He felt a hand on his arm. Barely.

“Di,” someone whispered, and the voice pulled him back.

His outstretched hands wavered, electricity receding back into his fingertips, pulling his scattered AI back into himself. Out of the bridge, the halls, the locks, the escape pods. Pried it from the core of the dreadnought like plucking splinters out of a flesh wound. As he left, he rewrote a single code. That was all it took to take down the gargantuan ship. Not an elaborate program, but a single set of numbers.

100101010101—

It was the deny code to power its solar core. One the Great Dark had to find before it could fix. It was like searching for a single star in a sky of billions. One by one, the lights flickered out, stranding the ship where it floated.

YOU ARE NOTHING.

YOU ARE NO T HI N G.

YO U . . .

The Great Dark’s voice faded as the ship went dark.

As he pieced himself back together inside his body, easing power back into his other functions, he began to realize just how little power he had left.

His eyesight began to dim.

Voices sounded far away—

“Ak’va—what in the Goddess’s spark did he just do?”

“I’m reading a system-wide shutdown . . . Sunshine, I think he turned off the lights.”

“He can do that?”

“Jax, do you have an escape route?”

“Ready and waiting.”

“Take it.”

—The voices were so familiar. He glanced around at the blur of faces. His chest was still hot, overheated, burning as it tried to cool itself down. He could no longer feel his extremities. He waited for the pull of the Great Dark to tear into his head again—

But there was nothing. Only his thoughts.

Only him.

Di, and not Di, and Dmitri, and D09, and he remembered everything. The Plague and Mercer and Marigold and Nicholii, and Mellifare visiting him as he died, and waking up a Metal, and not remembering himself, and the years spent in the service of Nicholii, who found out, and Mercer, older and bearded, who shoved a little girl into his Metal arms, and Marigold finding their escape pod, and the light-years spent in love without knowing what it felt like, what it meant, that he was not broken or glitching, but that he was mortal and—

The hand on his arm tightened. “Di?”

He looked over.

A heart-shaped face and bronze skin, and golden eyes. His gaze fell across her scars, as intricate as a night sky. As he turned to her, his vision narrowed into a pinprick, and he fell into darkness with her name on his lips.

Ana

Ana frowned, crossing her arms over her chest tightly, as she looked in through the window to the medical ward. Inside, Di sat restrained in a chair in the middle of the room, well away from anything he could use to murder anyone. His eyes were half open but unseeing, as they had been since he’d fainted in the cockpit, and the longer the minutes dragged on, the more worried she became.