Heart of Iron

by Ashley Poston

  He hesitated, clenching his fists, feeling the way his leather gloves tightened around his knuckles.

  “That was our agreement, C’zar Taizu,” Lady Valerio reminded him.

  “It was half of our agreement,” he said. “My half.”

  The woman looked tired. “Of course. And that’s truly what you ask? That my son doesn’t come to harm? Do you think me a fool?”

  “I think I want you to keep your end of the bargain.”

  “Fine. I promise I will not let anyone harm Robbert—”

  “No, the unbreakable way.”

  Her lips pursed. “I promise on iron and stars, Solani.”

  An unbreakable oath. He felt the pull of it, the sway of the stars at the promise, her words knotting together.

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “All right.”

  Kneeling in front of her, he peeled off his gloves and folded them neatly in front of him. His hands were pale in the dim light of the room. They were normal hands, long fingers and short nails. There was nothing special about them, but there didn’t need to be. It didn’t have to be his hands—a brush of an elbow, a bump of knees, a kiss—they all worked the same. But in his hands he could control his gift, feeling his way through the stars.

  He asked her to lean forward.

  She did, and closed her eyes.

  He hadn’t purposely used his gift in ten years—Robb’s small tryst aside—not since he’d left his home on Iliad. Not since his father had forced him to read his stars—for the future of the Solani, his father had said. That same night, he kissed his mother good-bye because he refused to be used as a weapon. He would not flare and burn out.

  But as his father said, one could not defy one’s stars.

  He reached out and pressed his thumbs against the middle of Lady Valerio’s forehead. The contact sent a jolt through him. Searing. He concentrated as his father had taught him, focusing on the star-stuff inside this horrid Ironblood—the same star-stuff inside every person—his senses already spiraling up to the pinions of lights above them, past and futures stretching far, far, farther than eternity. He was one of the last Solani who could read them.

  The very last, perhaps.

  He sensed the glow, the warmth, of Lady Valerio’s stars.

  And then he pressed the rest of his fingers against the Ironblood’s temples and drank in the sky. Whispers, mutterings, images so sharp they felt visceral—

  A coronation, a thousand candles lighting the shrine, panic, a grating and horrid noise, a bloody crown, the muzzle of a pistol—

  He gasped, wrenching his hands away from her.

  Lady Valerio opened her eyes. She studied him.

  “I am going to die,” she inferred calmly.

  “Yes,” he gasped, shaking. He had seen before how someone was going to die, but he’d never seen it so close. So thoroughly. The emotions leaked into his head, filling him to the brink. “Soon.”

  “Very well,” she said, but there was a flicker, finally, in her cold eyes. She touched the remote to his collar again, a warm buzz filling his ears, and left the room.

  Jax sank to his knees and pressed the palms of his bare hands against his eyes, the sting of tears fresh and scathing. Because of the promise they’d made. Because it was unbreakable.

  A promise on iron and stars.

  Ana

  D09—her Di.

  Robb said there was only one Metal stationed there that evening—the one her parents trusted. It was D09, and D09 had saved her, so he couldn’t have been the one to start the fire. And if he was the only Metal in the tower that night, then what Metals were Rasovant talking about when he said they set fire to the tower? And why had Robb’s father called the guards before the fire broke out?

  Now she had more compelling proof than ever. Something had happened. Something that someone wanted to keep quiet—

  “Ana . . .”

  A chill curled down her spine. She quickly pocketed the note from Machivalle. “Hello?”

  But no one answered.

  Taking off her heels, she got to her feet, cocking her head to listen for the voice again. It was faint—and sounded like her name. Coming from the wall.

  No, not the wall—the servants’ entrance.

  She should go get Viera, but had she actually heard anything? It was so faint—what if it had been in her head?

  Her fingers ran along the sides of the hidden door, feeling for the seams. She shoved against it, but it didn’t budge. She tried again—harder.

  The wall swung open into a dark corridor.

  “Anyone in here?” She nervously rubbed her pendant as she reached out her hand to skim the dusty wall, and felt her way through the darkness, so thick her eyes began to float with spots of color.

  A soft, hushed breeze tickled her ear.

  “Ana . . .”

  She spun around—

  “Who’s there?” she asked. “Where are you?”

  The dark responded with the sound of pattering feet—running. Echoing down the long corridor, away from her.

  Her hand sank to her hip before she realized she didn’t have her pistol. She’d never missed it more.

  Another voice whispered, sounding a thousand miles away.

  “Hurry up!”

  She knew that voice, didn’t she? From somewhere. If only she could remember.

  “Follow us, Ana!” called a third voice.

  “Wait,” she whispered. She could almost taste the memory on her tongue. A little girl running through secret corridors, bare feet scurrying across the floor. “Wait a second—please!”

  She stumbled after the voices, her hands pressed against the walls, rushing across the years of dust and cobwebs.

  “What are you waiting for, Ana?” one of the boys said. The eldest. “Hurry up!”

  Rhys—

  He let her taste the sweets from the kitchen. The scent of cinnamon. Warm brown eyes, a melting smile. He used to kiss her bruises when her middle brother, Wylan—a cocky smile and a mess of black curls—knocked her down when they pretended to be outlaws. All the horseplaying would scare her youngest brother—Tobias. Valerio blue eyes and a small smile and a love of violins and sweet candies and stories.

  Rhys. Wylan. Tobias.

  She remembered.

  A sob caught in her throat. They had died. They had not escaped. They had never escaped—they were still here. Still in the ashes and soot and dust of the palace.

  And she had forgotten them.

  She stumbled to a stop, leaning against the wall with a hand over her mouth, trying to keep herself quiet. Tears burned in her eyes. Her brothers. They’d been there the whole time, waiting just at the edge of her memories.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Wylan’s voice echoed off the walls.

  “It’s dark in here,” the youngest complained.

  She closed her eyes. This couldn’t be real—they couldn’t be real. This was a trick. Like the redheaded Metal in the ballroom—a trap.

  “Scared the Great Dark’ll eat you?”

  “Stop scaring him, Wy,” Rhys chided. “Ana, come find us!”

  She would—if only she knew where they were. Had she taken a right? Or two lefts? She couldn’t remember how to get back to her door, and she could barely see the hands in front of her. Swallowing her fear, she continued toward the laughter.

  Until, like dawn breaking over the edge of the moon, the glowing outline of a door came into view. She rushed toward it, pressing herself against one side to swing it open, and she tumbled through.

  Her elbows hit the hard marble and she hissed at the sting, ash rushing up around her in a cloud. She coughed in it, squinting her eyes against the bright gray light. Ash coated her tongue, stale and tasting like cinders.

  Shakily, she got to her feet.

  It was a room, but not like any she’d ever been in before. It was burned, charred wood crumbled against the floor, resembling a bed and chairs and a wardrobe, all covered in seven years of ash and dust. Black marks slithe
red up the sides of the marble, a wall of bright bay windows letting the silver light of Eros’s other moons into the room.

  It was the North Tower.

  She stepped lightly over the blackened wood, the bent metal scraps and bits of trash, when movement caught her eye. She looked up, but it was only herself in the remnants of a dressing-table mirror. The glass was fractured, split into dozens of pieces. A girl with a shaved head and long eyelashes, a latticework of scars crossing one side of her face.

  When she was younger, she used to look into the mirrors in the Dossier’s bathroom and imagine what her parents looked like—if she’d gotten her hair from her mother or her eyes from her father, but she was a mixture of two people she didn’t know. Two strangers staring back through the mirror.

  But things were coming back in slow, steady trickles—like remembering a dream. Her smile came from her mother, and her ears, and her temperament. Her eyes came from her father, but the quirk of her lips came from a woman with fiber optics in her hair and a coat the color of blood.

  Even when she remembered her parents, she missed Siege more.

  Something snapped behind her.

  Ana lurched forward and grabbed a piece of the mirror and whirled toward the noise. But no one was there. The mirror cut into her hand, and a thin line of blood trickled down her arm.

  It would’ve been really nice to have a pistol right about now.

  Where had those voices gone?

  As she began toward the door that hopefully let out into the main hallway, she heard footsteps.

  Slow, sliding.

  She froze.

  There was something behind her.

  She looked over her shoulder. A Messier stood on the opposite side of the room, the silvery moon making its metal skin shine.

  She pulled at the door—but it was melted shut. The knob broke off in her hand.

  “Goddess’s spark,” she cursed.

  The blue-eyed Messier picked up a piece of broken mirror and lunged.

  She dodged its first attack, snagging up a blackened metal tray from the floor, and deflected the next. The sound of the mirror shard against the tray made a loud ping, and shattered in the android’s grip.

  “Stop! I’m not an intruder!” she tried to reason with it. “I’m Princess Ananke—”

  “Burn,” it snarled in her eldest brother’s voice. The Metal’s eyes deepened to a bloody red.

  Then it said in Tobias’s sweet tenor, “You should have burned.”

  Her stomach twisted. She knew that phrase, echoed to her again and again in the Tsarina. The malware. But this Metal had a memory core. It wasn’t hollow like the ones on the Tsarina. It was HIVE’d. So how had the malware taken over?

  “You should have burned,” it repeated in Wylan’s voice, and attacked again. “With us.”

  Gripping the tray tightly, she slammed it against the side of its face. The android stumbled sideways, its neck cracked open, hissing with broken fuses. It snapped its head back and turned to face her.

  She held the metal tray out like a shield.

  The Messier punched through it, hand reaching for her neck.

  With a scream, she let go of the tray and scurried back toward the door. It threw the tray—she stumbled—and the tray flew across the room, shattering through one of the windows.

  “You should have burned,” it kept repeating, her brothers’ voices. “You should have burned.”

  “I did!” she cried. “Can’t you see it? I burned with the rest of this damned place!”

  She pressed her back against the melted door.

  The Messier fisted its hand and threw a punch. She ducked.

  It slammed its fist through the melted door, and with a fierce groan it gave, sending both of them out into the hallway. Ash and dust kicked up in a cloud. She scrambled to her feet, gasping and coughing, but she couldn’t get a deep enough breath. Her head swam.

  The Messier got to its feet. Sparks spewed from broken wires in its neck, igniting the dust around them like lightning in a thundercloud.

  Oh, how she wished she had her pistol.

  The Metal reached out to snag her, but she slipped through its hand and darted away as fast as her dress would let her.

  Everything was burned and gray, black scorch marks licking up the sides of the marble, around white outlines of people, she realized, only their skeletons remaining, furniture turned to cinders, tapestries half melted, singed Armorov crests papering the ground.

  She had to find someone—anyone. She needed to tell the Grand Duchess or—or Robb!

  She tripped on a piece of debris—a charred piece of furniture—but she pushed herself back up and kept running, hoping to find—

  A door, sealed shut.

  A dead end.

  It was a dead end.

  She slammed her hands against the sealed door it with a cry of rage.

  “You should have burned, Ana. You should have burned with us,” her brothers’ voices taunted.

  This was her nightmare, but real. It was the aftermath, the moment just before waking up, when the fire still scorched her skin, when she could still taste the ash, cough from the smoke. Fear rose in the back of her throat.

  And from down the corridor, the Metal with red eyes slowly approached. As if it had all the time in the world.

  Knowing she couldn’t escape.

  Maybe Erik had been right. Di would be alive if she had died in the fire. So would Barger, and Wick, and she wouldn’t have ruined anyone’s lives—

  Don’t start thinking that, she urged herself.

  The Metal’s footsteps were close now. How would it kill her? Punch a hand through her sternum and rip out her heart, like Di ripped out memory cores? Then let it take her heart. It hurt when she didn’t need it to, it mourned and made her careless.

  What she wouldn’t give for a different kind of heart.

  Think.

  She beat her fists against the sealed door again—and felt it give. Just a bit. Ash flaked out between seams. Seams? It wasn’t melted shut—not like the other door. It’d been opened recently. The keypad—dark beside every other door—glowed red.

  The power was still on—why would the power still be on in the abandoned wing of the palace if no one came in here? Unless someone did come into the North Tower. Goddess’s spark—she’d walked right into a trap. Of all the stupid things Siege had told her not to do, one should’ve been Don’t compulsively follow the voices of your dead brothers.

  Her ears perked at the sound of broken fuses in the Metal’s neck. Spitting sparks. Hissing. It was a foot away—maybe two.

  She hadn’t survived mine raids on Cerces and exploding ships and foul-breathed mercenaries to be taken out by a murderous red-eyed Metal here. Who would be left to remember her family? Who would be left to remember Di?

  Then the Metal lunged.

  She might have been born of Ironbloods, but she was a child of distant starships and buried treasure, and if a Metal thought it could kill her that easily, it was mistaken.

  She sidestepped, spinning away as the android brushed past her, slamming its hand into the sealed door.

  Before it could pry its hand out, she grabbed a handful of the broken, exposed wires in its neck and pulled.

  The Messier jerked, trying to reach for her, but she wrapped the wires around her hand and wrenched them out. Sparks hissed from its neck, burning the tips of her fingers, but she didn’t let go until the lights in its eyes dimmed and it toppled to the floor.

  “That was for Di,” she rasped, and sank down to her knees beside it.

  She wasn’t sure she could stand at the moment. That had been too close. A Messier with the malware, here. After everything that had happened, she knew—the malware had been here the night the tower burned.

  But Ana remembered that evening now—there were no Metals. Her mother had tucked her in to sleep while her father read her and Tobias a bedtime story. Before he could finish, he was called away . . . but not by Mercer Valerio.
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  By Rasovant.

  The next thing she knew, Robb’s father was shaking her awake, and the fire was everywhere. Her nightmare—the one from the Caterina—it had been real. And that meant . . .

  She touched her cheek, her burn scars.

  Di had saved her.

  She scrambled to her feet again. She needed to tell Robb that she remembered—when she noticed the red keypad again. And hesitated.

  A chill crept down her spine, the kind she got with the thrill of a hunt—a part of her she’d thought had died with Di.

  A sealed room in the burned tower that was off-limits and continuously guarded? It was the perfect place to hide something, if she were to hide it. And only secrets needed locks.

  She tried a few numbers that came to mind.

  The keypad blinked red each time.

  “I hate technology,” she muttered, and slammed her hand against the sealed door in frustration—

  But then she got an idea.

  It was too tightly closed to pry open with her bare fingers, but maybe she could with an object. Rolling the prone Metal over, she wrenched a rectangular slat from its face. That would work.

  She might not have been tech savvy, but Great Dark take her if she didn’t know how to break into a damn room.

  Jamming the slat of metal into the seam in the door, she pushed as hard as she could, door groaning, until it opened with a snap.

  Cautiously, she stepped inside.

  It was a small room, no bigger than the infirmary on the Dossier. Spare robotic parts cluttered the countertops beside dog-eared books, scattered diagrams, holo-pads full of schematics, maps of the kingdom—and what theoretically lay outside the asteroid belt. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with medical texts on anatomy and brain chemistry, and studies of failed AIs.

  She slid a glass holo-pad to the side to get a better look at one of the schematics. The image looked like a memory core.

  There were photos on the counters of Plague victims, their limbs blackened, others amputated. Before Rasovant created Metals, the androids in the kingdom had not been sophisticated enough to treat the Plague victims, and the doctors who went to help the sick eventually became ill, too.

  Against the near wall, a dusty computer console woke up to her entry.