Nevaeh looked so small from up here, a tiny city filled with tiny ants, and once she had thought that was how the Goddess saw them. But now she was sure the Goddess wouldn’t have looked down, but up from the ground.

You are not the Goddess, Koren Vey had said.

No, but she was Captain Siege and Talle Fior’s daughter, and somehow that felt all the more powerful.

She pulled out Lady Valerio’s decrepit holo-pad and powered it on. The screen glitched, warming to a neon green. When she had first seen the files, she could hardly believe her eyes. Lady Valerio had depicted the Great Dark’s heart in painstaking detail, rendering it in blueprints and meticulous descriptions, analyzing what it was made from and what could destroy it, but the most startling thing of all was that it looked just like any other Metal heart.

She knew from the Goddess’s tomb it was small and square, but she wasn’t prepared for it to look like the memory core she kept in her pocket, made from an unknown metal that could be destroyed only if enough heat was applied.

Lady Valerio could never do that. The possibilities are endless with this technology, she had noted. She had kept it as a leveraging tool.

Ana now understood what sort of power she held over Rasovant. She had been a terrifying woman indeed.

At the zenith of Astoria, look north across the city. I hid it in the hands of the Goddess, protected by years, she had written in the files, the only clue to the heart’s whereabouts.

Astoria was at its zenith, in the center of the skyscape above Nevaeh, at the highest point in the sky. Four other floating gardens gently twirled around it, a hundred feet below, patches of flowering moonlilies and deep lavenders. She faced north and looked across the city, but all she could see were towering buildings that shone gold in the sunlight that poured from the lip of the harbor above, and lines of traffic, and—

And the burned remains of a cathedral—the Iron Shrine—protruding up out of the city like a shard of obsidian.

I hid it in the hands of the Goddess, Lady Valerio wrote.

There was a statue of the Goddess in the shrine.

That was it.

She put the holo-pad away and quickly ran to the edge of the docks, calling for Jax and his skysailer. A moment later, a ship eased up from the traffic lines, though it wasn’t Jax at the helm. It was Siege.

“Where’s Jax?” she asked, climbing into the craft.

“Staying. Where to?”

Ana nudged her head toward the Iron Shrine. “There.”

The edges of her captain’s hair darkened with foreboding. “Aye, I was afraid of that.”

Di

Out in the garden, Erik Valerio climbed up onto the dais in the center of the garden.

“It seems our Emperor will not make it today,” he started, and in the crowd Mellifare looked pleased, just as Di had hoped. There had been a spy on the Dossier, but it was not anyone in that private meeting Robb had called. “Though we do have another guest with us. I have told you that she is alive—and with Lady Wysteria’s help we found her. We have been lied to, friends, about everything. About our late Empress, about her death. You see, she is not dead at all, and I have brought her here to show you. Your Grace, if you would,” he called, turning everyone’s attention to the honeysuckle vines.