Heart of Iron

by Ashley Poston

  “Last time I woke up, a Metal sedated me.”

  “D09 rarely likes people who try to get Ana killed. In fact, I don’t like those kinds of people, either.”

  Robb steeled his shoulders, because Ana hadn’t been the one dangling a thousand feet over Nevaeh’s slums. “Fine. I assume I am your prisoner. Where’re you taking me?”

  “Taking you?” The Solani bit back a laugh. “Ironblood, you’re just along for the ride.”

  Embarrassment tinged Robb’s ears. “Then where are we going, star-kisser?”

  The Solani’s face pinched. “I have a name, little lord. You could ask me for it.”

  Robb bit his lip. “Where are we going?” he repeated, trying to look anywhere but at the Solani—at the cabinets, the rusted walls, the flickering halogen lights of the infirmary.

  “The Tsarina.”

  He gave a start. “What?”

  “It’s Rasovant’s lost—”

  “Fleetship. The coordinates. Yes, I know. We’re going?”

  The Solani crossed his arms and leaned against the dormant medical console. “Yes, we are.”

  I’m prisoner on a ship going to where I need to go, Robb realized. How lucky was that? If he played his cards right, he could use these pirates to get what he wanted. He just had to survive until then.

  There had to be a catch. “Where do the coordinates point?” he asked.

  “Palavar.”

  Ah.

  Cerces’s dark moon. Of course. It made sense. Where better to hide a solar ship than a place no solar light could reach?

  “And no one’s following us?” he asked. “Not the Royal Guard or . . .” My mother, he thought, rubbing his thumb over the chip in his wrist. It hadn’t been activated yet, so his mother either didn’t know he was missing or didn’t care.

  The Solani rolled his eyes. “Please, we lost the Royal Guard. Well, I lost them. Modesty is overrated.”

  “And Vier— Captain Carnelian?”

  “Lost her halfway around Eros. She’s eating my space dust.”

  I wouldn’t count on that, he wanted to say, because if he knew Viera Carnelian at all—and he knew her better than most—she was viciously stubborn. And righteous.

  The Solani inclined his head. “Now come on, we’re not staying in the infirmary.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we. Someone has to keep an eye on our esteemed guest, and I drew the short straw. What’s your name?”

  Did no one know he was a Valerio?

  Am I really this lucky? he thought, putting down the suture pen. These criminals had bandaged him up. . . . Why would they do that if they wanted to kill him?

  He said the first name that came to mind.

  “Aragon.”

  The Grand Duchess’s maiden name. Most of their descendants had died of the Plague, so these outlaws would be hard-pressed to catch him in the lie. And when lying, it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible.

  “Robb Aragon.”

  “All right, Robb Aragon. I’d say it was a pleasure meeting you, but I can’t lie.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The silver-haired boy cocked his head, as if debating for a moment. “Jax.”

  “No last name?”

  “Not one that matters. Now follow me.” Then Jax pushed himself off the old console and left the infirmary.

  Robb—feeling like he didn’t have much of a choice—followed. The dried blood on his shirt crackled when he moved. The pain was horrible, but the smell was worse—rotten eggs and iron. He tried not to gag.

  Of all the people to get hit by a stray bullet, it had to be him.

  Goddess, he was cursed.

  The stairs hurt. Walking hurt. Even breathing hurt. On the first level of the ship, the Solani showed him to an empty bed in the crew’s quarters. Two bunk beds sat on either side of the room, with a communal meeting area in the middle. His bunk was apparently across from Jax’s. The quarters were small—smaller than any room he’d ever slept in before—and smelled like fresh linens. A row of bookcases lined the far wall, filled with medical texts and ratty adventure books, the covers so worn they were falling off. This . . . wasn’t the type of living space he imagined when he thought of outlaws.

  The rest of the crew were somewhere else on the ship—Robb could hear them shouting. He’d rather not meet them, but he knew he would eventually.

  They’ll gut me and eat my insides, he thought, remembering the stories from the Academy.

  “Here,” said Jax, handing him some clothes from a trunk.

  Robb stared at them.

  “Unless you want to go around smelling like a corpse, little lord.”

  Little. A muscle in his jaw throbbing, he took the shirt and breeches. They smelled like lavender, reminding him of the skysailer, pressing his chest against the Solani’s back—

  He swallowed thickly and turned his back to the silver-haired boy.

  Unbuttoning his shirt, he winced as pain spiked across his ribs again, racing up his side. He managed to get one sleeve off, but it hurt to move his right side. After his third try, he noticed the Solani watching, sitting on the edge of his bunk with one leg draped over the other.

  “Do you need assistance?” asked Jax, amused.

  “I can do it,” he snapped, and to prove it, he unlaced the other sleeve and tore off the shirt, dried blood crinkling, and pulled the new shirt on. It was too baggy. He hesitated before he took off his breeches. “Do you mind?” he asked, giving Jax a pointed look.

  “Mind what?”

  “A bit of privacy?”

  The silver-haired young man grinned then, toothy like a cat. “Afraid I’ll judge too harshly?”

  Robb narrowed his eyes.

  “Fine.” Jax sighed, turning to look toward the wall instead. “You know I’ve always heard Ironbloods were never any fun. Glad it wasn’t a lie.”

  I do have fun, he thought angrily, quickly changing into the new breenches, and sat down to lace up his boots again. The trouser legs were so long, he had to roll them up to his ankles.

  “And I’m glad to know that all Solani—” Robb went to stand again when black spots ate at his vision. He swayed, trying to catch himself on the side of the cot, but the Solani caught him first and set him down on the edge of the bed again.

  Robb was afraid to move until his head stopped spinning.

  “You’ll pull your stitches if you don’t slow down,” the silver-haired boy cautioned, and rerolled Robb’s left pants leg.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sure you are,” replied the Solani, and leaned forward, “but just a word of warning: if I catch you lying to me or the rest of the crew about anything you’ve said, I promise you’ll wish I’d let you fall out of that skysailer on Nevaeh. Do you understand?”

  Robb sat back, distancing himself from that fierce violet-eyed glare. His chest wound tight—from panic. It was definitely panic—

  A shrill bell rang across the intercom.

  Robb jumped.

  Jax quirked an eyebrow. “It’s the dinner bell, little lord. Stop being so jumpy. You act like you’re expecting company.” He stood, dusted his knees off with his leather-gloved hands, and left the quarters.

  Once he was gone, Robb finally got a chance to catch his breath. The lingering smell of lavender was suffocating.

  The sooner this band of space pirates found the fleetship, the better. He hoped this antique ship had enough of a head start to the Tsarina before his mother tracked him down. What happened after—to these outlaws, to that Solani and that girl Ana—didn’t matter.

  His father mattered. Finding him mattered. And the answers were on the Tsarina, Robb was sure of it. He was sure he’d find his father. Or find out where he’d gone—find something. He had to.

  He’d spent seven years searching, and he wouldn’t let anything stop him now.

  Ana

  Ana rubbed her half-melted pendant, contemplating the playing cards in her hand.

 
The crew sat around the cramped galley table, playing a round of Wicked Luck after dinner. A scoreboard hung on the far wall of the galley with little tick marks under each of their names to signify who had won previous nights. Jax was leading by forty-seven wins.

  But no matter how much Ana tried to concentrate on the queen, jack, and three aces in her hands, she couldn’t, too afraid that the Royal Guard were still in pursuit and that all of this would be for nothing. She barely ate any beef stew. Her stomach was tied in knots, and hers wasn’t the only one. Beside her, Lenda—who normally ate three helpings—hadn’t even touched her food.

  Please, don’t let this be for nothing, Ana thought. Please let the Tsarina be there.

  “Five hours until we reach our destination,” Di’s voice rang out over the intercom.

  “Seriously?” Lenda groaned, brushing back her floppy dishwater-blond hair. She was solid, with narrow brown eyes and tawny skin with rosy undertones. She displayed the scars on her arms like trophies—battles won in the fighting arenas of Iliad. Lenda was twenty and unafraid of everything—

  Except, maybe for Palavar. “We’ve only been traveling for two? It feels like years.”

  “Eh, don’t bother me. Three jacks,” said Barger, a stout man in his mid-twenties with a ginger mustache. His fingers were always grease stained, nails ripped short, the signs of a tireless weapons mechanic.

  Lenda frowned over her cards. “You can’t have three jacks,” she told the ginger-mustached man across from her.

  Barger snorted. “You ain’t gonna call Wicked on me, Len. Hey, Solani, your turn.”

  At the far end of the table, Jax tossed two cards into the middle. “Patience, you heathen.”

  The object of Wicked Luck was to lay facedown however many cards you had of that pair, and lie your way to zero cards first. If someone caught you in a lie—by saying “Wicked”—then you got the entire pile of discarded cards.

  And there was nothing like calling someone a liar to ruin friendships and solidify lifelong grudges.

  Jax tossed two cards facedown onto the pile. “Two aces.”

  “Wicked!” Lenda called, pointing to Jax. “Wicked, Wicked, Wicked!”

  Jax rolled his eyes and flipped the two cards over. “I can’t lie, Len,” he said, and the crew roared with laughter.

  Lenda raked the entire pile of cards toward her end of the table and sorted through them in her hand.

  Ana patted her on the shoulder sympathetically.

  At the head of the table, beside the captain, Talle—short and thin, with black hair in a pixie cut and hands so steady she could slit a throat clean while navigating the skyways of Nevaeh—sliced a piece of bread in half with one of the dozen knives from her belt, and buttered it. Siege leaned forward and ate it out of her hand. “Sunshine! That was mine.”

  “Ours,” Siege replied, kissing her, and played her hand—three twos. No one called Wicked against the captain. No one ever did. Except Talle.

  Talle and Siege had been married longer than Ana had been part of the Dossier. She always wondered how they’d met, but it was a secret—like Siege’s last name.

  Di once said that it seemed surprising that two people who were so opposite could fall in love, but he didn’t see that while Siege was the flame, Talle was the shadow. One could not exist without the other.

  Ana wished she could explain it. She wondered, often, if he would feel the same about her if he was programmed to have emotions.

  Talle leaned over to the old engineer beside her. “Riggs, I think you’re up, sweets.”

  “And get your damn leg off the table and play,” Barger grouched.

  Riggs, fiddling with a ball bearing in his mechanical leg, grumbled a reply and heaved it off the table, setting it on the bench beside him. He’d lost his right leg to the Plague twenty years ago—cut it off himself right above the knee. He lost his family to the disease on Eros, and kept a photo of his daughter in a silver locket around his neck. Sometimes at night, Ana heard him talking to her in his dreams. He picked up his cards, fanning them out, and set three down. “Three fives—”

  “Wicked!” Lenda roared.

  Barger threw up his hands. “You gonna call it all night?”

  “Sorry,” she muttered sheepishly. “I’m just real jumpy. I don’t like Palavar.”

  “No one does,” rumbled Wick, who had a habit of being quiet. He listened, and that made him a talented communications specialist. He absorbed languages like a sponge, so many that Ana could only hope to wrap her tongue around a quarter of them. He was Cercian by birth, the markings under his eyes so faded Ana couldn’t tell which clan he hailed from, and he never told, having left that life years ago. His skn was a shade darker than Siege’s, with a warm hue to it—like the dawn. “This is dangerous.”

  “My leg’s hurting, too,” Riggs added. “It always hurts before a fight.”

  “Your leg always hurts,” Talle replied dryly.

  “Yes, but it hurts more,” the engineer said defensively, and Wick nodded in agreement—but he always agreed with Riggs. They’d spent years in a Cercian mine together. “Palavar is dangerous.”

  “Palavar will be easy,” Siege assured them. “We’re on the quietest ship in space, and we’ve got the best crew in the kingdom.”

  “Yeah, but what about that Ironblood?” Barger jutted his chin toward Robb, who went still in his chair. The Ironblood hadn’t touched his food, potatoes sitting congealed on his plate. “What if he sends out our coordinates? Tattles?”

  “Well, then we can space him,” Jax replied, reorganizing his hand.

  The Ironblood choked on a sip of ale.

  “We’re not spacing him,” Ana said, tossing two cards down. “Two tens.”

  Barger took two cards out of his hand. “Two queens—”

  “Wicked,” Robb called.

  Barger shot him a look that Ana could only have described as death incarnate. The table was quiet until Wick leaned forward and flipped Barger’s two cards over for him. A nine of spades and a three of hearts. Wick shoved the stash of cards in Barger’s direction.

  Smoothly, the Ironblood leaned forward and dropped his last four cards onto the table. “Four queens.”

  Jax gave him a side-eye. “I think I’m going to call you.”

  “Then do it,” Robb replied.

  “You can’t have four queens. You can’t be that lucky.”

  “Technically, I can— OW!” Robb gave a cry and clutched his right wrist.

  The captain leaned forward worriedly. “Something else hurt?” she asked, Jax and the rest of the crew echoing the concern.

  Ana didn’t like the way the Ironblood turned pale. Or the way he straightened up again, a rigid set to his eyebrows. “No—no, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” said Jax.

  Robb’s blue eyes turned cold. “I said I’m—”

  “Captain,” interrupted D09 through the intercom. His voice cut through the noise of the galley like a knife scraping against metal.

  The captain finished her tankard of ale in one gulp and called up to the ceiling, “What’s it, metalhead?”

  “The Grand Duchess is transmitting live from the palace. She is speaking about the events on Nevaeh.”

  Ana’s heart plummeted into her toes.

  Cursing under her breath, the captain left for the cockpit in a whirlwind of bright fiber-optic-tipped hair, the rest of the crew scrambling after her. In the cockpit, Wick quickly slid into his chair at the communications console, pulling up the vid.

  Ana elbowed her way through the crew to stand beside Di, lacing her fingers through his.

  He slid his expressionless gaze to her, and she met it, swallowing the lump lodged in her throat. No one could have possibly identified them on Nevaeh. There was nothing to be worried about. Nothing.

  But her heart pounded anyway, calling her a liar.

  The Grand Duchess’s delicate face stretched across the starshield. “At sixteen hundred hours, a terrible act rav
aged our beloved Nevaeh. A Metal and its accomplice attempted the assassination of my heir, Erik Valerio.”

  Ana felt all the blood drain from her face.

  “Thankfully, he was unharmed, but his kin was not as fortunate. As of four hours ago, we have it on good authority that the younger son of the Valerio family, Robbert Mercer Valerio, was taken captive by the assassins.”

  A photo of a young man with curly hair and sky-blue eyes appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. A cold chill curled up Ana’s spine. She knew that face—sat across from it at dinner.

  Oh—oh no.

  She quickly looked around the cramped cockpit for Robb, but he had disappeared. Had he even followed the crew here? She couldn’t remember.

  “Ak’va,” Jax cursed under his breath. “He said his last name was Aragon.”

  Siege’s eyes darkened. “Aragon my ass.”

  The Grand Duchess went on. “This is an act of terror, and it is war against our kingdom. I will award five hundred thousand coppers to whoever returns Robbert Mercer Valerio unharmed.”

  Ana could see the thoughtful looks on everyone’s faces at the idea of half a million coppers. That was three new sails for the Dossier. An updated solar core. A quiet house on Eros. A new life.

  “And to whoever brings in the rogue Metal assassin and its accomplice, I will reward you whatever you desire.”

  “Whatever we desire?” Barger murmured. “We could get our records wiped clean.”

  “I’d space you first,” Talle warned, her words as sharp as the knives on her belt.

  “There is no price too great for the safety of this kingdom and the security of its people. We will not bargain with terror. May the stars keep you steady and the iron keep you safe.”

  The connection flickered and faded to stars. Ana counted the silence—one heartbeat, two, before the fiber optics flared in her captain’s hair like an inferno. But as Siege opened her mouth, green eyes full of murder, Jax dashed out of the cockpit and slammed the door closed, locking them inside.

  Jax

  Jax was, by all accounts, the most merciful crew member on the Dossier.

  He also had a promise to uphold to that charming, lying sack of spacetrash who happened to be from the most hated family in the entire kingdom. He tried to forget the solidness of Robb’s chest as they free-fell through Nevaeh, the warmth of the Ironblood’s hands over his as they pulled the skysailer into flight, and the color of his eyes, a blue that reminded Jax of summer rain on Iliad.