the feeling of the cold Iron Crown as he placed it on his head.