A hundred glasses rose up, and a hundred people said in unison, “And the iron keep them safe.”

They downed the liquor and smashed the shot glasses against the floor, and the crowd followed suit. Glass scattered across the floor like glittering stars, reflecting the lantern lights above. Then Ana, without a moment’s hesitance, turned and left the ballroom.

Jax

A twenty-piece orchestra struck up a tired tune in a minor key, and it made the air shiver with mourning. A strange feeling vibrated through him, the light under his skin shifting, whispering to him. Robb would turn to him, ask him to dance, and—

“Would you care to dance, ma’alor?”

And then, out in the garden—

“Please,” he said under his breath, hopeful, and grabbed his partner by the arm and dragged him over to the ballroom’s grand windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, overlooking the royal garden beneath. Moonlilies were just beginning to open, unfurling in bursts of white. The light inside him swayed and shimmered, and he was heady with the possibility.

Please.

A figure materialized out of the darkness of one of the arches. It was Ana, the brassy buttons on her red coat catching the moonlight like flares.

“Are we spying on her now?” Robb joked, glancing between him and Ana down in the garden. “Is that E0S?”

“We’re just looking,” he said, but when his partner raised an eyebrow he added, “And yes, that’s E0S.”

“You’ve seen this before.”

“I hope so.”

There was a shadow on the other side of the garden. It materialized out of an archway, a stranger in a billowing half cape. He crossed the garden in long strides. His hair was half pulled back into a bloodred knot, and the was unmistakable in the way you always knew the color of the sun, and following like a trail of suns were countless palace lanterns.

And although Jax couldn’t hear him through the window and the noise of the funeral, he read Ana’s name on his lips.

Di

A glitch festered at the back of his mind, and all he wanted to do was pluck his memory core from his body and finally rest. But as he stood in the cockpit of the Dossier, about to break away from the moonbay and leave the Iron Palace forever—he remembered how Wick used to kick his feet up on the communications console, and how Riggs’s mechanical leg thunked up and down the hallway, the sound of Talle’s laughter rebounding from the galley, so full of mirth it made his soul ache a little less, and the glow of Captain Siege’s hair just before an adventure, and Ana’s eyes glimmering yellow-gold of suns and new hope and excitement, so bright it blinded his memories—

And Siege turned around in the pilot’s chair and gave him a knowing look. “You don’t want to be here, metalhead.”

Now he found himself standing in the middle of the palace’s dark garden, as the most beautiful person in the universe stared at him as if he was a comet that had passed long ago and was never expected to return.