“My God, you don’t see it?” Dak gaped at me. “Isaac, it’s amazing. I guess only people with enormous dicks can see it.”
Quinny chortled from a spot by the castor turret and whispered something to a fellow Akarri beside her. She made a gesture to her whole forearm, and the other Akarri gaped at Dak.
“God damn it,” Dak muttered, head in hand. “Is she talking about me again?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s flattering things, at least.”
“Not judging from the terrified expressions on all their faces,” Eliandra said. Bragging, Quinny made a fist by way of illustration and, true to form, the other soldier blanched. “The tenor of the story seems to be the scale of the endeavor and her own courage.”
“True.” Dak folded his arms irritably. “I am an endeavor.”
“So where is this Citadel?” Eliandra asked. She motioned to her groin. “I’m not as gifted as the orc.”
“As gifted?” Dak lifted an eyebrow.
Eliandra gave a sly grin.
Dak glanced at me and I shrugged. “I only drew her with clothes on.” Inwardly, I winced.
For a moment, Eliandra studied my sheepish expression. Then she afforded me a slight nod. “For which we’re all grateful.”
It didn’t ease the tension, but we were at least speaking to one another.
Ronin gave the order and someone in the command chamber opened a side hatch on the Nell. A whole section of paneling slid open like a three-yard-wide minivan door. Beneath that, a patch of railing and parapet descended to form a ramp that dipped into the water.
Walking to the ramp’s end, Ronin drew her blade. The strange metamorphic steel emitted an eerie resonance, like the ringing of a crystal wineglass. I realized, then, that the last dreamer had designed Ronin’s armor and blade. The blade was her key to enter the Citadel. “Let us pass,” Ronin said.
We waited.
Just when the wait became awkward, bubbles frothed from the icy water at Ronin’s feet.
“Something’s coming from the right side of the boat,” I shouted.
“You mean starboard?” asked Dak.
“I made this boat and it’s the right side.”
Dak glanced at Tammagan, who navigated. She mouthed, “Starboard.”
Three enormous brass-and-wood orbs bobbed to the surface, like apples popping up in a vat. Water sleeked off their shiny surfaces. Each was riveted together and sported a round top hatch and a narrow, forward-mounted window.
“Submersibles!” It dawned on me. “The Citadel’s underwater.”
“Everfrost Lake is too cold to swim,” Ronin explained. “In places, the liquid water can reach temperatures far below freezing. At its deepest, it could freeze a dragon through.”
Retractable pylons clicked from the three orbs, keeping them from rolling in the water. The Akarri fetched rope salvaged from the Valkyrie and lassoed the orbs, dragging them one at a time to our ramp. Dak had to wriggle to fit through the hatch; Quinny offered to assist, since she was “good at making him fit.” He shot her a murderous look and finally wedged through, curled inside like an angry tomcat in a hamster ball. His big nostrils steamed the window; Eliandra slammed the hatch closed, muffling his curses.
“I’ll take this one,” said the Queen, hopping into the second orb and shutting the hatch before anyone could accompany her.
Ronin and I took the third. I climbed through the hatch and settled into the cramped interior. The floor was flat, the chamber hemispheric with a domed ceiling, the brasswork and rivets dull and unadorned on the inside. I settled onto a plain wood bench, squeezing to make room for Ronin.
She settled beside me, our bodies touched, and my gut tightened. When the door sealed and we sank beneath the water, she unclipped her mask.
The light coming through the porthole was teal, but darkened as we descended. Lime-colored fish darted past the window, but it was otherwise featureless water and whorls of dark particles. My breathing sounded noisy in the echoing confines, but Ronin was eerily quiet. I realized she carried a scent—familiar now from lying in her bunk. It wasn’t the girl-shampoo aroma my Homecoming date had left on my borrowed jacket. It reminded me of sea spray and wind.
I shut my eyes. Sails. Her smell reminds me of sails. I shivered.
“Do you use soap?” I asked abruptly.
I felt her stiffen. “I bathe.” An awkward pause. “You’ve seen it.”
“You smell different.” Her glare heated my cheeks. “Not bad. But not a regular-person smell.”
“I’m not a human person.”
The press of her body was steering my thoughts back to that lurid image she’d evoked at the wheel of the sky ship—her atop me, untamed. My libido lurched on its chain. I fought back by producing a sketchpad, working in the remaining light on concepts for shoulder pauldrons.
“What’s that?” Ronin asked.
“Once we deal with Dracon, my first change to Rune will be re-armoring the Akarri.” I showed her.
“Not bad. Consider an overlapping plate to deflect blows.” I jotted a quick concept sketch and she nodded. “Perfect.”
Much like with Dak, the sketch made talking to Ronin easier. It put something between us, besides all those awkward feelings. “You raised Eliandra. Do you think she became Queen because of me?”
“That is a tangled question.”
I sucked pensively on my lower lip. “Can you untangle it?”
“Even when Eliandra was a young girl, I could sense the pull of a dreamer’s magic—in the convenience of her finding me in the market one cold winter day, for instance. It was the subtle work of many decades, but when you drew that picture of her, crown on head, it set something near irresistible into motion.”
“So that’s… a yes?”
“And a no. Eliandra still chose. The magic straightened her path, but she walked it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because when I sensed the magic at work I opened another path for her. I swore to save her mother, to free her from that obligation. Choices matter to me.” Staring through the window, Ronin frowned slightly. “I wish most days she’d chosen differently. But I couldn’t choose for her. It wasn’t my choice to make.”
I closed my sketchpad. “So for seventy years before I ever met you, you’ve been fighting against me. My painting, at least. Every day.”
“I have. And you won.”
I glanced at her. “Why don’t you hate me?”
“Why would I?”
“I put Eliandra in danger. In a way… I took your daughter.”
She frowned. “Is that what you think she is to me?”
“I do. She won’t admit it, but she is. Hell. Even the part where she won’t admit it is suspiciously daughter-like.”
“How so?”
I smiled, remembering. “I went through a ‘you’re not my real mother’ phase with Aunt Amy. Suffice to say, I only ever said it when she was doing an excellent job at being my mother.”
“Were you happy? With your aunt?”
“Sure, I guess. She’s smart and funny. Uncle Scott’s very serious, but Aunt Amy and I have the same sense of humor. I think you’d like her.”
“I like your humor.”
“You should laugh at it then.”
“I do.”
“That snort you do is not a laugh.”
“It is.” Her blue eyes broke through me, and the truth in her words revealed itself there. I amused her. It was evident in the faint curve of her mouth and the way her eyes were slightly wider while watching me. And God, I loved the attention. The fact that I alone seemed to command it made her consideration sweeter still; it was weirdly intimate, a thing between us and no one else.
Outside, the depth had dipped us in shadow and turned the water a deeper blue. The temperature dropped until our breath frosted.
“What are you exactly?” I asked.
She released me from her gaze, finally. “Something damaged.”
�
�I find that hard to believe.”
“I am broken.” She fingered the hilt of her sword. “Defective.”
“How?” My mind swam. Silver blood. Strength. Less need for sleep, for food. Thinks of herself as malfunctioning. It came to me in a shock of realization. “Are you mechanical?”
“We both are. Your body is a system of levers, pulleys, circuits, and pressurized tubes.”
“But our levers, circuits, and tubes—they’re not made of the same stuff, are they? Yours are metal.”
She studied the hilt of her sword intently. “My parts are no more solid metal than your bones are solid calcium. But… yes, I am made of different substances. There is alloy in my bones and blood.”
“God.” I scrutinized her now. She’s a magical cyborg ninja.
“Hold still.” She seized hold of me by throwing one arm around my shoulders and my stomach lurched at the motion of our submersible—the world pitched upside down. The dizzying whirl ended two seconds after it had begun; I’d not hit the ceiling, thanks in part to Ronin’s steadying grip.
“Did we just do a roll?” It felt like we were righted now.
“In a sense. We passed the depth at which gravity reverses. What was once ‘down’ is now ‘up,’ so that the Nell is below our feet. We’re rising away from it.” She released me.
Eerie lights filled the water on the other side of the porthole. I could see once again the sleek contours of Ronin’s face, the light dusting of freckles, and her large eyes. “How are you defective?”
She hesitated, weighing the words before she spoke. “I’m a slaughter-class infiltrator. I was designed to kill efficiently. In that matter, I am not defective.”
“I’d gathered.”
“But the things I do now go beyond my design specifications. Rearing Eliandra, leading Akarri warriors into combat… fighting alongside you.”
“You were a solo act, and now you’re not.”
“Correct. And so I’ve made errors. I don’t have the warmth Eliandra required, nor the words to lead.”
“And me,” I said. “You don’t have the equipment to deal with me, exactly, either.”
“I do not.” She stared at the hilt of her sword, chin down, intent on something that wasn’t me.
It seemed like a strange gesture for Ronin, and when it dawned on me why she made it, I could hardly believe it. “I make you nervous.”
“Of course not,” she snapped.
But it was true. “You’re afraid of the things you feel around me.”
Her glare vivisected me. “No.”
I grinned at her. “You can read lies through heartbeats. Tell me, what’s your not-quite-fleshy heart doing right now? Lie detector, detect thyself.”
She tilted nearly nose to nose with me. “Do not trifle with me, human.”
“You don’t scare me, Ms. Murder-bot.” She’d opened up. I’d seen her vulnerability, and it had changed everything.
Her fists bunched in my shirt, steely tight, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure. The look of determination in her blue eyes stole my oxygen.
But it wasn’t the same type of scared. I swallowed, sensing what was coming even as she thought hard about it. “Why do you even like me?” I blurted before I could stop myself. Some part of me was still terrified that she was my murder-bot, imported from some other story, setting, or world I’d made.
“I was built to destroy. You were built to create. You are the very thing I lack, and you make me feel… unsturdy.” She dragged me closer to examine my face. “You’re also pleasing on an aesthetic level—attractive in ways that make me wish to protect you.”
She thinks I’m cute. “Anything else I make you want to do?” I was teasing her now. It gave me a little swell of power—and a swell somewhere lower too.
She dragged me nearer. The chill air lingering between our bodies disappeared and I reveled in how warm she was.
I let her kiss me. Her firm mouth tested mine, and then attacked. She was in charge and—what the hell—I liked it that way, shuddering when she pushed into my mouth. My fingernails raked the stiff clothing at her ribs and an approving growl whirred from her throat, lifting the fine hairs along my spine.
She broke off, our frosty breath mingling. I leaned forward to chase her, brushing my mouth against hers, and this time she let me kiss her. She’d crushed me to paste, dizzied me with the sparking collision of her body into mine, but now that the pace was mine to set, I took the smallest taste. She let me, though I sensed a wry smile.
I drew back. “How long have you wanted to do that?”
“A while.” That rasp in her voice nearly undid me. “You kiss like a virgin.”
I blushed furiously.
She lifted an eyebrow.
I coughed, and the terrible thought recurred. “Just to super-confirm, I never drew you, right? You’re not from some science-fiction setting of mine or anything?”
“After our conversation about choice, would you care?” she asked.
My man parts screamed, Hell no! But I worried my lip and glanced at the floor, avoiding her eyes. She felt amazing and I could still taste her, could envision what it would be like to loop my arms around her and feel the contours of her back. I needed courage; needed to cage the mental images of what Ronin could doubtless do to me given a bed to sprawl out on—or, hell, what she could do to me right here in the submersible, since she was a determined woman. I nevertheless managed to say the dumbest true thing of my life: “Yes. It would matter.”
She tilted her head to the side. “You’re not lying.”
“No.”
Something changed in her face—that faint smile erased, leaving her colder than before. She scooted a few inches away, and frigid air filled the space between us. “I shouldn’t have done that.” The regret in her voice was so sharp it sliced into my center.
A breath shuddered out of me. “I made you, didn’t I?” Of course I did. Gorgeous, hyper-competent women who find me sexually appealing do not just happen.
“We’re here.” She glanced through the window as the water disappeared and we bobbed to the surface.
We’d arrived in a tall cavern, a dark reflection of Everfrost Lake that was hidden from the surface world. The lake’s island had its twin here, except it was not barren: it was dominated by a great citadel of glacier-blue ice. The citadel was ringed in frozen columns whose glittering pushed away the voluminous darkness of the cavern, making me think of midnight on Christmas Eve.
Ronin ascended the ladder and I focused on getting my body to exit kissing-fun-times mode. “So you’re defective?” Seems to function flawlessly, in my humble opinion.
“Yes.” She banged the hatch open.
“Promise it wasn’t my fault?”
She seemed surprised. “Of course not.” A sigh. “I’ll make it all clear. I only hope you’ll forgive me.” She disappeared from the submersible.
I tried to figure out her words and came up with nothing. Before taking the ladder, I slapped my face one, two, three times. The first for staring at her butt, the second for not touching her butt when I could have done so in a state of guiltless ignorance, and the third for wanting to touch her butt when it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
***
The whole citadel was ice—the steps, the railings, the cathedral-style doors ahead of us. “You think the last dreamer was an Elsa fan?” I asked Dak.
“You’re just jealous because she remembered handrails.”
He was right. I was thoroughly jealous of her ornate railings.
Dak touched one and scowled. “Not even cold. What the hell?”
“Magic, plainly,” Eliandra sniped. “If the water in the lake is colder than ice, why can’t the ice be room temperature?”
“Because physics!” He folded his arms. “Fucking dreamers. Read a textbook.”
The doors bore an engraving of two elk whose interlocking antlers barred our way. Antlers and door melted in the presence of Ronin’s raised, humming blade, water shunting aside
to allow us entrance. It flowed back in place behind us as efficiently as doors on the Enterprise, with less swooshing.
Inside, the citadel’s surfaces were snow white. We passed through a grand foyer decorated with flowers frozen in transparent ice casements. A hearth flared to life at the foyer’s end, the effect of blue fire and ice together stinging my inner green-eyed monster.
“Come,” Ronin beckoned. “We must take the stairs.”
“So the dreamer forgot an elevator.” I was glad I wasn’t the only bad architect.
“There’s an elevator, but we take the stairs. They tell a very old story.” Ronin glanced at us. “They were made for this very moment.”
I’m not jealous, I repeated over and over in my head until it no longer sounded like a lie.
As we ascended an enormous spiral staircase, images appeared on glassy walls, one after the other, depicting a strange and hellish world unlike any I’d ever seen: a place of darkness, rust, misshapen gears and molten furnaces. Black soot coated everything, and from the images emanated the sounds of clanking chains and chugging machinery.
“What’s the meaning of all this?” Eliandra grumped, walking ahead of us all, perhaps because it kept Ronin between me and her.
“This is Elarr, home of the builders,” Ronin said. “It’s one of the Twelve Hells.”
“Only twelve?” Dak asked sarcastically.
“Twelve greater Hells,” she clarified.
“Ah.” Dak nodded. “The lesser ones must be in Florida.”
“How many Heavens?” I asked.
The scenery changed and Ronin traced her fingertips across a pastoral image of wildflowers on an alien world, though its colors and shapes were faded like an old memory. “There were once eleven Heavens and a single Hell. Now there are no more Heavens and twelve Hells.”
My skin prickled at the implication.
“You would call the builders ‘demons.’ ” Shadowy, inhuman shapes dominated the stairwell’s walls. Nothing there was familiarly bipedal—they appeared squid-like, or to be housed in nautilus shells, or to float on blimp-like bodies, their forms utterly alien and the details obscured by darkness. “Their magic has conquered nearly the entire multiverse—all greater worlds but one.”
Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3) Page 8