She smiles slightly. “Those poor children.”
I shrug. “Exactly. Then, you know, he died, and I kept on looking for fights. I guess it was lucky that at that point, I could win them, too, since there was no one to pull me out. Gods know Jen liked to sit back and watch more than anything else. Said it was good for me.”
I scratch at the back of my neck as the silence unfurls. We both know that we’re dancing around the elephant in the room. His footprints pad the rug fibers. His fingerprints are on the sagging bookshelf and mark nearly every single page it holds.
“Milo will come around,” I repeat.
“Am I…,” Sona murmurs, and one of the brittle logs snaps and spews orange, fireflylike sparks all over her clothes. She lays the poker down calmly and brushes them away. Now she turns, staring with her single doe eye. “I am more trouble than I’m worth.”
“I prefer to run toward trouble,” I say, quietly for some reason.
“Why’s that, Eris?”
“Because it means something interesting’s bound to happen.”
Sona stands, dusting soot off her trousers. “You have issues.”
“Absolutely rich, coming from you.”
She stands there for a moment, backlit by the glow of the hearth, shoulders braced back in that ridiculous, perfect posture. Then they begin to shake.
I move, and she turns away, but my arms slip around her sides to clasp over her stomach. My cheek rests lightly against her spine; I can feel when she breathes.
“I think I have cried every day since I met you,” Sona murmurs.
“I have that effect on people.”
“I do not even know why.”
“I’m kind of a bitch, honestly.”
She pulls away and faces me, looking almost furious. “You are a riot with skin, Eris,” she says hotly.
“Oh” is all I can bring myself to say. I like her words too much. I like how she chooses them and how she says them, even though I don’t understand why she’s angry now. But I do understand, with a rabid, desperate kick, that I want her to say more.
“And you … you are ridiculous, and chaotic, and arrogant, and a headache, and—and—” Her hands lift from her sides, unfurl helplessly. And then she’s laughing. “You are going to kill me one day, Eris Shindanai. I have never been surer of anything.”
I just stare at her. The fire crackles low in the hearth. Did I have anything to drink tonight? Why do I feel light-headed like I’m buzzed, lighthearted like I’m an idiot? Why do I say, “Do you want to dance?” and then hold my breath in the silence that spreads before her answer; why am I so viciously confident a no would kill me?
She answers. She doesn’t say no.
The first song is a good one. So is the next, and the next. We start on the floor and end up on the tabletop, wrists bumping against hips and sides and ribs. She’s never danced before, and I can tell; she looks ridiculous and it’s so, so good, because I do, too. She’s grinning, and I don’t know what time it is. She’s just a kid but was never allowed to be, and I know how that can mess with you.
I tilt my head back as the room fills with long, hypnotic notes. “I love this song.”
“It’s softer than I would have pictured your taste.”
“It picks up…”
She slips from the table and sticks out her hand. “I think I would like to dance.”
I look at the palm and all the calluses that dot it. “We have been.”
She rolls her eye. “Our flailing does not suit this.”
“I thought we looked good.”
“You do. Please show me how to do this.”
Heartbeat in my throat, I join her on the carpet and take her by the wrists. I place her palms above my hips and intertwine my hands behind her neck, fingers dipping into her curls.
“So what now?” she asks.
“What do you mean, ‘what now?’”
“Do we just sway?”
“I guess.”
“Do you sway with Milo?”
“Milo doesn’t like to dance.” A beat. “Stop smiling. You know what—”
Before I can step away, her hands drop from my waist, one of them sliding up and catching my wrist. She gently tugs her grip upward, and then my feet are pivoting into the dusty carpet. As I catch myself, her fingers interlace behind my neck, pulling me closer.
“Did you just twirl me?” I’m stunned, and she looks all too pleased with herself.
“I like this position better,” she murmurs, eye drawn low. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just … you sound tired.”
“I am.”
“Me too.”
But we don’t go to bed. We don’t pull away. And I know she likes girls, have known for a while now that I do, too, but right now, this isn’t something like that. We’re just close. We’re just leaning on each other.
“You were right,” she says after a while. “It does pick up.”
“What the hells are you two doing?”
I nearly yelp and jump back. Sona folds her hands neatly in front of her, gaze shifting toward the door.
“Good evening, Jenny.”
“It’s well past midnight, Bot. Good morning.”
Jenny is wedged in the doorway, dulled gloves clutching the frame as if steadying herself. Her goggles are pushed past her forehead, giving us a clear view of the dark eyes and the even darker rings that encircle them. Her chest is heaving, giving the illusion that the tattoos inked along her collarbone are attempting to leap away.
I cross my arms as heat floods my face. “Funny, I don’t remember giving you an invitation to come to my floor.”
“And I don’t remember you kicking Milo to the curb,” Jenny responds seamlessly, tossing a pointed look at Sona. “Trouble in paradise?”
“What do you want, Jen?” I snap, then sigh. I already know. “We’re going?”
“Why, yes, yes we are,” she confirms with a wild grin. “Go wake the kids and meet my crew outside. And tell your driver to be quiet for once. That girl’s shriek could knock Voxter out of whatever drunken blackout he’s fallen into tonight. I expect everyone outside in ten. We’re off to the Waypoint.”
With that, Jenny turns on her heel and marches out.
“She looks unnervingly excited,” Sona murmurs, then looks over at me. She sighs. “You look unnervingly excited.”
I’m suddenly aware of the smile touching my lips. “What do you know about the Iolite Waypoint, Glitch?”
The Iolite Peaks is the mountain range that bubbles across most of the continent, and sitting at their dead center are the Ore Cities—a string of high-end resource towns from which Godolia gets its main imports of precious metal. They’re also where the Academy receives most of the Windup materials from: manufactured in individual pieces, like limbs and digits, in the Peaks, and then sent to the Academy to be assembled into a full mecha.
Glitch says none of this, even though I’m sure she knows it as well as I do. Instead, she looks me dead in the eye and pinpoints the one thing I actually care about.
“There is a hells of a fight awaiting us there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SONA
It is dawn when we reach the Waypoint, but just barely. The air stands cold and still, gray and dark sky stretched overhead; we can still see by the light of the stars.
While we wait for mechas to emerge from the ground, Jenny decides she wants to take a look under my skin.
“Is this yours?” she asks, tapping the panel where my new gears rest.
I fight the urge to pull away. “That is my skin, if that is what you are asking.”
She hums, then slides her hand down my wrist, fingers poking the curve of bones in my forearm.
Jenny laughs lightly. “Quit scowling, Eris, I’m just sifting.”
“You’re just what?” she snaps.
“I’m kidding,” Jenny sighs, flipping my palm in hers, pinching the base of each of my fingers. “You certainly didn’t inhe
rit a sense of humor.”
“Please,” Eris shoots back. “What would Dad find funny about this?”
“Not Appa.” Her fingers tread up my arm and skip across my collarbone; I lift my chin toward the night sky. The oranges and reds of the tree leaves are the colors of bruises against the darkness. Jenny’s voice drops to a murmur. “Mom always laughed at everything.”
We hover in the shadows of a thickly wooded forest, just at the border of the Waypoint. Or rather, above the border. A massive underground complex sprawls below us, linked to a highway tunnel that runs throughout the Peaks and connects to each of the Ore Cities. About fifty feet to our left, the earth yawns open and spits an exit into the forest and the Badlands beyond.
“Yeah, well, she had a dark sense of humor.”
“She didn’t, actually.” Jenny’s touch treads up my neck, pressing lightly against my pulse. “She laughed at absurdity. Everything is absurd, so she laughed at everything. Your heartbeat is quite high, Glitch.”
She can feel me swallow hard. “This seems quite personal. I should—”
“I think Dad would’ve liked her,” Jenny interrupts. Her finger is under my chin, tilting from side to side. There is none of the hunger there was yesterday in her lab, as if now she is just going through the motions to keep her hands occupied.
I go still, cheeks burning. Eris is quiet for a moment, then says, “Why do you say that?”
“Because she saved you. Because he was trusting, like you. And Mom…” Jenny finally releases me, steps back. She looks over me once, head to toe, crosses her arms. Her smile is weary. “Mom would’ve torn her to pieces.”
Eris flinches. I stay unmoving, the urge to recoil boiling over into the urge to run.
“Or she would’ve tried to. I think—” Jenny hesitates. I did not think she had the capacity to hesitate. She sighs again, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She has so many gear tattoos that they spill past her collarbone, dripping down into her shirt. “I think I would have stopped her.”
Eris’s scowl disappears for a second, then deepens. “You never can pass up a good guinea pig, after all.”
Jenny sneers, pretty features sharpening. “I can never pass up a weapon. But I guess, if they were here, they wouldn’t have to deal with Glitch at all, anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If they hadn’t gotten killed, you never would’ve been captured.”
Eris’s temper flares, and she pitches forward. “What, because I would’ve gotten more training? That’s absolute bullsh—”
“Because if you had more than me waiting for you back home, maybe you would’ve thought twice about martyring yourself.”
Eris pauses. She runs a nervous hand through her hair and shakes her head. “Ah, Jen. Don’t say that. I was just trying to—”
“Buy time for your crew to get the hells out? That’s what Mom and Dad did, too, don’t you remember? It wasn’t right, Eris. It wasn’t right for you to go at it alone, when I wanted to stay and fight, and—”
Jenny stops abruptly, cheeks turning pink.
“Godsdamn it,” she mutters. “I meant when ‘your crew’ wanted to stay and fight. You know that’s what I meant.”
Eris stares at her. “Uh, yeah, Jen. I know.”
Jenny huffs and shoves her welding goggles into place, turning on her heel. “I’m doing a perimeter sweep. Do something useful and go check on the roadwork.”
As we wander through the forest to the place where the path from the Waypoint meets the edge of the tree line, Eris is silent, scowl fixed. I knead the skin that Jenny poked at on my forearm, feeling for whatever she was looking for. Mom would’ve torn her to pieces. I open my mouth, close it. When I open it for a second time, still not knowing what to say, Eris speaks.
“My parents died on a run. Jenny was with them.” She keeps her gaze pinned ahead. “In case you needed context.”
I switch my touch to my collarbone. “I did not know you ended up at the Academy to save your crew. That was very brave of you, Eris.”
“I was slow,” she mutters. “I was trying to take out the guards first, didn’t even notice that the Pilot had turned around. But I’ll take brave, thanks.”
“I’m sure Jenny thinks so, too.”
“She’s always been a little mad at them, I think. Our parents, I mean. For telling her to run. A little mad at herself for actually listening.”
She slows her steps—the path out of the forest stretches before us, dotted with dark splotches of overturned earth. Buried beneath is a collection of explosives and magnetic disrupters, to ground the hoverbarge carrying the Archangel pieces. Arsen and Juniper toss us a little wave from their post by the road, faces streaked with dirt.
“They’re probably all pissed at me,” Eris murmurs, waving back. “I guess it’s different for them, for Jenny. They’re the ones who got left behind.” She lowers her hand, clasping her fingers tightly together. “I just want to keep them alive, you know? Sometimes that’s all I can think of, and so I don’t think about the aftermath.”
You got left behind, too, I want to say. But instead I say nothing, swallowing my words just like she told me not to. Because comforting people is new to me. I have grown thorns all over myself. Maybe that’s what Jenny was feeling for. Suddenly, now, there are people around me that I do not want to hurt, and I do not know how to take my hard edges out, how to say the right things, how to comfort the girl who gave me living, breathing people to fight for.
“I’m not my mom, just so you know,” Eris continues, interrupting my thoughts. She draws a line in the dirt with her boot.
I smile a little at that. “I am nothing like my parents. They would be so proud that I have the Mods.” I tap each of my inked gears. “And appalled by what I have done with them. What I have done in general.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is.”
“I’m sure—”
“You do not understand,” I snap, my voice harsh, and she does not deserve it. But Eris does not match the flare of my anger, just waits quietly as I close my eyes against it and find that it’s not even rage, not really. It’s shame. “My parents were Mechvespers, Eris. They … we worshipped Godolia for bringing the Gods into the physical world.”
A pause. I can feel the heat building in my cheeks, but she is not wearing the expression I expected when I look at her again, her head tilted up to mine as she speaks softly. “I know, Sona. I mean, I figured. Most of the villages up near the northern foothills are Mechvesper-heavy.” She chooses her next words carefully. “Would they have wanted you to get revenge for them?”
“It is not just for them. I am doing this for me.” I blink, surprised at myself, but Eris watches unflinchingly, and the thoughts bubble over and out. “My mother and father taught me that Godolia is good. Godolia is a merciful place. They might have died thinking so, and that … it isn’t right. I am going to get revenge for them, revenge that they may not want but deserve nonetheless, but I am going to get revenge for me, too. Because I revered the same Gods that slaughtered them. Because I lived the first part of my life in awe, and now in anger, and throughout all of it, Godolia has owned me. That isn’t right, either.”
“You’re fighting to own yourself.” Her natural scowl drains a little when I nod, and she drums her fingertips against her own tattoos. “You’re in the right place, Glitch—with the wrong kind of people, and the right kind of intentions. You’re off to a good start.”
“The explosives all set?” Jenny calls, emerging from the forest with the rest of the crew at her heels. “Good. Gather round, kids.”
Arsen and Juniper trot over, followed by Zamaya and Seung, the other demolition and corrosives experts. Jenny sits down on a patch of forest moss and crosses her legs, chin rising like she is the reigning queen of the woods.
“If any of you damage the Archangel pieces,” she says offhandedly, “I’ll leave you as molten as the mechas.”
The s
hocked silence weaves thick. Jenny takes it as a pass to continue.
“We have two goals: The first one is to take out the Windup escorts. The second is to protect Gwen.”
“Me?” Gwen squeaks. “Why me? No, wait, I don’t want to know, just let me die—”
“Because you are going to get onto the hoverbarge, get to its control tablet, disable the tracker, and reroute it.”
The girl’s cheeks pinked at her first mention, and now her whole face is sheet white. Her hands rise to rip at the ends of her short blonde hair. “Oh Gods. Reroute it to—”
“Home,” Jenny says primly, unabashed about enjoying our confusion. “You turn it toward the Hollows.”
“Holy hells,” Nolan mutters, biting his thumbnail. “What are you planning?”
“In due time.”
“No,” Eris snaps. Jenny’s gaze lolls to her, unamused. “I thought we were here to destroy the pieces.”
“I never said that.”
“What are you using them for, then?”
Jenny smiles slowly. “You talked about buying time with your plan. I don’t do things to buy time. I do things to make history.”
“And just how are you going to do that tonight?”
“Come now, where is your sense of dramatic anticipation?”
Eris growls. “Nonexistent when it involves throwing my crew into a fight I don’t know the purpose of.”
Jenny stands, dusting dirt off her pants. “I don’t need your crew, actually. We can do this on our own.”
“Then why did you even—”
“What kind of sister would I be if I let you miss out on a fight?”
“A sane one!”
“Can you imagine?” Zamaya mumbles.
“Fine. Sit this one out, then, if that’s what you fancy,” Jenny coos, head tilting toward the road. “We’ll show you how it’s done.”
I do not know what caught her attention until I feel the footsteps and see the leaves above tremble. Then from within the gaping maw of the tunnel, we see the eyes—three pairs of red eclipses, set far above the earth. The hairs along my neck prickle, the static before a fight, and I know that it is our fight, too, due to the fiery expression already fixed on Eris’s features. Jenny may be arrogant, but she is anything but ignorant.
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