Jax winced, shielding his eyes, as the brightness swept across the bridge.

“Get off of me!” the Emperor in the XO cried, grabbing the bot.

The XO threw it against the window. It sank to the floor beside Jax. He pressed himself harder against the window, wishing he could sink right through it.

The XO twitched, electricity jumping across the badges and buttons of its uniform, as it raised its lightsword to Jax. “You.”

This was the image he’d seen in Robb’s stars—the moment he would die. The blade would find his heart and pin him to the glass window, and there he’d bleed out. He used to wake up gasping from this nightmare, and Robb would crawl out of his bunk bed and into his and tell him it was all right.

But it wasn’t. It never would be. Because he knew he couldn’t stop it.

That he shouldn’t stop it.

He winced away, bringing his obsidian wristbands up to shield his face, waiting for the pain, the slice of hotness. Di drove the sword down—

Into E0S.

And there the sword embedded in the window and stuck fast. His heart jumped into his throat.

The stars had changed—but who had changed them?

Jax tried to push himself off the window, but the glass crackled beneath him. He froze. The lightsword spread fissures in the glass around it, feathering outward like a lightning strike in all directions. A high-pitched whistling squirreled through the cracks, oxygen swirling out.

If either of them pulled the lightsword free, the window wouldn’t hold.

“Damned thing,” the Emperor murmured, wincing as if in pain. The XO’s eyes flickered—and its body jerked again.

Another crack inched across the glass.

“You won’t catch her,” he said. “She’ll always be one step ahead of you. She’ll stop you. She’ll bring you back.”

The Emperor glanced out the window, but the skysailer was long gone. “Bring me back?” He laughed, and the body of the XO jerked again. He crawled closer to Jax, until they were only inches apart, and Jax glared at the monster looking out from behind the Messier’s glitching gaze.

The darkness that had twisted Di.

Ah vent’a nazu mah, it hummed in his head, a slight shift in the whisper he’d heard all those months before in the palace. Where it was a promise to come then, now it was a promise come to pass. Ah vent’a nazu morah.

I have come from the edges, it translated. I have come from the end—

From out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a skysailer bank upward toward the bridge.

Robb.

“I will let you in on a secret, nan c’zar. There is nowhere she can hide where I will not find her,” whispered the Emperor, flicking his gaze up behind Jax to the skysailer as it approached. “She is mine.”

“Oh, metalhead”—the blue-white glow of the lightsword illuminated them, the verge of death painting them the color of a moonrise, and he looked up into the metallic face of the XO, to Di, and wished he wasn’t afraid—“you were hers, too.”