I hesitate.
“It’s a handshake, Glitch, not a firecracker.”
I knead the side of my cheek briefly between my teeth. “I look like a Bot, Eris.”
“And you growl when you fight, and you fight like your opponent is already on their knees. My whole crew is full of kids like you. Loose cannons and wild cards and freaks. Glitches. And the thing about glitches is that they tend to be unpredictable. Which means they never see us coming.”
She leans closer, and that is, of course, when the tears slip from my eyes. But there is not one ounce of ridicule across her face; she only continues in a fierce voice. “Hey. I won’t tell you that we can burn Godolia to the ground. I won’t even tell you that you won’t be lying crushed flat by the end of your first mission. I won’t promise you revenge; I can’t. But I can promise you that every single takedown stabs another thorn in their side, and leaves you with more life in your lungs and more fire in your breath than should ever be humanly possible. So, what do you say, Sona? Wanna be an inconvenience with me?”
I manage the slightest dip of my chin, and suddenly, Eris is beaming with a smile that could crack the cruelest of storms apart.
Luckily, before I can open my mouth and say yet another rambling, imbecilic thing, the doors burst open and Jenny rushes out, bright grin pinching her features and speech like Berserker gunfire. Before the doors swing shut, I get a glimpse of Voxter with his elbows planted on an oak desk, rubbing small circles into his temples. It is a bit of an odd sight, because I was sure that he was the head of the Gearbreakers.
“Right, then!” Jenny chirps, and shoves a paper with a gold seal into Eris’s hands. “That letter speaks on behalf of our Bot here and will be posted across the Gearbreaker campus by the end of the hour. So, that’s my end of the bargain, now—”
“Not now,” Eris says abruptly. She crumples the letter and shoves it into her pocket. “Glitch and I have had a very long day. And I have not had a bath in the better part of a week.”
“We had a deal.”
“And we still do. I’ll bring her by your lab tomorrow.”
“Don’t walk away from—”
Jenny’s fury is cut short when Eris turns on her heel and throws her arms around her sister’s shoulders, the hug only lasting for a hummingbird’s wing beat before she retracts. Eris smooths her hands down her jacket and forces them into her pockets.
“Thank you, Jenny,” Eris says swiftly. “For coming for me.”
For the first time, Jenny’s eyes do not narrow when Eris speaks. But she does twist her lip into an unconvincing scowl, turning back toward the doors and flinging them open with both hands. Voxter is still slumped in the same position.
“Bright and early, you two,” she calls as the doors slam shut behind her.
Afternoon light, softened down to its dregs, makes the silent air seem as tangible as fabric. Eris turns and offers me her hand again. This time, I take it.
She was wrong. This feels like a firecracker, like something dangerous. But it’s also Eris. She is never going to feel like anything else.
* * *
We trail past the courtyard, and although the Gearbreakers stare again, this time none of them start screeching threats. They do look like they want to when they first get a glimpse of me, but then they see the expression across Eris’s face—a look that could suffocate a hurricane. Her steps carve a path, and anyone in her direct vicinity immediately scrambles to get out of her way lest they be trampled. And by the hardness in her eyes, she would not even register if they slipped beneath her boots.
We enter another building and climb a dust-streaked stairwell. On the fifth level, Eris chooses a door and punts it open.
A gray carpet runs up the single, long hallway, mussed and matted by countless feet. Walls, papered in pale blue, contain an array of photographs and drawings: a picture of a curly-haired boy viciously hugging a freckled one, a handful of crudely drawn stick figures shouting profanities, a photo of two girls dozing against each other on a love seat, a simple sketch of Eris’s scowling profile leaned over a book.
Eris tugs off her boots and drops them haphazardly in the corner, where they land softly atop the heap already placed there. I start to follow her example. She does not wait until I have untied my laces before setting off again, practically sprinting to the last door on the right. Before she rounds its frame, her footsteps slow and she wavers, hand to the wall.
I come to a stop behind her, watching a silent inhale lift her shoulders. Around the curve of the doorjamb, voices spill into the hallway, sharp and clamorous.
“Are you all right?” I whisper, and she nods feverishly.
“Just can’t wait to see the looks on their faces, is all,” she murmurs.
Eris nods sharply, steeling her resolve, and smooths her palms against her jacket front. A small, giddy smile roots across her lips—happiness that this time she cannot smother before it glistens in her eyes. She rounds the corner, but I stay stuck at the threshold, noting how she clasps her twitching fingers in a hard ball behind her back.
Then she begins to scream.
“What the hells did I tell you idiots about getting candle wax on the table?!”
The room goes dead silent. Six heads turn in her direction, all blinking slowly, mouths opening and closing like goldfish.
A tiny girl with white-blond hair falls from her perch on the edge of the dark wood table, and slams flat against the floor. A groan, and then her head is lolling up, shockingly green eyes wide, a sizable red mark sprouting on her forehead.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Juniper’s séance worked!”
“You think my ghost would just come when called, like some sort of dog?” Eris scoffs, crossing her arms. “I’m insulted.”
They all stay silent. Eris runs a hand through her hair, eyes skittering across her crew.
In a chair above the girl who fell is a boy with his legs tucked up underneath him, his raised brows hidden behind a curtain of pale bangs, an array of freckles spilled across his nose and cheeks. On a large couch listed at a careless diagonal from the back corner, a girl with bright green hair has snapped to attention, thoroughly jostling the boy who was asleep on her lap, something like soot smudged over the dark skin of his cheeks. He has propped himself onto his forearms now and stares with wide, saucerlike black eyes. Above them, sitting cross-legged on the back of the couch, gawks a boy with pixielike features, drastically pale in contrast to his mop of dark curls.
It is clear that Eris’s gaze snags a bit longer on the boy sitting alone in the love seat. His fair hair is brushed neatly back, revealing the twin lines of gear tattoos that emerge from his shirt collar and trickle up to his jawline. A worn paperback book rests clutched in hands riddled with scars as he stares back with such a vividness of blue in his eyes that it nearly seems artificial. Eris forces her gaze away.
“I said…,” she mumbles. “I said to not spill the candle wa—”
He is on his feet, book clattering softly against the ground. And then his arms are around her, so tightly that it forces something akin to a sob to fall from her lips, and tears spring to her eyes.
“Get off me,” Eris growls half-heartedly as her hands wrap around his back. “I need a bath—get off me.”
The rest of them peel away from their positions, crossing the room as silently as phantoms, enveloping Eris in their embrace until she is nothing but a small inkblot in the center of their limbs. I stand at the threshold, watching their tears flow hot, listening to their staggered sobs and frantic whispers, eyes pinned wide as if they believe that blinking will steal Eris away from them once more.
I wait for one of them to notice me, and when the blond girl does, her cries shut off like a faucet. In an instant, she has split from the embrace and flown over to the fireplace, an iron poker materializing in her hand. Then she is charging.
I sidestep, and she brushes clean through the door frame and promptly smashes into the opposite wall. She teeters back w
ith one of her pearly cheeks stamped with a red mark.
“Nova!” Eris squeaks, batting away her crew’s limbs and lunging toward me before the girl can shake off her stupor.
“Holy shit, is that a Pilot?” the freckled boy shouts, shredding the remnants of the peaceful air. Eris throws her arms across their path, taking a step backward.
“A Valkyrie,” breathes the boy who I assume is Milo, eyes flicking over my jacket. “Eris—”
“Shut up for a Godsdamn second,” she barks, and they do. She pats around in her pocket for a moment and then flings the letter at them. “Read this. The lot of you.”
At once they all pounce for it, the letter zipping between their hands in a frenzy, fingernails ripping off the seal and tossing it to the side. One-second arguments spark and die out, until they resolve to gather around the paper in a semicircle, half in the hallway and half in the room, heads tucked against one another as Milo stretches the letter taut in the center of them. They read it once, then shake their heads, and read it again. And again.
“That was Voxter’s seal, wasn’t it?” Nova murmurs, dropping to her knees and tapping around the floor for the discarded wax. She finds it and immediately tosses it upward, directly into the freckled boy’s waiting hands.
“No way,” he breathes, thumbnail digging into the symbol.
The green-haired girl snaps her gaze at me, dark brown eyes locking on.
“I believe it,” she says in a calm voice. “She doesn’t give out that particularly evil air, does she?”
“What? Judging by how she hasn’t started slaughtering us yet?” says the boy next to her in a slurred tone, as if sleep still clutches him.
The girl gives him a very long, stern look, and I get the strange sense that he wants to recoil, or even drop to his knees and start sputtering apologies.
“I don’t believe it,” Milo murmurs, listing his eyes toward Eris. “It got you out.”
“She did,” Eris replies.
“A Valkyrie not loyal to Godolia.”
“Loyal to burning it to the ground.”
“You are mocking me,” I say softly.
“And I told you I’m not, Glitch.”
“Oh no,” the freckled boy groans. “She named it.”
Eris’s brow furrows, and she points rigidly back into the room.
“Inside, everyone, now,” she snaps, and they oblige, scurrying to their places like field mice, save for Milo. He stares at me steadily for a few measured moments before following her command.
Eris gestures me inside, and then begins to pace back and forth, wringing her hands. We all watch her, silent. She stops a few times, brow furrowing deeper, and then continues her march. Only when Milo clears his throat does she come to a true halt, whirling around and slamming her palms against the tabletop.
“Listen up,” she shouts. “In the span of a few days, I have taken out three Windups, escaped Godolia, and gone down in history as the only Gearbreaker to ever break out of Academy captivity. I am tired. I don’t want to explain the situation for the billionth time today. You read the letter. Every word of it is true. And if you don’t trust Voxter, trust me. And if you don’t trust me, then I’ll assume you’ll want to be reassigned from this crew. My crew, I might add.”
She points at me, and suddenly I am painfully aware of my jacket and my ripped face and my filthy, fraying bandage that hides the eye that still glows despite its restraints.
“Crew, meet Sona Steelcrest, our newest member. If I could trust her with my life in a place like Godolia, you sure as hells should trust her on Gearbreaker soil. And that is an order.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ERIS
“You think you can just march back in here, guns blazing, Bot in tow, and start shouting orders again?”
I open one of my eyes to peer at Nova, perched precariously on an edge as she always is, one hand spinning circles in the bathwater. Juniper sits next to her, jeans rolled halfway up her calves, feet submerged.
“I can,” I say evenly. “And are you going to give me any privacy?”
“I have questions,” Nova huffs, and then throws her thumb over her shoulder. In the corner, Sona is leaned over a small block of porcelain—our sorry excuse for a sink—dragging a damp rag over the cuts on her face. “And don’t talk about wanting ‘privacy’ when you marched in here with it in tow.”
“Don’t be crass, Nova,” Juniper says, wiggling her toes. She gives a slow smile to Glitch, who notes it for a moment before darting her eyes away. “Her name is Sona.”
“I don’t know why you’re so on board with this, June.”
“Just the other day you were up for my séance, in case Eris had died.”
“Well, ghosts are real, duh, and I’m not talking about me.”
“Well, Novs, think of this, then,” Juniper says sweetly. “No Gearbreaker has ever escaped the Academy’s captivity. In fact, all of them are presumed to have died very slow, meticulous, and unimaginably painful deaths. Escaping said captivity would have taken nothing short of a miracle, and I believe it is a miracle for a Bot to have any sort of feelings or remorse at all, and so there Sona sits.”
Nova opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again, crossing her arms. “And she’s sitting in here with us because…?”
“Eris feared for my life,” Sona says nonchalantly, the first words she’s spoken since we piled in here.
I go rigid. “I did not—”
“The others are not happy that I am a part of your crew,” she continues smoothly, tucking a curl behind her ear to dab softly at the blood on her jawline. “No … I believe it was just Milo, and the boy who shares some of his features. Brothers? But the rest … Xander and Arsen, correct? They seemed more open to the idea of my being here.”
Sona runs the rag under the tap, and the water flushes red once it reaches her hands. She turns her head to get to work on the other side of her face.
“You two seem nice as well,” she murmurs. “Nova and Juniper. I like those names.”
“I don’t fear for your life,” I say loudly, to distract from Juniper’s blush and Nova’s scoff.
“And here I was, enamored by your perceptiveness,” Sona responds, setting down the rag.
“Ouch,” Nova says.
“Glitch,” I growl, kicking Nova’s hand and sending it retreating from the water. “I’m your crew captain. I think I deserve a bit more respect.”
A shadow of a smirk that vanishes just as quickly.
“It is hard to take your authoritative voice seriously when you are sitting below me,” Sona remarks, brushing her pinkie finger along her hairline. “Naked, I might add.”
“Double ouch,” Juniper whispers, as Nova shrieks with laughter.
I jump out of the bath and loop a towel under my arms, nearly slipping on the slick tile floor. Sona watches me steadily, holding my gaze until I reach her, before directing it back toward the mirror.
“No need for worry,” she says, face stoic. “You have no reason to be self-conscious, from what I’ve seen.”
Heat floods my face, and it’s not from the bath steam.
“Are you going to yell at me for being observant?” Sona asks innocently, the smirk snaking across her lips again. “You are the one who dragged me in here, after all. For my safety.”
“It wasn’t for your safety!” I lie.
“Oh. Just to show off, then. I am flattered, Frostbringer.”
My prepared screeching gets caught in my throat as Sona unwinds the bandage from around her head, revealing her closed eye with a perfect red circle burning underneath the lid. Behind me, Juniper’s and Nova’s laughter is stifled.
“I do not blame them,” Sona says softly, folding the fabric neatly in her lap. “Theo and … Milo. That was his name, correct? I am surprised that I was not shot on sight the moment I entered the Hollows. That Jenny and Voxter did not go through with killing me. That … that you did not, once I was blind and defenseless in the Valkyrie. Despite ever
y other voice in your head telling you to do otherwise.”
At her words, I can suddenly place the look on her face: It’s the same expression I used to wear constantly, in my young days of Gearbreaking, when the tremor of battle hadn’t become familiar yet. It’s the look you wear between hits, in the spaces between fights. And now Sona sits, gracefully cleaning her bloodied face, and waits for the inevitable point when her work will be undone. Be it by the hundred Gearbreakers who stared at her with disgust, or Theo, or Milo …
Or me.
She continues before my silence can fully take root. “I am surprised I ever got to see autumn trees again, or feel a breeze that did not emit from a blast of factory steam. And I’m surprised that I am still sitting upright, cleaning off my blood in a washroom that smells like jasmine tea, with three Gearbreakers who have not already buried their daggers in my back.”
“We don’t all carry daggers,” Juniper says, looking pointedly at Nova.
“Because look at me, Eris,” Sona murmurs. A finger goes up to tug back her left eyelid, and for a moment I see it again: the yearn to dig under, to rip out by the roots. “How much more luck do I have here? For how much longer should I expect people to be lenient with me, looking how I look, being what the Academy made me to be? Days? Hours?”
“Do you really think they’re going to kill you?” I ask Sona gently. As if I didn’t see the twin glints in Milo’s and Theo’s eyes as I left the common room, as if they didn’t cause my hand to snap out and seize Sona’s as I went past. As if both boys don’t carry pistols in their belts and their trust in me can’t be overcome by their fear of Godolia and the cruelty of their Pilots.
As if she wasn’t right. As if I didn’t fear for her life, because of people I would undoubtedly give mine for. And yeah, that thought kind of throbs a little.
“They can try,” Sona responds, steel in her words. She closes her eye again, turning on the faucet to soak the bandage through. “But I am here as long as you want me to be, Eris.”
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