* * *
When I order Milo to give up his room for Sona, he shoots her a look with such a vicious gleam of hostility that my heart jumps to my throat.
For context: I was very relaxed from my bath, just at the point of recovery from Sona’s sly remarks, Nova’s and Juniper’s snickering, and hells, let’s also throw in there that I felt like the stress and terror of the past few days had started to peel away. And suddenly Milo is standing in front of me, breath twisted in a growl, tearing the slim illusion of peace to shreds.
And I get mad.
I bark for the rest of my crew to go to their rooms. Sona is the first to oblige.
Then I scream at Milo, and he screams back, and we scream from one end of the hallway to the other and back again. I scream about trust, and he screams about loyalty, until hot tears are flooding my eyes, trickling in two rivers that match his perfectly. We step into my bedroom, and he slams the door so hard that it makes the floor vibrate, and I flinch, and he notices, and suddenly there is silence.
I sit on the edge of my bed, and he sits next to me. I play with the fraying threads of my comforter. Someone, probably him, washed my sheets while I was gone.
The silence pulsates like a heartbeat, and it bursts when his hand flutters up to wipe the tears from my eyes.
“Did they hurt you?” he asks, voice scraped raw.
They hurt me, I think to myself, but I don’t want to talk because I don’t want the yelling to start again. There’s been too much anger and too much violence and too much noise. But I can’t take a break, not now, not when I can still feel the threat on Sona’s life in his tone. I’m in between hits, all for someone I met a mere few days ago, someone I was sure was going to deliver the next punch. A girl with hate strung between her features, a familiar fury—my fury—encased in a form that terrifies me.
In a form that saved me.
Milo tilts my chin with a single finger, and then brings his lips against mine. Moving slowly now. I can’t. I slide a hand underneath his shirt. I’m too soft. Too weak. I kiss down his neck. Too in need of comfort. His palm presses against my back. Too desperate to scrub the fear from my skin, to expel every horrible fantasy of how they would have picked me apart. To forget how much they did.
When his fingers trace through my hair, when he holds me and murmurs, “You’re home. You’re okay now.” I let him.
I’m too tired to say otherwise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ERIS
Déjà vu.
Nova’s outside my door again, screeching that the day started ages ago. My eyes fling open to the dust-filled dawn light and the cracks in the ceiling. Milo’s toes and breath and heat against me under the blankets, his hand catching my wrist as I start to pull away.
“We’re still fighting,” I remind him.
He blinks a few times, trying to make me come into focus. “Are we?”
“Depends. How do you feel about the Bot?”
“Like Godolia’s got her so twisted around in your head that you don’t know which way is up.”
I consider for a moment, then swing my leg around, punting him onto the floor. All the air leaves his lungs as he lands with a satisfying oof. I snatch the discarded Berserker jacket from the floor and chuck it over to him.
“I got this for you.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“The joke is that you’re still in here. Get out.”
He mutters a vibrant string of profanity as he rises to his feet, stomping over to the door and shoving it open. Sona stands in the hallway, with horrendous bedhead, curls puffing around her ears and the curve of her bandage. Milo’s so thrown off by her presence that he stops short.
“Nice jacket,” Sona says, nodding at the bundle in his hands.
His shoulders stiffen, and suddenly he’s leaning too close to her. My fingers curl into my mattress as I watch them, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Sona, small compared to his height as everyone else is, stares up at him calmly.
“I can smell the copper on you,” he growls.
“Milo!” I snap.
“And you smell like Eris,” Sona replies, her sight slipping past him and into my room, gaze meeting mine. “We are supposed to meet Jenny, correct?”
“That’s right,” I say. Milo shoves past Sona and stalks up the hallway, the carpet useless in absorbing his heavy footsteps.
“Wonderful,” she says evenly. “Do you think I can borrow a shirt?”
I lead Sona down the ten flights of stairs it takes to get to Jen’s lab. The space is how it always is: a complete and utter mess. Large plastic spools of colorful wires, puffy sheaves of moth-eaten insulator foam, and cardboard boxes overflowing with miscellaneous junk sit piled high atop the two glass tables lining the left wall.
Jenny’s face is buried between two of the spools, rummaging through the tools that I know hang on bolts behind the stacks. When she pulls back, a string of copper is entangled in her hair, and she uses the drill in her hand to gently yank it free.
She grins, hopping down from the small step stool that was wobbling fiercely under her weight. “There you are!” Her focus dips behind me. “And you brought the whole orphanage because…?”
I turn around to see that my crew has silently slipped in behind us, Nova giving a smart salute as she closes the filthy glass door with her elbow.
“Nothing else to do,” Arsen says.
“Though we will have a run at some point in the future, I think,” Nova chirps. “So we gotta see if Jenny’s going to leave enough of the Bot for her to join us.”
Jenny marches across the room and tosses aside a stack of fabric that was covering a wooden chair, patting the seat enthusiastically.
“How many limbs do you need?” Jenny asks as Sona sits.
“I can spare a few,” Sona replies.
“No way,” I say, shaking my head, ignoring the snickering of my crew. Besides Milo, of course, who I can feel hovering behind me like a shadow. “Questions only.”
“You want my eye, yes?” Sona says, tugging the bandage from her head.
“Yes, I believe I do,” Jenny breathes.
I watch, at a loss for words, as Jenny flits over to the table and produces a pair of surgical gloves from one of the sagging boxes, while Sona carefully returns the fabric to her pocket.
“Is this really happening?” Theo asks, disgust clear in his tone. All their boots scuff softly against the tiles, wanting to recoil, but morbid interest keeps their gazes set. Little shits.
“Glitch, wait,” I say, taking a step forward. “You don’t have to—”
But then both of her eyes meet mine, the left festering like an infected cut, red throbbing, pulsating. The glow of Windups and the artificialness of Godolia bundled up neatly in a single socket. At the sight, just for a moment, I falter between my words. I try to collect my thoughts to continue before she can notice, but that expression is already on her face, laced with equal parts shame and sadness. She looks back to Jenny.
“Go ahead,” she says to her.
Then, to my surprise, Jenny hesitates. Her eyes narrow sharply.
“Too easy…,” she mutters, unmoving. Her hand drops from the air and onto her hip. She leans closer to Sona. “What game are you playing, Bot?”
Sona smiles, prettily as she always does, but what makes my blood freeze is how her fingers begin to wander up her eye.
“An easy one, apparently,” she says, and then there’s a slick pop.
Behind me, Nova and Theo stifle a shriek, and I think Xander’s breath stops altogether. I find myself staggering a step back, and Milo’s chest meets my shoulder blades, impossibly still despite the scene in front of us.
Sona ignores our shock, delicately—leisurely—winding the copper trailing out of her socket around the tip of her forefinger. Her hand jolts forward, and another pop sounds, this time accompanied by the angry hiss of broken wire.
“Too easy,” she murmurs, and then reaches for Jenny’s wri
st. “And too red and too vile and too…” She gently tips the eye, now flickered dull, into Jen’s gloved palm. “Fragile. I would not close your hand too tightly. And unfortunately, that is the only Mod that is so simple to remove. The others are a tad more ingrained.”
Sona tugs back the sleeves of her shirt, revealing the two rectangular ridges carved into her forearms. She trails a thumb over one of them, then presses. The panel springs open, revealing the silver dish inside.
“This wire here feeds into my radial artery,” Sona says, shivering as she runs a finger down a cord that nestles comfortably beneath the cable openings. “From there, it splits into microscopic strands that coil next to my nerves. Did you know that there are approximately forty-six miles of nerves in a human body? If you count the ones they added, that number doubles to ninety-two miles. Ninety-two miles! All that tech, these lovely Mods—the true testament to how Godolia bests all others in brilliance and cleverness—and the Academy has so graciously entrusted them to me. All so that I could have the ability to feel pain while I do their killing and whatever else they require of me. Was that not so very kind of them?”
Her singular eye sweeps over the room, daring us to correct her.
“Did you know the eyes are connected?” Sona reaches back, gently brushing aside the hair at the nape of her neck. “At the base of the brain. The socket is just a receptacle that feeds into it. I can see through both eyes in a Windup with the sight Mod, because it isn’t a superficial trinket.” Her fingers lie lightly against the exposed skin. “It dives down.”
No one really knows how to react to that, to her soft, faraway voice crawling from the dark smirk across her lips, and soon the only noise in the room is the slow start of Jenny’s cackling.
“Eris calls you Glitch, doesn’t she? That’s a fitting nickname,” she chuckles, shaking her head.
Jenny walks over to the circular stone countertop set in the center of the room, a space considerably less jumbled than the glass tables. Colorful liquids stand in neatly spaced rows, suspended in plastic stands, curling tape labels sporting Jenny’s handwriting in blue marker. Beakers stacked by size live in a wooden box in the middle, also patterned at times by Jenny’s scrawl, probably when she didn’t have paper at hand. Large glass flasks gush spiral tubes, note cards shoved underneath them that read something along the lines of You can’t read this because you’re not a genius.
Jenny comfortably takes her place on a stool set in front of the small metal sink. I’ve seen her sit in that same exact spot for hours on end, nights bleeding into days and back again, making her concoctions and inventions and whatever else she believes Godolia will fear.
Jenny takes a small clean jar and gently places the eye inside, and then less gently, tips a vial of blue liquid into the opening. She secures the flask with a rubber stopper.
“A fitting nickname indeed, Glitch,” Jenny murmurs, holding up the encased eye to the light. The blue fluid casts a rippling hue across the tiles. “Because you’ve definitely got a screw loose.”
“Do you have a rag, by chance?” Sona asks, unfazed.
Jenny runs one under the tap and tosses it over her shoulder, along with a surgical patch and a tube of ointment produced from one of the drawers.
“Put that on,” she orders, but as Sona moves to oblige, Jen suddenly springs forward and seizes her chin. She lifts Sona’s face, tilting it from side to side, gaze slipping into the now-empty socket. A hum buzzes between her lips.
“Curious…,” she murmurs. “Titanium plating … no … would have to be something lighter … lithium, perhaps? But that could cause extraocular muscle abnormalities … which goes to ask … how deep does it root? Or not lithium at all, perhaps instead—”
“Jen,” I warn.
“You’re blushing,” Jenny notes, leaning closer until they’re nose to nose. “Why are you blushing, Glitch?”
“You are very pretty,” Sona responds without hesitation. I roll my eyes, and she seems to see, one corner of her mouth lifting.
“Ah. I know.” Her hand retracts, lifting the jar up to the light again. “Out, all of you,” Jenny barks. “I need some time alone. And I would scurry along to the Junkyard, if I were you. See if you can find a glass eye lying around, or an orbital implant, or a suitable eye patch. Maybe even a weapon she’ll fancy.”
“You do not need me for anything else?” Sona asks.
Jenny’s sight is still on Sona’s eye, the one no longer in her skull.
“I’ll be busy for quite a while with this,” she purrs.
Sona hops down from her seat. “Thank you, Unnie.”
Jenny glances away from the Mod to shoot me an absolute shit-eating grin—even though Dad wanted me to, I stopped calling my sister Unnie when she got fond of calling me little bastard—before saying, “Shut up and get out.”
But she’s pleased, I can tell, and I think Sona can tell, too, wandering over to us with light steps. My crew’s wary gazes skip past my shoulder to land on her patch, and the bit of blood underneath her nails.
“You all right, Sona?” Arsen asks in a warbling voice.
“Just wonderful,” she says, brushing her fingers innocently against the hem of her shirt. My shirt. I will not be asking for it back.
“That was hard-core,” Theo murmurs as Sona begins to climb the stairwell. In the background, I’m vaguely aware of Jenny still humming happily, and the slosh of the flask in her hand.
Nova pokes her head through the door to watch Sona climb. “Damn, why does she have to be so absolutely gorgeous?” she mutters, looking back. “Anyone else realize how she monologues like a supervillain?”
“She plucked out her own Godsdamn eye,” Arsen gasps, smacking his lips together to imitate the sound. “Deserves some degree of respect, yeah?”
“Not like she could feel anything,” Milo grumbles.
“And if you were hopped up on painkillers, you’d be perfectly fine with doing the same?” Juniper asks pleasantly, her hand between Xander’s shoulders, rubbing small circles. Kid’s still looking a little pale. “Are we going, Eris?”
I nod, running my hand through my hair, trying to listen for the remainder of Sona’s footsteps. She smiled at me as she passed, a new flush in her cheeks, and the memory sparked again: I hate red and I hate my heartbeat and I hate being this.
If I didn’t believe that string of statements then, I sure as hells do now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SONA
They chatter like birds to Eris, and she barks back at them as if she means to snap their wings. They pay her little mind. Milo has daggers falling from his gaze whenever he attempts to steal a quick glance in my direction. I do not mind much. Eris’s leg is pressed against mine.
I look over the edge of the truck and watch the ground shed its shadows as we leave the Hollows’ tree line in the dust. When the ground begins to dimple with large potholes and the truck takes to jumping over jagged shards of blasted concrete, I look away. I do not need to see the damaged landscape to know what it looks like or see their footprints to know they were here. The stench of their metal will always poison the air.
But the crew’s laughter cuts it a little, along with their horrible singing when they try to accompany the music that Nova is blaring through her open windows. She seems to be intentionally driving over the potholes, just for the split second it flings us into the air.
“I like your music,” I call to her, meaning it. I have not heard music in a very long time.
“Finally, someone with taste,” she yells back over the wind. “I call it my Bot-killin’ mix.”
“Novs,” Juniper hisses, stopping short when I begin to laugh.
“Your battle songs, then,” I say, feeling the beat run up my spine.
Nova blinks at me in the rearview mirror, a stare brilliant as emeralds, hair nearly pale as fresh snow. She grins wildly.
“Hells yeah they are,” she chirps, nodding decisively.
For perhaps the hundredth time si
nce I took out the eye, I look over Eris’s features again. Pale skin like porcelain embedded with two gleaming shards of obsidian, the careless nature of her raven hair. She is a black hole in the center of the midday world, an act of defiance without even trying. The inked tattoos across her collarbone glisten with the kiss of the uncloaked sun.
“Just a bit farther now,” she says, snapping me out of my stupor.
“We are heading to the Junkyard, Jenny said?”
“Yeah. It’s what it sounds like,” she says, shrugging. “They had to put all the rubble and broken pieces somewhere, after all the fighting.”
“And you really think we are just going to find a glass eye lying around?”
“Ah, Glitch,” Eris sighs. “Have a little faith.”
“It’s the Junkyard,” says Arsen wistfully.
“You can find anything if you look hard enough,” Juniper adds. “An eye wouldn’t be the oddest thing we’ve come across.”
I hear the Junkyard before it comes into view. The wind plays cheerfully between its jagged edges, darting through the staggering piles of mismatched objects. I expected the entirety of it to be dull, items long forgotten and scraped of color by the elements. But when I step out of the car, my feet hit lush ground, the cool shadow of foliage shifting over my shoes.
“I was not expecting a forest,” I murmur.
Awe has rooted my feet, and I move only when someone gently brushes past me as he slips out of the trunk. I apologize, looking down to find his sight already on me. His jacket droops limply from his form, shoulders and collarbone akin to a wire hanger. All he gives in return is a small tilt of his chin.
“No climbing. Except for Xander,” says Eris, nodding at the shadow of a boy. “I don’t need anything collapsing from your weight and someone getting buried under. I don’t have an interest in carrying something as heavy as a corpse back to the truck.”
“Always one for pep talks,” Nova sings, already near one of the stacks, hand buried in the lavish coat of moss that has enveloped a rusted dishwasher.
Eris rolls her eyes and sets off, curling her fingers over her shoulder, beckoning for me to follow.
Gearbreakers Page 18