Glitch emerges from the climb a few minutes later, and I can’t stop the words.
“You took your time.”
She tucks her hair behind her ears as she brushes past me. “You are the one who left a mess all over the detention hallway.”
“You gave me the knife,” I shoot back, stripping away the medical patch and dropping it to the floor. “What did you think I’d do with it?”
Glitch steps onto the rounded area of blue Pilot glass, its glow sending shadows of her eyelashes spilling up her brow.
“Victoria is accompanying me on the run.”
My hands slip from my pockets. “Hells. What are you—”
“What I have to.” Her voice is hard. “Whatever I have to.”
She presses her thumb to her forearm, and the panel pops outward, revealing a smooth metallic divot where there should be blood and bone and vein. As I fixate on the sight, I feel her glance at my expression before turning away.
One by one, she clicks the cords into place, a small jolt rocking her shoulders at each new addition. The wires spill down her arms, looping in the air before spiraling back upward toward their tethering mechanism, which I know shifts and swivels with the Pilot’s movements so they won’t get intertwined with one another, or with her as she fights.
Sona hesitates at the last cord, fingers rolling it lightly between her fingers.
“As soon as we leave the city limits,” she says, “you will climb down and take out the guards. They should be arriving in a few minutes—three of them. They will not suspect you coming from above.”
I nod. I figured as much.
Sona runs her thumb over the nub of the cord, staring down at it. “Would you mind being careful? I will be able to feel it now.”
“Why…” I trail off, unsure of myself. Her voice is thin ice, but it is nothing like anger. More like shame. “Why did the Academy make it so the Pilots can feel pain? While they’re wound?”
It’s a ridiculous question. Godolia is cruel for the sake of cruelty.
Sona shrugs. “Take your pick. To keep us motivated, perhaps. A testament to the technological superiority of Godolia.”
“And what do you believe?”
She smiles wryly. It’s a mask; I’m finding most of her smiles are.
“It’s just a big joke to them,” she murmurs, still staring down at the unhooked cord. “Take away our pain, stuff us with wires, tell us to rejoice in our evolution. Give back our ability to hurt whenever we feel a sliver of true power. Make it so that even when we are akin to deities, we still have flaws that can be exploited. The Zeniths have all the Pilots wandering around like barn chickens, thinking that just because can still take a step, it must mean that we are still alive, while in reality, they cut off our heads ages ago.”
“What do you mean?”
She taps the nub of the cord on the edge of the silver dish. “They like us scared.”
I smirk. “What’s life without a little fear?”
“I just—” Her voice breaks. It’s so sudden that the smile slips from my lips, but Glitch doesn’t see it, back turning to me, silver stars scattered across her jacket. Head held high but shoulders stiffening, waiting for the hit. “I just want to be able to breathe.”
Her curls are ignited by the light filtering from the Valkyrie’s eyes, fluorescent beams stained red. It’s when her gaze lists over her shoulder that I realize it’s gone quiet. Not in the room, but in my head. My thoughts slow and lie still, save for one:
I don’t want to kill you.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SONA
Victoria is steady next to me, shoulder to steel shoulder on the frozen path stretched beneath our greaves. Billowing wind cuts the snow in icy sheets, and through it, the red of Victoria’s eyes sears behind the visor.
Below the curve of the hill sprawls Winterward Lake. Seventy miles north of Godolia, the jagged line of the Iolite Peaks rises behind the forest and collection of lights and wood houses that stud the rim of the lake—a testament to the town’s confidence that the surface of the water will remain ever-frozen, as it has been for decades. The hoverbarge can be seen from here, too: a large, perfectly square vehicle stacked high with massive iron crates. But even so, it is likely that each of the crates is packed to the point of bursting, with stacks of timber, drums of briskberries, large slabs of sugar, and solid blocks of ice that will be melted into clean, purified water, a rarity in Godolia.
“Godsdamn it,” Victoria mutters, comms planting her voice right at my ear, as if she is standing inches away. “What’s taking so long?”
Anyone looking on would believe that we are exact duplicates of each other, 180 feet of mecha, twin killing machines. Difference is, inside my ribs, my heart thuds like a caged owl. They must be able to hear its beat all the way back at the Academy.
“You could just enjoy the view,” I say, feeling my real lips move against each other. It is an odd sensation—the sound of my voice resonating inside my own head, the roll of the words as they curl off my tongue, but at the same time, I know that the Valkyrie’s mouth was not designed to be functional. Two bodies, two sets of everything that contradict each other in every piece and crook, save the mind that connects them.
Though that feels as if it is split, too.
This is not my body. These are not my hands, absent of scars, steel that bends with a mere thought. My skin does not ignore the cold; my head does not kiss the sky.
But it feels like it does.
And it feels good.
“Finally,” Victoria snaps—the hoverbarge has begun to glow beneath its hull, tech awakening to lift it from the ice. Despite its immense weight, it takes off at a nimble pace, smoothly gliding about ten feet over the ice as it makes its way across Winterward. I hope that Eris is not teetering precariously on one of my support beams as Victoria and I turn, heading down the slope toward the thin canal where the barge will meet us.
“It’s Jole’s birthday next week.”
“Oh?”
“Rose is going to ask you for help baking some ridiculous, elaborate cake. I said no, because I don’t want to, and she said she would find you instead because you’re all lovely and nice. Her words.”
My heart rushes to my ears. My silence is a tell.
“What, sweetheart, no retort?”
The wet sputter of Rose attempting her last words. The soft thud of her body meeting the mat. “I—”
Something snags across my ankle, and the frostbitten earth rushes up to meet me.
Instinctively, I tuck my head, my sword going flat on the ground for half an instant as I roll, and in the next I have brought my leg around in an arc, drawing a half circle in the snow to spin back and bring myself upright, facing the path from which we descended. Inside my head, the other body’s right knee is pressed against the cold glass floor, left leg still jutted outward from the swoop of the arc, fingertips of one hand perched on the ground to steady myself while the other reaches back for the hilt of my sword.
Over the path, a steady line of thick steel cord stretches twenty feet above the ground, ends fastened to two briskwood trunks standing opposite each other across the clearing.
Wind moans against the metal shell, icicles beading the grate of my visor. I clear them away. My stomach quakes. Gods, Eris, please have been holding on to something.
“Trip wire,” Victoria growls. She rises to her feet, blade already in hand, dark and sharp against the soft snow billowing around us. Her eyes glisten wickedly behind her visor. “Gearbreakers.”
Her head snaps to the right, and in the next moment a burst of gunfire rings from the tree line, the peace of the snow-blanketed landscape ripped to shreds by the shriek of bullets. Victoria has already thrown her arm over her eyes, the shots pinging off and ricocheting toward the ground. The frozen path splinters into a sky of tiny jagged stars.
Without hesitation, Victoria shifts seamlessly to a fighting stance, and she slashes the sword low through the air.
For a few seconds, the snow reclaims Winterward’s silence, interrupted only by Victoria’s low growl. Then, the briskwood trees let out a soft sigh, nearly a yawn, before succumbing. Save for approximately ten feet of their trunks, the trees list to the side, their snow coverings misting the forest in a thick cloud and cloaking their impact.
From within the veil rise the startled shouts of the Gearbreakers.
“I found you,” Victoria sings.
Her tone draws her expression vividly—teeth bared in a slick, sharp grin, eyes alight, blond brows arched in her excitement. She paws through the grounded foliage, hand sifting through the cloud. After a pause, she retracts, and their shrieks ring out, louder than her voice in my head, louder than my heartbeat. A pickup truck is pressed between her fingers, driver strapped in the front seat, five other Gearbreakers in the open bed, faces lifted toward hers.
They have stopped screaming.
The sound is replaced by Victoria’s howl, so shrill and piercing it feels like it scrapes ribbons against the curve of my skull. Her sword falls into the snowbank lining the path, right hand flying up to her shoulder, fingers clenching against the needled pauldron.
“What is this?” she rasps in my ear. “What—”
She cries out again, dropping to one knee. The metal bubbles between her fingers. She pulls her hand back; a thin coat of black sludge sticks to her palm.
In the truck bed, a Gearbreaker has risen to her feet. A grin perches on her face, radiant as the snow around us. The veins of her hands are ignited.
Victoria tips her palm to the side. A hundred-foot drop. I do not watch the Gearbreakers hit the ground; I cannot, because Victoria is rising, looking back toward me. Even now, in this form, the sight of the Valkyrie breathes panic through my blood.
Her voice sounds with a dry, unhappy laugh. “You didn’t kill Starbreach.”
Movement beside the path. The car hit the bank, deep with powdered snow. From within, a glow sparks, and grows.
“Neither did you.”
Victoria moves for the Gearbreakers, and I move for her.
Unlike Rose, she does not take her cut silently. As my blade enters her side, her scream is so loud in my head it is a physical, thorny weight. I force the sword deeper as we both slam against the path, her metal skin wrinkling into jagged clefts.
But no matter how piercing her shrieks are, she will not die by pain alone. I reach for her visor, for the small Pilot hidden inside.
Victoria brings her knee up beneath me, foot extending into my abdomen and forcing me back. I struggle to my feet, her sharp, animalistic snarl sounding again, and I snap my head upright to see her pulling my sword out of her ribs.
“What the hells did you do?” she roars, clutching the blade tight in her hand. My glance over to the snowbank where her sword rests is quick, but she catches it, stepping in front of the path. “Oh, you’ve let that Frostbringer get all twisted up in your head. You were weak, and I knew it, and you—you—you will burn for this, Bellsona!”
My hands curl at my sides. “Better than dying for them.”
I turn as she jabs, and the tip of my sword slices a clean, shallow line against my shoulder blades. A stinging pain erupts—sweet, real pain—and I duck underneath her next swipe and lunge past for the snowbank. She spins quickly to follow, but her sword is already in my hand, and the next slash collides with mine, freeing a metal-on-metal screech as our blades lock in a stalemate. Our faces are so close that even if our voice comms were not connected, I could still hear her discordant threats.
“You can’t beat me,” she hisses, blade pushing closer. The ice ignores my plea for traction.
“I have before.”
She barks a laugh. “I was going easy on you.”
I nearly scoff; mercy is not in her nature. “Why?”
“Why do you think, Sona?”
I feel myself losing footing at the same time I hear the note of hurt in her voice, so jarring from the likes of her. I push the thoughts away and my weight forward, slamming my forehead against hers. As she stumbles back, I reach out and dip my fingers between the bars of her visor. I toss it to the side, swiping to cleave her chest. She deflects the blow, vaulting backward, then doubles her swing back. I parry. The metal screeches again.
“They will never accept you as you are,” Victoria seethes, pivoting and sending me careening past her toward the frozen canal. I raise my blade as I turn, fending off her next thrust. It forces me back another step, and the slick of the ice threatens to rob me of my footing. “You’ll never be one of them.”
She feigns an attack, and when I move to block it, her sword darts across my thigh, making short work of the armor bolted over it. I drop to one knee, barely catching her next strike. Her blade slides close to mine, our hilts meeting.
“You could’ve been so much,” she spits, eyes so close their luminescence causes tears to leap into mine. “A legend. A deity. You could’ve had a family.”
I snap my gaze away and stand, aiming a push kick to her pelvis that releases the gridlock.
I had a family.
I will not find another.
Her swings become erratic and heavy, one after another, so relentless I cannot throw an attack between my parries. She forces me backward down the slope, her assault occupying me so that I do not realize we have reached the canal until my boot steps onto its sleek, frozen shore.
I slip. My open hand spirals back to catch myself, the other rising, far too slow to deflect her next jab. Her blade slashes through my wrist, and my sword clatters against the ice, my amputated hand coiled around its hilt.
The pain is not real, it’s not real—a scream tears from my throat. Victoria levels her blade at my neck. She leans close, towering as I kneel before her, remaining hand stuck behind me. I imagine the Valkyrie’s proud expression matches hers perfectly, down to the shadow of a grin.
“Do as you wish, Bellsona,” she coos, cocking her head to the side. “Damn Godolia, the Academy, whoever or whatever else you please. But those Mods that are so intricately, beautifully intertwined inside you—those are everlasting. You are forever bound to be a Pilot, and even in death, Godolia will still reside inside you. You will never not be theirs.”
I can hear her grin as much as I can hear her truth, and the terror of it forces the words from my lips.
“Get out of my head!” I scream, with more of my true rage and hurt than I ever thought I would show to another Pilot. “Get out of my head!”
“En garde, Bellsona,” Victoria sings.
Blade still pressed beneath my chin, her hand reaches for my visor, easily tearing it free. Then her finger enters my eye, and across my real cheeks I feel the whisper of shattered glass.
That does not hurt.
Everything else does.
Victoria digs for me, fingers twitching against the rim of my socket, both physically and mentally inside my head. Her jagged laugh is a noose around my throat.
I take my last breath.
Cold swirls into my chest.
Victoria screams, her hand jerking back, and through the eye she did not gouge I see that frost has sprouted over her fingertips. It grows like a vine, a rot, threads of ice shooting up to her gloves, then over her wrist. In shock, she flexes her palm, and a deep crack splits it. She screams again.
“What is this?” she cries, stumbling back, blade falling from my neck. I stumble backward as soon as the threat lifts, and my real body thuds against something solid.
“Deities,” Eris growls. “I leave you for one damn minute.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
ERIS
The guards had clearly never been in the wonderful, terrifying hamster wheel that is a rolling mecha. But I don’t have time to admire all their splattered, broken bits painting the inside of the Valkyrie, because somewhere above me, Glitch is screaming.
All I can think as I climb is I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared.
“Get out of my head!” She’s bleeding. She’s begg
ing. In the hollow of the head, it’s not one scream; it splits off and echoes and forms something worse. “Get out of my head!”
The mecha is leaning, the floor tilting under our feet. There are metal fingers taller than me writhing inside the room. I don’t care about any of it; I can’t. She’s on her knees, blood on her cheeks, dripping from a dozen places. Her tears well in large drops, flushed crimson by the time they reach her jaw. There’s glass in her curls.
Another splintering scream. The kind that’ll be living in the back of my head until the day I die.
I crush my power in my hands and send it loose. Just as the frost threads begin to weave across the metal, the hand retracts, allowing a pure white light to pour in.
Glitch jerks to her feet, stumbling backward. I deactivate the gloves, hands landing on her shoulders. Catching her.
“Deities,” I growl. “I leave you for one damn minute.”
She’s shaking under my grip, and it’s not from the cold. Ice-strained wind hisses from the fragmented window.
“I lost my sword,” she manages weakly.
I nearly roll my eyes. “Hold still, then. Give me an even shot.”
I release her and step off the glass platform, thumbs on the gloves’ triggers. The serum roars to life, blue light rushing up my arms.
The other Valkyrie’s longsword stays clutched in an unbroken grip, despite her crumbling left hand. A smile twitches across my lips. She thinks she can beat me. That she can beat us.
I press my fists together, the serum bubbling between the cracks of my fingers.
The Valkyrie moves, one foot carving in an arc across the ice, sword lifting for a heavy-handed, downward blow, and the serum bolts from my grasp. It screams from the broken eye, across the frozen air, and finds home in the crook of her shoulder.
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