Still, he looked like . . .

“Di?”

The young man glanced up—and through—him.

No, he wasn’t D09. He couldn’t be. What were the odds that the person D09 had been actually looked like the body Robb had uploaded him into? This was the boy—the original one—who looked like Di’s body. This was the real version of that mold. Human—

And very much dying.

There were footsteps behind him. He turned to watch a girl come down the aisle toward them. She looked around sixteen, in a ratty gray shawl and a hood that covered half her face. The tail of a straw-colored braid curved down her shoulder, and she played with it around her finger. He recognized this girl from Robb and Ana’s stories of her. What was her name—Mellifare?

Quickly, before she could see, the young man hid his book underneath his pillow.

“Hello, Dmitri Rasovant,” she greeted him in a feathery voice.

Dmitri Rasovant—this was Lord Rasovant’s late son?

So this was the past, then.

Quickly, Jax glanced around the hangar again. Now he could see the threads of light between one gurney stall and the next, the places where one fate ended and another began, stitched together to create this illusion of the past. He had never seen the past in the stars before, but it wasn’t unheard-of. Time flowed like a river, and the past was just a bit upstream.

But why am I here?

The redheaded young man, Dmitri, shifted uncomfortably at her knowing his name. “And who’re you? You’re not supposed to be here—and I’d appreciate if you didn’t get closer. Or you’ll get the Plague, too.”

She cast an amused glance at the other Plague victims. “I cannot contract it.”

“You’re immune?” he asked doubtfully.

“Something like that.”

“Did Mari—Marigold—send you? I told her not to. I told her to forget about me and—”

“No,” Mellifare said softly, warmly, a pleasant hum in her voice, “I am here of my own accord. To see you. To offer a proposition.”

Simply being near her made Jax’s skin crawl. Ripples of something terrible slushed off her, so heavy it made his mouth taste like ash.

It seemed like the young man felt the same, and he shook his head. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I can’t do anything—”

“But you can.” She tilted her head, her eyes drifting down to the young man’s blackened hands. “Are you afraid of dying, Dmitri Rasovant?”

The question seemed to surprise him. “. . . Y-yes?”

“Would you do anything, if I said I could save you? If your own father could save you?”

Dmitri’s eyebrows furrowed. “Save me? How?”

She smiled. “Your father is a brilliant man, and I wish to give him all the knowledge I possess to save the kingdom—and to save you. You see, I am not from this kingdom. I am from far, far away and I have lived a very long time, and I need his help.”

“You are delusional,” Dmitri replied, and his heart monitor began to beep sporadically. “Leave before I call a ward—”