Oh, of all the people Ana could have fallen in love with. Of all the thousands of Metals, hundreds of thousands of Solani, millions of Erosians and Cercians—she had to fall in love with the son of the man who tried to kill her?

The boy who let the Great Dark into the kingdom?

He took a step back.

“I know you,” Dmitri went on. “I feel like I must.”

“Why did you do that?” Jax snapped. “Why did you sell us off to the Great Dark? You—”

“I was afraid!” he replied. “I didn’t want to die.”

The anger in Jax cooled into a dull, aching throb. Because if Dmitri had never sold out the kingdom, he would never have become a Metal. Never met Ana. Never met him. In two strides he came up to Di and took him by the shoulders. He was so thin and gaunt and sick. Jax hated to see him like this. “Look, metalhead, I don’t know if this is a dream or a memory or what—but you have to remember her.”

The young man looked confused. “Who?”

There was a sharp sound, and one of the fate threads above them unwound, tearing the rooftop open like fabric, to a deep, unending darkness. Seams began to unravel down the walls, across the floor, picking apart the scene thread by thread, swallowed by a darkness so loud it rattled his bones.

He turned his gaze back to Di as black tendrils swooped down and ate the privacy sheets, the hospital bed, the floor, and began to pick at the edges of Di. “You’ll know her—you’ll always know her, I promise.”

Piece by piece, the darkness took him. He tried to grab ahold, to keep him a little longer—

Because this was Di, their Di, and Goddess he wanted him to remember the rounds of Wicked Luck he lost—and he wanted him to remember Ana and Robb, and Siege, and Talle, and Wick, and Riggs, and even that bastard, Barger—to remember him. To remember all of them.

But most importantly, he wanted Di to do the impossible—

He wanted him to come back from the HIVE.

Because he was family. Jax’s family.

And Jax had never thought he’d have something like that.

One moment, he had his fingers curled around Dmitri’s arms, and the next Dmitri had unraveled into a string of light, and snaked away, up and up, like a streamer caught in the wind—and vanished.

Jax fell into the darkness.

And fell.

And fell.

So far, and so fast, he soon forgot he was falling at all. The warmth in his chest where his light once resided was gone, replaced by a deep and hollow emptiness. Bit by bit, the darkness began to take him, too. First a speck, then another, until he was disintegrating like a statue of sand. His hands gone, his arms, his legs . . . fading into a nothingness.

And he was so tired.

In the distance, he heard a voice. It was familiar, but he was so tired, and the nothingness in his brain felt so comforting.