Ana quietly shimmied across the arms. Her grip was sweaty, and the wax was slippery. The only sound she could hear was her hammering heart, and she hoped it wasn’t as loud as she feared—
Her hand knocked over a candle.
It toppled before she could catch it and clattered on the ground.
The Great Dark turned her gaze up toward the statue—
When a bolt of lightning caught Mellifare on the side of the face, and she went stumbling into the pews.
Di dropped from one of the windows accessed by the outside scaffolding. He had a sword wound torn through his chest, too close to where his memory core should be, and it sparked even in the shadow of the shrine. He pulled himself up to his full height, even though it looked like it pained him. “Looking for someone?”
“You,” Mellifare seethed, righting herself. She clutched the side of her face, where the skin had blackened and cracked. “Why do you stop me? You are on my side. You are with me.”
“I am not with you, Mellifare. I was never with you willingly.”
“Lies—I was in your head. I remember.”
Di shifted uncomfortably.
“You promised me the heart, Dmitri.”
“I am sorry mine was not enough,” he replied—and winced. He must have heard the song.
Or realized how bad that pickup line was.
Ana curled her fingers into the soft wax underneath her. She had to keep going.
Don’t stop, she coached herself, and began to creep forward again, her heart thundering like funeral drums in her ears. She had to go quietly, and quickly, while Di kept Mellifare occupied.
“And what did Viera promise when you turned her? Or was she dead before you made her a monster?”
“A monster? I gave you freedom.”
“You took away who I was!” he snarled.
Mellifare laughed. “I made you better. Now where is my heart, brother?”
“I am not your brother.”
Below her, Mellifare circled Di like a carrion bird did to a corpse. “You will tell me. You do not have a choice.”
Then she flicked her hand. A bolt of light jumped out of her fingers and shot toward Di. He caught it in his hand and shot it back. It whirled over Mellifare’s shoulder and slammed into the intricate stone molding above the door. A piece of marble cracked off and shattered on the ground. Mellifare launched herself at Di, arcs of lightning striking the pillars and scorched stone walls, leaving burned flower markings in their wake.
Goddess’s spark, Ana cursed, and the hair on her arms stood on end. She doubled her pace to the shoulder of the Goddess and down the side of the statue. An arc of lightning shot up into the rafters, and Di went flying back into the benches, snapping them in half like a twig. She had to end this—fast. She jumped down the last few feet onto the pedestal.
“STOP!” Ana cried.
In the ruins of crushed benches, Di struggled to his feet, slipping on a piece of splintered wood. His moonlit eyes flickered, the wound in his chest sizzling. He was overheating again, and Mellifare looked barely winded as she jerked her gaze up to Ana, a smile curving across her lips.
Ana held up the box. “I—I have it. I’ll give it to you. Just let us go.”
The Great Dark clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth and outstretched her hand to Di again. “Oh no,” she purred as he tried to stumble away, and a blast pinned him up against the pillar. He cried out in pain. “You will hand it to me, and perhaps I will spare him.”
“No,” Di forced out. “Ana—d-do not.” He pushed himself off the pillar, but it was clear he needed it to stand. His fingertips were blackened, burned up to his first knuckles. She resisted the urge to run to him, to make sure he was okay, to tell him to destroy the heart so Mellifare could never get it—
But Mellifare wasn’t going to let her do that, so she had to improvise.
She walked up to the Great Dark, even though with every step her skin crawled at the nearness, and offered out the box. “I think this is yours.”
The Great Dark looked down at the lockbox for a moment, as if not quite certain it was hers. Then the monster reached with trembling fingers and gently took the box. Ana retreated back to Di and quickly pulled his arm over her shoulder. The wound in his chest looked worse up close, a slice right through the center of it.
“Why did you do that?” he asked, his voice scratchy, like nails across metal. It reminded her of the voice he’d had in his old body. “Why did you give it to her?”
“Trust me, okay?” She subtly took his other hand and pressed it against her pocket. To the cube shape there. The heart. “Di—overload the memory core in the box.”
“The what?”
“I swapped them—your old one is in the box.” She led him, stumbling, toward the back exit, and he nodded and twisted his hand back toward the box. His fingers shook. Mellifare broke open the lockbox with her bare hands. At first there was delight as she stared into the box, but then it quickly dropped to rage—
She grabbed the memory core inside.
“What is this? Whose is—”
Di’s fingertips sparked.
The memory core exploded in her grip, swirling outward in a bloom. It rattled the rafters and filled the shrine with smoke. The shock wave swept up the walls, snuffed out all the candles, and plunged the Iron Shrine into darkness. She hauled Di to the side exit where they had escaped once before—in pursuit of Robb and the coordinates to the Tsarina—and pushed on the door.
Robb
Viera attacked with a sweep of her lightsword.
Lenda deflected with the butt of her pistol and rolled away from her. Robb watched helplessly, his hand gravitating toward the lightsword at his hip. Lenda had terrible odds, but she was keeping Viera occupied. Somehow.
They needed to get inside and help Ana. The longer she was trapped in there with Mellifare, the less likely he’d see Ana again alive. He remembered facing Mellifare the last time in the shrine in the Iron Palace. It had been terrifying, and back then he hadn’t known that she was the Great Dark. It was because of him Viera was dead in the first place. She had faced off against Mellifare in that shrine and given him time to flee after Ana.
And now Viera was dead, and Ana was fighting Mellifare alone.
He had to do something—
Jax stilled his hand reaching for the hilt of his sword and shook his head. Robb ground his teeth, feeling more helpless by the moment. “Maybe we can overpower Viera together, and then sneak in through the side entrance—”
“No can do, kiddo—that entrace was melted shut,” a gruff voice said behind them. Everyone jumped in surprise and spun back to it. A tall and burly shadow towered over them, with curly peppery-gray hair and a handlebar mustache.
Robb recognized the man with a start.
“Mokuba! Finally!” he cried, pulling the burly man into a quick hug. Over Mokuba’s shoulder, he noticed other people behind him—Red Dawn mercenaries and the people from the sanctuary on Nevaeh. “Did Xu and Elara—?”
“Take destiny into their own hands when the comms went down and rally the reinforcements? Why yes, Smolder, we are competent,” interjected Elara as she melted out of the shadows, Xu beside her. “Though we kinda ran into some Messiers.” She pointed her glowing boomerang behind her, and to his horror Messiers began to come into focus at the end of the street, patiently stalking toward them. “They’re heading this way. There’s a lot of them.”
“They’re coming from the other streets, too,” Siege added grimly, nudging her chin across the square. A handful of Messiers in pressed blue uniforms came into the square. They advanced on the shrine—and on Viera and Lenda.
“Shit,” Robb cursed. “Can’t one thing be easy, just one?”
“Ma’alor, when has anything been easy?” Jax replied tiredly.
Xu assessed the situation. “I believe our best option is to try the front door. But they will attack if we make our move.”
Siege forced herself to her feet.
Her hair burned a deep, bloody red. She took out her Metroid and checked her bullets. “Aye,” she said, and the look on her face was grim. “And if we go over in our skysailers, we’ll be shot out of the sky. Front door’s the only way.”
Talle gave a start. “You’re hurt, Sunshine! We need to trust Ana.”
“But I’m not dead yet.”
“Even if we tried, there’s twenty—maybe thirty Messiers already in the square,” Jax added, but the captain wasn’t taking their excuses.
“I’ll get myself there, with or without your help.”
Robb gave Jax a hesitant look, and then he glanced back at Elara and the rebels from the santuary, the last of the rogue Metals who had held out this long, and a few crewmembers from Siege’s other fleetships. His family’s militiamen were helping with the disaster of Astoria, evacuating all nearby buildings and making sure everyone in the gardens got out safely, while the Wysteria militia were trying to keep order in the docks above after Mellifare had cut off all incoming traffic. They weren’t going to get any more reinforcements.
This was it.
The odds were getting slim. Robb really did hate his luck, especially now. He remembered back to the Wicked Luck game with that cheating bastard. Mellifare had a card up her sleeve, he had a feeling, but doing nothing was worse than waiting to see what trump card she’d play.
“Okay, Captain,” he told Siege, voicing the consensus of the group, “we’ll get you to the door. Just be ready to knock.”
In reply, the captain pulled back the hammer of her Metroid. “They’ll hear me.”
Di
The exit door was melted shut.
A critical warning blinked in the back of his head, and his chest burned like someone had poured lava onto his ribs. The fight with Mellifare had made him expend so much of his energy. Another stunt like that—even as much as feeding energy into anything—would overload his hardware.
It would kill him.
Mellifare gave a feral cry, and he heard her prowling toward them in the darkness, pushing the pews out of the way as if they were made of paper. “I know you have the heart. I will find you!”
He and Ana ducked behind one of the pillars, and they pressed against each other in the dark. Without the candles, they could barely see anything—only the hint of smoke rising from the wicks, and the outline of the windows high above them, shedding light from the misty city outside. There were footsteps to their left, but were they just echoing from the right?
He could not tell.
“Ana,” he said softly, “you need to get out of here.”
“Not without you.”
“I will distract her. What matters now is the heart.”
She gave a start. “Are you sure?”
“I will be fine,” he replied, but he could feel his eyes flicker again.
“No,” Ana replied, and his face hardened. “I won’t. I won’t make you do that.”
“I am asking—”
His chest sparked again, and he gave a groan, doubling over. Warning flared in his head. CRITICAL MALFUNCTION, it read. He pressed his hand against the wound, his eyesight glitching.
Distantly, he heard Ana calling his name, and then it was—
“Di, look! It’s your name!” Nicholii laughed, flourishing his hand at the ancient stone wall. They were in the ruins near the Academy, waiting for Mercer to fix their skysailer. It had broken just outside the ruins, and no matter how many times he kicked at it, the damned thing just would not start. Nicholii had found a piece of charcoal in the glove compartment of the sailer and got to work alleviating his boredom.
Di was not amused. “Could you stop desecrating the ruins?” he asked, looking up from his holo-pad in annoynace. “You’re the prince, for Goddess’s sake.”
Nicholii gave him a pointed look and, after DI, added IS A SPOILSPORT on the wall, and both Mercer and Selena Valerio fell back in peals of laughter. “Oh, whoops, now you’re immortalized as a dick!”
Di rolled his eyes and glanced back at Mercer. “Honestly, can’t you just call Cynthia and ask her to come get us?”
“And incur her wrath?” Mercer scoffed, wiping the oil from the skysailer’s engines off his hands and onto his trousers. “The ruins have been off-limits since the Plague. Cynth and I might be betrothed, but she would kill me if she knew I went out here.”
“No, she wouldn’t.”
“No, no, she would,” Nicholii agreed. “She’s terrifying.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Mercer chided. He came over beside Nicholii, took the piece of charcoal out of Nic’s hand, and scratched out the NICH in Nicholii and put DICK. He gave his friend a shit-eating grin and handed him back the charcoal. “Why don’t you call your father?”
“Pff! And have the royal guard scolding me for the rest of my life? I think not.”
“Cynthia’s our best option,” Di added.
The memory was like a bright flare in his head—Nicholii tossing the piece of charcoal to him, and Mercer rolling up his sleeves with his greasy fingers, and Selena sunbathing on a thousand-year-fallen pillar, and—
“Where’s Marigold?” Di asked, glancing around the ruins.
Selena pointed deeper into the shrine. “She went exploring—and Mercer, I think everyone’s right. Cynthia’s our best bet.”
“I refuse to . . .” Mercer went on a rant about why Cynthia would be the worst person to call to come fetch them, but Di tuned him out as he went to go look for Marigold. He wandered deeper into the shrine, into a circular back room with a dry fountain in the middle. There were tiles on the walls, murals depicting the plight of the Goddess and her age-old battle with the Great Dark, faded and crumbling with time. It was a marvel that it was still here at all.
He found Marigold on the far side of the circular room, standing in front of an enormous iron door. The lock was so intricate, it curved in and out of itself up the flat surface of the door, and he imagined it would turn like a great machine work—cogs interlocking with each other and teeth turning. It looked a little like a map of the Iron Kingdom.
Marigold traced the circular lock where some sort of round and jagged key went. She did not hear him until he accidentally kicked a fallen tile, and she glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes focused.
“Oh—Di. I didn’t hear you.”
“Evidently.” He came up beside her, studying the door. “What is this?”
Mari turned her gaze back to the circular shape where a key went and shook her head. “I don’t know, but I feel . . . like I know this place.” A laugh bubbled up from her throat. “Isn’t that silly?”
“Perhaps in another life?” he asked.
She laughed in earnest this time. “Perhaps,” she agreed, and turned her gaze back to the door. “I just feel . . . peaceful here. Like someday it’ll bring me good things. And I’ll be happy.” She surprised herself by wiping a tear from her eye. “Goddess, I swear I’m not crying!”
In reply, Di dug a kerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Your eyeliner didn’t even smudge,” he replied in good humor, and realized that Selena was calling them back to the front of the shrine.
“Hey, Di?” Mari asked, but her voice sounded different. It sounded like—“Di!”
Ana grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around the other side of the statue, as a bolt of lightning arced through the darkness. She grabbed him by the side of the face and made him look at her, the dim light falling softly along her scars. “Di—can you hear me?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” he lied, dazed, and pressed his hand harder against his chest. The blade had cut into his memory core. It was malfunctioning. He needed to keep himself together. Ana slid closer to him, and in the quiet he could hear her frightened breathing.
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“We can’t give her the heart, either,” he replied.
Ana paused for a moment and then said, “Can yo
u—could you free them? I mean—you can do everything else she can, right? Can’t you—can’t you go into her and disassemble the HIVE?”
The taste of the memory had unbalanced him, half of him still in that sun-drenched memory, and he shook his head. “I do not know.”
“Do you think you could try?”
“I do not know.” He tried to sound patient, but he was not patient anymore. He wanted to end this—to fix the mistakes he had begun. Perhaps if he had enough energy, he could force his way into her mind—but what if he tried and the HIVE consumed him again? What if it made him turn on her?
In the darkness, he felt Mellifare’s anger roll off her in waves. She was getting closer.
“You know that captain of yours? She begged for her life, you know. Outside. Before I killed her.”
He heard Ana suck in a breath, and he found her hand and curled his fingers through hers. He squeezed. She is lying, he wanted to tell her. Siege does not die so easily.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed as electricity surged around Mellifare’s footfalls, like drops of water in a calm pond. The shadow lunged. Di grabbed Ana by the hand and pulled her out from behind the pillar and down the middle of the aisle. She stumbled on a censer that had been dropped in the abbesses’ mad dash out of the shrine.
“She begged me to spare your life”—Mellifare’s voice was so close, how was it so close?—“just before I killed her.”
Ana let go of his hand before he could tell her to duck or dodge, felt for the censer on the ground, and swung it by the chain. It collided with Mellifare and knocked her sideways. Her footsteps stumbled like a pebble tripping across a pond.
“Siege would never beg,” Ana snarled into the darkness. “She demands.”
“Oh yes, darling, I demanded so much from you.”
A shudder crept down his spine. It was Siege’s voice, and not Mellifare’s, the honeyed dip and swing of her accent. He felt Ana tremble beside him.
“It is not real,” he told her, trying to convince himself.
“I died,” the Great Dark went on in Siege’s voice. “You let me die, darling. You disappointed me.”
Soul of Stars Page 27
