She didn’t trust this kind of silence, and she quickened her pace.

Halfway into the shrine, she noticed writing on one of the walls. At first it looked like nothing—errant age marks—until she came closer. The drawings were faded and written in inky black charcoal. It was graffiti.

MARI + SEL, one said.

NICHOLII THE GREAT (although NICH was changed to DICK, which Ana thought was really classy).

There were drawings—stick figures and tic-tac-toe games. A little farther down, there were scenes from landscapes she could see from the shrine—the forest in the distance, the valley beyond, and one of the broken Goddess statues just a few feet away. They were signed by M.V.

Robb had said that students at the Academy a few miles away used to come here before the Plague. These drawings must have been the work of those students.

She ran her hands along the words.

If they were Ironbloods who went to the Academy twenty-something years ago, the last names had to have been families she knew.

M.V. Mercer Valerio?

And Nicholii—her father, the late Emperor Nicholii?

DI’S A SPOILSPORT, another message read, although that had been crossed out three different times to DEVILISH ROGUE, SARCASTIC SMARTASS, HANDSOME BACHELOR. She grinned at that one.

“These sound like jokes Jax and I’d make to you, Di,” she murmured to the memory core in her pocket, and closed her eyes to recite a prayer that Siege had used just a few months ago when they sent Riggs to rest.

“To those who set sail into the night,” she whispered, and a part of it felt like she was saying it to her own Di, too. The one lost to the HIVE, and the fragment in her pocket, and the memories that still haunted her head. “May the stars keep you steady, and the iron keep you s—”

A rock skittered across the uneven flagstones.

Ana jerked to her feet and whirled around toward the entrance of the shrine, reaching for her pistol—

And froze.

A long shadow stretched into the shrine from the open doorway, lengthening in the waning afternoon light. Her throat began to tighten, each footfall making it harder to breathe, until she couldn’t at all, and the scar on her stomach burned with pain like it never had before. She quickly pressed her hand against it, feeling the knot of skin. She tried to breathe. To think. To run—Goddess, she had to run—

Goddess help me, she prayed, even though she was certain the Moon Goddess no longer listened.

And he stepped into the shrine.

“You are trespassing.”

It was a voice she knew, a voice that haunted her when she closed her eyes. He was in every good memory in her head, and he was in every nightmare.

She couldn’t run.

She could barely even move.

The heart was here, and so was he, and whether she had unknowingly led him here or he had been lying in wait . . . it didn’t change the shape of his shadow. And a part of her was happy he was here—alive—