Heart of Iron

  “Check the next one down,” snapped a familiar voice out in the hallway. Rasovant. “The intruder has to be here somewhere.”

  Ana and Di froze until another door opened. Not theirs yet, but closer. It was only a matter of moments before the Messiers opened theirs. Rasovant was relentless. Even if they fled, he wouldn’t stop until he found them again, and he would find them. Perhaps not now, but in some other corner of the universe. They would never truly escape.

  “Di,” she whispered, stopping him from climbing over the windowsill. “I can’t.”

  He turned back to her, confused. “What?”

  “I can’t go,” she repeated, and her voice warbled with the weight of those words. “If I don’t stay, then Rasovant will create his army and innocent Metals will die. But if I survive until my coronation, I can dismantle the HIVE. I can destroy Rasovant—”

  “And if you die?”

  She tried to smile. “Apparently, I’m a lot harder to kill than people think.”

  Di looked away, probably trying to calculate another way for her to leave before Rasovant and his Metals found them—she knew him. She knew he would try again and again and again. And she loved that about him. He was her Di, good and selfless and logical, but it was the .02 percent that she did not know that surprised her.

  He turned his dark eyes back to her and said, “Then I will stay with you.”

  The good-bye she had formed on her lips fell away. “What if someone finds out you’re a Metal? You should be afraid of the HIVE—”

  “Of course I am afraid,” he replied, and it hit her, finally. That he felt, and that it didn’t matter that he was afraid. “I could not stay with you in Astoria because I was a Metal—but now I have the chance. Let me try.” He brought her hand up to his cheek and pressed his face against it. “Tell me to stay by your side.”

  She wanted to. The way he looked at her, as though she was the moon in his night sky, made her braver than she thought she could ever be. Brave enough to realize that there were no good good-byes.

  She was afraid of Messiers finding them—of finding him. Would Di be HIVE’d? And if he could now feel, would it hurt? Or would he simply slide away like rain across a starshield? There and then gone?

  She didn’t want to find out.

  So she memorized how the light from the windows slanted across the sharp edges of his face, the way he leaned toward her like a shield, how there were a thousand stars in his eyes, which sometimes made them shine as silver as moonlight—as they did now.

  In any other universe, she and Di probably would have met in a room like this, with plush carpet and dour-faced portraits, and sat on the fainting couch by the window. They would’ve talked for hours.

  She would have liked him. Maybe someday, she would’ve liked to marry him, too.

  But in this universe, for a moment she existed where he existed, and that was enough.

  “Next room!” snapped the Iron Adviser. The Messiers’ march was so loud, it rattled the antique china on display in the curio cabinets. They were coming for their door, overriding the locked keypad.

  “I want you to stay,” she whispered, taking off the half-melted pendant and tying it around his neck. Because it would protect him. Because it had protected her for so long. “But you can’t.”

  And for a split second his face began to fracture, the metal heart inside his chest breaking, before she shoved him out of the window with all her might, and sent him tumbling into the garden below.

  Bleeping, E0S swirled out of the window after him as the Messiers unlocked the parlor door. She turned to their blue-eyed stares with a pleasant smile.

  “We are searching for an intruder,” the first Messier said.

  Of course they were. “Good luck,” she said with a smile.

  Di

  Di hid behind a statue of the Goddess until the patrol passed the entrance to the garden.

  His mind was numb, his fingers rubbing the pendant she’d given him—the slightly melted ouroboros—as another group of Messiers passed, moving in perfect precision.

  She had pushed him away; she didn’t want him to stay.

  You knew you could not, he thought, but he wanted to so badly, it ached in places so deep, he could not think.

  He did not want to feel anymore. How foolish he was. Humans did not love Metals, and Metals could not love. And she would rather stay and fight than leave with him. The irrational, emotional part of his programming hated it, but the Di he used to be understood. The lives of many outweighed the lives of the few. And Ana was stubborn enough to know it.

  Eros’s second moon drifted into the corner of the sky, shedding silver light across the garden, exposing the shadows. E0S flew up beside him, hovering over his shoulder.

  “Almost out,” he told it.

  Around him, moonlilies began to open, and he tried not to step on them. Two hundred feet separated him from the side garden where he’d come in last night, and then he could sneak out into the square and—

  The footsteps were so quiet, he almost did not hear them.

  “I know someone is there,” he called to the shadow behind him as E0S dove into the shrubbery to hide.

  A Royal Guard stepped out of the shadows of the garden, blond hair shining like a halo of gold in the moonlight. A hand rested on the hilt of her lightsword. “I think you’re on the wrong patrol, guardsman.”

  “My patrol was boring,” he replied, turning to face her. She knew he was not one of her guards. Her breast pocket was much too decorated. “Royal Captain Viera, is it?”

  “Put your hands up—slowly,” the woman commanded.

  “I am not a threat.”

  “We’ll see about that.” She unlatched her cuffs from her belt clip. “You’re under arre—”

  E0S darted out of a bush and slammed into her head.

  As she stumbled, Di grabbed her lightsword and drew it, sheath in one hand, blade in the other. She reached for her pistol from inside her uniform jacket and aimed.

  “Just let me leave,” he said, inching back toward the side garden and escape.

  Instead, she grabbed for the comm-link on her lapel. “I found th—”

  “NO!” he cried. A jolt snapped through his body, and the comm-link sparked. The young woman gasped, dropping the communicator. It exploded before it even reached the ground. He watched in horror. “I—I did not mean to do that.”

  She pulled the trigger.

  The bullet scraped across his cheek. He winced, the sound reverberating in his head, and with him distracted, she grabbed him by his hair and slammed the side of his face against a statue of the Goddess. She pressed the barrel of her gun against the side of his head.

  “I warned you—”

  Di glared. The dark of his irises flickered, faintly, like a slow-kindling fire, and morphed into a silvery-white as it caught the light. The mark on his cheek where the bullet grazed did not bleed. It looked like part of the earth cracked open, revealing a vein of silver.

  Her eyebrows furrowed. “What are you?”

  “In a hurry,” he replied, and E0S rammed into her again, bleeping triumphantly.

  Di caught the Royal Captain by the neck and put her in a choke hold. She thrashed, but he was much stronger.

  One second, two, three.

  He waited, closing his eyes, trying to concentrate on something else—anything else—as the guard captain gasped and clawed in his grip. But all he could think of was the man in the square, the bone protruding from his arm, the calls of monster.

  He was not a monster.

  Her struggling finally died, and she slumped against him. He gently laid her on the grass full of moonlilies, her chest rising and falling in steady breaths.

  “I am sorry,” he said, and stood.

  “Why?” asked a voice behind him.

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  Flaxen hair, narrow face, wearing the deep purple of a royal handmaiden. It was her again—the girl from Astoria. The one who first called h
im “monster” in the square. Rasovant’s servant.

  “Never apologize for being what Father created,” she said, and raised her hand toward him.

  The air spiked and static filled his head. Loud, grating. It seized his processors, made him want to swallow his own tongue, it was so painful. His body began to lock up like a hundred thousand volts overloading his system.

  Faintly, through the buzz in his ears, there were voices. Familiar voices. Robb, he recognized—and Jax. They were close.

  He tried to open his mouth to shout for them, but his vocal box crackled.

  The girl smiled. “They will not hear you.”

  Fear crawled up his spine. He was helpless. It hurt to move, like razors slicing over his skin. But he had to do something—so he did the only thing he could think of.

  Wincing, he grabbed for E0S and pushed a node of data—instructions, the memory core still in the infirmary, how to fix it—into the little bot, and blasted it away with an electric spark. E0S tumbled into the darkness of the garden and escaped into the nearest bush. This girl could not catch it and keep him detained.

  The girl bared her teeth. “That made me angry, brother.”

  The air turned sharp—cutting, like a knife through his core. His vision blitzed between static and color, warnings swarming his sight like storm clouds. He tried to move, but his arms weren’t his anymore, and his body was something he couldn’t control until, like a switch, the whirring thing inside him shut off.

  But not him. He still existed. In the nothing.

  The void.

  He remembered the void from before.

  Jax

  The crowd in the square made his head spin.

  The warm glow of lanterns and tents and food stands was such a sharp difference from the cold, dark palace that the sight overwhelmed him—and the sky. Goddess, the sky was so wide, and all the billions of stars shone down on his skin. He drank the starlight in. It filled him, expanding, and the dull ache that had crept into a corner of his chest subsided.

  He’d never longed for such an open expanse before in his whole life.

  “So, let me get this straight. You read my mother’s stars?” Robb asked as they bobbed through the crowd. “See anything exciting? Torturing poor citizens? Erik becoming Emperor? Sucking human blood?”

  Jax wasn’t in the joking mood. “I didn’t see anything I wanted to,” he replied gruffly, and his tongue felt heavier and heavier, the almost-lie tasting like iron. So much blood—a crown covered in it.

  He hoped Ana was at the docks. He couldn’t wait to see her again—golden-brown eyes and a smile that curled with trouble. He missed his best friend.

  But when they arrived at the docks, no one was there.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be here?” he asked as a cold knot of dread curled in his stomach.

  “Yeah. There’s the skysailer Riggs left. . . .” Robb moved toward the Dossier’s skysailer. It was a sight for sore eyes. “Maybe they’re running late—”

  A loud bleep filled the docks. Screaming. Coming from the square. Speeding toward them as fast as the little bot could was E0S.

  It dove into Jax’s arms.

  “Please say this is part of your plan,” he said to Robb, who was quickly paling.

  “I don’t—I mean, I don’t think—”

  From the square, Messier voices rose up over the chanteys sung by the merrymaking crowd, asking them to kindly move. Jax would bet his left ear they were heading for the docks. Ana, he realized, wasn’t coming.

  Jax held the bot tightly. He was foolish to think he could change anyone’s stars—that the stars were theirs to change. He resigned himself to it until the Ironblood turned back to him, fire in his eyes.

  “You need to leave,” Robb said, “before the moonbay exit codes expire. I’ll stay and distract them—they can’t do much to me. I’m a Valerio.”

  “You’re lying,” he replied. “I can tell now when you do.”

  “I’ll be fine—”

  In the square, the Messiers broke through the crowd, making their way toward the moonbay, marching in unison, blue eyes blazing.

  “—Please, Jax,” Robb pleaded. “You have to go—you’ll be fine. If your visions are right, then Ana is still in trouble. Go find help. I’ll distract them and you can—”

  Jax took Robb by the face, fingers spreading into his hair, dark curls wrapping around his fingers, snarling them, so Robb could look at no one else. He memorized the constellation of freckles crossing Robb’s nose, peppering his sun-kissed cheeks. The way the human boy looked at him made a strange, burning feeling turn in his stomach. He wanted to kiss off the freckles and place them in the sky as guiding stars.

  Closer, closer the Messiers came. Down the ramp, past the first ships

  “The Solani have a saying,” he said, his voice soft. “Al gat ha astri ke’eto. It means something like ‘Until the next star shines on you’—until we meet again. So, Al gat ha astri ke’eto, ma’alor.”

  Robb grinned despite his fear—Goddess’s fiery spark, Jax hated that grin, arrogant and insufferable and now he could think of little else. “What does ma’alor mean?”

  “Stop,” one of the Messiers said, drawing its Metroid. “Please step away from the ship.”

  “I’ll save you,” Jax said.

  And Robb replied, “I know.”

  Then he shoved Jax into the skysailer, kicked the ropes holding it, and pushed it off from the dock. It rocked away, and the curly-haired boy gave a last nod before he turned back to greet the Messiers.

  Jax scrambled to sit up, reaching back toward Robb desperately, but the words he needed sat lodged in his throat.

  The guards were one hundred feet away, closing in, and without knowing what else to do, he started the skysailer. Its golden wings fanned out as the engine gave off a sweet, faint hum, and E0S sent out the exit codes to leave the moonbay.

  Goddess, give us new stars, he prayed as the skysailer lifted into the starry night, and out into the darkness of space, watching Robb’s shadow grow smaller and smaller until it was nothing at all.

  Or give us the power to change ours.

  Robb

  The Messiers led him out into the moon garden.

  He was wondering if there was some prison below the garden he didn’t know about when he caught sight of a lone shadow sitting on a bench where roses bloomed. His mother inclined her head as he approached, her face lit by the steady glow of the candles shining out of the Iron Shrine. She dismissed the Messiers.

  “Come,” said his mother, and patted the bench beside her once they were gone. Hesitantly, he sat, wondering what sort of trap this was. “You let the Solani go. I am honestly surprised it took you so long.”

  He shifted uncomfortably, noticing the open voxcollar in her hand. Erik must have gotten out of the wardrobe and come running to their mother. Typical.

  “Is he gone?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Then why did you not leave, too?”

  “Because I want to see Ana on the throne.”

  She raised an eyebrow, more amused than angry. “You truly are your father’s child.”

  “I hope so.”

  Her grip on the voxcollar tightened. She’d yet to look at him, only at the Iron Shrine, as if he wasn’t worthy anymore. “You care too little about legacy, about the Valerio name. Toriean el agh Lothorne—Glory in the Pursuit, but you never cared for glory. You never went to pursue it, not like your brother. Erik is ravenous for it. He is strong; he will carve our name across the galaxy for the glory of it all.”

  Robb scoffed, shaking his head. “Erik’s a monster, Mother. He doesn’t care about family, he cares about himself. That isn’t a Valerio—”

  “And you know what being a Valerio means?” she asked, her voice like dry ice.

  “Yes!” And in that word was all the pent-up rage he had carefully stored. Every moment, every motive, every syllable, bubbling up until he couldn’t be quiet anymore. “Our fam
ily’s motto is Glory in the Pursuit—the pursuit of honor, of family, of love. It isn’t pursuit of your own glory. It never was. My father taught me that.”

  “And he died for it, too,” said his mother, and she could have said anything else. Absolutely anything, and it would have broken his heart a little less. It would have made the next moment harder.

  He stood, and bowed to her. “Then if he is not a true Valerio, neither am I.”

  He waited for a moment as the wind carried his words through the rosebushes and willow trees, picking the dying petals of the moonlillies into the air. He waited for her to say otherwise, but she never did, and the hope that maybe, somewhere in that twisted, small speck of dirt she called a heart, she cared for him, went out in a breath.

  Blinking back hot tears, he said, “I’ll leave after Ana’s coronation tomorrow so as not to draw suspicion to the family.”

  “I will find you if you leave.”

  “Then I will just escape again, and again, until you grow tired of finding me.”

  Then, like she had done to him his entire life, he turned his back and left her in the quiet of the moon garden, alone.

  Di

  Eventually, the void split apart in a blaze of light. It swarmed him, rushing, rushing, until he could feel his hands and feet, and the sharp ache from the bullet that had grazed his face—and he awoke with a gasp.

  “So you’ve come back online,” said a deep, dry voice. Lord Rasovant.

  Di trailed his eyes up to the man sitting on the stool across from him, one leg over the other, watching. Once, the Adviser would have been a nice-looking man, but sixty years had pulled his skin downward and freckled his face with sunspots.

  Blinking, Di tried to clear the fuzzines out of his head. He was bound to a chair in the center of a small, dark room. He had been here before. Moments before, it felt like. Papers were scattered beneath the chair legs, a pile of overturned books in the corner, a headless Metal underneath. The computer on the far wall was dark, crumpled in with the weight of Ana’s fury.