YOU ARE MINE YOU ARE—

He tore out the Great Dark’s memories of being Metal. Of the palace, of the kingdom, of all the people it had killed.

YOU ARE MINE—

Of the galaxies it had invaded. The Solani kingdom, among countless others. The eons of history it had devoured. The suffering, the bloodshed. He separated zeroes from ones, spreading through them as swiftly as ice across the windshield of the Dossier.

YOU ARE—

He tore the Great Dark asunder, until it was only—

YOU—

“They are free,” Di said, and tried not to think about what he had just done—taken eons’ worth of stolen light to free the Metals in the HIVE. The energy now hummed inside him, powering his wires, his core, his hardware, and he felt strange. Too full and empty all at once. It was a buzzing sort of feeling, his skin tingling with it.

“You promised,” Mellifare whispered as she fell away from his touch, sinking down onto her knees. Her hair was burned at the ends. She held her broken chest and the memory core inside. “You . . . you promised me my . . .”

“He couldn’t promise something that wasn’t his to give,” said Captain Siege as she came up to them, leaning heavily on Talle. Blood leaked from between her fingers as she held on to her wounded side.

Mellifare drew her gaze up to the captain. “. . . Goddess?”

“Siege,” she corrected.

“It is so lonely in my head,” said the Great Dark. “I do not want to be . . . a-alo . . .” Her eyes gave one last brief flicker, and her head bowed; and in a great sigh of time, and space, and stardust . . .

the Great Dark was gone.

Ana

“It’s done,” Ana heard her captain say, and her hair shifted to a yellowish white, like the heart of a candle. Her knees gave out, and she dropped to the ground. Her breath came out in short, sporadic gasps.

“Sunshine!” Talle gasped, falling to her knees beside her. “Di, hurry, there’s a medical bag in the skysailer—”

“On it.” He spun on his heels and broke into a run out of the shrine, tripping on an overturned pew as he went, out of the open shrine doorway and into the square filled with Metals, slowly blinking back to themselves, and people holding their wounds.

Ana’s gaze drifted down to the wound on her captain’s side, not quite understanding what she saw. Too much blood, too little time. It was everywhere, blending into her bloodred murder coat, painting up the side of her cream-colored blouse.

“Starlight,” Siege sighed to her wife, “just let me . . .”

“Stay with me,” Talle whispered. “I love you, sunshine.” She curled her fingers tightly around her wife’s shaking hands. Siege looked pale—pale in the way Ana had seen corpses look pale, and her captain wasn’t a corpse.

Her captain was . . . she was . . .