“Ana—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she had added, trying to tell herself that he didn’t mean it that way.

Even though it sounded like a declaration.

Even though it made her heart flutter.

“Besides, I was only saying we should buy the bot so it can do all the chores that I know you don’t like to—and I’m sure you could find some sort of use for it, and it might not be as much of a nuisance as you’re thinking and— Di?” she had called when she realized that he hadn’t been following.

She’d glanced behind her to see where he had wandered off to. A vendor probably caught his eye, or a window display. Instead, she found him only a few feet behind her, having paused in the middle of the market, somewhere between one step and the next.

Her heart had leaped into her throat.

“. . . Di?”

On some nights after, when they visited mechanics on Iliad and listened to rumors of Rasovant’s lost fleetship, she wished she had never turned around. Because Di stood frozen, shoulders stiff, legs immobile. His eyes flickered like the lightning storms on Eros, strange and all of a sudden terrifying.

It was the first time he had glitched.

And it would be far from the last.

Now she wondered how different her world would be if she had never gone in search of Rasovant’s lost fleetship. If faced with the choice now, she wasn’t sure what she would do to have Di back.

All the good memories in her head warred with the look in his red eyes as he sank his lightsword into her stomach. The way his face twisted, the grimace trying to be a smirk. It made the scar on her abdomen ache so deeply it went to her very soul.

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her teeth from chattering and upsetting the voxcollar. The Messiers shoved her into a vacant room. It was a small medical ward, but it had been emptied of all equipment and stocked with spare Metal parts.

One of the Messiers grabbed her by the arm, and the door closed behind her, trapping the two of them inside. The voxcollar gave a pop, and the hum silenced as it deactivated.

“Where is it?” the Messier asked, its monotonous voice dipping into the brassy, familiar baritone she dreaded. It made her breath hitch. When she looked at the Messier again, its eyes were red and Di looked out of them.

She jerked out of his grip.

How could he do that—jump into other Metals? Was it a power of the HIVE?

He advanced on her. “Tell me where the heart is.”

The . . . heart? The only heart she knew about was—

The Cantos. The Great Dark’s heart.

He took a dagger from his waist. It was steel—not a lightblade. A blade made to bleed, whereas a lightblade burned. He meant what he’d said before. He would kill her slowly. She stumbled back, mind reeling—Think, think, think!—as he twirled the blade in his fingers and advanced upon her.