“They want to do the right thing.”

“Because they believe in you,” she snapped, and threw her arms into the air. “Argh, whatever! It’s no sense arguing with you.” She shoved open the green curtain of vines and disappeared into the ruins.

Why do they have to follow me to do the right thing? She bit her tongue so hard, she tasted blood. Why am I their conscience?

Robb came to an inching stop in the shadows of the ruins and stood, brushing the dirt off his trousers. “Well, that was exhilarating—where’s Elara?”

She jabbed her finger into the ruins.

He minimized his shield and put it on his belt. “Did . . . something happen?”

“No,” she said quietly, wanting to ask Robb if it was true—if he would die for her, too, like Jax had, but she thought better of it. She’d rather not know, because she might just strangle him if he said yes. Together, they pushed back the vines that hung in the mouth of the entrance.

Her anger quickly evaporated.

“Oh, Goddess,” Robb whispered.

They stared up at the ark in awe. It was hard to be angry in the midst of something this overwhelming.

The ancient ark stood in all its ghostly glory. It was so much larger than Ana could have anticipated, its crystalline structure reminding her more of fossils found in the earth than a ship at all. Great vine-covered pillars curved inward, reaching five hundred feet in the air to make a sort of rib cage for a great beast. The ark spread out in both directions, so long it faded into the trees on either side. It was like nothing in the Iron Kingdom because it wasn’t made of iron or copper or gold. It was ivory and ancient.

Elara walked up to one of the enormous ivory pillars and tenderly placed a hand on it, as if it was dear to her.

Home, Ana realized. An ageless part of it.

“The allahlav,” Elara began. “The ark. It brought us here a thousand years ago. My grandmother used to tell stories her grandparents told her, and theirs before them, of how our galaxy used to be. Stories of cosmic beasts who protected our worlds and kept us safe. The allahlav were our ships. Living organisms with wings and teeth and circuitry as their blood. But then the Great Dark came, the stories say, and we couldn’t stop it. This was the last allahlav. It helped us flee, and then it died here.”

“So it was an animal?”

Elara shrugged. “A tech-creature? A bio-automaton? I don’t know. They’re fairy tales, Princess.” She patted the pillar and added, “We just have the bones now. Come on—Koren Vey is through here.” She nudged her head into a darker part of the ruins and traveled on.

For a moment, Ana let the image sink into her memory, the sun-drenched bones of a gaping rib cage, eaten by time and trees and ground. There was so much of it, she felt small. A dust speck in the great expanse of the universe.