The frost splits the metal in jagged stars. The sword falls from her grip, clattering against the ice. The mecha falters.
When I breathe, it blooms from me. Is that it? Did I actually survive this?
Then, to my left, something like a growl. The wind picks up.
I look just in time to see Glitch break into a sprint, glass floor spinning beneath her rapid steps. The sudden momentum nearly throws me to my knees. In a half instant we’re next to the other Valkyrie, and Glitch’s head dips down, sending the floor angling beneath my feet. Her hand grapples open air. Outside, her Valkyrie’s metal-plated palm reaches for the mecha, seizing the nape of its neck.
Another feral growl falls from her lips. Glitch snaps her arm forward, bringing the Windup’s head straight through the ice.
The massive limbs spasm awkwardly against the ground, scraping up frost that the wind greedily takes. Glitch doesn’t yield. Her hand doesn’t shake.
Pilots can’t drown, but they can still freeze.
The mecha stops thrashing.
My heart does not.
Glitch rises to her feet, and then stands so perfectly still, shoulders drawn back, one hand lifted slightly at her side. Tears fill her eyes, but not much else. I watch her take a breath.
Quiet, again.
I’m not built for quiet. Not built to be soft. I can’t be.
I reach for her. My hands are ignited.
Now we go for the Pilot.
Her hands slide around my shoulders. She pulls me close.
She can’t see me. How—
“Thank you,” Glitch murmurs, words thick with tears.
I am frozen. My hands hover inches away from her skin; she must be able to feel the cold crackling across them. Her arms tighten around me, chin to the top of my head. She’s warm. Despite the bolts and wires in her veins. Despite the snowflakes. When she breathes, her ribs move against mine. “Thank you, Eris.”
My hands drop to my sides.
She shivers. And then she’s screaming again.
“My leg—” she starts, and her knee buckles. Without thinking, I deactivate the gloves and catch her under her arms, one limp again, the other scratching blindly for the right cables. She binds them all in a tight fist and tugs sharply, jolting against me. Another cry sounds, and my chest tightens.
“Eris … the left cords … please,” she begs.
I bob a nod she can’t see, my hand trailing down her forearm and intertwining my fingers around the cables. I yank harshly, popping them free, desperateness leaving no room for gentleness.
I look up to see the blank glaze evaporating from her eyes, tear-swollen with the red roots of veins crawling against the glossy whites.
“Are you all right?” she croaks.
“Shit, did I do that right?” I say at the same time, dropping the cords.
And that’s when it rushes in. We’re out. We’re safe. I’m laughing suddenly, and she’s staring at me like I lost it, and maybe I deserve to after all this shit. I grin, happiness shooing away whatever particle of good judgment I have left, and I press my palms against her cheeks, flushed wondrously pink under the blood.
“You are insane,” I conclude, nodding sharply. “Definitely a Glitch.”
There’s a moment when I think I feel a smidge of heat spark under my touch, before she shoves my hands away.
“We should leave before the Windup collapses.”
“Collapses?”
She turns and points rigidly out of the broken eye. “Do you know her, by chance?”
Below us, where the ice graces the tree line, a group of people are walking toward us. They’re led by a girl with night-dark hair, a rippling orange glow bursting from her fingers. A ferocious grin perches on her lips, brilliant and lively in contrast to the ambiguity of her eyes, hidden behind the black glass of her welding goggles. Of course, I’m not close enough to see that detail, but I don’t need to be. I would recognize the unnerving presence anywhere.
She’s alive.
Of course she is.
“Ah, shit,” I murmur. “I’m in so much trouble.”
* * *
We’re both glazed with a sheen of sweat by the time we make it out of the Windup. Glitch’s curls are pasted against her cheeks, and I see her fingers move to unzip her jacket, flittering for a moment before dropping back to her sides. Her shirt is back in Godolia, still soaked through with that other Pilot’s blood.
She stops short and glances back. About thirty feet away, the gold of her Valkyrie’s right greave is dripping down in swollen droplets, leaking from the molten-rimmed crater set just below her knee. It’s no wonder she buckled. Jenny’s serum should burn itself out soon, but not before the entire Windup collapses under its weakened stance. We need to clear the ice before the force of it sends us underwater.
“Are you okay?” I ask, watching as Glitch drops her stare to her palms, where angry red blisters have sprouted across the calluses. My gloves protected me from the broiling heat that Jenny’s serum shot through the entire structure, but Glitch clung to the ladder rungs unprotected.
She shrugs. “Not like it hurts.” She’s bound the fabric around her eye again.
I get a clear view of the moment when Jenny recognizes me. Her mouth unhinges slightly, and her footsteps stop. Her crew—the people I grew up with, who I could name by their voices alone—follow her example.
“Eris?” Nolan gasps, the barrel of his gun dipping toward the ice as he stops, blue eyes going wide. “We thought you were dead!”
“Knew it.” Gwen nods and turns toward Zamaya, bouncing on her toes. The two guns in her hip holsters jostle along with her. “Seung, my candy, if you will?”
Seung takes a toffee rolled in wax paper out of his pocket and deposits it into Gwen’s waiting palm. Of course they took bets on me. No reason to stop gambling just because I might be dead.
My gaze carefully trains on Jenny, on the rigid shoulders that might as well be screaming her next intention, at the dark eyes I know flicker behind her goggles, to me and to the Pilot on my left and back to me, over and over and over.
My feet move instinctively. I put myself between Jenny and Glitch, and the moment I do, the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Like they do before a storm breaks out. Before a fight starts.
“Hey, Jen,” I say, trying my hand at a smile. She peels it off my face with an abrupt scowl. During a takedown, Jenny will keep her grin stitched on even when—no, especially when—she’s feeling particularly murderous. So naturally, when she frowns, I feel my heart skip a beat.
“Step away from the Bot, Eris,” she says tightly.
“Jen, I will explain everything to you, I promise. She wasn’t just my escape; I was hers, too. She’s not like other Pilots. She’s from the Badlands. She’s like us.”
For a moment, I think my words get to her. Jenny reaches up and pushes her goggles free.
“Oh, Eris,” she says softly. The veins in her gloves burst alive with the magma serum. “What the hells did they do to you?”
“Jenny—”
I barely register the moment she breaks into a sprint, and when I do, she has already flung me against the ice, and her hand is rising toward Glitch’s head. I swipe a leg across her ankles, sending her spiraling backward, but she scarcely touches the ground before she’s back on her feet, rounding on me. I snatch her wrists with both hands, tugging her close, forcing her to meet my eyes. My fingers are against her ignited palms, but it doesn’t hurt me, just like my serum can’t hurt her. She designed our gloves to recognize us and each other, because she’s crazy smart. Which means she’s absolutely creative enough to find other ways to hurt me.
“I know—I know—it sounds crazy, but just listen to me!”
Her eyes flash black fire, head whipping toward Glitch, who has staggered a few feet backward.
“You put her head through the blender, didn’t you?” Jenny spits. Her hands twist free, shoving me back to the ice. “You’ll thank me later, Eris.”
“I’m not corrupted!” I scream, scrambling to my feet, forcing myself in front of her again.
“We’ll fix you,” Jenny growls, and for a shocked moment I swear I hear a sob in her voice. Her attention slips past my shoulder. “Grab her.”
Two sets of hands clamp down on my arms, hauling me backward. Something clicks in me, and I drop my gaze to the reflective gloss of the ice. Nolan’s on my right—I smash my foot on top of his first—and after he yelps and releases, I twist, driving my elbow into Seung’s ribs.
“Jenny, just let me—!”
“Stop.” The voice is resolved yet hushed. Zamaya, Jenny’s second in command. Demolitions expert.
I turn to find her twenty feet away, bow notched with a steel-tipped arrow—the special, explosive kind that Jenny made just for her. Zamaya swallows hard. She has two gear tattoos on her cheeks that disappear into her dimples when she smiles. But she isn’t smiling now. “Eris, babe … please.”
Nolan and Seung grab on to my arms again, pinning me tight. Zamaya shifts her aim, past me and past Jenny, onto Glitch.
Her uncovered eye skips off the tip of the arrow and lands on me. “I should not move, correct?”
“Correct, Bot,” Jenny answers. She takes a step forward and snatches both of my wrists, holding them close to her face. Her eyes are narrow, thumb brushing against my forearm. “This isn’t your skin.”
I blink. She’s touching the area the Spider healed, after Wendy and Linel had their fun. “There’s no possible way you can tell that.”
“They healed you?” she murmurs. “They healed you. So you could, what, infiltrate the Hollows? Take us down from the inside? Godolia loves the poetic, huh?”
Every part of me recoils at the idea, and I open my mouth to tell her this, but then see the tears in her eyes, glazed over each dark iris, and the words catch in my throat.
“Look at me.” I flip my hands so that they clasp hers, and I pull her close. “Jenny, look at me, I’m not corrupted!”
“Then why would they heal you?” she shouts. “Why would they let you go?”
“They didn’t do either. They … they hurt me, Jen.” My voice breaks, and I didn’t expect it to, and worse, now my bottom lip is trembling. I hate seeming weak in front of her. “They did—they did a lot, okay? But she healed me. We escaped together. She saved me.”
Jenny snarls and snaps her hands away, turning back toward Glitch. Her gloves, clenched at her sides, ignite orange.
“We’ll save you,” she whispers. “We’ll undo what they did.”
Jenny begins to walk toward Glitch, and Glitch, despite her unnerving calm, takes a step back. Panic rising, I look from Nolan to Seung.
“Let go of me!”
Seung shakes his head. “We’re not trying to hurt you, Eris. We’re just getting you out of Jenny’s way.”
They’re not trying to hurt me. I glance back, where Zamaya still has her bow leveled, and Gwen, their sharpshooter, is next to her, pistol clasped and finger nestled up against the trigger. Some of the most fearless people I know, and their hands are shaking.
They would never hurt me.
I thrash first, and when their grips tighten, cry out. Jenny turns back as I do, just in time to see Nolan and Seung hesitate, their holds slip. The warning leaves her mouth only after I wrestle free, and only after I activate the cryo gloves.
Jenny meets my gaze with a startling sadness I have not seen in a very, very long time.
“If you want to kill her”—I take a breath, steeling my glare—“you’ll have to go through me.”
“Do you think I won’t?” she asks softly.
“You won’t.”
She raises her fist. A single tear drips down her cheek. “Then you are far too sympathetic for this line of work, Eris.” She swallows hard. “But you were good. A good soldier. A good Gearbreaker. Nolan, Seung, get back.”
I think it’s when they scatter that I realize how real this all is, how insane I must seem, how insane I am, fighting for a Pilot, who stares back, eyes wide now, whose mouth is opening, gashed lips moving. She’s saying—what is she saying?
The shriek of an arrow.
It hits the ice between me and Jenny, and the world dissolves in a blinding flash. I’m thrown from my stance, skin scraping against cold, clothes snagging against frost. I land on my side, breath torn out of my lungs.
Across the smoke, my sister rises to her feet and extends a finger toward Zamaya—who, looking bored as usual, notches another arrow.
“You are out of line, Z,” Jenny snarls.
“I’m being nice, darling,” she responds, shrugging. “That was a warning shot. We’ve been around your bickering enough as it is. Just kill the Bot and get it over with.”
The haze clears. The blast blew Jenny backward, toward Sona, and I am too far away to do anything, too far away to stop Jen’s fist from colliding with Glitch’s cheekbone.
Jenny kicks Glitch onto her back and claims a wide stance, closed fists clenched above her head, the veins primed to burst.
“Any last words, Bot?” Jenny sneers.
Sona stares up, curls spread out beneath her like a pillow.
“Go ahead,” she says, nudging her chin forward. Her face is softened, utterly without fear or hesitation. Her fingers lie relaxed against the ice.
Jenny sharpens her glare. “What did you say?”
“I cannot blame you for your mistrust. And I have long found that I do not care how I die, as long as it is not in a Windup and nowhere near Godolia’s limits. I said go ahead, Gearbreaker.”
Then, Sona tilts her head toward me, looking at me with a single doe eye. A small smile cracks her lips.
“Thank you, Eris,” she says. “For everything.”
“No…,” I whisper, then my voice leaps to a scream. “Jenny, don’t!”
Jenny stares down at Sona, and in the stiffness of her shoulders and the trenches of her frown I see every single particle of hate embedded, everything that we have been taught from birth bubbling under the surface. She has a different voice in her head, belonging to whoever first uttered the words to her: Go for the Pilot. Her cheek dips as she bites the inside of her mouth.
“Did you save my sister?” Jenny asks. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her voice dropped to a whisper before.
“We saved each other.”
“You don’t serve Godolia?”
“Everybody serves Godolia, in one way or another,” Sona says, and then her fingers are dipping below the bandage, tugging it up past her curls. The red glow of her eye flickers into place as it blinks in the sudden light. “And because of this,” she continues, “I will always serve its image, will always reinforce the fear it craves. The Academy made it so. And this is the reason why I begged Eris to help me escape.”
She grins happily. The corners of Jenny’s mouth twitch, fists still suspended in the air. It jars me a bit, seeing the tables suddenly turned like this: Jen fighting to keep her expression stoic, and Sona baring her teeth.
“I intend to make them pay for it. I will make them pay for it.” She laughs, bright as wind chimes. I have the strange urge to run away. “That is, if you do decide not to kill me.”
Jenny says, “Convince me.”
Sona is silent for a moment. The corners of her smile flutter into something less brash, a little more sheepish. “So. I hope you have forgiven me for this. I dropped you in a river.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SONA
Jenny looks like Eris, down to the way she takes her steps—almost arrogantly, stomping proudly as she goes along, as if all Winterward is held under her reign. The difference is, when she looks at me, the obsidian is still hard in her eyes. She shoves me toward her truck, where the driver sits rigid in the front seat.
“You’re being crazy, Jenny,” he mutters half-heartedly, seeming to know that his efforts will be met with nothing but a sharp scoff.
“And you love it,” Jenny responds, pushing me down into a corne
r of the truck bed. Eris promptly takes the place next to me, cracking her knuckles. Jenny takes the opposite side, mirroring her. “If anyone has something to say, say it so I can ignore it properly.”
“She’s corrupted, Jen,” a Gearbreaker hisses as the truck hums to life. He drags his gloved fingers down his tawny face, cheekbone-to-jaw, fine, black eyes drawn down in morbidly pantomimed sadness. “Bummer.”
Eris shoots him a poisonous glance. “Corrupted or not, Seung, I can still kick your teeth in.”
“She still sounds like Eris, at least,” remarks another boy. “Also a bummer.”
The teasing seems more habit than humor. Fingers ghost quietly but not subtly over weapons.
“I trust you all with my life,” Eris snaps, voice rising over the billowing of the wind. “The least you can do is trust my words.”
A Gearbreaker with bright violet hair and tattoos on her copper-colored cheeks—the archer—chuckles. The sound is anything but light. “Babe, your words may be nothing but a programmed script.”
“I’ll kick your—”
“Stop,” Jenny says, and the truck goes quiet. The gust even dies down a smidge. She tugs her goggles off, glancing at her reflection briefly. Then, without looking up, she says, “You. You’re from the Badlands, supposedly. Where?”
“Silvertwin. It was—”
“No one survived the Silvertwin Massacre,” Jenny says bluntly, and I hesitate for a moment. I have not heard my hometown’s name on anyone else’s tongue for as long as I can remember.
I shake my head. “They … they sent a Paladin first, to crush the tunnels. I managed to climb out, and … a Phantom was there to pick off the rest.”
“So how are you alive?” Jenny demands. “How’d you get to Godolia?”
“A family friend found me,” I say. “Went to get help. Got picked up. Got dropped.”
Inside my pocket, my hand twists around my bandage, uncoils it, twists it again. Over and over and over, faster and faster and faster as my heartbeat rises. I swallow hard.
“I crawled toward the cargo train, fell into our coal quota. Lay there until it got to Godolia, crawled out, wandered around until the Academy services found me. They placed me in the Windup Program. They gave me food, shelter, clothing. A Windup. This eye, these wires, the—”
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