“I would like to change your mind,” she says.
My thoughts are slow to churn up some snippy, violent response, and I’m already drifting away before they do.
And then the clamp around my right wrist clinks open.
I open my eyes as she reaches to unlatch the other restraint.
“My name,” she says, a note of excitement quickening her voice, “is Sona Steelcrest. I … I believe we can help each other.”
I sit up. Wait for the momentary spray of black dots across my vision to quell. Scrub my palms against my cheeks to gather myself. The pathetic, sloppy excuses for gears peek at me from both arms, outlined with stinging ache. Those dark promises I made bubble up: For every drop of blood they took from me, I’ll take a thousand from them.
“You are an idiot, Sona Steelcrest,” I say, and push off the table.
We hit the ground in a tangle of limbs. I send a fist toward her nose. She moves her chin, and my knuckles catch her hair—soft—and then the ground—not soft. I clench my teeth against the shock of pain and lurch my weight forward, free arm tucking underneath her chin. Her mouth opens wordlessly, eyes flickering over my face as I wait for those little muscles to give, one by one—Pilots can’t suffocate, but they can still break.
Twisting, she swings her leg out from beneath me, knee driving into my stomach. She scrambles away as I falter back, keeping low, spine to the door.
We were originally trained to dismantle Windups, but once the Academy got wise and guards became a common parasite, we had to learn how to fight humans, too. Jenny was eighteen when I was assigned to her crew, eight years my senior, and still spared no second thought on knocking me flat on my ass. Repeatedly.
“You think Godolia’s going to care you’re a kid?” she would yell, watching me stumble up, then shoving me right to the floor again. “The Zeniths, the mechas, the Bots—they’ll tear you apart and not lose a wink of sleep over it. Get on your feet.” I would get up, and she would shove me back down. “You hit again and you hit fast and you hit hard. You’re a Gearbreaker, Eris, and that means when your back’s against a wall, you go through the wall.”
“Frostbringer,” the Bot hisses. She has only one eye open now. “Please, I need to talk to you.”
I suck in a breath, hands clenching into fists. “Then talk.”
I lunge. The Bot’s spine collides with the door. I expect both of her eyes to spring open from the shock, but if anything, her left one pinches even tighter, creases rippling along her brow. I bury my fist in her ribs, once, twice. The third time, something shudders beneath the skin, the sensation undulating across my knuckles.
But her face doesn’t even yield a twitch, palms still hovering, unmoving and complacent. Feel something, anything, you damn Bot! I land a hook to her cheekbone, and her legs wobble and collapse. She stutters back against the door, and I knee her in the stomach before twisting my hand around her shirt collar. My other fist stretches back to my ear, winding up a cross to the bridge of her nose, to hear another glorious crack.
The Bot locks her half gaze with mine, the flesh of her cheekbone already blooming dark and swelling, beginning to morph her eye into a crescent, and suddenly I hesitate. My fingers still wrapped inside her shirt fabric, my fist still raised, and I’m frozen. Jenny’s voice is curling around in my ear: Now we go for the Pilot.
“You are spectacular, Frostbringer,” the Bot croaks, hands finally lowering, going limp at her sides. The bandage comes fully loose and uncoils in a heap against the floor. “And … and beautiful. Even in red. But I prefer you like this, in this shading.”
I bristle, eyes narrowing. Her chin is held high; I twist the fabric tighter around her neck.
“You’re a riot.” I laugh, but the sound is anything but light.
She shakes her head as best she can. “And you,” she says, eye tracing up my face, “have a minuscule gash from destroying a Valkyrie. You—we can help each other.”
I open my mouth, and her hand closes around my forearm. She’s warmer than I thought a Pilot could be. Like there’s nothing cold under the skin.
“You can help me escape,” she whispers. “You can help me destroy Godolia.”
A laugh spasms up my throat. “And you can rot, you f—”
Her fingernails burrow into my wrists with such sudden ferocity that I flinch. I can’t tear my gaze away from the new expression that has appeared on her face. It’s a look I recognize well, felt across my own features countless times, equal parts wild and panicked. Right now, unexplainably, the Bot is a wounded animal backed into a corner.
“What have they done to you, Frostbringer?” she murmurs. Her voice is soft now, but barbed. It strikes me as strange. And I realize why—where there was the Godolia lilt, now there’s … something familiar. Something like home. What game is she playing? “There is an anger in you, Gearbreaker, a glorious anger. I saw it winding tight in your chest when you killed the mecha, and I see it driving you now, driving this … this hatred toward me. So I ask, what have they done to you? Did they kill your family, like they did mine? Did they turn you into something terrible, something powerful? Was it worth what they took away?”
Like they did mine? My fist falters, drops to my side.
And then—she draws a breath.
The thoughts collect back into their rightful line, that path toward the fight, toward my fist to her nose, to her teeth, to feel another glorious fracture. She’s right—I am angry, so vividly angry, all the time, and you know what—it helps.
And then she leans closer, and there are words moving her lips. They don’t make sense until they’ve left the air, silence falling between us. When they come into comprehension, they come in screaming.
And softly, too.
“How do you kill a God?”
I’ve always known the answer to this question. I say it aloud because everyone should know, too. “From the inside out.”
She smiles. I ready myself.
Her hand drops from my wrist, dangling at her side. She’s exposed, a million places for my fist to sink into suddenly left open and welcoming.
“Break me, then,” the Bot murmurs, just before I move to, and the chill her words draw down my spine seals me in place. “If you are not going to help me escape, then take me apart. Make it stick. They left me in pieces just to sew them back together as many times as they pleased, and I let them, because I was so blind with the want for revenge, the want for power, that in the end, I was made into the very thing that ripped me from my home in the first place. They have not given me power; they gave me the ability to come undone. I … I never wanted to be a traitor. I just wanted to be like you, Gearbreaker.”
From both eyes, tears dampen her lashes. A large drop rolls over her swelling cheekbone and plops onto the floor. She hurriedly wipes its trail away.
“I hate red and I hate my heartbeat and I hate being this. Their soldier. Their God. I must steal color back from an eye that paints the world vile, steal my thoughts back from the hum, that damn hum, because … because I refuse to end like this.” Her voice is choked, nearly a whisper, and though she’s crying, there’s a fury pushing her words forward. And it is bottomless. “I will not die in a Windup. I will not die following their orders, and I will not die as their protector. I will die human or I will not die at all.”
I stand still and quiet, mind stuttering, stunned by her words. I stare at the tears I didn’t know she could possess; at her, bleeding and swelling and crying, and in the back of my mind, Jenny’s voice—Go for the Pilot go for the Pilot go for the Pilot.
“You need a way out. I need somewhere to run to.” Her lone eye is fixed on me, hazel dropped to a dark brown with her head tilted down and away from the light, like overturned earth. “Do we help each other? Or do we die here, just two other insignificant Badlands girls to add to the rest?”
“I am not insignificant!”
“Neither am I,” she spits. “So let’s show them.”
I recoil, fingers r
ising to tug through my hair. This is ludicrous. “You’re not from the Badlands. You’re just another poor kid who’s been sucking on Godolia’s tailpipe for the entirety of your life. I’m surprised you don’t spew smoke every time you open your mouth. This is … another tactic. Some other form of interrogation, a sob story to get me soft—”
“Is it because of this?” Her left eye opens, a red eclipse gleaming back at me. There is a new hardness to her jaw, like she’s trying to hold it steady. “Is this why you do not believe me?”
My laugh is dry. “It’s not helping.”
A small line appears between the Bot’s brows. “And what about the prospect of an alternative?”
Her voice has changed, tucked back into that neat package of the Godolia accent. It’s like the room’s air has been replaced, heavier now, primed for a storm. My fear, momentarily suspended by the confusion, has fallen back into place. I’m suddenly very aware of the blood on her hands, the shine of her Valkyrie jacket under the light.
“Alternative?”
“They sent me as your last interrogator. If I fail, they will move to the corruption process.” She searches my face when it’s clear I don’t intend to respond. “Do you have any other choice?”
Many choices. My knuckles bloom ruddy with bruises, but a few splotches of skin remain untainted. So much potential. So much destruction I could cause, so many ways to be feral. So many opportunities to make Jenny proud of me.
They’ll tear you apart and not lose a wink of sleep over it.
“You’re too good to be true,” I murmur, and the thought scrapes me raw. I sink to the floor, fingers curling against the dirty tiles—I barely care how pathetic it looks. Juniper painted my nails black a few days ago, just like she’s done dozens of times before, and the feeling of her small, scarred hand holding my palm is something that startles me now. A memory I don’t want because it feels so viciously real and warm and safe, the old-paper smell of the common room mixed with the chemical tang of nail polish, the shriek of the kids brawling on the dusty rug—
It’s all a joke. A delusion. I’m not going home. I’m never going home.
A pair of boots appear in front of my hands. My eyes trace up the long legs, to the jacket, to the face tilted down toward mine. It’s hard to tell with the glow of her eye, but the features look as if they’ve softened.
“I am not good,” she says.
I blink. She has two freckles on the left side of her nose, four on the right. There’s salt dried against them. She’s pretty, I realize, which is an odd thought, because I genuinely can’t tell if she’s about to start crying or hit me across the face.
And I think to myself—Fuck it.
“What did you say your name was again?”
A small, surprised pause follows before she says, “Sona. I prefer Sona. I do not believe I caught yours.”
“I don’t believe you’re going to.”
A smile flickers on her lips. “I suppose it is not relevant. I only need the Frostbringer, anyway.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
SONA
My hand feels cold. The Gearbreaker must have bitten off more skin than I thought.
I close the door of the holding cell behind me, my arm already lifting to stop Lucindo’s furious form from slipping past and ripping it off its hinges. The look on his face is quite pleasing, strikingly livid after taking a glance at my swollen face. He must care about me, like he does for all his other little Valkyries.
“No one lays a finger on my unit!” he roars, stopping his thrashing to face me with eyes blazing.
“I admit, she may have been a tad hostile.”
His fingers tuck my hair behind my ear, and he leans closer to peer at the angry flesh of my cheekbone. I stand perfectly still, allowing him this prodding, hands folded carefully behind me.
“We offer her mercy, and she does this?” he hisses. “Where else—”
“I am alive, yes? She had the chance to kill me and did not take it. I would say this was a step in the right direction.”
Something shifts over his expression at my words, and for a moment I believe his ridiculous sense of possessiveness is going to win out, and that he is about to tear past my outstretched arm and leave my only chance of revenge bleeding out against the tiled floor.
Then his shoulders lose their rigidness, and he takes a step back. Lucindo scratches the nape of his neck, brows furrowed. “I don’t like it. These niceties. She doesn’t deserve it.”
She does not deserve any of this, I think to myself, but the dark expression on his face spurs panic in my chest. He is going to pull me from this, bar me from seeing her again. And I … I want to see her again.
“Tomorrow,” I say, my voice miraculously steady, “I will do something worse. Something that scares her.”
I match this with a smile, and he smiles back, because he finds me wicked, and he likes me in such a light.
“Can you trust me?” I ask him. I am genuinely curious. “Can you trust that I can do this?”
He shakes his head, throwing his hands up in defeat. “All right, all right. Of course I can. I only worry because it’s my job to.”
I take his hand, mostly to see what reaction it will provoke. “Thank you, Jonathan. It means the world to me.”
He rolls his eyes, perhaps trying to distract from the new shade of red his cheeks have taken on.
My grin widens. Nothing but a fool stuffed with wires.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SONA
The next morning, as soon as I blacken the mirrors, her hand twists around my collar. She shoves my back to the glass, fist rising to shatter my nose.
It hesitates beside her jaw, and I meet her glare with my right eye, the left carefully shut. She herself has the most wonderful eyes—black as night air, rimmed by feathery lashes and heavy, dark circles.
“Well?” she demands after a few seconds of silence.
“What?” I say dumbly.
Her mouth twists. The fingers on my collar jostle a little.
“Oh. Oh.” My chin tilts down; she stands a good half foot shorter than me. “You want me to flinch?”
Her thumb skims along the skin of my neck. “Are you going to?”
“Are you going to hit me?”
“I’m undecided.”
“Well, mull it over.” I steal another glance at the circles ringing her eyes. “But do it sitting. You are wavering on your feet.”
She sniffs and releases my shirt, the crimpled fabric relaxing under the absence of her grip. She hauls herself up on the table, crossing her arms. “Shockingly, it’s hard to get any sleep around here.”
Even so, she still has that same dangerous energy vibrating around her, a gleam in her glare, and still that lovely scowl slashing her lips, sending a strange twist through my rib cage.
“I have some things for you.”
“My gloves?” she asks excitedly, pitching forward.
“Not yet.” I hold out the damp rag I’ve been clutching, and rustle through my pocket for the other item.
She stares at the rag. “How generous,” she says drily.
I shrug. “Truly, I do like the blood on your cheeks. And the soot.”
She takes it and starts scrubbing at her jaw. “So,” she says, “what’s that?”
I move to the table, the vial in my fingers. I ease off the plastic cork and tip the round Spider capsule onto the tabletop. It rolls a few inches before meeting my fingers. When I press down, the Spider awakes, spiny limbs uncoiling from the metal abdomen. I tap its head to flip it upright, the razor pinpricks of its legs skittering across the smooth surface.
The Frostbringer recoils. “What the hells—”
“It’s all right,” I say, allowing the Spider to climb onto my palm. “Just a little pick-me-up.”
“Is that why you’re looking so bright and shiny today?” she snaps.
“Yes. Thank you for noticing.”
I extend my hand, beckoning for hers. She does not m
ove, so I close the distance and reach for her wrist, taking care with the broken flesh warping her forearm, and tip the Spider beside it. Glowing eyes scanning for the areas of interrupted flesh, it strings pale, fresh skin over the tattered portions from its spinnerets.
I take a deep breath. “Frostbringer—”
“When am I getting my gloves, by the way?” The Gearbreaker revolves her wrist around slowly, eyes darting over the new flesh.
I pluck the Spider away, placing it on her other forearm. “When we leave.”
“Can’t you just waltz in and grab them from wherever they keep the prisoner effects? That Valkyrie jacket must be a free ticket around here.”
“It is. I am not getting them to you sooner than I need to.”
The Spider finishes its work, and, tentatively, she pinches it between her fingers, transferring it to her cheek. Her eye winks shut as it climbs toward the gash in her hairline, and it bows its head over the laceration, weaving a thin pale thread across the cut. “And why not?”
“You are practically salivating. You would freeze me where I stood.”
The Gearbreaker grins, a nervous, warbling expression that seems more like a grimace. “You don’t trust me or something?”
“I trust your fear.”
She pauses. The Spider, sensing no more broken flesh, stills on her crown. “I guess you’re not as stupid as you look, then.”
I take another breath, one hand wrapped to my side, ribs rising beneath my fingers. “Tomorrow night, I am going to tell my superiors that you will not break, and that they should collect you for the corruption process.”
Her face is expressionless, fingertips patting the new skin on her knuckles. “I take it back.”
I rub the bridge of my nose. “Frostbringer—”
She barks a laugh, slipping from the table, feet landing hard against the tiles. She begins to pace the room jaggedly, muttering under her breath. “I Godsdamn knew it … has a screw loose…”
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