“Ma’alor.”

He held on to the sound of Robb’s voice like a light across a vast and dark sea.

Emperor

Wynn Wysteria was going to be a problem—especially if she began comparing notes with Erik Valerio.

He drummed his fingers on the desk of his vanity, staring at the broken silver stitches across his cheek. Erik Valerio liked to run his mouth, and Wynn Wysteria poked around in places she should not. He could not just dispose of them; the families they came from were too prominent. He would have to get rid of them some other way.

Absently, he plucked the suture pen from its stand and began to restitch his cheek—

“Careful—do not sew them too close together. Do you want me to do it?” a voice, grating and metal in his head, asked.

With a jerk, something snared him by his coding with so much force he bent forward, dropping the suture pen. He gripped the edge of the vanity.

It felt as though his chest was on fire—the stifling, terrible need to breathe—

It was an image—a memory. In that old and rusted medical ward.

A young woman—fifteen, with unruly black hair braided atop her head—glared at him. Golden eyes. It was the Empress. “I said no. I can do it.”

“On your own leg? Just allow me.”

“C’mon, let me try it for once.”

“Why?”

She looked him defiantly in the eye. “Because someday you might not be around to stitch me up.”

“I doubt that.”

—And then he was sitting on the stool of his vanity again. The reflection in the mirror looked back at him, eyes the color of moonlight, and said, “You were wrong.”

He screamed and lurched off the bench, stumbling away from the mirror, and fell flat on his back. But as soon as he looked back at the mirror, it was vacant.

It had been an illusion.

A virus that bot had injected into him.

A—a glitch.

He curled his hands into fists of rage and slammed them against the floor. And again, this time with a scream. Again, and again, until the skin on his knuckles cracked, revealing the silver veins of his metal skeleton underneath.

That damned can opener did something to him, and he could not zero out the virus quickly enough. It was leafing between his programs, as soft and subtle as water between his fingers. Some sort of malware—but every time he tried to isolate it, the program disappeared. Then reappeared elsewhere. He felt constantly distracted. Constantly unmoored, dredging up memories that were his but not.

And it had something to do with that girl—

“Your Excellence?”

The voice startled him, and he glanced behind him at the herald standing in the doorway. He quickly got to his feet, brushing off his pants, and cleared his throat. “Forgive me—is there something you need?”

The steward went on as if he had not just seen the Emperor banging his fists on the ground for theoretically no reason at all. He was very good at pretending. “Your Grace, Erik Valerio is scheduled to see you today. He is very adamant.”