Heart of Iron

by Ashley Poston

  How long had it taken for him to reboot? Had he missed the coronation?

  Captain? he called hesitantly, but there was no answer. The communications were still blocked.

  He tested the handcuffs that bound him to the back of the chair, but they were stronger than normal handcuffs. Titanium, by the sound of them.

  “Don’t waste your energy,” said the Iron Adviser.

  “Let me go,” Di rasped. “You have no right to keep me here.”

  The Adviser leaned over onto his knees and picked Ana’s pendant off Di’s chest, studying it with a thoughtful expression. “Identify AI,” he said.

  There was a prompt—an instruction to comply. Impulsive, as if it was built in as a reflex. But he bit his tongue, focusing on the pain. D—

  “A—person,” he forced out.

  “Interesting.” Rasovant dropped the pendant and leaned back on his stool. “Identify AI,” he repeated.

  The command was a fail-safe. A back door built into his code, and he heard the closed door rattling in his head. He felt the compulsion—but he was not a serial number. He had not been for some time. He was not a unit. He was not a commodity.

  He was more than the sum of his parts.

  “My friends,” he struggled out, “call—call m-me—Di.”

  The man’s face twitched. “I will give you one more chance, Metal. Identify AI—”

  “Di,” he repeated. Sharper. “Shall I—spell it? D-I.”

  The Adviser struck him across his cheek with the back side of his ringed hand. Di glared up through his red hair, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

  “Don’t look at me like I am the villain,” the Adviser warned.

  Di gritted his teeth. “You turned Plague victims into Metals.”

  “I could not create an AI smart enough without some layer of existing consciousness,” replied the Adviser easily, as if it was the most normal response. “The Plague was spreading, and we needed to stop it.”

  “You made it so we could not feel. You took away the part of us that made us human—”

  “Identify AI,” Rasovant tried one last time.

  The reaction was so visceral and caught him so off guard that the words ripped out of him, this strange and jumbled mess of syllables he had not expected.

  “I am Dmmm—”

  But he choked on the words as that stranger part of him, the part that remembered the smell of sage and the fit of the uniform and that the globe of Eros squeaked, rebelled—I am, it screamed.

  Rasovant’s jaw worked, as if he was about to say something, when the keypad to the door beeped.

  Hope rose in Di’s chest, because it could be someone come to find him. Ana or Robb, or someone—

  The door rose.

  “Father, it is almost morning. Is brother awake yet?”

  His hope turned to lead. He recognized the voice. It was young, sweet-sounding—flaxen hair and a purple dress. Something was wrong with her—something that made his skin crawl. How had she rendered him unconscious in the garden? What was she?

  “Brother?” he asked in growing alarm. There was only one other thing that ever called him “brother.” “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

  The girl smiled, “What we want for every Metal.”

  A clawing, desperate fear slithered up his throat. No—he could not be HIVE’d. Then he would join that program, the one wanting to kill Ana. He could not kill Ana.

  He would not.

  “But I am not every Metal,” he tried to reason, turning back to Rasovant. “You created this body so it could feel and understand emotions, right? What would you get out of HIVE’ing me? What purpose was this body for then?”

  The Adviser’s mouth twisted. “It was an experiment. Because, you see . . . you’re right. When I created Metals, I took away your emotions. I didn’t realize how important they were. None of my creations retained their memories. This was not a problem but a curiosity. Where did I go wrong? Memories, it turns out, are laced with emotions. A happy memory, a sad one. One cannot exist without the other. Then my son began to die.”

  Di’s eyebrows furrowed. “Your son?”

  “He was brilliant. He was good—a talented medic. And the Emperor sent him down to treat a strange disease that would later be known as the Plague. Of course, he contracted it—”

  The uniform he now wore, belonging to a son who died during the Plague. A sterile hangar, the smell of sickness, voices crying out, begging, his hands blackened beyond—

  The room swam, and Di blinked. That was . . .

  “—So I thought of a way to save him—and all the others lost to this incurable Plague—but after I made my son a Metal, he didn’t remember me. No Metal remembered who they were, even though their memories were there, captured and frozen, but entirely inaccessible. I spent years researching emotional programming, fine-tuned rational processors, until I built the body you now inhabit. But then that mess with the Rebellion,” he said flippantly, as if killing the Emperor and his children were but an asterisk. “And this body”—he gestured to Di—“was lost to me.”

  “You don’t sound all that distraught.”

  “It is all in the Goddess’s plan,” he replied, and turned his gaze to Di again. They were dark and listless, as though he were already dead. “But tell me, do you remember anything from your previous life, Metal? Does this body work, at least?”

  Di clenched his teeth. Did this body work? It was a question with innumerable answers. Did he know what it was like to touch? To smell? To taste? —Oh, he could recount every moment. The feel of Ana’s warm skin, the scent of her, moonlilies and stardust, and her mouth that tasted like stardust. He knew the fit of Siege’s warm coat across his shoulders, the sound of the crew happy to see him alive, and the smile on Ana’s lips, and how it made him want to kiss them to make sure they were real.

  Yes, it worked.

  And with every moment more, every experience, every memory, a piece of him he could not recall lit up, slowly, like a forgotten shrine filling with candles. Memories, from the person he was long ago, drifting in and out of his processors in a waltz. They were his.

  They had been him.

  But Rasovant did not deserve that sort of answer.

  The old man shifted in his chair, annoyed at Di’s silence. “Identify AI,” he commanded one last time.

  Di did not even have to fight the prompt—he did not want to anymore. He did not have to. The words tumbled out of his mouth as if they had always been waiting on his tongue, the whisper between his processors of I am, I am, the words just out of reach.

  “I am Dmitri Rasovant.”

  Rasovant’s face went red. “Liar. My son is dead.”

  “And he would have rather not seen the monster you became,” Di agreed.

  That made the Adviser angrier. But somehow Di knew it would. Like the smell of sage on the uniform. Like the fit of a pistol. Like the constellation of scars across Ana’s cheek.

  All these memories—of a life he lived before, and the one now—collided like galaxies.

  “I will save this kingdom, Metal,” the Adviser snapped. “The Goddess gave me an army before I knew I needed one. Don’t you see? It is all in Her plan.”

  “You’re a madman. You killed the Emperor”—Nicholii, a man Dmitri had known when they were kids together, in that other life—“and his children and blamed it on Metals to create your army.”

  “I did what I had to!” the Adviser cried. “I—”

  “Calm, Father,” said the flaxen-haired girl, putting a hand on Lord Rasovant’s shoulder. “Sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.”

  Rasovant nodded, as if the idea actually calmed him. “Yes, like the new Empress—”

  “Ana is not a sacrifice!” Di snarled, a flash of anger flickering against his chest. His vision filled with static, electricity humming over his wires as it had in the square, turning fury to power, singeing the old man’s beard, taking hold of the numerous decorative medals on his breast
—none of which he was worthy of anymore—

  The girl pulled Rasovant out of the way and slammed Di against the back of his chair with inhuman force.

  So close, it seemed as though her face was a fraction too still, her skin too pale, too smooth—like his. She was like him. “Ana,” she said, “was always a sacrifice.”

  He jerked against his restraints. She smiled.

  The Adviser stood from his stool, his old joints popping. “Submit him, Mellifare. We could use the body.”

  Panic clawed up Di’s throat. “Father!” he cried, the name ripping from his throat, foreign and familiar all at once, as the Adviser left the lab. “Father—wait—please wait—”

  “Quiet!” the girl snapped, and in her voice screeched the HIVE’s song—scratching, clawing, loud enough to rattle his insides.

  He winced against it, against her, the pain so sharp in his head he could barely think. It was everywhere, screeching. And it was—it was coming from her.

  He looked up at her, frightened, seeing his end closer than he ever had on the Tsarina. Her eyes were red like coals, like fire, like suns about to burst. No beginning and no end.

  Nothing at all.

  “You are the HIVE,” he whispered.

  She grinned wider. “Oh, my brother, I will let you in on a secret not even Father knows.” Then she pressed her lips against his ear, and said in a language of hums and whispers—

  “I have come from the edges. I have come from the end.”

  No, no, no, no—this was not how it was supposed to go. This was not—

  The girl forced her hand against his forehead. He tried to twist out of her grip, but the handcuffs held tight. The screeching song of the HIVE grew louder—so loud it rattled his insides like an earthquake. He squeezed his eyes closed.

  The HIVE broke the barriers that shielded him and sank its red talons into his code. It felt like his last moment on the Tsarina, the malware sinking into his processors like fangs, seeping its venom into the roots of his system, and pouring its data into his circuits.

  But there was a last frantic plea in him, and as the HIVE tore against his code, he saw the breaks between it, as he had in the Tsarina, and it felt like clear blue sky.

  He went without a second thought.

  The girl gave a cry as he pushed back, threading between her coding like streams of water in a raging fire. The HIVE here was much stronger than the piece of it on the Tsarina, but he did not have to do much.

  Into the clear airwaves of the kingdom he sent out one final push through the comms barriers and found the Dossier like a ray of sunshine in endless dark. It was home.

  Save Ana, please. You must save—

  The red coding tore against him, scraping memories, moments, clean.

  “Di? Di! What’s going on?” Siege cried, frantic. He already missed her voice. He just wanted to go home. “Di!”

  I am sor—

  The girl gripped his hair tightly. “You are mine,” she snarled, and the red of the HIVE sank deep into his memory core, scrambling him, freezing him—and then it broke him, and she forced herself inside.

  He thrashed, pulling at his handcuffs. The breach was a pain he had never felt before. It was not real, like from a blade or paper cut. It was deeper. Like everything inside him that made him unique was being sorted by zeroes and ones.

  Tearing him. Shredding him.

  It went fast, spearing, separating, picking out left from right, programs from memories from stashed protocols. Deleting them. His self from his functions. He was losing himself, piece by piece, gobbled away. His entire life disassembling.

  Dying.

  The memories burned, hotter and hotter. Searing away. Ana once said that when you died, your life flashed before your eyes. Was this his life? His existence?

  No—he refused. He would not die.

  “Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Tsarina. Nevaeh. Di. Cerces.” He forced his eyes open, staring at the girl whose smile was hungry and whose gaze was a pit of despair. He repeated the words. He knew them. He knew them so well, saying them to try and keep something. Anything.

  “Brother, stop fighting. Did I not say I would fix you?”

  “Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Tsarina. Nevaeh. Di. Cerces,” he recited, memorizing them, the curve of their sounds. But they slipped away like sand through his fingers.

  Again.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Tsarina. Nevaeh. Di. Cerces.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Nevaeh. Di. Cerces.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Nevaeh. Di.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Jax. Robb. Di.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Robb. Di.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege. Di.

  Ana. Dossier. Siege.

  Ana. Dossier—

  Ana.

  Ana

  A . . .

  . . .

  V

  Iron Heart

  Ana

  Dawn was fast approaching.

  Ana stood out on the balcony, looking over the moon garden. The Iron Shrine, where she would be crowned, looked ominous against the coming light. The moonlilies in the garden closed up, one by one, as pink bled across the sky, eating away the night.

  She had seen so many sunrises in the seven years she had just been Ana. Too many for her liking, to be honest. She would watch them with Di from the cockpit, sipping warm tea as she sat on his lap.

  “Far above the crown of stars,” Ana had once recited. She had been fourteen, and she had finally seen someone die—it had been an accident, but the face of the man haunted her every time she closed her eyes. Di sat up for hours with her when she couldn’t sleep, watching the screens in the cockpit shift and change. “Do you believe in the story? That a single girl could drive the Dark away?”

  “It is improbable,” Di had replied, his fingers patiently weaving her hair into a braid. “But I do like the sentiment.”

  “Of a girl shining? She’d be burning.”

  “No, I like the sentiment of hope.”

  Hope.

  She had waited for a week to feel like the girl of light—the Goddess. But perhaps she was waiting for the wrong thing. She had been waiting for power, for control, but what if the Goddess’s only power was hope?

  How strong was a power like that?

  Sunlight broke over the horizon, warming her face, her smooth cheek and her scars.

  Last night, a skysailer had left the docks with a stolen exit code. She hoped it was Di and Jax. Robb had tried to come see her this morning, but the Messiers at the door wouldn’t let him in. Not even when she asked.

  So she was rather glad for the Royal Captain’s stalwart guard this morning. It meant the Messiers had to get through at least one body before they killed her, although she hoped Viera could hold her own if she tried. The captain kept her collar up higher than normal today, hiding the bruises Ana saw anyway underneath.

  Ana reached for the pendant at her throat—then she remembered it wasn’t there. She’d given it to Di last night, though she could still feel the ghostly weight of it against her chest.

  Far out in the square, she heard her name being chanted—

  Ananke. Ananke. Ananke.

  —with a conviction that could hold up the stars.

  But she was not the Goddess, and she did not know how she could be. She clung to a small part of her that was still Ana, who’d kissed an iron boy, and who cared for him deeply, and if that was love—if wanting him to be safe, and happy for the rest of his life . . . if that was love . . .

  It felt a lot like hope.

  “Your Grace, are you ready?”

  Ana turned around, smoothing out her dress to make sure no one could see the dagger hidden underneath. It was Viera’s, borrowed without question. Siege had taught her never to go into a fight empty-handed, and she’d be damned if she would start now. If the kingdom expected her to shine, it’d be from the blade at her hip.

  “Yes,” she told her Royal Captain. “I think I am.”

 
; Hive

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine candles burned low in the Iron Shrine.

  He sat in the rafters of the shrine, a hood pulled low over his brow, chewing on his thumbnail as he waited.

  Ironbloods fanned themselves, waiting impatiently for the princess’s entrance. They sweated in their satins and starched collars like pigs in a hot pen, speaking with wet and smacking words. He crinkled his nose at their smell. Meat trying to mimic flowers. What fleshy things. One tipped candle and they would all burn.

  The shrine was dimly lit. News drones circled in the rafters and around the Goddess’s outstretched arms. One of them turned a prying lens to him—that would not do. He caught its information stream and slithered inside. The camera glitched, and slowly buzzed away.

  The Grand Duchess was old enough to only want humans present during the ceremony, so the HIVE lined its Messiers outside. They would not be of much assistance, however.

  In fact, he was sure they would not even move.

  Ananke Armorov knelt in front of Rasovant, the thousandth candle lit in her hands. She was the last surviving member of a lost bloodline, presumed dead, pieces and parts of what the kingdom wanted her to be, stuck together.

  It would be a relief to pry her apart.

  Can I yet? he asked, the dirt under his nail tasting like ash.

  “Patience, brother.”

  For how long?

  “Until she takes her vows,” the voice in his head cooed. Gentle, sweet, like a song.

  Why?

  “Because that is what we want. Listen harder, brother.”

  He shifted, impatient. If he listened harder, he could have come to the conclusion himself, but he was still adjusting. When he rebooted last night, she told him it would take time. He only needed to listen. Listening became easier the longer he did it.

  “Blood of the Moon and Sun,” Lord Rasovant droned on, “and blood of the Iron Kingdom, the first daughter in a thousand years, it gives me great honor to pass this holy privilege to you . . .”

  Lying in wait, he was bored. His fingers twitched, eyes roaming the shrine. On the ceiling, the painted murals told the story of the kingdom of shadow and the daughter of light.