Ana looked closer at the screens. “How did you do that? The Dossier doesn’t have cameras. Did you install them when we weren’t looking or—”

“Nope. About a month ago, I patched myself through the Dossier’s holo-screens and rewrote the projection to not only export images but input them as well. It’s part of a code I stripped from Xu while they were HIVE’d. It’s how the HIVE can be anywhere and take control of anything. The code literally creates a back door, wipes the slate clean, and rebuilds it to its own specifications. That’s how it controls Metals.”

Ana frowned, looking through the hazy images on the screen. So that was how the HIVE could control Di. It erased him, then built him back to serve it. His memories were still there, but he wasn’t.

“How did you get Xu back if it wipes the slate clean?”

“Honestly? I didn’t think I could, but Koren Vey said that while the HIVE can erase data, it can’t erase them. I locked them in a lead-lined room to dampen the HIVE’s signal and started rebuilding them piece by piece, memory by memory.” The three screens minimized, and Elara’s face appeared. She looked like she was hunkered down in the Dossier’s cockpit, sitting in one of the emergency foldout chairs. Her hearing apparatuses glowed purple in the dimness. “I could do it because I knew Xu—everything about them. I’d have stayed in that room as long as it took—years, decades. But then, partway through my rewriting their first memory, Xu’s memory core started . . . well, it started to rebuild itself. Right in front of my eyes. And in a matter of seconds, Xu was back.”

Ana’s heart fluttered at the thought. Di’s memory core in her pocket felt heavy and important—so much more so than it had been before. “So if we destroy the HIVE, we can bring all the Metals back at once?”

“No,” Elara replied, sounding troubled. “It’s not that simple. From what Koren Vey and I found out in the coding I stripped from Xu, all the Messiers are linked to one AI.”

Ana sat a little straighter. “Who?”

“The D’thverek.”

The Great Dark.

She had been right all along. She had looked into Di’s red eyes, and she had seen it, had almost been killed by it. A chill prickled her skin.

“Metals are a part of it now,” Elara went on. “They’re all tied together in this weird symbiotic relationship that we know as the HIVE. The D’thverek feeds off of them somehow. If it dies, so do all the Metals it’s connected to.”

“But there are thousands—tens of thousands—of Metals in the HIVE by now! It’d be impossible to detatch them from the HIVE one by one. We can’t possibly—”

“Maybe we can. That’s why Koren Vey sent me to find you.”

“How does this Koren Vey know so much?”

“It’s complicated—”

Robb crashed through the bushes, effectively cutting her short. He picked a leaf out of his hair, absolutely oblivious to the conversation. “Ana, there you are! Siege said you’d be in the garden, but I didn’t think I’d have to fight nature to find you.”