But still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched.

Emperor

The golden-eyed girl left the freighter on a waystation near Eros and boarded an S-class transportation vessel bound for a small town in the Aragonian District called Calavan. An agricultural town—hardly worth the trip, except for its proximity to the Ironblood’s esteemed Academy. Most people going to Calavan were merchants and travelers and rough-looking mercenaries searching for business. The girl didn’t fit in, though she tried. She held herself too tall—like that captain of hers.

He struggled to keep himself planted in the Messier as he watched her buy a ratty cloak from a vendor on the ship and throw it over her sage jacket. As if that would disguise her.

Was she just bad at hiding, or could he simply recognize her out of a crowd of thousands?

She could make it a little more difficult—

The glitch tore through his thoughts again, screeching like a stereo with a receiver too close, and forced him back into the redheaded Metal body. He despised this glitch with every number in his AI programming.

He blinked and refocused his gaze on the entrance to the North Tower. It had burned to cinders almost eight years ago. No one was allowed in. He touched the bulbous lock on the door. He did not know what had led him here. A feeling, perhaps?

It annoyed him. He was having a great many of those—feelings—when just a few days ago all he knew was hatred—for moonlilies, for people, and especially for girls with golden eyes. Whatever this glitch had done to him, he had to fix it before Mellifare found out.

He was afraid that if she knew, she would think him no longer useful.

He was not sure what she would do with him then.

The two Messiers who stood guard by the door watched him with careful gazes. He recognized Mellifare in them. She was spying on him. He quickly turned away from the North Tower, setting a course to return to his room.

He passed a closed door at the end of the hallway and paused, that strange feeling again, like electricity at the back of his molars. He turned back to it. The red light on the panel indicated the door was locked. Familiarity scratched at the back of his head like a dog at a door. He reached into the keylock and clicked the access to green.

The room opened.

It was a study.

Dust-covered books lined the left wall, beside bone-white skulls and golden astrolabes. There was a desk on the right side of the room with a computer embedded into the wood, but it was long-since dead, blackened marks stretching out across the oak as if the computer had fried itself.

He ran his fingers along a globe of Eros and spun it. The axis creaked, but he already knew it would.

“And how do you think you can help?” a voice in his head snarled, and he jumped in surprise. It was old and gravelly, and familiar.