(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Elegy descends the steel steps into the lower level of the central ship at the heart of Union and the sound of her own footsteps wakes memory she had not known she still had. Old memory. Not from the day she was led out of this place as a newly made Charred — from before that. Just the sounds. The descent. Terror. And light.

A door has been left ajar where the officials dragged Rebeke through in a hurry. She pushes it the rest of the way open and the light is the light she remembered: hundreds of sunhearts set into wall slots along the corridor — Union's reserve, what Elegy thinks of, accurately, as a mausoleum of souls. A single Charred guard charges her. She blocks the swing with her forearm, holds his eyes a moment, and feels not the usual frenzy but a strange quiet. She tosses him aside, breaks his throat with a punch as he gets up, drops a second guard into the wall with his own momentum a moment later. What she remembered, she realises, is mostly the pain and the terror — not what she had loved, or known, or believed before they were burned out of her. The cruelty of it, she thinks, is being left only with the panic and not the things that gave it meaning.

She bursts into the chamber where Charred are made — Union's Hall of Burning. A line of frightened captives stands along one wall, three officials working hurriedly to process them, presumably to push reinforcements onto the streets where Zellion is fighting. They have strapped Rebeke into the rig without bothering to undress her, and as the machinery engages — an articulated spear tipped with a burning cinderheart descending onto her sister's chest — Rebeke's shirt catches fire. Elegy remembers screaming when this was done to her. Rebeke turns her head to look at her, the light in her eyes already starting to dim, and Elegy screams again with her own remembered scream, both moments folding into one. She leaps the chamber, tears the spear from its mount, breaks the bonds, hauls her sister off the table — but the cinderheart has already started to embed. Rebeke's skin is greying around it; the fire is going inward. Elegy gropes for the sunheart sliver and cannot find it. She can feel, through their link, the burning at Rebeke's core consuming everything that was inside her.

She does the only thing left to do. She pulls Rebeke against her own hollowed-out chest, against where her own self had been destroyed, and whispers an altered version of the recharge prayer — *give my cinderheart your heat, that you may remember*. Their cinderhearts cannot touch directly, Elegy's is too sunk into her chest, but warmth flows through the skin between them anyway, from Rebeke into Elegy. The warmth burns away the last remnants of memory Elegy had still been holding — the steps, the corridor, the small things — and when she lets go, the cinderheart has stopped sinking into Rebeke. It is embedded into her like a gemstone in a setting, with a starburst of ashen skin radiating up her neck, but Rebeke's chest is intact and Rebeke's eyes are her own. *Elegy?* Rebeke breathes. *I'm still me.*

Elegy is crying. The feeling, she thinks, is nearly as overwhelming as the desire to kill. Rebeke believes the rest of Elegy's memories will return. They will not; Elegy knows she has just spent the last of them, on purpose; she lies and says *yes* anyway because it is the right thing to be. She checks the three officials — one of them reaching for a gun on a counter — and shakes her head at him until he backs off. The two Charred she had crushed in the corridor are still standing where she left them, eyes distant, dazed by something. Rebeke can feel them. She can feel all the Charred. The process did not complete with her, Elegy realises, but enough of the bond formed for her to share the link.

They test it. Rebeke tries to make the two dazed Charred come into the room and sit down; their heads turn toward her, but they do not move. The Cinder King is blocking her — he is stronger than she is on the link. But Rebeke thinks the other Charred will at least not attack her, and might be persuadable around the edges. She is overwhelmed. Elegy, who has known since she came back to herself that *all I know is how to break things*, tells Rebeke that this means the difficult decisions are Rebeke's now. Then she passes along the message Zellion charged her with for her sister: there is a way to recharge sunhearts; Beacon knows; the more cities that hear, the better. Rebeke frowns at it, takes a breath, stands up with Elegy's help, and says they need to get to Union's command centre.