“Hello?” she called.

No one answered.

She squinted, willing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but still she couldn’t see anything. “Hello?” she called louder, and stepped through the doorway. “I’m not here to hurt you. You sent for me. I’m An—”

The front door slammed shut, and static filled her earpiece.

Startled, she recoiled deeper into the shop, reaching for her pistol, when she felt it.

At first it was a gentle tug on the metal bits of her coat—the metal buckles and zippers and cuff links and weapons on her—before an electromagnet above her grabbed them with such force that it picked her up off the ground and slammed her into the ceiling. It held tight to the daggers in her boots, the twin pistols under her arms, even the rings in her ears, leaving her suctioned against the magnetic plate on the ceiling—which hurt like mad.

Of course it was a trap.

“Goddess’s spark,” she cursed as she tried to pry her arms off the metal plates, but she couldn’t due to the pull on her favorite heart-shaped cuff links. She couldn’t even reach her comm-link to call for Robb and Jax.

“This was designed to catch Messiers,” the shadow said in a monotonous voice, “but it seems you have a lot of metal on you as well.”

Robb

Robb sincerely hoped whatever Ana was walking into wasn’t a trap.

He and Jax were waiting in a small bar about three streets over from the address, playing a few rounds of Wicked Luck with the locals.

The LowBar was aptly named. It was small and dark, the gray walls rusted from a leaky irrigation pipe in the building above them. Mechanics, ship workers, and hired hands alike milled about, drinking and gambling, the stench of motor oil and sea salt strong from Lake Leer. Neons on the ceiling pulsed in gentle waves—it felt like being underwater. Before, when Robb had been a Valerio, he wouldn’t have even thought to step into this part of Neon City, afraid some orphan pickpocket would clean him out. But now he dared someone to find a copper anywhere on him.

He wasn’t a Valerio—he wasn’t anything. He hadn’t taken Siege’s name yet—her real name. The one she’d whispered to him in private when he had woken up in the infirmary six months ago, after the assassination attempt on Ana’s life.

He . . . was rather afraid to take her name, he hated to admit.

Robb’s mechanical arm twitched, and he rubbed his forearm to keep it calm. The mechanic who installed it a month ago said the glitches were normal at first—the nerves were reconfiguring themselves to the new tech—but that meant he couldn’t control it well yet, and that annoyed him. It acted up at the worst times. Like when he was angry. Or sad.

Or nervous that Ana was about to walk into a trap—

“The twenty-third Emperor of the Iron Kingdom will be making his appearance in Nevaeh in just under an hour,” said a reporter on a holo-screen in the top right corner of the bar. The newsfeed showed the space station of Nevaeh and hundreds of thousands of citizens crowding into the street. “Praised as a light in the darkness . . .”