The Windups surround the Academy in a solid two-block radius around its campus. I reach their outer edge and slow to a stop.
I rip away these pitiful, worshipping fantasies, relieve the masses of their ignorance.
I save them all little by little, missile by missile released on the machines standing below, hellsfire by glorious hellsfire.
Godolia and the Windups are not invincible. They are not Godslike. They are not blameless of the pain and suffering they have spread across the world.
But I realize that I do not care if they do not realize this, that the people here today may tell the next generations that this was an unprovoked attack, that a Badlands girl so blessed by the Academy had no cause for such barbarity.
Because now I am in control.
Because people I have loved in the past have been hurt by this nation, and the people I love in the present have been hurt by it again, and because now I can do something to stop it.
Because you choose sides in war and I chose the one that makes me feel human, and this I will not apologize for.
I am violent. I am awful. But every vicious thing about me is mine in its entirety.
I will not die as theirs.
The Windups fall. The Academy nears, surrounded by an inferno of cracked metal and slain deities. The people are specks, and somewhere within them, the Zeniths are indistinct faces in the panic. They look for a way out past the flames. Past cracks of dark earth pressing in from above, the people around them too shocked to move.
I need to aim low, let the brilliance of Jenny’s magma serum spread deep. I hover directly above the gold-foil trees, leaves glittering cheerfully in the rush of smoke swirling around the campus.
And all at once there is silence.
There are no more screams. There is no more hum. The pain and rage part ways for a veil of perfect calm.
Eris screams. All light becomes threaded with darkness.
I reach out—I do not know whether it is for her or because of the incredible pain that has sprouted along my left wing—and the sun comes into view as we are pulled above the smog. My form contorts as my wing tip snaps, a shriek barreling out of my throat. Without thinking, I throw my head back, vaguely aware of my real body losing purchase on the glass mat. A dull thump sounds to my left.
But I glimpse the Archangel, so black and jagged that against the sky, it simply looks like a part of the heavens has been torn away, and I meet its eyes.
I burn its sight with mine, then drop my gaze, and release the last missile directly downward.
Its descent seems almost lazy, cutting through the clouds. Anticlimactic. Quiet. How many have I just killed?
The Archangel’s talons curl around the back of my neck, its heel on my spine. My hands search for metal and find only sky. Inside my head, someone is laughing and sobbing all at once. Eris is unconscious. It must be me.
Have we won? Is it over?
I am not good, and dear Gods—isn’t it funny that it hardly matters?
A pressure, and then a pain like no other as the Archangel takes my wing away, and then lets me drop to the earth, into the city I set aflame.
CHAPTER FORTY
ERIS
Heavensday
Today is not as fun as I thought it was going to be.
“Come on,” I mutter, picking my way through wires and glass, through the fog in my head, the slightly concerning pang in my ribs every time I draw a breath. “Come on, Sona, we have to go.”
I kneel over her crumpled form. Cords tangle around her arms and neck, twisting the skin.
“Wake up,” I murmur as I untangle her. “There isn’t time for this.”
I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand, and curl over myself, forehead on her stomach.
“Come on,” I mumble into her shirt. “Come on, you aren’t doing this to me. You aren’t leaving me here alone. Get up. We have to go home.”
She’s not moving. It doesn’t make sense. Why isn’t she moving?
“Wake up!” I scream. “Godsdamn it, wake up!”
Oh. I’m an idiot.
I wrap a hand around the cords and yank, popping them all out at once. Sona sits straight up, eyes springing wide. I lean forward and snatch her chin, tilting her face side to side to make sure she hasn’t gone brain-dead.
“We are alive,” she states.
“Seems like it.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“Yeah. Shit.” I chuckle a bit. “Guess Nova was right, huh? There really was a boss battle.”
“We lost.”
I release her face. “Ha. Well, we—oh. You brought your sword.”
“You knew this. Is that not a good thing? Since we are probably going to have to fight in about thirty seconds?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s probably only going to be useful to us if you remove it from your Godsdamn leg.”
The sword is slanted at an angle toward her body, the hilt resting on top of her thigh, several inches of the blade swallowed by her flesh, and the tip bursting free right before her hip. Sona sighs, inconvenienced, and pulls it free. She shrugs off her Valkyrie jacket and tears away the sleeves, tying them around the punctured skin.
She looks up at me. “You are injured.”
“You just pulled a sword out of your leg. Please shut up.”
She rises to her feet, far more gracefully than she should be able to. The smugness on her face makes me bark a laugh, and whatever is wrong with my ribs chuckles along with me.
Outside, there are sirens and running feet. Red light filters in from above through the one viable eye, and I realize that I definitely must be dreaming. Which is fantastic, because I really do need the sleep.
And then Sona asks calmly, “What do we do?” and the rigidness of that calm sets my teeth on edge. I’m awake. And there’s virtually no way out of this.
“I’m going to take out as many of those bastards as I can,” I hear myself say. “Go down screaming and kicking and everything in between. I may be going to hells, but I’m going to damn well bring some of it here first.”
Her bottom lip trembles, the barest bit.
“I have a plan,” I say.
“Oh?” she murmurs, laughing softly. “Oh no.”
She laughs again when I finish explaining it.
“What?” I snap. “It’s not terrible.”
The corners of her mouth twitch before she turns away. “You do not have the face of a damsel in distress.”
I scowl, which probably just amplifies her point. “You distress me plenty. Maybe that’ll be good enough.”
Sona gets to her spot in the shadows and looks over her shoulder, her smirk as piercing as it is slight.
I kneel in the base of the head, hands pressed to the floor. There are footsteps ringing across the metal, and then Godolia soldiers teem at the sockets above, maggots come to get their fill of a corpse. Ropes are unspooled, and bodies are dropping and shouting, and I’m shouting, too, “Please, don’t shoot! I’m cooperating, I’m unarmed!”
I catch bits of images as they gather around: Godolia soldiers in black bodysuits, a few Pilots in the mix with harshly glinting eyes, and the glaze of a gun as it swings into the side of my head.
I give myself one generous moment to stop the world from tilting before raising my eyes again. A fractured chink in the side of the Archangel’s head acts as a small porthole, a mouth of gray light. A food cart has toppled over and spilled its steaming contents onto the concrete. A shoe with gray laces lies on its side on top of a gutter grate. Paper banners have been torn from their holds and lie plastered against the asphalt by a thousand panicked footsteps.
And then the light splinters as Sona peels from her position. Her blade flashes in her hand, and at the point where a shriek and an arc of blood simultaneously split through the air, I coil my hand around the nearest ankle.
I rise as he falls, skin and bone eaten by frost.
A whisper of bullets cuts past my ear, and I twist, gathering my energy in my palm
and releasing it in the direction of the gunfire. The blast hits the soldier square in the collarbone, her scream extinguishing almost as soon as it erupts. Sona ducks behind the upright corpse, and the bullets that follow her movement pucker the frozen flesh into particulates. I locate the shooter and dive for his base, smoothing a hand up his chest as we both fall. Once we hit the ground, I’m holding nothing but a body. A sensation equal parts revulsion and satisfaction rocks through me as I kick away.
The fight comes in sensations. Ricocheting bullets vibrate the floor beneath my toes. Cold air prickles gooseflesh across my skin. My hair glides against my cheeks as I go airborne; my breath hitches in my lungs as I descend, followed by the shock of my teeth biting down as I collapse onto another soldier. A warm slickness pastes my shirt to my stomach.
I am so damn good at this.
So very good at anger.
A back presses against my own, fingertip dragging across her blade. Her wrist flicks, speckling red across the floor.
She breathes something low, or maybe she laughs, dark and dangerous and lovely. Then she is gone, too.
When I turn to search for the next fight, a blistering spike of pain explodes against my side.
I manage to get one more shot off, somehow hitting the soldier despite seeing his movements only in my blurred peripheral vision, and then collapse onto all fours. I press a hand against my right ribs, vaguely noting that my palm comes away bloody.
“Hey, Glitch?” I call meekly, trying to focus on my breath. It hisses inside my chest like a broken wire.
No response, besides a few other screams and more empty husks colliding with the floor. Gunfire. The ping of bullets. A figure with hushed footsteps flickering all over the room, vanishing at each taken life and materializing in the wake of another, never hovering in one place for more than a half instant.
I must be losing it.
A sudden stillness, corrupted only by the stuttering of my chest.
The figure descends, a soft hand wrapping under my arms and gently tugging me back onto my heels. There’s a slight pressure as her chin graces the top of my hair.
“Can you turn off the gloves for a moment?” Sona murmurs.
I grind my teeth and oblige, and she takes my arm and loops it behind her neck. Black spots surge across my vision as she hauls me to my feet, and we begin to make for the base of the Archangel’s head.
“Where are we going?” I groan, pitifully mindful that she’s carrying most of my weight.
She laughs. I feel it sing through my skin. “I have no idea.”
Her feet slow, and I pick my head up. The light doesn’t reach very far into the neck, but I can see that Jenny’s modesty was well placed: the Archangel’s innards really do look like shit. From the slim area that is visible, bundles of wires are tangled like cobwebs across the air, and the iron bars crisscross haphazardly between the spaces, the bolts sealing them mismatched in both size and color. And, since the Archangel has been thrown onto its back, the ladder stretches before us like a pathetic excuse for a bridge, splaying both into and over what seems like an infinite chasm.
“How the hells did Jenny get this thing to fly?” I mutter.
We both hear it at the same time: another round of shouting and the heart-thumping march of rubber-soled boots across the metal above. The next wave. I suppress my cringe as Sona releases me.
“Crawl,” she orders, nodding at the ladder.
I place my knees on the side rails of the ladder and pull myself onto the next rung. We work our way toward the feet, toward the dark. My thoughts rabbit around in my skull. Where are we going? Nowhere. We’re not going anywhere. Ha. There’s no way out. There is really no way out this time.
I don’t know if it’s the panic that makes me glance back at her, but I’m glad I do. A soldier stands in the hollow of the neck, his firearm raised to the back of her head.
“Duck!” I yell, and the first bullet pings past us and into the abyss.
The agony of whatever ruptured inside my rib cage dulls, and adrenaline blurs both time and pain in a way I can only call helpful. Next thing I know, Sona and I have rolled away from the ladder and onto a support beam, across it, and under a curtain of wires. My back presses against the Archangel’s side, and I make myself small, throwing my hands over my mouth to silence my labored breathing.
The beam is just wide enough to hold us both side by side, but Sona crouches in front of me, sword freed from her belt and one hand wrapped around a bolt for support. Her blade is positioned so that it’ll sever the next person who dares emerge from the copper drapes, and maybe afterward she’ll leap and manage to take out a second. And then …
And then she’ll be peppered with bullet holes and list over the side, down, down, down.
This was not the plan. What was the plan?
Get out. Fight our way through, get her plugged into the first Windup we come across. Assuming any were spared. Shit. Glitch did a good job. She did a fantastic, devastating job, and the world severely owes her for it, but it has a fucked-up sense of humor, so instead it’s just going to kill her.
Or … maybe not.
Because she’s priceless.
Because she’s got those Mods all wrapped up inside her flesh like a present, and that’s worth something to them.
“Sona.”
“Be quiet!”
“Just stop.”
“What?”
“I said just stop!”
“How can you say that?” she hisses, whipping her head around. Her features are pinned in a snarl, the fire of her left eye carved down to a crescent. “Take out as many as we can; that is what you said. And that is what I am going to do.”
“I said that’s what I’m going to do. But you … you’re their investment. You’re valuable. They might take you alive.”
Now she whirls on me. The light of her eye draws an arc through the air, and she slams her free hand directly next to my ear. The blow hums in the metal at my back, and she’s so close and so damn pretty, and so furious. All I can think to myself, because she’s scared off any semblance of eloquent thought in my head, is This sucks.
“How can you say that?” she screams, ignoring her own advice to keep quiet. “I am not theirs!”
There. My fury, my recklessness, stitched onto a different face. I had suffocated within my own fear, and I tried to remedy it with another punch, another battle cry, another violent thought. Not now. Now, I lift my gaze, and I draw a breath.
“No,” I snap, with just as much ferocity. “But you’re one of mine, and that damn well means something. It means everything.”
“I belong to no one,” she snarls. “I am not anyone’s—”
“But doesn’t it feel like it, Sona?” I reach up and place a bloody hand on her cheek. My vision is blurring. I’m spiraling. “It was unplanned, and maybe it was a mistake, but it happened, didn’t it?” We haven’t lost everything. We can keep going. “Doesn’t it feel like we belong to each other?”
And then—silence.
I wait for it to collapse. I wait for it to splinter apart, to drown under the thud of my heartbeat, because stillness never liked me much, because there’s always too much of the fight left for the good parts to hover.
But the moment doesn’t recoil from me.
She holds the quiet in place, her hand on my ribs now. When she kisses me, she kisses me slow. Like we have all the time in the world. Like we’re safe on the couch back in the common room, hearth breathing heat all over us, nothing to do but watch the sun bleed from the sky.
I need her for so much. To dance terribly. To read my books. To keep the ash in my mouth at bay, to keep me blushing and breathing and fighting. To come home.
I need her to live.
I am a Gearbreaker.
When my back’s against a wall, I go through the wall.
My glove roars to life behind my back, forcing the serum into the metal supporting my spine. I bring my legs underneath me and shove my shoulders into
the wall, and it shatters like glass.
The free fall lasts only a second, but I still get a clear view of the shock that breaks across Sona’s features, and oh, it’s stitched into place by an incredible, detrimental hurt.
Every strand of breath in my lungs rushes out in a single gasp the instant my back collides with the concrete below, and Sona miraculously catches herself before she can smash on top of me. Something warm and wet pastes my hair to the nape of my neck.
“You didn’t,” she screams down at me, miles away. “Eris, you didn’t!”
But her attention does not stay on me for long. Dark figures emerge into my speckled peripheral vision, seizing her flailing form. Once, just once, she wrenches free, screeching incomprehensibly, and the stench of blood tinges the air again. More hands descend, tethering her limbs, tearing the sword from her grasp. I reach for it. They’re not taking me alive.
A boot kicks it away, and I snap my sight up to find it was hers. She stares down with such a palpable fury twisting in her eyes that I flinch.
“You’re not leaving me here,” Sona shrieks. She rears her head back, curls flying, and breaks a soldier’s nose with a harrowing crack. She kicks the blade farther away as more hands land on her. “You are not leaving me here alone!”
Frost bleeds from me, spills from my palms and devours asphalt and deity and flesh. Dripping serum, red slicking my neck and jaw, I make it onto my side, and then onto my arms, lifting my head.
“You’ll win the next one,” I rasp, her screams clawing at me. Ice scrapes the pavement, crystals rising up like closing teeth. “When you get out of here and find Jenny—you’ve really got it next time.”
“Oh, you can rot,” she spits as they haul her back, both eyes bright with rage. They got her; she knows it, and she’s laughing, and it’s terrible. “Wither, love, absolutely wither.”
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