In reply, Di dug a kerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Your eyeliner didn’t even smudge,” he replied in good humor, and realized that Selena was calling them back to the front of the shrine.

“Hey, Di?” Mari asked, but her voice sounded different. It sounded like—“Di!”

Ana grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around the other side of the statue, as a bolt of lightning arced through the darkness. She grabbed him by the side of the face and made him look at her, the dim light falling softly along her scars. “Di—can you hear me?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” he lied, dazed, and pressed his hand harder against his chest. The blade had cut into his memory core. It was malfunctioning. He needed to keep himself together. Ana slid closer to him, and in the quiet he could hear her frightened breathing.

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“We can’t give her the heart, either,” he replied.

Ana paused for a moment and then said, “Can you—could you free them? I mean—you can do everything else she can, right? Can’t you—can’t you go into her and disassemble the HIVE?”

The taste of the memory had unbalanced him, half of him still in that sun-drenched memory, and he shook his head. “I do not know.”

“Do you think you could try?”

“I do not know.” He tried to sound patient, but he was not patient anymore. He wanted to end this—to fix the mistakes he had begun. Perhaps if he had enough energy, he could force his way into her mind—but what if he tried and the HIVE consumed him again? What if it made him turn on her?

In the darkness, he felt Mellifare’s anger roll off her in waves. She was getting closer.

“You know that captain of yours? She begged for her life, you know. Outside. Before I killed her.”

He heard Ana suck in a breath, and he found her hand and curled his fingers through hers. He squeezed. She is lying, he wanted to tell her. Siege does not die so easily.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed as electricity surged around Mellifare’s footfalls, like drops of water in a calm pond. The shadow lunged. Di grabbed Ana by the hand and pulled her out from behind the pillar and down the middle of the aisle. She stumbled on a censer that had been dropped in the abbesses’ mad dash out of the shrine.

“She begged me to spare your life”—Mellifare’s voice was so close, how was it so close?—“just before I killed her.”

Ana let go of his hand before he could tell her to duck or dodge, felt for the censer on the ground, and swung it by the chain. It collided with Mellifare and knocked her sideways. Her footsteps stumbled like a pebble tripping across a pond.

“Siege would never beg,” Ana snarled into the darkness. “She demands.”

“Oh yes, darling, I demanded so much from you.”