Close, but never touching.

“. . . Jax? Is there something wrong?” he asked hesitantly.

“Can’t I kiss my partner?” Jax asked, and gently traced this thumb across Robb’s bottom lip.

Maybe he’s just nervous, Robb thought. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes in the docking bay, then. Either I’ll have Ana—or you will. We’ll be fine.”

For a moment longer Jax studied Robb’s face, as if he was trying to ingrain it into his memory. “Al gat ha astri ke’eto, ma’alor.”

Until the next star shines on you.

“I’ll see you soon,” Robb promised in reply, and watched him leave down the dark maintenance hallway and out of sight.

It’s nothing, he told himself as he heaved the rucksack, heavy with the tools he needed, onto his shoulder and left down the other way to find the electrical conjunction. Jax is just nervous, like I’m nervous.

He easily found an open grate into the ventilation ducts, or climbed on top of a cleaning bot to lift himself inside, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, even as everything went according to plan.

Ana

A group of six Messiers led her down a long gray hallway. Halogen lights lined the edges like trim work, the doors they passed sealed tight. There were medical wards and living quarters, vacant food halls and empty rooms, their windows dark. She didn’t know where they were taking her on the dreadnought, and that made her all the more nervous.

She should be dead. She was going to be dead if she didn’t come up with another lie—and fast. At least she knew she’d been right: the HIVE was looking for something in the shrines, and then burning them.

But what?

Think, Ana.

When the Messiers had loaded her into a transport shuttle, they bound her hands behind her back with magnetic cuffs and snapped a voxcollar around her neck. It hummed softly against her throat, a constant threat of ten thousand volts straight to her skin if she so much as mumbled a word. She couldn’t escape it. Was this what Jax had had to deal with for a week while he served Lady Valerio in the Iron Palace? If she fought back against her captors, she’d surely make a sound.

So she had to work around that.

Somehow.

When they had brought her onto the dreadnought, the Messiers stripped her of her cloak, her weapons, her coppers, her comm-link . . .

But when the Messier had found Di’s memory core, it paused.

There was a shift in its eyes, and it flicked its gaze to her—and there he was. Just like on the rooftop in Neon City, the Emperor—Di—looked out through the Messier’s eyes.

He had tucked the memory core back into her coat pocket. “For your comfort,” he had purred, and then the Messier’s eyes faded to blue, and he was gone again.

It had to be a trick of her mind—he couldn’t be anywhere, could he?

The Messiers let her keep Di’s memory core nevertheless, even as they stripped her of everything else and led her deeper into the dreadnought. She had been walking for so long, she couldn’t remember how to get back to the docking bay where they’d brought her in.