When all the people videoing in nodded in agreement, Siege leaned forward on the table, her hair shifting from a prickly orange to yellow, and she told them everything—about how the HIVE was the Great Dark, like in the prophecy, and how it was now looking for its heart. She told them what had transpired with Ana in the palace, and what they had learned in the Solani ark, about how Rasovant had created Metals, and how the Great Dark stole the light from Metals to fuel itself, and how it was growing stronger.

“If we don’t stop it soon, then it will be too powerful to stop, and once it has its heart, it will kill us all,” she finished. “We need to get the heart first, and we need to stop the Great Dark.”

For a tense moment, no one said anything, until Mokuba shifted in his chair and finally leaned forward. “So you’re saying, Siege, that we need to defeat what amounts to a god.”

“Sounds like a job for the Goddess,” someone said through the video feed—one of the Ironbloods.

Ana fisted her hands under the table, because she wasn’t the Goddess. Under the table, Jax put his hand over hers comfortingly.

“The fate of the kingdom should not fall on one person,” said another voice from the doorway, “but on all of us.”

Oh.

Everyone in the room turned toward the Metal Emperor as he stepped into the room.

Di

They did not want him here.

Wynn Wysteria saw him first, and jumped to her feet as though she had seen a ghost—or perhaps worse. Probably worse. They had been in the palace together just a few days ago. He had seen her down a hallway, mourning dress and curls of hair retreating, having eavesdropped during his argument with Erik Valerio.

She had seen his eyes turn red, the lanterns above his head swirl.

“You,” she hissed, and jabbed a finger at him. “What is he doing here?”

Her voice was so sharp, he winced.

Her shock rippled across the table as the other guests lurched away from him, as if he himself was the Plague.

The captain made a calming motion with her hands. Her hair was the color of agitated coals. “Let him speak—”

“Speak?” the captain of the Prospero, Cullen, snarled. “What would the Iron Kingdom’s heartless Emperor know?”

“He ordered the assimilation of Metals,” Mokuba added. “He ordered my friends who protected them to be killed—butchered like animals!”

He did.

He remembered every word of those orders, because his memory was as perfect as his deeds were dark. There was nothing he could say to change them. He wanted to explain and tell them the truth. That he had been HIVE’d. That he could not control what he said or did. It had still been he who did those terrible things.

He made himself stand there, and he listened, trying to hold on to the words Jax had given him in the medical ward. That he was good.