I am trapped in a wave of awe, disgust, and cold fear.
“Valkyrie,” I whisper. “She is beautiful.”
“That she is,” chirps a voice, inches from my ear.
We were taught not to flinch; we were taught to strike. But when I turn, fist raised, a hand curls itself around my wrist—quick, startlingly quick—and a face is suddenly pressed close to mine. A red, glowing eye, bulging from its left socket, twitches over my stunned expression.
“Well! This is the first time I’ve almost been punched out by one of my Pilots,” he says, a laugh lifting his words. My thumbnail hovers an inch away from his jaw, but he does not seem bothered by the near miss. “Before a proper introduction, anyway.”
The young man releases me and places a hand on his hip. The other reaches back, fingertips curling to scratch at the nape of his neck. My sight catches on the clear rectangular indentation spiraling from his wrist to his elbow. My thumb unconsciously skims over the sleeve of my own forearm.
“They said you were young, but Gods,” he murmurs. His other eye holds ice, blue as a clear noon sky. My gaze flicks over the rest of his features: white-blond hair, milky complexion with dimples like sinkholes, an attentive smile. I do not return it. “Name’s Jonathan. Jonathan Lucindo. I’m your unit captain. You’re Bellsona Steelcrest, correct?”
“Just Sona—”
“That’s correct,” Tether interjects at the same time. Lucindo glances over to the colonel like he just noticed the latter’s presence, and his eyes tread downward, where Tether’s grip still chokes my wrist.
“I asked her, Mister,” Lucindo says, lips quirking on the common formality. The expression is gone as swiftly as it appeared, replaced by a chilling stare. “Do you think she’s going to start swinging at you, too?”
Tether blinks. “Sir?”
Lucindo’s grin is cheerful, but far from warm. “Let go of the Valkyrie.”
A scoff trickles from Tether’s lips as his fingers slither away from my wrist like maggots, each leaving behind a crescent-shaped imprint in the skin.
“Do not die and embarrass me, child,” he spits.
I take a moment to imagine the mark my knuckles would leave across his cheekbone, the way I would bite down on the thrill of the fight I have never dared to chase. And I would win this one, too, like I have all the rest. But power comes from finishing fights, not starting them. So instead, my fist uncoils at my side. I smile and say, “I will damn well die when I please.”
Tether stalks off, most likely to find a place to watch the winding, and behind me, Lucindo chuckles darkly. I turn to find the Valkyrie has offered his hand.
My bravado freezes in my chest. I stare at the panel set into his arm, the area where the Academy eased open his flesh and stole Gods know what from him. From both of us. Now he stands before me, blinking his eyes as if they both belong to him, pretending that the gesture he offers is full of only his blood and his bones, and not the wires that encircle them.
I square my shoulders and salute my new captain, an act he will consider to be derived out of respect rather than a resolution of my own fear. I need my full focus to survive the test run, and I will not be able to retain it if I clasp Jonathan Lucindo’s hand and find it cold as the copper that runs through us both.
“Well, then, Just Sona,” he says, retracting the handshake and flashing a smile. “Happy seventeenth birthday. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we?”
* * *
Despite this current infestation of Gods, the world used to be a truly Godsless place.
Skyscrapers bloomed above the clouds as cities bulged with numbers they could not sustain, besieged by famine and diseases against which they had no shield. Fear and desperation flooded the streets like sewage, and like in ancient times, the human spectrum began to shift in one of two directions—toward gluttony and sin, as people sought pleasure to stall the pain, or toward piety, as people sought the Gods to save us all. The desperately righteous carved out a new theology, one that combined the deities of the dominant world religions into a single doctrine, and punished the people who had turned immoral with the proclamation of a twin hell eternity: one purgatory for the sins of the flesh, and one for the sins of the mind.
This religious fervor only exacerbated unsteady diplomatic relations between nations. As they panicked and prayed and found it was not enough, found they needed their deities here for them, to kill for them. They sculpted their new weapons of mass destruction in the image of the Gods, and called them the Windups.
It was a completely new kind of warfare—it is a completely new scale of destruction, when people find divinity in bloodshed.
Two and a half centuries ago, the world witnessed the beginning of the Springtide War, where the most powerful nations possessed the most powerful Windups, using their mechas to claim dominance over the planet’s already sparse resources. The battles were hardly fought at all with human lives—until Godolia, ruthless in its determination, created the first generation of piloted Windups rather than the conventional autonomous systems.
It was a bit ironic, I suppose, that they utilized the human factor by ripping out some of the human parts. That was the purpose of creating the Academy: to find those with flawless reaction times, who had a knack for battle tactics, and, of course, those who possessed the raw instinct that no amount of gears and bolts and wires could replicate.
And so Godolia rose, pronouncing itself the capital of the world—what was left of it, at least, after the War, littered with felled idols and cut with ribbons of dead, dry earth. They tell us the Windups were meant to be a beacon of hope. They tell us it is as if the Gods themselves have descended to protect us all. They tell us to celebrate red skies and flesh rendered painless, for these mark our inhuman parts, our more than human parts.
Yet I have been biting back a scream since I woke up from the surgery. For me, and for everyone living outside Godolia’s limits and under its thumb, what had been meant to end terror ended up thriving on it.
As Lucindo turns toward the Windup, I glimpse the insignia sewn across the back of his dark gray military jacket. It is the mark of the Valkyrie unit: a black sword, blade and handle edged with silver thread, stitched painstakingly into the image of the night sky.
The only things bigger than us are the heavens, and barely, our spines pressed fast against the stars.
He leads me to the base of my Valkyrie, where a door is etched into the metal of her boot.
“Look into there,” he says, pointing at a small glass orb that juts out of the door. I lean in, but he shakes his head. “No, no. Open your left eye.”
I hide my grimace and follow his command. The door slides open, revealing the inner workings of the Windup. A ladder spirals up the inside of her calf, and Lucindo begins to climb.
The mecha’s innards brim with copper and silver wires that hiss with electricity, gears that whir together seamlessly, and valves that spew steam over the rungs of the ladder. As we near her chest area, I catch sight of a large box suspended in the same place a heart would rest: the Windup’s central power core.
Once the chip they implanted at the base of my brain stem syncs to its network, the Valkyrie will be wound, and we will be one.
That, of course, assumes that my brain can survive the stress.
I pause on the ladder, noting the platform that branches off the core’s box, coming to rest a few feet above my head.
“You coming or what?” Lucindo calls, ten rungs ahead.
“Why … why is there a platform?”
“What?”
I loosen my grip on the ladder to point. “Why is there need for a platform?”
He blinks. “For the guards to stand on.”
“Guards?”
“Yeah, guards.”
I keep my mouth closed for a few moments, before the curiosity pries it back open. “Why is there need for guards?”
“Gearbreakers, of course.”
I blink. “Gearbreakers?”
A Paladin went out last week and never came back.
They found that lost Pilot at the bottom of the Hana River. Should we be worried about the Gearbreakers?
Worried? another would always say. We’ll be Gods.
“They still don’t teach about Gearbreakers up there?” Lucindo asks, turning back to look at me.
“I thought they were classmate gossip.” A beat of silence passes. “I do not think I understand. They … they are—”
“Tiny? Yeah, but they’re clever, I hate to admit it. Once they get inside, it only takes one of them to bring the whole mecha toppling down. A few snipped wires here, a cracked gear there, and…”
I glance over the edge of the platform, where the Valkyrie’s leg extends a hundred feet downward, supported by iron beams and metal plates and ribbed gears, some as small as my pinkie finger, others as large as my torso, each feeding into another. One simple jam in the rotations, and the mecha is scrap metal.
This is why they did not teach about Gearbreakers in the Academy. It would be teaching us that their Gods are delicate.
“I suppose it’s just proof that Godolia’s the only truly civilized nation left.” Lucindo sighs. “The Gearbreakers … they’re all just barbarians.”
Barbarians who can pluck apart deities.
We reach the head, a space expanding larger than my bedroom. Two long windows mark the Valkyrie’s eyes, which glare proudly over the Windup hangar from behind the grated visor. Luminescent glass is set into the center of the floor, the same size and shape as the base of a simulation dome. From the ceiling above dangle a multitude of rubber-wrapped cables, and at the sight, a shriek begins to creep up my throat. I suppress it as Lucindo turns to me, offering me his hand again. This time, I take it.
He leads me over to the glass, which glows brighter once sensing our weight, and then to the very center of the cords. I can tell he is about to pull away, and my hand involuntarily tightens around his. Heat floods my cheeks. I wish they had taken away my ability to blush.
But Lucindo looks at me, eyes full of infinite understanding, smile almost reassuring. I drop his hand.
“Palms up, please,” he says, voice suddenly soft.
I raise them, and he gently peels back my sleeves, fully revealing the panels running up my forearms. At his single press, they pop open, and I brace myself. To see blood and bone and arteries that bulge with each rapid heartbeat, threads of veins that glisten under the sudden light. To feel raw flesh growing cold against the air.
But there is nothing but a smooth, silver dish lying within each arm, lined on each side by a tidy row of small sockets.
Lucindo sees the shock on my face and chuckles. “I was expecting it to be disgusting, too,” he says. “But they cleaned us up pretty nicely, huh?”
I wipe my features again, and nod at him to continue. He reaches up to grasp one of the cords, tugging it down to my forearm.
“You won’t be synced until these are all attached,” he murmurs, snapping a cord into one of the sockets with a small click. “And once you are, once the Valkyrie is wound, take it slow at first. It’s almost like waking up in the morning.”
My left arm is attached, six cords spilling into my skin, like blood trickling from the radial vein. Nausea clenches at my stomach, and in the wake of it, I think of bolting. I think of wrapping the cords around his neck and twisting and my hands grabbing the ladder rungs before his body can hit the floor. I think of how many feet I can get before a bullet shatters the back of my skull.
I think of death, and how I think too much on it, and how little damage a corpse can inflict.
Lucindo moves to my right. “And you’ll get the ability to feel pain back, too. It’s like … it’s a different kind of hurt, though. Like … ghost hurt, because in the back of your head you know it’s not real, and you know that you can rip the cords out at any time and it’ll be gone. I guess it’s a little odd to think about it that way, like part of you doesn’t exist. But you will get used to it.”
I will get used to it.
His hand freezes, a cord pinched between his fingertips, hovering over the last empty socket. He glances up at me. Dull and glowing. Natural and unnatural.
“Do it,” I say.
“I can’t. Not if you’re not ready. You need to be in the right mindset, or that little chip at the base of your head is going to fry you.”
He waits as my silence seeps into the air.
“Okay, listen, Sona,” he says, relaxing his grip a little. The cord leaves his hand to hang in the air. “You know why the Valkyries are the most elite unit of Windups? Why we’re the most valued, why we handle only the most dangerous missions?”
“They…,” I start, stumbling to remember my lessons. “They are the quickest mechas ever created, because of their lightweight metal. They are the most carefully crafted of all the other units, so they nearly have the intricacy of the human body. Their hip, heel, and leg joints are set with detailed, tiny gears, so they can twist their stance, such as to perform a roundhouse, whereas other Windups can only walk or run. They can mirror any fighting style used by their Pilot with complete precision.”
Lucindo shakes his head. “Incorrect, Sona.”
“It is not.”
“It most certainly is, in fact,” he says, stepping closer. His eyes bore into mine. “You mean to say I. I am the quickest mecha ever created. I fight with complete precision. I am the strongest Windup. I am a Valkyrie. Say it, soldier.”
I raise my chin. “I am a Valkyrie.”
Lucindo flashes a grin and reaches for the last cord. I close my eyes, and the world ceases to be red, or colorful, or anything else.
The cord clicks into me.
A shock seizes my spine, a bolt of electricity that throws me to my knees and causes a cry to tear free from my throat. The jolt forces my eyes open, but I do not find the glass floor beneath my knees as I expected.
Rather, Colonel Tether’s face is drawn wide with startled features.
The rubber of his boots screams across the floor as he staggers backward to escape the space between my gloved fingers, splayed flat against the ground. My other hand is wrapped around the grip of my sword, glinting wickedly in my peripheral vision.
I raise my head, noting the number of people who have gone still at the sight of me. Ignoring their stupor, I bring a hand up to my eyes, watching my fingertips twitch and the chrome gleam.
Oh.
I did not expect it to feel like this.
Like nothing new, nothing foreign at all.
It is just … me.
For the first time in a long time, I feel quite like myself again.
I rise to my full height, and their eyes follow me, gorging themselves on the God awakened. I take a step, and somewhere in the back of my consciousness, I know that I sense the glass floor shifting beneath my feet, the wires that grace my skin, and Lucindo’s gaze boring into my back. I know about my second self, small as those gawking before me, but for right now, we are not one and the same. I am someone she could never be.
I am someone who could destroy Godolia.
The Windups were created to protect this nation.
I was created to protect this nation.
Godolia needed me, and so the Academy pulled me apart and put the Mods in the places where there was once breath and life and color and called it my evolution.
They said I should celebrate the day the sky bled.
I am celebrating. I am reveling.
Because they did not simply create another Pilot. Another soldier. Another protector.
They created nothing short of their own downfall.
“This feels good,” I say, and I think she is smiling, that she is grinning ear to ear. “This feels really fucking good.”
CHAPTER THREE
ERIS
Three Weeks Later
There’s a lot of reasons to wake up kind of pissed.
You could blame it on the first thing you see every morning—a ceiling riddled with water damage, cracks splitting the cheap plaster into structurally questionable fragments. You could blame it on the fact that you’re sweating from the dull heat produced by the fair-haired boy slumped underneath the covers next to you, or the fact that last night he took your shirt off and maybe some other choice articles of clothing, and at some point you’ll have to go hunting for them.
Or maybe blame your driver, who’s banging at the door with her little caffeine-fueled fists, screeching at you to get your ass out of bed because there’s another two-hundred-foot-tall mecha on the loose and it’s severely fucking up the world and it’s your job to deal with it.
Blame anything and everything, because it hardly matters. Wake up pissed, wake up grinning—I still have to pull on my shoes and try not to die today.
“I’m awake, screw off!” I yell, and then the dust crowds my throat and I double over in a graceful coughing fit.
Seventeen-ish years ago, my parents named their second daughter after one of the many Gods of discord, destining that even as a chubby infant toddling around the renegade compound, I was synonymous with chaos.
Seventeen-ish years later, as I rub the sleep from my eyes with the heels of my hands, I think I can only manage one or two mediocre disasters before I have to take a nap.
I peel back the blanket, only one of my feet skimming the hardwood floor before Milo’s hand catches my wrist. His eyes are still glazed with sleep, lips parted in a sloppy smile.
“You at least owe me five more minutes,” he mumbles.
“Like hells I do,” I snap, yanking my hand away. I stand, the cold from the floor immediately seeping up my legs, and for a moment I consider his offer. But then I mentally shake myself.
“Get out,” I growl in the same harsh tone. “We have work.”
He props himself up on his elbows, a crooked smile dimpling his right cheek. He watches me change into a pair of black overalls yanked from one of the piles of clothes heaped around the room. I narrow my eyes, scanning the floor.
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