“I am the Great Dark,” a memory purred in his ear. He was in a room tied to a chair, and Mellifare had whispered into his ear. He had been different then. He had been—he had . . .

He had forgotten.

His body went rigid.

She came to stand so close to him they almost touched, and she looked up into his eyes. “She has gone to find the tomb with my heart, and she knows exactly where it is.”

“Y-yes, sister,” he whispered.

Suddenly, the song changed. It grew heavy and dark and erratic. He did not have to listen to the commands to know what it said.

He hesitated. “Sister?”

“And why did you not tell me?”

“I felt that—”

“I am tired of your feelings and ideas,” she said, and flicked her hand at him. The HIVE clawed into his head. An explosion of pain rocked through his wires, like molten lava under his skin, and he dropped to his knees. He swayed, unsteady. She came up to him and pressed two fingers against his forehead before he could stop her. “Remember that you are nothing.”

The red code pierced through his pain and betrayal like an arrow—between the memories of the study, of her whispers, of the Great Dark—and left him hollow yet again, filled with only the song.

She took him by the chin and made him look into her red eyes. “Now, I think it is high time we met Ananke Armorov again and let you make good on your promise, Dmitri—and give me my heart.”

Jax

When he finally came to, he was in the Spire’s medical ward again—alone. He plucked the IV out of his arm and sat up in bed, trying to parse together what happened between the ark and returning to the Spire. He still had the C’zar’s voice in his head.

Van ma’alor, she had said when she raised her hand, prompting him to do the same. Take my light.

And he had. He stared down at his bare fingers for a long moment, watching it shift underneath his skin like a living thing. He had never felt something so . . . visceral before. It was like his entire body thrummed with light.

He rubbed at the place where they’d stuck the IV, but he couldn’t find the mark anymore. The wound was gone. Was this how powerful his ancestors’ light was—even watered down after a thousand years? It was almost frightening.

He concentrated for a moment on the strange power—and then outward, sensing the two guards standing outside his medical ward, their own light bright like bonfires. Then the hundreds of people in the Spire below him, his captain, and Talle, in the prisons underneath. He could feel all their lights, too.

But Robb’s was different. It didn’t burn like a bonfire but swirled and danced and beckoned, almost like—

He jerked his gaze toward the doors to the ward just as a boomerang clipped one guard in the head and slammed into the next one. They both slumped to the ground. Their assailer, another Solgard, picked up the boomerang, put it back on their waistband, and opened the door.