Gearbreakers

by Zoe Hana Mikuta

  “Novs!” Theo hisses.

  Nova snaps her hand out to yank one of my curls, laughing brightly. “Ah, come on. Glitch knows I’m joking.”

  “I will send the Zeniths your regards,” I say, my smile effortless, muscle memory at last. Like it should be.

  June gives me a last squeeze before leaning away. “We’ll see you at home real soon, okay?”

  I blink.

  My Gods—holy hells—I actually have a home to come back to.

  Complying with Jenny’s impatient gesturing, I leave them to fawn over Eris for a bit longer, though her twitching expression is rather entertaining.

  “Remember,” Jenny grunts, leaning down and prying open the entrance hatch. “I put the magma serum missile last in the chamber. Should burn its way to the deepest level of the Academy, but you gotta give the foundation a fair divot for it to set right. We’re not pulling our punches today. You use everything. Got that?”

  “I understand.”

  “And Sona,” Jenny says, her tone soft. She stands, and her hand clamps down on my shoulder, constricting harshly. “I want you to know that I do not care about you. At all. Live or die, just get the job done.”

  “Noted, Unnie.”

  “Shut that down immediately. As for Eris, I won’t ask you to take care of her. She doesn’t need anyone’s protection. Just stay out of her way. But despite that—and believe me, I know this is terribly and hilariously ironic—if anything happens to her, I’m blaming you. And I know you can’t feel pain or anything, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.”

  Eris’s footsteps announce her approach, and Jen snaps her arm away. Her expression is still enraged, but for just an instant, I see a spark of doubt.

  “Get going,” Jenny barks once Eris is in earshot.

  Eris rolls her eyes. “No ‘good luck, hope you don’t die’?”

  “If you need luck, we’re already screwed ten times over,” Jenny says dismissively, turning away. But she pauses a moment. “You should know by now that you do not have my permission to die. Neither of you.”

  Then she is gone, vanished into the tree line along with the crew. For once, those words do not leave me feeling cold.

  Eris huffs in exasperation. “This is just another Sunday morning to her, isn’t it? What did she say to you?”

  “Some threats.”

  “The full Starbreach treatment.”

  “Do I get anything from the Frostbringer, too?”

  Eris grasps the door of the entrance hatch. “After you.”

  I drop my feet into the opening of the mecha. “And they say chivalry is dead.”

  “I’m not being polite.” She drops in after me, jumping to close the hatch and seal us in darkness. “I’m trying to leave before Jenny comes back and insists on piloting this thing herself.”

  We glance at each other. Her color has drained a bit. I start laughing first, and she falls into it as we trace our way up the neck.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SONA

  Heavensday

  As much as I want to detest the thought, I cannot loathe flying.

  I know, I know this is simply another conceited attempt of the Academy to replicate deities. This form, like all the others, is false, charged with narcissism. But for now, I have wings, and my fingers scrape the open sky.

  “How far out are we?” Eris asks. I imagine her sitting cross-legged between my eyes, gaze purposely turned away from the windows, though she would be livid if she knew I had a slight suspicion of her acrophobia.

  “Are you bored?” I ask, glancing over her question. Godolia has not yet broken the horizon, but the train tracks are becoming more frequent. It should be any moment now. From this height, they are reduced to threads that stitch the desert into pale red polygons.

  “No.” A pause. “That would be kind of … like—”

  “Sadistic?”

  I practically hear her scowl deepen. “I was going to say unsavory.”

  “You are an acquired taste.”

  “You little—” she starts, her jacket crinkling as she rises to her feet. I feel a slight vibration: her stepping onto the glass mat.

  My wings stutter only for a moment, but Eris immediately begins a vivid string of curses that overthrow the blaring of the jets, signifying her loss of footing.

  “That’s not fair!” she manages.

  My lips twitch. “You are aware that I cannot see you, right?”

  I look away from the tracks and toward the point where the sky meets the earth.

  “Eris?”

  “What, Glitch?”

  “Why are you here? There is really no reason to be.”

  “Wow, okay,” she huffs. Then, after a few moments, when she realizes that I am waiting for a viable reply, she sighs. “Did you think I would miss seeing this? I’m here for the best spot in the house.”

  I wiggle my toes as I absorb her words, reminding myself of the solidness that rests beneath me, rather than the weightless sensation of the soles of my feet dangling into the open air.

  “Full circle,” I murmur.

  “What?”

  “We escaped together. We return together. This is closing a cycle.”

  “We’re not closing anything,” she muses. “We’re burning it to its roots.”

  The sun is pinned to the center of the sky, marking midday. The parade should be in full swing by now. Although Heavensday is the most celebrated event of the year—and the holiest, originally meant to give thanks to the Gods who allowed the world to complete another cosmic revolution—at the Academy, the students were still confined to their floor like every other day.

  We were allowed our own party, though, with delicate lights strung above the simulations’ wing, a degree of leniency from our set diets. I liked stealing sweets. Sugar-glazed fruit tarts, pink and yellow songpyeon with sweet sesame centers, fried rice cakes drizzled with honey, truffles with candied petals—all hauled back to my room to gorge on until I felt sick.

  A bitter child then with a horrible sweet tooth. I am not much different now. The thought makes me smile.

  Colonel Tether was always far below my feet, enjoying the warm glow of the gold oak tree statues in the courtyard. That was the main event of the students’ party: watching the festivities below with wide, desirous eyes whenever the smog was kind enough to give a view, free of the instructors’ cold supervision. Marveling over Windup after Windup that stood proudly on the bordering streets, and whispering excitingly that they, too, would one day be within an arm’s length of the Zeniths. I imagined the same, alone in my room, licking the syrup from my sticky hands.

  One day, I would be given the honor of attending the Heavensday Parade, and I would snap the neck of the first Zenith who was imbecilic enough to cross my path.

  Oh, the peach tarts. Those were always my favorite.

  “There,” Eris murmurs, just as Godolia breaks the horizon. The black skyscrapers fragment the sky like tendrils of smoke. I shift the wings, soaring higher above the earth as giddiness clutches my chest.

  I make sure to place myself far above the smog once it begins, pillowing over the factory district like a filthy quilt. I stop my breath altogether once I see the spires marking the walls, protruding outward like angular tombstones. Eris follows my example, ceasing the shuffling of her feet as the spires near. Their dark metal is puckered with darker openings, where the cannons will jut out like blisters when primed.

  She mutters something under her breath, low and sharp, like a blade cutting smoke.

  “What did you say?” I ask, expecting her to repeat something like a taunt on Godolia, or a prayer equal parts dark and sarcastic. Something to fuel the battle fervor.

  “I said, there’s that famed Godolia extravagance,” she repeats, the barest ridiculing laugh trailing on her words. “Are there statues all the way around?”

  “What statues?”

  “Right up ahead.”

  “I do not—”

  “Two o’clo
ck. The one with wings. It’s … it’s massive.”

  And there it is—against the wall stretching between two of the spires, wings pinned wide and flat against the metal like a preserved moth. I can see why I missed it: The statue is pure black from its base to its head, blending against the barricade nearly seamlessly, save for the harsher way the light glints off its sculpted angles. In fact, it seems that there are no smooth curves to it whatsoever, each edge pointed, feathers and fingers slashed in peaks.

  The humanoid form makes me think that it must be sculpted in the likeness of one of the infinite deities, and I almost laugh, picturing them pasted all along the outside of the city. As if they would condone the mass-produced imitations manufactured within, and past that, seek to protect them.

  But of course there are no Gods here, good or bad, protective or vicious. There are only brutal people and their brutal toys, preying on those lacking in their own brutality.

  Then there are no more thoughts of deities in my head, and only fear—cold and vivid and feral—pounding like gunfire in my ears, winding tight around my throat as I come to a dead stop.

  Because in front of me, the statue’s head has turned.

  It meets my eyes.

  Its red matches mine.

  Eris sucks in a breath. “That’s—”

  “An Archangel.”

  I force power into the jets, soaring upward, higher and higher above the earth. The spires and the factories dotting the ground shrink to pinpricks, but the Archangel stays the same size, peeling off from its stasis and rising after me. It’s quicker; a darker, perfect echo of Jenny’s best efforts, mismatched parts nonexistent, and panic rises like an ocean in my chest.

  “Sona—”

  “Hang on to something.”

  I dart forward before the Archangel can reach my altitude, flying directly over the wall and into the city. The smog stretches below, expanding into the misted horizon, the tips of skyscrapers like fingers, reaching up, up, up.

  “What are you doing?” Eris screams.

  “We are doing this,” I say through gritted teeth. “The Academy falls today.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickle, and below, pressed against the smog, are two winged silhouettes. There should only be mine.

  It’s right above me.

  The shadow moves, clawed hands reaching down, down, down. It is reaching for my wing.

  I tuck in my wings, and we plummet like a stone. My real feet lose purchase, and a thud sounds from my left, followed by Eris’s cry. We plunge into the smog. My vision goes dark.

  The light pours in all at once, too fast, a flood of wicked glints. I realize what it is too late—the shimmering gloss of a skyscraper, and it is all I can do to throw my arms across my face before the impact. Pain, bright and shocking, immediately embeds itself in a hundred slashes across my body. My right eye is cracked, I can feel it, a rooting agony in the form of a spider’s web.

  I push it all away, and then push myself away from the building. Miraculously, it does not collapse, my shattered imprint thrown across a dozen stories of it, glass giving way to a cragged mess of concrete floors and iron support beams.

  Amid the large fragments of glass, the Archangel lands in the street behind me, its wings untucking, relaxing.

  Specks of people scatter on the street below, but the few blocks that separate us have been abandoned midfestivities. Street carts that I know sell everything from silk kimonos to paper masks to self-igniting sparklers stand abandoned. Hidden speakers must line the sidewalks, because the faintest bit of music trickles by weakly.

  I face the Archangel and raise my chin. It stands still, regarding me evenly. It can’t help but steal a glance. A dry laugh unfurls from my throat. Even now, when I am no longer small, when there is panic at my feet. They will always think I am insignificant, won’t they?

  Just another girl from the Badlands, from yet another massacred town. What a poor, pitiful barbarian, the girl who does not worship this place.

  But I do not care that they do not see me. I already have people who matter who do.

  They will burn blind, but burn nonetheless.

  “Eris. Please tell me you’re alive.”

  A groan. Relief breaks across my skin in a single, dizzying wave. I imagine the roll of her shoulders, shaking away this setback like all the rest.

  “You going to fight that thing, Glitch?” she asks, breathing labored.

  “I do not have much choice. But I need something from you.”

  “What?”

  “Some help.”

  “Ha.” A pause. “Oh. I really don’t want to do that.”

  I look toward her voice, dropping my eyes to her height.

  “I know you can’t see me; stop staring. I hate it when you do that. How do you do that?” she mutters, her feet shuffling—her step is slightly off, I can tell. “Do—should I count down, or just go ahead?”

  “Just—”

  A striking pain, lively almost, and I cannot stop a cry from tearing free as cold roots and shatters the glass of my eye. It is all I can do not to fall to my knees. My right-side vision winks out instantly.

  “Shit. You okay?”

  I bite the inside of my cheek. “I’ll get you in range.”

  I charge forward, my steps fluid and effortless—Jenny really did a fantastic job. But I am only a block away when I realize that the Archangel has not moved forward, or even taken up a guarding stance. And I realize why the barest moment before it is too late.

  The missile goes soaring past my head, and I hear the instant it buries itself in the building behind me, glass and iron and concrete decimated in a shrieking flash of light. The fury rises fast, ravenous, eating away the choke of fear, of hesitation, and I barely think before my own missile screams across the air, traced by a dark slash of smoke. The Archangel twists out of its way, as expected, right into the path of my second missile, which catches it at the crook of its left wing.

  Black vapor shrouds the street, but through it, I catch that glint of red eyes. They look unfazed. And then they are too close, boring into me, and a taloned fist is swinging out of the smoke, colliding with my side. I let it, let myself be forced into another building, let the destruction swell around me, and reach forward and grapple into the darkness. My claws find a hook, and I curl and pull, ripping the Archangel from its concealment.

  We are face-to-face, brow-to-brow, and Eris is at my side, muttering, “Atta girl.”

  Cold flushes across my real skin, raw and clean and sharp. Light floods from my broken eye and swallows the sight of the other in a burst of white.

  The first glimpse I get when I spiral back is of frost against metal, its delicate crystalline design raking across the perfectly sculpted brow of the Archangel.

  The second is my fist cracking against it. The metal does not fracture. A growl of frustration vibrates my teeth. I raise my fist again.

  The third is a neat row of black holes opening up, one by one, along the top of the Archangel’s left wing. A flash of light within each void. One by one. And the rest seems to happen all at once.

  I am on my back, looking up at a veiled sky, punctured by the fingers of skyscrapers. Pain grips my chest and spirals down my arms, the metal scorched and steaming from the impact of the rockets. I smell smoke, and somewhere close to me yet too, too distant, Eris is heaving, coughs scraping and violent. On instinct, I reach out in her direction, and the ugly, taloned hand rises to touch the clouds.

  The Archangel descends. It does not use the missiles this time. It brings its boot directly down on my stomach, and the metal crumples, snapping inward. With the second kick, I am genuinely shocked that my real ribs do not break along with it. Black dots spark across my vision, the negative image of a sky filled with stars.

  They are torn away in the next moment by another sudden, brilliant flash of light. The Archangel recoils back a step, frost clawing against a section of its left hip. When it tries to regain balance, another bolt flies free, i
njecting into the thigh, and the asphalt of the street cracks as the mecha collapses onto its knees.

  Eris coughs once more, and then in a string of lovely, detrimentally rage-slurred words, snarls, “Send it back to the twin hells, Glitch.”

  I bury my hand directly into the building beside me, glass giving way to the concrete infrastructure instantly, a hold to heave myself up with. I flick my wrist, thoughts ignited with my intentions, and the foreign body obeys, dissecting the air with a stream of missiles. They make direct impact in the Archangel’s thigh, shoulder, chest, three of them bursting apart across its arm sheath, thrown over its eyes at the last possible second.

  I am on my feet, hand around its wrist, tearing the defense away. My other palm curls around the nape of its neck, and I bring my knee into its ribs, once, twice. This time, when the valves across its wing tips gape open, I am gone before the flashes of light, leaping straight up into the air. Flame and smoke explode across the building beneath me, and I do not hesitate before feeding it, sending another round of missiles into the hellsfire below.

  “Is it dead?” Eris breathes, voice hoarse. “Please tell me that the motherf—”

  A hand reaches out of the cloud of smoke, talons curling around the edge of a nearby building, and the Archangel hauls itself into our view. Its head swivels, searching the skies.

  I do not give it a chance to spread its wings. I turn and force power to the jets, and the landscape smears beneath us.

  “Damn it,” I say through gritted teeth. There is some fault along my left wing now; I feel a stutter in its speed. I can only hope that we inflicted enough damage that the other Archangel falters, too.

  “That’s the Academy up ahead, right?” Eris asks. Her words sound labored.

  “Are you all right? Is the air getting too thin?”

  “I’ll be all right when it’s done,” she snaps.

  And there it is, outlined in gold, a gilded target. We are about ten blocks away, and up ahead, in their proud stances, tower the jewels of the Heavensday Parade: Windups upon Windups upon Windups, shoulder to shoulder in the streets touching the Academy, good soldiers set to march. Unwound, and laughably harmless. Like Jenny said, they are nothing but eye candy for the masses, the people standing outside the roped-off areas, gawking up with eyes wide, fantasizing that maybe someday they could hold that much power, too.