One moment, he was watching the light fill the ark until only the shadow of Jax remained, and the next he was lying on his back a few feet from where he’d been standing, Siege covering him with her body. The skysailer Ana, Talle, and Elara were in had been pushed back against one of the bone-white pillars, and there it sat smoking. His ears rang, his head spinning.
“C-Captain?” he whispered.
She slowly unfurled herself from over him, bits of ivy and ancient ark sloughing off her back. She sat beside him, bleeding from her hairline. Her hair simmered a soft, hesitant blue. “Are you okay?”
He nodded.
And realized, quite suddenly, that the roar of the astrolabe’s rings was gone. The air was thick with silence.
The ark was still there, standing, despite whatever happened.
That could only mean—
“Jax,” he gasped, coughing as he inhaled the dust lingering in the air and scurried to his feet.
The shock wave had knocked the vines off the ribs of the ark, and the evening light poured in like fire. Whatever was left of the interior had crumbled, and the last of the creature’s skin, hanging on to the bones, fluttered down like pebble-size metallic snowflakes. One landed on his shoulder, but he brushed the scale off. The rings of the astrolabe had come off their rotation and sat on their sides on the floor, encircling the crystal, which was now clear all the way through—like glass.
“Jax?” he called, coughing against the ancient dust, as he climbed over the rings and onto the center dais. Dirt and dust stuck to the tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if he was sobbing or calling his name. “Jax?—”
As the dust settled, he saw him.
The Solani prince was standing, staring down at the palm of his hand, surprise and confusion lacing across his silver eyebrows. His hair cascaded down his shoulders to his lower back, glimmering like spun steel in the sunlight. There was a new color in his cheeks, and the bruises across his arms and under his eyes seemed to dull by the moment.
He was alive, and Koren Vey was gone.
His hands went to the life support on his chest. Robb tried to stop him—but Jax shut it off before he could say a word. The disk went dark, needles coming undone from his chest, and it clattered onto the ground.
Jax took a deep breath.
Then another.
There was an odd light in the ancient ark that didn’t come from the sunlight streaming in overhead, and it seemed to get brighter with each breath Jax took. At first, Robb thought it was a trick of his eyes, but as he came closer, the light didn’t fade. It was the same soft shimmer from the crystal, but now—now it was coming from . . .
“You’re . . . glowing,” Robb whispered, quite unable to say anything else. And he was. Robb blinked the tears out of his eyes just to make sure, because it looked like a million stars shimmered, dim, just underneath Jax’s skin.
Startled, the C’zar turned to face him, his violet eyes impossibly wide. “Ma’alor?”
“Y-yes?” He came up to him, pressing his metal hand against Jax’s cheek. He was alive. He was okay, and Robb had yet to stop crying.
“I think you should catch me.”
“What—why? Goddess—Jax!”
The Solani’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he dropped like a sack of lead, but Robb caught him before he hit the floor.
Emperor
He scoured the rare book selection in the palace’s library, combing through the contents of numerous dissertations and nonfiction accounts of the Goddess’s reign. He even flipped through one of the first translations of The Cantos of Light from the Old Language, but there was nothing he didn’t already know.
He licked his thumb, his tongue dry, and it surprised him for a moment before he remembered that of course it was. He did not have saliva. His tongue was merely . . . there. Which, if he thought too hard on that, was a little odd—and he flipped through an older tome, the leather dry and brittle in his hand. It was a novel detailing accounts of the Great Dark’s descent into the Iron Kingdom. It came in the form of a Solani, because it adapted to whatever galaxy it absorbed, like how it looked human now. The Great Dark—Mellifare—came to absorb the light in the kingdom, but the wording was strange.
There were some words in the Old Language—the language the Solani brought with them—that really had no common tongue equivalent. The translation read light, but that word . . .
He tapped his finger on the ink-smeared page.
That word—andor—was not light in the old tongue.
Andor.
Souls.
The glitch festering in the back of his head sparked with a pop, and he winced. His sight pixelated, and suddenly he was no longer in the library but in a cold laboratory with a screen spread across the wall, reading off vitals and data usage and RAM. A strange contraption sat on his chest, heavy and cold, pulsing a strange white light.
“Father, what are you doing?” a voice—his?—asked, and pulled at the straps that tied him to the operating table, but he was too weak, and his bones hurt—everything hurt. From the inside out, like he was rotting to the core. An inky blackness crawled up his skin like vines, eating away at him. The Plague.
“It will be pleasant, Dmitri,” his father had said, shushing him. “You’ll barely feel a thing. I can save you. I will save you.”
“I don’t— Father, this isn’t—” This isn’t right, this isn’t what I wanted, he wanted to say, but he was breathless just from speaking. His heart gave a terrible lurch in his chest.
The light on the contraption flickered, and then he noticed it—the small cube placed in the center, where the light came from. He took another shuddering breath. Black dots ate at the edges of his vision. He felt strange and distant, like his body was there but he was slowly, slowly not.
“I want to save you,” his father said, and his voice broke with it, and stroked his hair like he had when he was little. But there was a strange sort of desperation in his marbled eyes. “I’ve lost everything—I can’t lose you, too. She said I wouldn’t lose you.”
Who?
But he remembered then—the girl with flaxen hair who had come up to him in the Plague hospital, asking what he would do for a cure, for life. Anything, he had said, and all she wanted was a heart.
Her heart.
The heavy piece of tech on his chest flashed again, and he tried to suck in a painful, burning breath, but he—he—he couldn’t—
The book in his hands clattered to the ground, and it jolted him from the memory. He was . . . he had been . . .
“Your Excellence,” the steward said, startling him. He whirled around to the short and paunchy man, fisting his hands so the man would not see them shaking.
“What—oh, it is you.”
“Yes, Your Excellence. I thought you would like to know that the shrine in Zenteli was set ablaze by Metals, but the guards there caught it early, and it suffered only minor damages, thankfully.”
“Was anyone injured?” he asked.
The steward looked at him in surprise. He had never asked anything like that. He was still shaken from that glitch—that was what it was. “Um—not that we know of, Your Excellence,” said the man. “It seemed there were a few citizens praying who managed to get the fire under control, but there is again no trace of the arsonist.” And then he fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot. “Forgive me if this is out of place, but do you really believe rogue Metals are behind it—”
“Are you questioning me?”
“No! No, sir, no, Your Excellence. I would never.”
You just did, he wanted to point out, but instead he picked up the book he had dropped and returned it to its spot on the shelf. “Send a correspondence to Zenteli, that if they need any assistance—”
“Have I come at the wrong time?” the oily voice of Erik Valerio interrupted as he approached them, his hands behind his back. He leered down at the steward, who shrank into his collar, bowed, and took his leave. After the servant had gone, he laz
ily turned his gaze back to him. “I hope you haven’t waited long.”
Twenty-three minutes, forty-two seconds, and fifteen— He fixed his face into an impassive look. “Not at all.”
Erik Valerio inclined his head. He was dressed to be impressive—in a sleek black evening coat with geometrical designs across the cuffs, and a bloodred ascot at his throat. His hair was slicked back, but it curled around his ears, like his younger brother’s did, though Erik’s was darker and his eyes were a sharper shade of blue. He had tried to mimic them for months, but while his looked glassy and cold, Erik’s were soulless. It was harder to mimic being an outright bastard than he thought.
“What pleasure do you bring to me today?” he asked Erik. “Should I genuflect to the man who saved my life?”
“Oh no.” Erik dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. His smile turned wolfish. “Although I do come bearing good news! I’ve—”
“You have canceled that party of yours?” he interjected.
Annoyance crossed his face. “No, of course not. I live for parties, and Astoria is beautiful. I’ve found the Empress. She’s hiding in Zenteli—where a shrine just burned, if I heard your steward correctly.”
“It was saved,” he amended. His anger was irrational, and now even his favorite room was soiled with the stench of Erik Valerio. He turned out of the aisle and left the library.
As he shouldered open the door, he called to Erik, “And as you probably also heard, Zenteli is not in our jurisdiction. We would have to obtain permission from the C’zar to visit.”
Erik scoffed, following him out the door and into the long and marbled hallway. “From the rumors I’m hearing? The C’zar’s dead—”
“Then take it up with their Elder Court.”
The Ironblood quickly stepped in front of him and stopped, blocking him from leaving. “Or we can take care of this ourselves. Kill her.”
He raised a single eyebrow.
“If the Empress returns, I doubt you will keep your throne, and she deserves it even less than you.”
“Bold, Sir Erik.”
“She was raised by outlaws,” Erik added.
“And you think you deserve the throne?” he snapped back, even as the Great Dark sang in his head to play along. He could not stomach playing with Erik Valerio any longer. “You can take up finding her on Zenteli with their Elder Court—”
As he tried to leave, Erik grabbed him firmly by the arm. His voice was low and livid. “If she comes back, then you won’t be in control anymore. You know as well as I do that this kingdom will rally around her—they follow you only because they think she’s dead. But when the kingdom finds out that you lied to them, Your Excellence? That your Messiers tried to have her killed?”
He held back a retort—the Messiers were not his—they had not been since that bot had uploaded the strange virus into him. He could barely command a simple door lock at the moment. It was like there was this cold shard inside him every time he tried, this errant line of code that kept pulling him back, yelling—screaming.
It was a problem he did not like.
Erik leaned in close, the blue of his eyes almost glowing against the shadow of his brow. He was meticulously put together, with pruned eyebrows and a clean-shaven face. The vines buzzed into the sides of his head were particularly sharp today, his hair atop expertly styled.
“You understand the great risk she poses if she is still alive,” said Erik in a soft growl, leaning back as a Messier made its rounds down the hall.
He would have thought it was Mellifare spying, but he knew she had taken over a Messier on Cerces, ransacking another ruin. She rarely used the crown anymore, and simply tore through the iron-locked doors with vicious strength.
He tried to reach out—take control of the Messier down the hall—but the cold spike of code drove into his head again, and he winced, snapping him back into his body.
The Messier moved on without so much as a pause.
When it was gone, Erik curled his fingers tighter into his arm, pinching his skin. “You have full authority in this Goddess-damned kingdom, Your Excellence. Why don’t you use it?”
He jerked his arm out of the Ironblood’s grip and walked around him. “That is true. But I would rather plot murder with a pile of dirt.”
With a snarl, Erik spun around and shouted, “You’re the Emperor! Do something!”
Ignore him, he told himself, his fingernails biting into his palms. Ignore the bastard.
“Or are you scared? Scared that I’m right? That if she comes back, you won’t be in control. Or maybe you don’t care because—”
Goddess, it would just feel so good to rip that Ironblood’s head from his neck.
“—someone controls you!”
The words made him stop. Because the Great Dark was scratching, hissing at the back of his head. A feeling he had only just recently come to hate. How it sang and sang over every thought he made.
And oh that damned voice underneath, where the glitch festered and someone shouted—screaming, raging—
He could not get the dead C’zar’s face out of his head, or the girl’s golden eyes, or the memories whispering, prodding—memories that were not, could not, be his—
He turned back to the elder Valerio, trying to control the resentment in his words. “Tell me, sir, who do you think controls me?”
Erik took one look at him and retreated a step. “I—I didn’t mean—”
“Who controls me?” he repeated, his voice rising, but he did not let Lord Valerio reply before he went on, “You are an Ironblood by birthright and so you are bred and taught to fill a role. Like the HIVE, you are given orders, and you are told to behave with a certain decorum. You are—what is a good word—brainwashed? Conditioned? Why do you bow to me if you think I am not deserving of this crown? Because you are told you should. Why do you ask my permission? Because that is how you are instructed.” He took another step toward the man, and his words were like venom. “It is because I control you.”
Lord Valerio’s blue eyes turned sharp. He could see the fire in them, as deep and raging as an inferno. Good. He liked hatred. It was something he could quantify. “I don’t take orders like some mindless Metal scum.”
Metal scum.
He had never wanted to kill someone more in his life. Electricity crackled across his knuckles.
Above them, the lanterns swirled around like the eye of a hurricane, their orange lights flaring so brightly their bulbs began to whine, fissures cracking across the glass.
“What the . . .” Erik whispered, and slowly sank his gaze back to him. “What are you?”
Not who.
Because he was not a person. He was a tool. A component. A part.
He took a step toward the human, so close he could smell the sweat and fear on his skin, and before he could stop himself, the carefully crafted Valerio blue of his eyes flickered a monstrous red. He whispered, to answer his question, “I am your Emperor.”
Erik took another step back, then another—and then he turned on his heels and fled out of sight. The swirling lanterns above him burst. Shards of glass rained down, plinking against the marble floor. Well, it looked like he had just uninvited himself to Erik’s party.
He began to fix his cuffs when heard a gasp, short and fearful, and turned to the young woman who hid in a doorway. But when he looked her way, she left in a flash of mourning dress and strawberry-blond hair.
Wynn Wysteria.
He had been careless.
He closed his eyes, trying to wrestle them back to blue. He should not have scared Erik Valerio. Mindless Metal scum, that festering flesh sack had called him.
It made him vibrate with anger, fresh against that terrible memory from the library, rubbing him raw and hollow. Another Messier came down the hallway with that familiar vacant look in its blue eyes. Mindless.
He quickly turned toward the nearest room, reaching out for the keylock, and with a flick of his wrist opened the door, locking it
behind him so no one else could come inside.
And in the silence his head throbbed, and the voice in the glitch screamed and screamed, and the Great Dark sang its song, and the noise was so loud he could hear nothing else.
The curtains across the room shifted in the evening breeze from the open window.
There was a girl standing there, her gown the color of opals and her skin an earthy bronze. She turned to him, her golden eyes catching the afternoon light—
Honeysuckles spilling through vines, her eyes wide and hopeful, leaning toward him, pressing her soft lips on his metal mouth . . .
I will always come back for you, I promise on iron and—
He blinked, and she was gone, and the wind whispered through the curtains.
III
Starlit
Ana
The Solgard descended from the watchtowers. Their silvery skysailers reflected the evening light off their hulls and made them look like comets streaking toward them. The dust had barely settled, and they hadn’t caught their breaths.
“Take Elara and hide!” Siege ordered, her hair as orange as the undersides of the Solgard’s ships.
Ana didn’t really understand. “But what about you and Talle and Robb and—”
“The girl’s an exile. If she’s caught, they’ll never let her leave.”
“But—”
“Siege is right,” Robb agreed. Jax was slumped against him, unconscious. “We’ll be fine. You’ll think of something.”
“We could all hide. Scatter and—”
“Ana.” There was an unspoken warning in Siege’s voice.
Ana cursed under her breath, looping Elara’s arm over her shoulder. The girl was still unconscious, her head lolling to one side, silver hair draped into her slack face. Ana barely had enough time to haul her underneath a waterfall of ivy hung from one of the ark’s tall rib-like bones before the fleet of Solgard ships crested over the ark and landed in the green clearing. The guards pried Jax, unconscious, away from Robb, and arrested them. Within moments, her family was gone, taken back up to Zenteli.
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