At the bottom of the steps, he paused. “I almost killed you. Is that not a good enough reason?”

She scoffed. “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

“You’re so childish!” he said bitingly in reply, and left for the other end of the hull.

She gritted her teeth, anger vibrating through her, and grabbed for the nearest thing she could—the carcass of E0S on the workbench—and threw it at him as hard as she could. It clipped the side of his head, and he whirled around. E0S clattered to the floor. He looked down to it, then to her. “Did you just throw the can opener at me?”

“Childish enough for you,” she snarked.

A dangerous glint sparked in his coal eyes. “Do not test me, Ana.”

“You’re so infuriating!” She grabbed a wrench and hurled it at him. He dodged. She picked up an omnitool and chucked that, too, and now he was walking back to her with that same patience he had used in the tomb. But she was not scared this time.

She was furious.

“Stop throwing things!” he cried.

“Do you honestly think”—she threw a screwdriver; he dodged—“that I’d blame you? When it was my fault?”

She had almost run out of things to throw, but there was a soldering iron on the hood of the skysailer, and she turned to grab for that. But when she went to throw it, Di was closer than she’d realized. He caught her wrist.

“It is not your fault,” he replied, his hands tightening around her wrist. “It was mine. From the very beginning.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“My name is Dmitri Rasovant.”

Her rebuttal caught in her throat.

The son of the man who’d murdered her family and tried to kill her. His grip on her wrist loosened.

“But my friends called me Di,” he added quietly.

Di—like the graffiti on the wall of the ruins.

The name she called him, too.

She studied his face, searching for any sign that this was a joke—a lie. Something that told her that she could laugh this off, because he couldn’t be . . .

But his lips were pressed into a thin, wobbling line. “When I was dying of the Plague, Mellifare came to me promising that she would make me well again. I just had to introduce her to my father. So you see, Ana, I sold the fate of this kingdom to her for my useless life—”

“It’s not useless.”

His shoulders slumped, and he looked away again. His mouth worked, trying to find the right words to tell her that yes, he was useless, that she should have left him, that he was dead and unworthy, but in truth he was just stubborn and noble, and she hated that so much about him. She hated it because that was what she loved the most, no matter who he was.

Dmitri, D09—

Di.

“So you see,” he said quietly, stepping away from her, “all of this is because of me. If it were not for me, you would still have your family. The kingdom would not be on the verge of ruin. The Great Dark would be nothing.”