As he reached for a buzzer to summon a nurse, she grabbed him by his blackened hand and jerked it toward her. Her eyes widened, pupils to irises flooding with a brilliant red light. He stifled a gasp and stopped struggling against her. “Now do you believe me, Dmitri Rasovant? I can save you. I can save you all.”

“Don’t,” Jax murmured under his breath, because even though he was in the past, he saw the future unfurling like a tapestry of fire and darkness.

Ana had said that Metals were once human, but he didn’t believe it until just then. How could Rasovant have uploaded people into machines? But Jax knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, that with the knowledge Mellifare had given him, Rasovant had done just that. Taken their souls and made them ghosts inside metal shells.

And this was where it all began.

Was this what the stars wanted him to see?

Dmitri Rasovant studied Mellifare as though it was too good to be true—and it was—but there was desperation written into the way he bit his bottom lip.

From the top of the row of sickbeds, a doctor stumbled down, dragging his left foot behind him. Jax thought it pretty strange that a doctor would be in a Plague hospital—until he realized the doctor was infected, too. Could all of these souls be the Metals who’d been HIVE’d? That was a terrifying thought.

The girl quickly looked at the doctor and then back at Dmitri Rasovant. “I need your answer. Do you not want to see your friends again? Do you not want to go home? What would you give if I granted you that?”

“Don’t,” Jax pleaded. “Please, don’t.”

But the boy glanced down at his terrible rotting hands, and then back to her. “Anything,” he replied. “I’d give anything.”

“A heart will do.” She grinned, and suddenly everything slowed to a stop. Noises echoed until they sank into whispers—

And then silence.

Jax glanced around at the rest of the hospital, but everything was so still it looked like a photo. He turned back to Dmitri and was susprised to see that Dmitri saw him, too.

“Why did you do that?” he hissed, wanting to punch him. The young man scrambled to the back of his gurney, frightened. “Was it worth it? Did you give her your heart? You probably ended up dead! Forgotten in the body of some HIVE’d M—” His words caught in his throat, and his tongue tasted ash.

I’m lying?

This boy hadn’t been forgotten. But how did he know him—from where? He studied him for a moment longer, shorn red hair and brownish eyes, and the realization dawned. What were the odds of it?

A thousand to one—a million.

But as he said his name, his tongue tasted sweet. It was truth.

“. . . Di.”

“How do you know my name?” the boy—Di, Dmitri—asked, and then his eyebrows furrowed. “Don’t I know you?”

Di. Dmitri Rasovant. Lord Rasovant’s son.