There were some words in the Old Language—the language the Solani brought with them—that really had no common tongue equivalent. The translation read light, but that word . . .

He tapped his finger on the ink-smeared page.

That word—andor—was not light in the old tongue.

Andor.

Souls.

The glitch festering in the back of his head sparked with a pop, and he winced. His sight pixelated, and suddenly he was no longer in the library but in a cold laboratory with a screen spread across the wall, reading off vitals and data usage and RAM. A strange contraption sat on his chest, heavy and cold, pulsing a strange white light.

“Father, what are you doing?” a voice—his?—asked, and pulled at the straps that tied him to the operating table, but he was too weak, and his bones hurt—everything hurt. From the inside out, like he was rotting to the core. An inky blackness crawled up his skin like vines, eating away at him. The Plague.

“It will be pleasant, Dmitri,” his father had said, shushing him. “You’ll barely feel a thing. I can save you. I will save you.”

“I don’t— Father, this isn’t—” This isn’t right, this isn’t what I wanted, he wanted to say, but he was breathless just from speaking. His heart gave a terrible lurch in his chest.

The light on the contraption flickered, and then he noticed it—the small cube placed in the center, where the light came from. He took another shuddering breath. Black dots ate at the edges of his vision. He felt strange and distant, like his body was there but he was slowly, slowly not.

“I want to save you,” his father said, and his voice broke with it, and stroked his hair like he had when he was little. But there was a strange sort of desperation in his marbled eyes. “I’ve lost everything—I can’t lose you, too. She said I wouldn’t lose you.”

Who?

But he remembered then—the girl with flaxen hair who had come up to him in the Plague hospital, asking what he would do for a cure, for life. Anything, he had said, and all she wanted was a heart.

Her heart.

The heavy piece of tech on his chest flashed again, and he tried to suck in a painful, burning breath, but he—he—he couldn’t—

The book in his hands clattered to the ground, and it jolted him from the memory. He was . . . he had been . . .

“Your Excellence,” the steward said, startling him. He whirled around to the short and paunchy man, fisting his hands so the man would not see them shaking.

“What—oh, it is you.”

“Yes, Your Excellence. I thought you would like to know that the shrine in Zenteli was set ablaze by Metals, but the guards there caught it early, and it suffered only minor damages, thankfully.”

“Was anyone injured?” he asked.

The steward looked at him in surprise. He had never asked anything like that. He was still shaken from that glitch—that was what it was. “Um—not that we know of, Your Excellence,” said the man. “It seemed there were a few citizens praying who managed to get the fire under control, but there is again no trace of the arsonist.” And then he fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot. “Forgive me if this is out of place, but do you really believe rogue Metals are behind it—”