“Five” came the voice of her captain, standing in the open doorway.

Mellifare stumbled back, staring down at the hole in her chest. “You—you would kill me? You would kill everyone?”

“The people I love are never really gone,” Ana said as the shadow’s pale hand grabbed Mellifare by the shoulder and spun her around.

“And some come back,” added Di, his eyes flickering, flickering, fading, and pressed his palm against her forehead. “But not you.”

Di

The moment his fingers connected with her skin, he felt the energy inside her, crackling like lightning trapped in a bottle. It was the light from eons of souls she had absorbed, from countless worlds, and it was tainted; it was wrong.

The stolen energy came to his fingertips like light through a dark tunnel, pouring through his fingers and up his arm. Crackles of electricity screamed across his skin as his programs flickered back to life, his synapses rebooted, his senses sharpened. It was like taking a breath after a year underwater.

Do you have enough? Are you sated? he heard her whisper across his code.

No, not nearly.

Overflowing with her power, almost drunk with it, he sank into her code, burrowing inside like a worm, between the pointed talons and snapping red maw, into the gnarled root of her, this twisted and dark thing. He did not know if it was her soul or just her code—her malware—but it was corrupted all the same. And from her stemmed thousands upon thousands of threads in every direction, arcing across the kingdom, and with them he could see every Messier. Ones guarding airlocks on Nevaeh, others dragging rebels away on Iliad, and the ones newly changed and waiting in dreadnought holds.

It was the HIVE, singing the song he had been a part of, that had not been a song at all, but thousands of voices screeching in agony.

It reminded him of the white gurney in the hospital, the Plague eating up his hands, and a terrible and spiraling blackness that sucked in all hope and happiness and left him empty. When he was alive, he had been so afraid of death, Mellifare had looked like a goddess come to save him.

He wished he had been braver.

But if he had not become a Metal, he would never have met Ana, and a life with her—with Siege and Talle and Jax and the Dossier—was the best life he could have had.

And it was a life worth fighting for.

YOU ARE MINE OR YOU ARE NOTHING, the Great Dark screamed, but like it had torn through his code, he set upon it with a vengeance. And there was no firewall intricate enough to keep him out.

YOU ARE MINE OR YOU ARE—

One by one, he tore out the threads connected to the HIVE, severing them quicker and quicker, letting them go like balloons into the atmosphere, freeing them. D293. D849. D394. D091—so many numbers, once people, ones with names, and perhaps with a little help, they would be again.