“Cullen!” she greeted. “Your hair’s longer!”

“So is yours,” they replied. “What’s Siege’s girl doing in a bar like this?”

Siege’s girl.

Even though Ana remembered her parents now, and the rest of her family, the thought of being Siege’s daughter still swelled her heart. It was a moniker she had always wanted to be worthy of.

She still sometimes felt like she wasn’t.

“Looking for the meeting room, actually. I’m a little lost,” she admitted.

Redbeard pointed out of the bar and gave her the directions. “I’ll be along in a jiff and leave this crew to drink without me, aye?”

“Aye!” his crew agreed.

Ana laughed. “Don’t have too much fun, now. I remember what happened last time you were all together—don’t burn the bar the down this time,” she added, waving good-bye, and followed the directions he gave her. Down the hallway to the fork at the end, and then left—

And found Viera instead.

She gave a start. “Oh! You scared me!” She put her hand over her heart and gave a wry laugh. “You lost, too?”

Viera gave her a brief look and nodded. She had combed her hair back against her head, but even in the dim waystation light it shone like plantium. She had borrowed some of Lenda’s clothes—a dark shirt that was a little too big for her and trousers cinched in at the waist. She had a gunsling strapped to her hip, and she tapped her finger on the grip of her pistol apprehensively.

“This place reminds me of the dreadnought,” she said after a moment. “I do not like it. We could be ambushed from anywhere. Why am I not invited to this meeting?”

“It’s just for Siege’s trusted—”

“Am I not trustworthy?”

“No, you are! It’s just . . .”

Viera studied her for a moment before she said, “Siege is wary, because the heart was not in the tomb, and we have a traitor in our midst.”

Ana pursed her lips. “Di’s not a traitor—”

“I do not mean him,” the ex–guard captain replied, and gave Ana a meaningful look. “Someone must have told the HIVE where you were, or else how would the Emperor have known?”

She opened her mouth to reply and then closed it again as the realization slowly curled down the back of her spine. There was no way the Emperor or Mellifare would have known where she had gone, unless they had intercepted her somewhere between Zenteli and Calavan, but she had gone under forged travel papers and never slipped her hood. “Maybe . . . I hadn’t been careful enough, and a Messier saw me at a port and they followed me.”

“Or,” Viera replied, and leaned in close to Ana, so close her skin prickled, “perhaps you do not know your crew as well as you should.”

Then she retreated back down the hall, toward the Dossier. Ana stood there for a long moment, reeling in the possibility Viera had presented. No, Ana knew the crew. They wouldn’t rat on her—not even Elara or Xu. They were good people. Everyone on the Dossier was. But she couldn’t deny the thought that someone had sold her out.