Dmitri heaved a sob. “But it’s all my fault.”

“You are good,” he repeated. The light faded, and as it did, Jax found himself looking into the moonlit eyes of the red-haired Metal again. He wiped a tear from Di’s cheek, a tear that shouldn’t have been there.

Di blinked. “How did you . . . ?”

“If you were a monster, you wouldn’t have a soul,” he said, and thumped his knuckles against Di’s chest. “Remember when you tried to save me on the dreadnought? You reached out to me and grabbed my hand, and before all hundred-thousand-something souls sucked the life out of me, I saw you—and I saw every other soul in the HIVE. But just then? There was only you.”

Jax wasn’t a fool; he knew that Di understood what that meant. That the HIVE no longer infested his code. That it was him, and wholly him. And slowly, his old friend gave in to the truth, and his shoulders drooped as if in a sigh.

“We need your help, Di,” he said carefully. “We must stop the D’thverek, but if she finds her heart, then we’re all dead, and you’re the only one who has been in her head who can help us.”

“And the only one I trust,” added the captain in the doorway, her hair swirled up into a topknot, pulsing orange then red then orange again. As she stepped into the medical ward, Jax quickly got to his feet. She motioned to Di. “Release him, and then I need you to make some calls.”

He gave a start. “To whom?”

“Everyone. I’ve a feeling we don’t have a lot of time left.”

“Yes, Captain.” He quickly undid Di’s bindings. The steel cords clanked heavily against the ground. Di massaged the side of his neck, rotating his shoulders, and nodded a silent thank-you to Jax. He smiled in reply and left the ward. It wasn’t until he was halfway up the stairs that he glanced over the railing and through the window, as Di stood and faced his captain.

And he wondered why Di looked so afraid.

Robb

The Valerio manor was an empty shell of itself.

It was winter in Ablos on the planet Eros, and the skies were a cotton gray that stretched to the edge of the horizon, just a shade darker than the thick layer of white snow that clung to the wrought-iron fence at the entrance and covered the barren grounds.

He hoped that his memory hadn’t failed him. While he’d sat in the prison in the Spire, he had finally remembered why Resonance had been so familiar. Once, when he was fourteen, he had slipped into his mother’s study to try to find some clues about his missing father. He had scoured her desk, her computer files, her cabinets and books, and when he’d found a decrepit holo-pad, he had powered it up. On it were files labeled Resonance.

He hadn’t gotten a chance to look at them before he’d heard his mother, stashed it back in the drawer where he found it, and leaped out of the window and into the hydrangea bushes.