She just wanted more time.

With Di, with Robb, with Jax—with Siege. Her captain.

But time flowed in a river going one way, and she was on it for only a short while, while this monster had sailed the river for countless centuries, killing and taking and devouring worlds, and that she could not let happen anymore.

Because she did not want her friends—her home—to die.

But she didn’t want the Metals in the HIVE to die either. She couldn’t save both, but she couldn’t choose one over the other. She wasn’t a Metal, she had never been part of the HIVE, and yet she had the power to damn them all. She had a choice that wasn’t a choice at all.

Destroy the heart . . .

Or let the Great Dark win. Let the Metals exist in the HIVE.

She now understood why it had won so many times over the course of its existence. Because it never had anything to lose, and Ana had everything. Di and Jax and Robb and Elara and Xu—dying so that she could succeed. And so she had to choose. There was no one else left to.

Her captain had not raised her to take the easy road.

“Fine,” she said, her voice trembling, curling her fingers tightly around the heart as it pulsed against her palm. “Then you’ll have to pry it from my corpse.”

“That,” Mellifare purred, “can be arranged.”

She appeared in the darkness, sliding between the shafts of light that speared through from the broken windows above, and stalked toward Ana, electricity curling in her hands.

Jax

“Get to the door!” he cried, deflecting a lightsword as it came down on him and slamming his foot into the Messier’s middle. It was infinitely harder to disable them without outright killing them. For every one Messier they took out, two more crawled out of the city to take its place. They were all converging, gathering, trying to fight their way into the shrine. Just as soon as Jax had decided to go for the door, what felt like every Messier in Nevaeh came to stop them. They poured out of the streets like ants, and in the middle of them danced Viera and Lenda.

He pressed his back against Robb’s as four more Messiers advanced on them.

“Are they ever going to let up?” Robb asked, brushing his arm across his forehead. He was breathless. “Do you have any bright ideas?”

“I could kiss you again and maybe see if we get a break in the future?”

“Do you really think that’ll help?”

“No,” he said bitterly, hating he couldn’t lie, “but it’d sure help me feel better.”

One of the Messiers attacked. Robb shoved his foot against its knee, and it buckled inward, before he drove a lightsword through its skull and kicked the android back into its friends. If Jax wasn’t so tired, he would have been incredibly turned on by how effortless Robb looked.

“Now!” Robb cried.