“Are you nervous about the test run tomorrow?” I ask.
I’m very aware that she’s stopped reading, eye still trained on the page.
After a moment, Sona says quietly, “Yes.”
“Why?” I ask, and then immediately feel like an ass.
Her long fingers twitch against the paperback. She leans her head back against the wood, eye sliding closed.
“I feel … big, during it,” she murmurs, so soft I almost don’t catch it, even inches away. “So big that my head may scrape the blue from the sky.”
“And it’s terrifying?”
“And it is glorious, Eris. Please—” She stops, voice breaking. I realize why her words come at a murmur. She’s ashamed. “Please don’t think less of me.”
When I look at her for long enough, like I’m doing now, I’ll see a crack splitting the passive features. And through it, there’s the flicker of an expression that makes me go cold. It’s the sudden, desperate urge to pop back the panels, to dig and rip and destroy.
Briefly, I imagine how her skin would feel against my mouth if I kissed her wrist to elbow, the need vicious, because she seems so sad and I hate it, and I feel so much and I hate it. We’re at war and people die and I care, and that’s going to hurt.
I swallow hard. “I’m only going to think less of you if you don’t give me back my book.”
Her shoulders seem to relax a little. She never stopped wearing her Valkyrie jacket, but it feels more like a taunt than anything else, sleeves rolled up so you can see her gears clearly. She opens her eye, drops it back to the page. “Worth it.”
She puts her head on my shoulder and tucks her legs up. Nearest to us on the wall is one of Nova’s scribbles, a plain stick figure next to blocky letters that simply read, TALK SHIT GET HIT. Seeing that just revs up the ridiculousness of the situation. I should really not be feeling this good. I’m meant to be a soldier with a stone heart. I’m meant to lose people because that’s just what happens. I barely told Milo I loved him, and after everything, that seemed like the right thing to do. I should move away from Sona before I forget that, before I forget the state of this world just because her skin is against mine.
“Are you going to be okay?” I say instead.
Sona shakes her head. “I do not know.” She turns the page. “But I feel okay right now.”
Oh, I see what’s happening to me, I think to myself, her curls against my jaw. Oh, okay. Oh shit.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ERIS
Her hands now empty, Jenny leans away from Sona. Glitch has already reset the eye patch. One of the glass tables was cleared for her to lie on, its contents scattered haphazardly around the room in Jenny’s excited haste. Or maybe it’s not excitement at all, but just the combination of a steady flow of caffeine in her veins and the jitters of a tired body begging for sleep.
“Come on, come on, come on!” she says, voice leaping to a shout in erratic intervals as she hops over the miscellaneous items on her way to the exit, gesturing wildly over her shoulder for Sona to follow. She promptly rams flat against the glass door, her brow knitting in confusion for a few moments as she pats against it, then wraps quivering fingers around the handle and flings it open. We watch silently as she stumbles up the stairwell.
“She’s off her rocker, Eris,” Juniper murmurs.
“She’s always been like that,” I say, watching as Sona steps gingerly over Jenny’s junk. Xander politely starts punting boxes away as she nears. “People just feel safer admitting it now, since they think the accuracy of her punches solely relies on her not wobbling whenever she stands up straight.”
“How ya feeling, Glitch?” Nova asks in an upbeat tone. “Ready to fly?”
Sona gives only a strained smile before following Jenny up the stairs.
We enter the courtyard to find that Arsen and Theo have claimed a comfortable perch atop the Archangel’s ankle. Jenny is below them, screaming shrilly to remove themselves from her mecha, her threats utterly ineffective as she is faced toward the Windup’s chest rather than its feet, and every other vowel is slurred.
At one point she must actually say something coherent, because Arsen chatters back a sly retort that makes Jen’s fraying focus suddenly snap taut. Her hand is around Arsen’s ankle before he can yelp an apology, and then he’s facedown in the dirt.
Nova shrieks with laughter as Juniper disappears from my side and materializes above Arsen, her growl slashing through the morning air. Jen easily sidesteps her left jab and loops her boot behind Juniper’s ankle, shoving her shoulder forward to send Juniper tumbling to the ground. Jen plants her feet between my fallen crew members’ knees and stares down, squinting.
“Which ones are you again?” she asks.
“Nova,” June chirps.
“Theo Vanguard,” Arsen says smoothly. “Pleasure.”
Jenny abruptly straightens and turns. Nova’s laughter and Xander’s quaking shoulders still as she throws them a death glare.
“We’re good, we’re good!” Nova cries.
Jenny growls and steps over June’s body, advancing. Nova yelps and grips on to my jacket as she nears, but Jen stops before she reaches me, extending a wavering finger past us and back toward the dorm’s entrance.
“I’m not after you,” she growls.
I turn to see that a group of people has slunk into the courtyard after us, and when I tilt my gaze upward, I find an array of faces pressed against each available window. I can’t not recognize every single one: They’re Gearbreakers who I’ve fought alongside countless times, lived with, bickered with, beaten the hells out of in arguments or practices and gotten a sizable collection of bruises and fractures in return. And most of them have begun to tentatively accept Sona, especially after the triple takedown at the Junkyard, the story of her unflinching face-off with a Berserker spread in whispers throughout the Hollows. They’re only here as onlookers, to see if Godolia’s destruction could actually be possible with the combination of Jen’s ludicrous plan, a handful of sleep-deprived renegades, and a rogue Pilot.
But the Gearbreakers near the front serve as the targets for Jenny’s glare. I recognize them in a different light: people who display their crippling cowardice with vivid threats on Sona’s life.
Standing at the center of their mass is Milo. His rifle is slung back casually, barrel rising over his shoulders. His stance is relaxed, but the furrow to his brow is a hard giveaway.
“You wanna go, too, Vanguard?” she asks.
Milo crosses his arms, and in my peripheral vision, Sona straightens the slightest amount, bracing for whatever comes next.
“That Pilot is not getting wound, Jenny,” Milo says gruffly. There is a dangerous weight to the air. Jen ignores it completely, hand on her hip, yawn stretching her jaw.
“This again,” she says. “Boring. Come on, Glitch, let’s get you set up.”
“It will kill all of us, Jenny!” Milo shouts at her back, and the crowd rumbles behind him. “The Hollows will burn if the Bot’s wound!”
“Good,” Jenny calls back. “This whole place needs a Godsdamn face-lift, with you lot milling around.”
A bang rips the air.
A thin line of blood splatters the ground. Warmth spots on my neck.
Jenny somehow catches Sona in her arms as she stumbles, just long enough for me to see Glitch dazedly put one hand up to her temple, which is sticky with red. Realizing she’s alive, Jen promptly shoves her away and moves so quickly that I don’t even register it until the splintering crack of a broken nose bridge splits the air. Then Milo’s blood is glistening over the black material of her right hand.
“You little bitch,” Jenny breathes, and the crowd surges forward. Sona, from the ground, faintly nods her chin in their direction, and with a growl, I turn and send ice screaming against the ground.
“Are you okay?” I rasp to Sona, veins of the cryo gloves blistering blue.
“He missed.”
“That’s not an answer.
”
“It hurts so very much, Eris.”
I roll my eyes. Jenny is batting her way through the crowd, and they let her, because they’re terrified of her, and they’re right to be. She has Milo’s shirt bundled in one fist.
“I think you owe someone here an apology,” she breathes, dropping him on the frostbitten ground. His hands come away flecked with shards of ice.
“I’m not apologizing to that thing,” he seethes, shoulders heaving. I think there are more lines on his face than there were the last time I saw him. More twisted anger. Or was it always there? He always told me I was the angry one, that he liked that about me. I thought it meant we balanced each other out, that his calm was something I needed. But maybe he wasn’t calm, just coiled up.
“What?” Jenny glances back at Sona. “Glitch is fine. You apologize to me. I’m the one about to kick your ass.”
“Do it,” Milo spits. “We’re all about to die, anyway.”
“On a cosmic scale, absolutely.” Jenny looms over him, one foot planted lightly on his fingers. “But your little head can’t wrap itself around that, can you? So let me make it easy for you—we’re not on a cosmic scale, we’re on my scale, my clock, my timeline. You get to die when I say you get to die. The only reason I’m not going to kill you right now is because you truly believe Glitch is about to rain missiles on this entire hellscape, and I’m hoping the fear will make you piss yourself.”
“Eris,” Milo breathes. “This is insanity, and you know it.”
I help Sona up from the ground. “Eat shit, Milo.”
“Anyone else?” Jenny asks the crowd, throwing her hands wide, provoking a startled shuffling of feet, even though she doesn’t have her gloves on. “No? Then can you all lighten up and let me end this war? Gods…”
She turns and grasps Sona’s chin, eyeing the bullet graze. I watch warily as the crowd thins, some heading back into the dorms, others making their way into the forest, presumably to get out of the way for when Glitch goes to kill them all in a few minutes. Scared or not, Jenny’s word means a lot around here, or at least her threats do. Most would probably rather die quick and easy by the missiles than however Starbreach personally decides to end them.
“You were paying attention,” Jenny murmurs. “Just a graze. Get some cobwebs from that tree root, Eris. Now eat them. Just kidding, Gods, is everyone going to be so stiff today? Give them here.”
She puts the cobwebs over the graze, patting over them lightly with her fingertip. Sona glances at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You look pale,” she says.
Numbly, I touch the blood spots on my neck and smear them onto her jacket sleeve. “Please shut up.”
“Put the entrance near the neck,” Jenny says as we ascend onto the Archangel, the absence of a fight allowing her words to slur again. She waves her fingers at the mecha’s skin. “Rest of the innards look like shit. Functional yes, but…” She trails off for a moment, forgetting herself. We reach a circular hatch set at the base of the neck, provided by the dead Argus, and she gestures weakly again. “Yes … looks like shit. Didn’t want anyone else to see it. In you go.”
“You aren’t coming?” I ask.
“You think you are?”
I cross my arms. “Of course.”
She mirrors me. “Why? She can damn well handle the cords and whatnot by herself.”
“I know she can. What’s the problem with me tagging along?”
A line forms between her brows as she fumbles for her thoughts, which I’m guessing have been stripped to mere filaments by her continuous refusal to sleep. She nods slowly, then triumphantly, plucking one out.
“If it ends up exploding, then my precious cryo gloves will be disintegrated.”
I roll my eyes, vaguely aware of Sona stifling a dark laugh. “Gods, Jen, if it explodes, then the entirety of the Hollows will be disintegrated as well.”
She looks at me blankly.
“Meaning that your precious gloves will get destroyed either way, so I might as well go.”
“Ah, I got it,” she murmurs, seeming like she doesn’t quite get it. “Well, then … have fun, Glitch and little bastard. And if the thing flies, would you kindly mind resting my mecha in the Junkyard after the run? I don’t need any other Gearbreakers rubbing their grubby hands all over it and breaking it before Heavensday. Especially your ex.”
Jenny teeters toward the shoulder, falls off, and lands hard on the wing. She takes a few more wobbling steps and disappears over that edge, too, and I stare for a minute until she appears in view again, stalking away on solid ground with a miraculously unbroken skull.
“Is she going to be all right?” Sona asks.
“Yeah. Sure. If she can see straight long enough to get out of the way,” I murmur, watching her ponytail bob as she goes. “Ready, then?”
Sona looks into the void and nods. The drop is about seven feet, and she lands steadily and shifts to allow me room. I wrap my fingers over the rim of the drop and slip inside, transferring my grip to the handle of the hatch as I lower myself, my weight allowing it to close. I land silently and in darkness. Sona’s hand brushes against my shoulder, and without another word, we walk into the Archangel’s head.
Since the Windup is laid flat, the glass mat takes up the wall behind us, while the one we face will become the ceiling once the mecha is upright. The connector cords trickle down from their holdings, copper nubs snaking across the floor. Which is the back of the Windup’s head. Sona turns in a slow circle, looking around the room, then stops to stare up through the Archangel’s eyes.
“I believe I am a bit disoriented,” she murmurs.
I find that funny. She’s used to seeing Windups upright. I’m more accustomed to them being anything but. I tap my boot against the floor.
“Lie down here,” I instruct.
She obeys silently. I kneel and gather the left and right cords into neat bunches and place them beside her. I give a slight nod, and she pulls back her sleeves. I think she tries to suffocate the way her fingers hesitate over her tattoos before I can notice, popping open the right forearm panel swiftly, but a lump in my throat still bursts to life.
One by one, Sona attaches the cords, a small jolt rippling through her at each new addition. Before she reaches for the last one, her hand travels up to gently tug away the eye patch, revealing a closed lid with a perfect red circle glowing beneath the skin. It shifts toward me, mirroring her other iris, and she places the patch in my hands.
“Hold on to this for me, all right?” she whispers.
I close my fingers around it and smile wryly. “Ready to fly, Glitch?”
“A kiss would help my motivation.”
“What about the fact that Jen’s going to break in here in about five seconds if we don’t get a move on?”
A sour look that makes me laugh crosses her face, and she considers it enough payment for her fingers to drift toward the last socket, clicking the cord into place.
My smile fractures.
Both of Sona’s eyes spring wide open, and despite myself, despite her, I feel my blood cool. She lifts one of her hands, twisting her fingers in the air; does the same with the other. The red light spilling in from the Windup’s eyes fragments as the Archangels’ talons appear above, coiling and uncoiling in flawless correspondence to her movements.
Keeping her head lolled back, Sona rises to her feet, one palm flipping open. I clasp it as she slowly brings her face level, causing the room around us to tilt and the ground to angle. I lead her toward the glass wall as it shifts to become the floor, murmuring for her to step when the angle becomes steep. The Archangel shudders as she obliges, and the glass floor brightens beneath our weight. The blue light cascades over her features, wringing shadows from her eyelashes. I release her hand and step off the mat. Her fingers drop to her side.
Sona extends her neck a bit and rolls her shoulders. A small line appears between her brows, and she slowly repeats the process. Then she brings her ha
nd around, tracing lightly down the ridge of her left shoulder blade as far as she can reach, a sigh escaping her.
“This…,” she murmurs. “This is strange.”
“The wings?”
“Wings … yes.”
I swallow hard as she tucks her shoulders back once more, adopting a proud stance. The armored wing tips could easily take out one of the Hollows’ buildings. So could a step. Or a thought. The destruction is too effortless.
“Are you okay?” I manage. The words sound forced, trembling with uncertainty.
“Oh yes, I am perfectly all right, Frostbringer.” Sona sighs. “In fact, I am feeling quite like myself again.”
I go completely still. I don’t pull my gaze from the smile settled against her features. My blood is frozen, threatening to crack.
But then Sona laughs, a bright, glittering sound that fills the space and overpowers the hum of electricity running through the Archangel wrapped around us.
“You should see the look on your face, Eris,” she gasps.
I struggle for breath. “You can’t see my face!”
“But I can feel it singeing my cheek. Are you really that terrified of me?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
I mean it to sound like a joke, though I’m sure it isn’t, but Sona’s voice drops to a sudden hush.
“I am a bit afraid of you as well right now. If that makes you feel any safer.”
Do I feel safer? Do I dare? I put those tattoos across her skin, marking her as one of our own. One of us. They don’t just disappear because the flesh is peeled back. Even beneath the clash of the red light pouring from the Archangel’s eyes and the glow of the floor, the ink still thrives.
“I’m not scared of you,” I say, lying my ass off.
“Could you be?” she asks.
The words take a moment to settle, but then they hit me like a bat to the chest. Does she know what I’m thinking, that of course I’m scared of her, but the fear of seeing her in this form pales in comparison to the fear of seeing her every single day—the jump in my ribs when she smiles, the hook in my stomach when she moves closer. Could you be? Is she scared of me, too?
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