Iron Heart

by Nina Varela

  “No,” said Crier. “Ten.”

  Oh gods. Without another word, they got to work. Ayla leaned over the first cot, this person who was not sleeping, and tried to wake them as gently as she could. Pressing at their shoulder, murmuring, “Hey, hey, wake up, please wake up.” She was horribly aware they could be caught at any moment. If a Watcher walked in here they’d be done for. Please wake up. Please wake up.

  Finally, finally, the person’s eyelids fluttered. They made a small pained noise.

  “I know,” Ayla murmured. “I know. I’m so sorry. I want to help you. Can you open your eyes?”

  Their eyebrows furrowed. They drew in a rattling breath. Across the room, Crier was speaking in a low voice to one of the others. Ayla tried to keep calm. How long had they been in here? How much time had they lost?

  “That’s right,” she said to the person on the cot. Focus, focus, don’t panic. “You’re going to be okay. Please open your eyes.”

  “Hook?” they whispered.

  Ayla frowned, scanning their body. She didn’t see any hooks. “Please open your eyes,” she said again, not sure what else to do. “Please.”

  “Ayla,” Crier said suddenly. “The door—”

  —opened.

  “I’ve been looking for you two everywhere,” said a familiar voice behind Ayla.

  Ayla’s heart hit the floor. She spun around, going for her knife, only to get a face full of—something, a cloud of dust, a yellowish haze obscuring her vision. Her head was swimming again, ten times worse than before. The floor was tilting, and the walls, the room balancing itself like a set of scales, tipping back and forth in a nauseating rhythm.

  The last thing Ayla saw was a pair of eyes, glinting like a cat’s in the flickering red light.

  Kinok had found them.

  It was determined, then, that the single greatest Flaw of Humankind was this “Emotion.” If humans were not so ruled by emotion—ruled, in their own words, by the “heart” instead of the mind—if Emotion were removed from the equation—then Intellect could fill the void left behind; Intellect, the foundation of all scientific, political, and cultural achievement and advancement. The four Pillars of the human soul, the prima materia, are Intellect, Organics, Passion, and Emotion (or, by some accounts, Intuition) and it was decided by the Makers—after months of debate—that the latter two Pillars must, like diseased limbs, be amputated for the good of the body. Only Intellect and Organics would remain.

  In the place of Passion and Intuition, the Makers chose two traits much more inclined to result in the progress of Automakind, the progress of a unified society, all minds working toward the same glorious future, unhindered by the fog of Emotion. The Four Pillars that would comprise the prima materia of the Automae would then be: Intellect, Organics, Calculation, and Reason. It was decided. And it was so.

  —FROM ON THE FORMATION OF THE FOUR PILLARS, BY ELIRA OF FAMILY NESTON, 782510832, YEAR 5 AE

  16

  Crier came to first, and spent the next hour listening to Ayla’s heartbeat.

  They were in some sort of cell, a small room carved directly into the mountain, stone floor and rough stone walls, a single arrow-slit window near the ceiling providing just enough low, reddish light to discern Ayla’s features. Both of them were bound to the wall, wrists manacled in iron cuffs thick enough to hold an Automa. Crier on one side of the cell, Ayla on the other, a person-length between them. Enough space that Crier could not reach Ayla, even pulling the chains to their limit.

  So she listened to Ayla’s heartbeat.

  Like the rest of the Iron Heart, the air smelled of smoke and copper. It was cloying, eye-watering; they couldn’t be too far from the forge. Ayla’s heartbeat was slow and even. Crier closed her eyes, concentrating on it, letting everything else fall away. She was reminded of that morning in the woods, months ago, her Hunt. Standing still beneath a high ceiling of dead, rustling leaves, a rabbit’s burrow somewhere beneath her feet. Four tiny heartbeats. Back then, the world had smelled of dirt and green things, firs, oncoming winter, and Crier had been Sovereign Hesod’s daughter, Kinok’s fiancée. Back then, the air was cold and clear, and she’d been suffocating.

  Ayla’s breaths were the rush of the Steorran Sea. A push and pull. Ancient, primordial. The oldest rhythm, the first song.

  Blood in Crier’s mouth. Her own. The texture was different, thinner and oilier than human blood. The taste was probably different too. Ayla’s heartbeat was quickening. Crier’s eyes flew open and she watched as Ayla shifted, fingers twitching. She was curled up on her side, hair spilling across her face. There were long claw marks up and down her forearms from Rosi’s fingernails.

  Ayla made a tiny noise. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Hello,” said Crier, trying not to sound hysterical.

  Ayla’s brows furrowed. She blinked once, twice. “. . . Crier?”

  “Yes.”

  “’S going on?”

  “Kinok found us. He used a fine powder to render us unconscious. Now we are in a cell, possibly in some sort of dungeon, though not too far removed from the heartstone forge.”

  “Nn.” Ayla shifted again, groaning. “You talk weird when you’re nervous.”

  “Do I?”

  “Even more . . . formal. ’N like, detached. I dunno.”

  “Oh,” said Crier, considering this. “I suppose that makes sense. It might be a defense mechanism.”

  “You being nervous is making me nervous.”

  “You probably should be,” Crier told her. “We’re in a very bad position.”

  Ayla pushed herself up on one elbow, wincing. “Panicking won’t help anything.”

  “I am not panicking. I am quite calm, actually. My heart rate is half the speed of yours; I’ve been regulating it. However, I was slightly concerned you would not wake up.”

  “Kinda wish I hadn’t,” said Ayla, all the way upright now, slumping back against the stone wall. “Feels like there’s one of your giants in my head. From the story with the, the craters, ’n the gold. Stomping around. Gonna break my skull.”

  “Well, you’re wounded.”

  “Yeah, thanks, I headbutted a mountain. Not gonna forget that one anytime soon. Ah.” She touched her temple, looking relieved when her fingers didn’t come away red. “Horrible. All right. Do we have a plan? I’m assuming you can’t muscle your way out of those manacles.”

  “I tried,” said Crier.

  “Really? Wish I’d been awake for that,” Ayla said, then cleared her throat loudly. “If that’s not an option . . . then what?”

  Crier shook her head. “There are no viable windows, the door is almost seamless and there’s no handle on the inside. Even if there was a handle I couldn’t reach it without breaking the chains, which we’ve established is impossible.”

  “Damn. Maybe—”

  “Shh,” Crier hissed, heart leaping into her throat. She could hear footsteps outside. She knew those footsteps. “Pretend you’re unconscious.”

  Scyre Kinok stepped into the cell. He took one look at Ayla and said, “I know you’re awake, handmaiden.”

  Ayla opened her eyes and glared up at him, the picture of defiance even chained to a wall, dried blood on her temple, covered in rock dust and bloodied claw marks.

  Kinok’s eyes flicked to Crier, evidently dismissing Ayla. “Lady Crier,” he said. “I missed you at our wedding. You made a fool of me.”

  “You deserve worse,” Crier spat. The word wedding brought up all the memories of that day: sitting in silence as handmaidens flitted around her, ornamenting her. Summoning Faye, begging her to deliver a hopeless letter. Crier felt the anger inside her solidifying, molten steel shaped into a blade. “I know everything you’re up to, Kinok. I know you’re looking for Tourmaline. I know you’ve been poisoning your own followers with Nightshade—although that was a mistake, wasn’t it? A failed experiment?” His face remained impassive, but Crier didn’t think she imagined the flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “I know you wa
nt to destroy the Iron Heart. To make our Kind dependent on you and you alone. I won’t let you do it.”

  Would she?

  Yesterday, she would have done anything to stop him. But . . .

  That room.

  The bodies.

  The blood siphoned slowly from their veins.

  Heartstone was a red gemstone, mined from the earth and imbued with alchemical energy. Everyone knew that.

  “You won’t let me? Bold words from a girl in chains,” Kinok said lazily. “Your naivete continues to disappoint me, Lady Crier. Such a waste of your intelligence. Such a waste of your Reason. You could have joined me, you know. You still can. I’m very forgiving.” He crouched down, eye level with her, that dissecting gaze again. “I know you, Lady Crier. I have read every essay you’ve ever penned. You wanted so desperately to join the Red Council, didn’t you? To eventually take your father’s throne? We are more alike than you think. We both want power, Lady Crier. The difference is that I know how to take it.”

  Crier bit her tongue. She watched him steadily, refusing to show weakness; she would not give him the satisfaction.

  “It is not too late for you,” he continued. “Join me, and you will be so much more powerful than your father ever was. That old fool, making his nest in the bones of a dead civilization. Traditionalism.” He spoke it like a curse, like it tasted foul. “He had no vision. No concept of innovation. Imagine what we could create together, Lady Crier. Imagine it: Beautiful Automa cities free of filth. Our Kind, ruling as we were meant to. Humans are such base creatures. Dogs rolling in their own excrement. There is no hope for them; their growth has long since stagnated; their age has ended. But for our Kind . . . there is nothing but glory in our future. Eternal glory. Immortal glory.”

  “You want to kill them all,” she said, hollow. And then be king. Forever.

  “No, not all. And I don’t need to kill them. Banishment would be enough. Let the Mad Queen take them in; she loves them so.”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said, meeting his eyes. “You’re nothing like me.”

  “Oh?” He feigned surprise. “Please, enlighten me.”

  “I don’t want power,” Crier said. “That’s not why I wanted to join the Red Council. I don’t care about being powerful. I want to make things better. I want to create a kinder world.” Her hands were trembling, her mind clear. “Your dream is monstrous. You don’t care how many die, you don’t care who you crush underfoot. I will never join you. I will fight you until my last breath.”

  Kinok looked at her for a long moment. “Lady Crier, it is not your last breath that interests me. It is everything that comes before.” And he unsheathed the sword at his hip, steel glowing dimly in the reddish light, and swung it in an arc. Crier tensed up, bracing herself.

  But it was not Crier at the end of Kinok’s blade.

  It was Ayla.

  The tip of the sword was resting at the hollow of her throat. It had not yet drawn blood.

  “No,” said Crier. Her own voice was foreign to her ears, flat and dead sounding. She couldn’t look away from the sword tip, cold metal on the delicate skin of Ayla’s throat. Ayla was breathing shallowly, holding Automa-still. “Scyre, I will bargain with you.”

  “Pathetic, how easy that was,” said Kinok. He was looking down the blade at Ayla, eyes half lidded. So infuriatingly calm. “Truly pathetic. This is what happens when you . . . consort with humans. You have become so weak, Lady Crier. Even a fifth pillar could not make you this weak.”

  “I know that was a lie,” Crier said. “I know you forged the blueprints. To blackmail me.”

  “Yet the outcome is the same. You are weak.”

  Blood in the air. He’d broken skin. Not deep. Only a few drops of blood, red and human.

  “You know what?” Kinok said softly, almost to himself. “I think I will cut out her heart.”

  “No,” said Crier, and this time she tugged at her chains. “No, take me. You can—you can use me against the sovereign. My father. You can use me as leverage against my father.”

  “Crier, no,” Ayla said, barely moving her lips.

  Kinok didn’t even look at Crier. “Do you think your father would risk anything, anything at all, to save you? You made a fool of him.”

  “I—I’m still his daughter.”

  “Ah. No, not quite. He is already in the process of replacing you. The blueprints for one Lady Yarrow are being Designed as we speak. He didn’t even wait a day. Not a single day after you ran, Lady Crier. Before he sent for the Midwives.” He traced the sword tip across the wings of Ayla’s clavicle, tapped it lightly on her sternum, over her shirt. No blood. He was playing with her. Relishing her fear. “Sovereign Hesod never cared about you, Lady Crier. He certainly did not love you. You were created to serve a purpose, and you failed to do so. What use are you to him? What leverage?”

  Despite everything, that hurt. Crier thought she’d severed herself from her father, renounced him entirely, but there was a part of her that would always be the gangly newbuilt child following him around, trailing after him through the halls of white marble and gold, asking him questions, asking him for ink and parchment, asking him about the Red Council, sitting in his study with a pile of books, looking forward to their slow walks through the flower gardens and the sun apple orchards. There was a part of her that had never stopped longing for his approval, his trust, his respect. That part was not so easily tamped down.

  “Worthless girl,” Kinok said to her. “Softened, rotted, worthless girl. I am going to cut your handmaiden’s heart out of her body, and you are going to watch.”

  “No,” Crier said, the word wrenched out of her. She threw herself forward, her entire body weight, everything she had, straining against the chains. Kinok was raising the sword, preparing to cut. It would not happen. It could not happen; Crier would not allow it. Her mind gave way to a singular goal: pulling the chains from the stone wall. She strained against them. It felt like her arms were going to dislocate, rip clean out of the sockets. She pulled. He was smiling. He was about to cut out Ayla’s heart and he was smiling.

  She heard the sound of cracking stone. Tiny eggshell fissures, growing—

  Then, a thousand times louder, the piercing sound of a chime.

  Crier and Kinok froze in unison. The chime was so loud Crier gasped, wishing she could cover her ears; it was reverberating in her skull. It was a high, nauseating noise, like fingernails on slate, so loud it seemed to shake the walls. Then—footsteps in the corridor outside the cell. How many—a dozen? Moving panic-fast.

  The door to the cell swung open with a scrape of iron on stone. A Watcher stood in the doorway.

  “What in all hells,” Kinok snarled. His expression was a rictus of cold, incredulous fury.

  “There’s been a breach, Scyre,” said the Watcher, cowering in the face of Kinok’s rage. “The prisoners are escaping. The Heart has been compromised.”

  17

  “What?” Kinok snarled, and Ayla pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t make noise when his hand jerked and the tip of the sword skittered sideways across her collarbone. “What do you mean there’s been a breach?”

  “In the western sector. The human prisoners were set free from the outside. And—provided with weapons.”

  “By who?”

  Had Dinara done something? Ayla had never seen Kinok like this. His composure had shattered; he was wild-eyed, mouth like a knife slash, voice harsh and furious. Gone was the cold, calculating scientist. In its place was what could only be described as a child throwing a fit.

  “We are not certain, Scyre,” said the Watcher. “They overpowered the Watchers of the western sector and stole an Iron Compass. By the time we discovered what had happened, they had already made it to the labyrinth. We are attempting to track them—”

  “Shut up,” Kinok snapped. He straightened, looking down at Ayla for a second. She could practically see him trying to decide whether he should just kill her now and get it ove
r with or wait until later, when he could draw it out for ages like he’d wanted, when he could make Crier watch the whole thing, a sick dissection. Efficiency . . . or control?

  She knew which he’d choose.

  Sure enough, Kinok sheathed the sword. “Once again I’m forced to clean up your mess,” he said to the Watcher. “Overtaken by a dozen humans. You disgrace our Kind.” He swept from the room, Watcher at his heels, and the thick iron door shut behind them.

  Ayla and Crier were once again alone.

  “You’re . . . ,” Crier said. Her voice was hoarse from begging for Ayla’s life. “You’re bleeding.”

  Ayla nodded. She reached up, running two fingers along her collarbone. It wasn’t too deep a cut, and it didn’t even hurt that much. Just a dull, throbbing ache. She held up her fingers, tipped in dark red, almost black in the murky half-light of their cell. The rebels had escaped and were already in the labyrinth, making their way out. They didn’t know Ayla and Crier were trapped in the Heart as well.

  Nobody knew.

  Nobody was coming for them.

  The air smelled of smoke and blood, and they were trapped in this tiny dark cell, and nobody was coming for them.

  Ayla didn’t realize her breathing had quickened until she heard Crier say her name, except it sounded like Crier was calling out from across a wide body of water, or through a thick fog, or through a tunnel, hollow and echoing like that.

  She pressed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to calm down, but it felt like half her mind was elsewhere, a scrap of paper caught in the wind. Carried all the way back to that day.

  That day. That day.

  In the outhouse, the tiny pitch-black outhouse, the smell of smoke and blood and human shit. Old, sour piss. Waiting for Storme to come back. Screaming from above, screaming and the sound of a village burning, the roar of fire and the great splintering crack of roofs collapsing. Waiting for Storme to come back. Knowing she’d just seen her parents slaughtered but not quite believing it, because how could they be dead? How could they be dead for real, forever?