“See, Vox?” Jenny croons. “You’re already coming around.”
He spits at the ground, smoothing a hand over his canvas jacket. “I just don’t want a mess placed at the center of the compound.”
I whirl on Jenny. “She didn’t come here to do this!”
“She came here to get revenge,” Jenny responds seamlessly. “I’m giving her the best chance any Gearbreaker has ever had to do just that.”
“You can’t make h—”
“Eris.” Sona’s voice silences me—something about how she says my name tells me she saw me pause. My cheeks burn when I turn to her, but her gaze is leveled at Jenny instead. “You believe this will work?”
“It’ll work,” Jen answers. “I’ll even design a magma serum missile to ensure it. I have a brand to uphold, after all. So what do you say, Glitch?”
In response, Sona nods once, and smiles. Without happiness, pure or bright or otherwise, but with something akin to exhaustion, or resignation. I think, maybe, she’s never had a difference between the two, and my heart tightens.
But I say nothing.
This isn’t a hesitation.
This is a silence, because those images keep flashing behind my eyes, and I can’t help but revel in them. All that glorious destruction at her fingertips.
CHAPTER THIRTY
SONA
For the next couple of weeks, I speak only when spoken to, one-word answers, sight set to the wall. Eris asks me if I am all right. I smile. I ease her conscience.
I wait in my own grave, and I let the cold fester.
They ask me if I am all right again and again. A dozen times. Fifty. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. Eris takes the hundredth. I am so full of lies and so ill from the false agreements that I feel as if my wires will snap if I voice another.
Rather than respond to her question, I say I need to wash up. I lock myself in the bathroom and scrub my skin with a nub of soap that smells like jasmine, rinse off, and step into the bath. My head slips under the water, and I listen to the hum that murmurs beneath my skin, so clear like this. I listen to my fear and my selfishness constrict around each other in an endless battle for dominance. There is no point. They both own me equally.
Nova’s and Juniper’s shrieks startle me, and I peer up at them from underneath the water’s surface.
“Holy shit,” Nova says as I sit up. “We thought you were dead.”
“How long have you been down there?” Juniper asks.
I rouse myself, pulling my hands from the now-cold water to inspect. The skin is wrinkled like dead leaves. “Quite a while.”
They stare, and I want to start screaming at them. It is nothing they deserve.
“Your eye is bleeding,” Juniper tells me. “Your, uh … nonexistent one?”
“Okay,” I say, resisting the urge to peel back the patch. Jenny had installed an orbital implant a while ago, but without a prosthesis lying around, half of my stare has remained blank, absent a pupil. It still marked me, so I have hidden it. An eye patch is more ambiguous. I could say that I was injured in a takedown. Or saving one of my crew members. Spitting in Godolia’s face. The list goes on.
Not that anyone has been foolish enough to ask. Patch or not, blank or glowing stare, they all know that I am just one of the Academy’s products. The cloaking is for me more than anyone else.
“Uh … you coming out?” Nova asks.
“No.”
Another hour passes. Someone will come along soon and ask if I am all right again. I will lie again. Over and over and over.
Being a Pilot has stolen from me. Flesh, breath, pain. But every time I’m wound, I get something back, too. A power that trickles in slow, fills me up fast. I do not own it, because no own should be able to own it, but I crave it nonetheless. I crave it like Eris craves adrenaline, and as soon as that last cord clicks into place, the hunger floods back in, all at once, an ocean of addiction, and under its surface, I do not care that I cannot breathe.
I am terrified of it. Terrified of what I could be, what I could have been if I was pinned to different loyalties from the start.
And when that damn eye is forced back inside, I will look in the mirror and see everything soaked through with red, and Victoria’s reminder will scream beneath every false breath: You will never not be theirs you will never not be theirs you will never—
I climb out of the bath, hurriedly folding a towel under my arms and stopping short in front of the mirror. Look at yourself, you coward. Brown hair plastered against my forehead and a single brown eye. A pale pink bandage. Gears along my forearm—my gears, not theirs. Victoria is rotting in the twin hells at this very moment, and I am still letting her voice whip around in my head? I am still allowing Godolia’s grip to seize around my neck?
One more time. I curl my fingers into the lip of the porcelain sink. One more Godsdamn time, and Godolia will be right where Victoria is.
I breathe. I can do this.
“Hey, Glitch!” Eris shouts from the hallway. “You good in there?”
I fling open the door, and she springs back, startled by my smile.
“I believe I told you I was all right, Frostbringer.”
Eris throws her hands up and sets off down the hallway. “And here I was trying to be nice.”
“Eris being nice,” Theo scoffs from his doorway, shaking his head. “Glitch, I think you’re a bad influence on her.”
“You’re all terrible influences on me,” she barks back. “I would have thousands of tattoos by now if I wasn’t weighed down by you lot.”
“Yeah, but then who would you have to brag to?” Arsen asks.
Juniper emerges with Xander in tow from the common room, and she places a hand on her hip and straightens proudly.
“They’re going to write the Frostbringer down in the history books for centuries, I tell you!” Juniper shouts proudly, fixing an Eris-esque scowl on her face and throwing a sheet of green hair over her shoulder. Xander gives a rigid salute and begins to clap. “Now, now, young man, I don’t deserve your applause!”
“No!” Nova chirps, skipping from her bedroom, ducking underneath Eris’s attempt to snatch her. “I, the Frostbringer, deserve much more! Mountains of gems and toffee pops and—”
“What you deserve is a broken limb!” Eris retorts.
“Like hells,” everyone besides Xander chimes in unison.
She looks at me with strained desperation, and I stifle my laugh. “Want to help, Glitch?”
“Like hells,” I say, just to get that delicious chilling stare, and then, “I believe they are suitable impressions.”
“The wall’s going to have their impressions if they keep speaking to me like this.” Eris huffs again and heads for the stairwell. “Everyone better be in the truck in ten, or else I might fancy finding myself another crew!”
“As if anyone else could put up with her,” Theo mutters once she is out of earshot, though an endearing hum runs underneath his tone.
The courtyard is in a frenzy, six other crews besides ours hauling into their vehicles, bustling around at Jenny’s relentless shouting. She stands on the hood of her truck, gloved hands tying back her hair, eyes buried beneath her welding goggles. Yet the intensity of her stare is not lost on me. She waves wildly.
“Hey, Bot!” she calls. I look to the ground and pull myself into the truck. “I know you can hear me!”
I take a breath. “Good morning, Jenny.”
She hops down from the hood and bats her way through the crowd, coming to rest her elbows on the filthy edge of the trunk. For a moment she stands there, watching. I do not know who her eyes are on.
“Need something?” Eris asks.
“A present,” Jenny says suddenly, jumping back to dig through her pocket. She retrieves something and tosses it through the air, and my fingers slide against fabric. “That strip of cloth is horrendous. Thank me later.”
Nova bursts into laughter as Jenny turns to leave. I flip the fabric in my palm, noting the gracef
ul stitching over the curved material: thin strips of gold thread interweaving into the simple design of a gear.
“You’re going to look like a pirate,” Nova hoots, climbing into the driver’s seat.
I gently peel back the bandage and hold the eye patch up before the blank socket can get a taste of the open light. I turn my head away from Eris.
“Mind tying?” I ask. There is a slight hesitation before her fingers take the threads, securing the knot nimbly. “Well, how do I look?”
“Jen’s not one to give presents,” she mutters low.
I turn and catch one of her hands before she can retract it, rotating the blue veins of her gloves into open view.
“Where did you say you got these again?”
“Grave robbing,” she responds instantly.
“Whose?”
“What?”
“Whose grave?”
“Yours, if you don’t let go of my hand.”
“You robbed my future grave?”
She goes pink. The bright hue swirls in her cheeks like dye in water. “And I’d do it again.”
“My, I’m thoroughly flattered.” I take her chin between my fingers and tug gently downward.
“What are you doing?” she snaps, smacking my hand away.
“You did not answer me,” I say, eyeing my reflection in the glass of her goggles.
“Didn’t peg you as one for vanity, Glitch,” says Arsen.
“On the contrary,” I say, patting over the eye patch. “I believe I am the most concerned with my image out of all of you.”
* * *
The ride to the Junkyard makes it seem like the Gearbreakers are trying to make their presence heard all the way back in Godolia. The crews yell from one truck to another in an attempt to best the rush of wind. It only amplifies once we reach the dead Argus, metal shining cheerfully on a bed of flattened field grass.
At Jenny’s command they snap to work, stripping down its skin and harvesting innards of wires and gears and plates—anything that might be useful to the construction of the Archangel—piling it all into the trucks. Arsen and Theo strain to lift the Argus’s chain mail veil, allowing the rest of us entrance. Eris presses her glove to the left pupil, ice flushing from beneath her palm. The blue glistens across her eyes, its light hopeless and dull against the darkness that churns there. She gives the glass a hard kick, and it snaps apart as easily as one would pluck a dandelion from the earth.
Eris doubles back and throws a hand over her mouth and nose. The rest follow her example. I consider mirroring them but choose instead to cease my breath. No point in trying to play pretend now, not when they are about to see what lies inside.
“Smells like death in there,” Juniper gags.
The Argus’s head is tilted slightly to the left, placing the Pilot’s corpse near the ladder opening. He lies on his side, both arm panels sprung open to reveal the vicious glint of the silver dishes, the severed cords resting within curled around one another like worms. The absence of light has painted the blood over his shirtfront into a voidlike black.
But for a moment, there is none of this.
All I see when I look at the Pilot is the shape his mouth forms as I pluck the shocked cry from his lips, and all I feel is the sweet spark of power as the fear drowns his movements, as it presses them still.
And then I just feel sick.
“Glitch,” Eris murmurs, her hand gripping onto my shoulder. I did not hear her enter. “Wipe the shame from your face. We don’t live long enough for it.”
Theo whistles low behind us, and I turn. “Man, if only Milo could see this.”
“He’s out there somewhere,” Eris mutters bitterly. “Jenny needed all the muscle she could get today. Maybe go drag him in here, but after we’re done. I want to get out of this stench as soon as possible.”
I mull over their reactions silently as we commence our work: pulling up the glass mat and prying out the piston mechanism that allows it to shift fluidly under a Pilot’s steps. My spine prickles as we labor—the corpse’s blank stare pasted to the nape of my neck. I hope Milo never sees it; he already believes me to be destructive. It may be the only true thought he holds about me.
I steal a glance over at Eris, a split-second glimpse of the little line set between her brows, the slight ridge along her neck as she strains to tug at a bolt. Wipe the shame from your face.
But my shame is not such a superficial thing.
And she can still look at me like that. Look at me with such … care, and I cannot understand it, cannot hold it for myself, because it does not matter that the rage and the killing are so easy in the moment. I go cold alongside the corpses.
Once we have removed the bolts, Xander lowers himself into the crevice and works a strong rope around the mechanism, tying a hard knot around its base. Together, we haul the piston out of the space, dragging it out the broken eye and over the ledge, where it teeters for a moment before smashing onto the earth below.
“Hope that wasn’t important,” Juniper whispers, gaze flicking into the clearing, waiting for Jenny to materialize and begin screeching at us.
No such sound. But there are sudden screams.
“Berserkers!”
“Get down!” Eris yells instantly, and the prickly field grass is clinging to my cheeks.
The air shrieks to life with the whistle of bullets, ripping up dark plumes of dirt that smear our line of sight. A distinct series of pings clang against the chain mail, causing it to ripple violently. I drop the rope and throw my arms over my head.
“How many?” Arsen shouts, and Juniper shimmies as close to the veil as she dares.
“Three,” she reports. “Two in the entrance path, one in the tree line.”
“Do you see Jen?” Eris asks.
“Middle of the clearing. Top of the Argus’s hip.”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course.”
I curl my fingers into the grass, readying myself. “Which one are we going for?”
Eris grits her teeth, raising her hand toward the chain mail, glove primed. “Whichever one is about to step on you.”
Cold air rushes across my skin as we enter the clearing, and my next breath exits in a cloud as Eris releases a shot onto the closest Berserker. The panels of its broad chest are peeled open, revealing a dozen gaping muzzles on a swiveling turret, and the shot lands home between the two leftmost cannons. The mecha teeters backward, a rush of white mist streaming across the clearing, and when it dissipates, the Berserker has a splitting chasm along its leg. I watch a handful of Gearbreakers sprint for it before something slams into me. My shoulder hits the ground, and a blue-veined glove smashes flat in front of me, inches from my nose.
“What the hells are you staring at?” Eris shouts, leaping off me. I gaze past her to see a sizable crater where I was just standing.
“Good shot,” I murmur, a tad dazed, and very aware that she just saved my life, and that I liked it. “You, I mean, not the mecha. It missed, but you can see that—”
“Can you get up?” she snaps, and I do. Then I grab her overall strap and force us both to the ground again as more gunfire tears the air above us. We crawl toward one of the trucks and press our backs against its filthy metal. Its windows are shattered, each tire popped.
“This is just great,” Eris murmurs, leaning back against me to peer into the car’s side mirror.
“Are you not having fun?”
“Are you?”
“Quite a lot, actually. Seems like the other Gearbreakers are, too.”
“Idiots and assholes, all of them.”
The ground shakes, and a round of cheers sweeps across the Junkyard, just for a moment overpowering the sound of gunfire.
“Yes!” Eris hollers, eyes still trained on the mirror. “That’s one down. Do you think you can make it to the tree line?”
“If you would like.”
“I’d very much like that, Glitch. Go help them there, and I’ll come as soon as I’m done with the other o
ne here.” A pause. “Don’t die.”
“Was not planning on it.”
“I mean…” She runs a hand through her hair. “If you die now, it’s my fault. Hells, if you die during any part of Jenny’s plan, it’s my fault.”
I blink. “Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re my problem.”
“Thank you.”
“No! I mean…” She takes a deep breath, eyes to the ground. “You’re one of mine, Glitch. You’re going to be wound again, and that must be something horrific. I’m … I’m letting it happen and it’s shitty and I’m selfish and I should’ve destroyed the crates when I had the chance but I hesitated and—”
“I am getting what I wanted, Eris.” I shake my head. “I cannot choose what I have been made into, but I can choose what I do next.”
“It’s still shitty.”
“It is. And nothing new.”
Her scar crinkles in her brow, there and gone in a flash. Eris shoves her goggles into place. “All right, then. Do me a favor and choose not to die.”
Then she vanishes, leaping over the trunk of the car and onto the other side. I am gone as soon as the earth in front of me settles—signifying that the Berserker has moved on to another target—and sprint for the trees. The chaos has scattered the garbage out of its heaps and sprinkled its particulates throughout the forest, making for inconvenient obstacles and convenient covers, when I see the Berserker start to change direction. I dive for shelter three times, and the third I end up shoulder to shoulder with two Gearbreakers I recognize: Xander and Milo, who looks at me much less welcomingly than his companion.
“Good morning,” I say to him as the bullets ping off the rusted object serving as our shield.
“Bot,” he says evenly, teeth gritted.
He holds a pistol in his hands. My sword is in mine. But our sights are not on each other. Instead, they’re on Xander, who clutches his forearm. Red blooms beneath his fingers.
“Xander,” I start, reaching for him.
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