Page 143 of Under the Iron Sky

The human ended the soldier in front of her with a flick of her wrist. She whipped around, hand raised to drag pools of blood off the floor and morph them into six crimson arrows, just as Theron turned his rifle on her.

Ikarus gathered his magic, the ground around the human’s feet beginning to flicker with the iridescent red of a shield.

But then nothing happened.

Theron’s expression was grim stone, but Ikarus heard him inhale sharply when he beheld the human’s face, the blood in her hair and on her hands. Ikarus saw the second he realized she had magic. Saw the moment his heart cracked.

Theron stared at her, then the bodies that lay around her. “What have they done to you?” His voice was hoarse and strained.

The human’s blank expression flickered. She twisted her hand, and the blood arrows hovering at her side turned until they were in perfect line with the exposed skin above Theron’s armor. One curl of her finger, and they’d spear right into his throat.

Her arms were shaking. She was still in there, no doubt trying to claw her way to the surface and stop this from happening.

Theron stared at her hand. He hadn’t lowered his gun, but his finger was no longer on the trigger. He had a clear shot but he wasn’t taking it.

“Raya,” Theron pleaded. The word was a snarl despite the pain so evident on his face. His chest was heaving, as though it was taking every bit of will to keep the gun aimed at the enemy wearing his friend’s face. “We miss you. Twiigs misses you. Whatever they’ve done to you, we can fix it. Just stop this and come home.”

The metal lynx stepped beside him, its large ears pinned back, yowling softly like it was trying to say the same thing.

The human shattered. She screamed, an ear-piercing screech that sliced right through each plate of Ikarus’s armor.

She cut her arm to the left, sending those arrows into the wall beside Theron’s head. “Kill me!” she screamed, so loudly it was a miracle she didn’t shred her vocal cords.

Theron’s expression crumbled. “What?”

“Kill me!” Tears streamed down her face. “Please—I’ve got no control when I’m under this Hex! Please, Theron! Do it before I kill everyone else!”

The sunrifle began to tremble in his hand. He looked to Ikarus, then back to Soraya, but Ikarus had already phased to the human’s side, had already wrapped an arm around her waist, tendrils of his magic pulling Malakai’s unconscious body to his other side, and then they were gone.

He let go of her the moment they were back in his dungeon.

There was no point in going back to kill Theron. The human leading them to the crater was proof enough that the Hex had done its job—that when she was under it, she was no more than a puppet on strings. Their weapon to command.

He didn’t feel like celebrating, though.

He felt like he might be sick, because the God Killer was on her knees, fingers scratching into the cold stone as she screamed and cried and shook with a grief so heavy it looked like it was going to drown her. He knew that grief, knew that pain and guttural scream that sounded like her heart had been torn right out of her chest.

And he was the cause of it.

47

The throne room was colder than usual.

It couldn’t have been, logically Ikarus knew that. It was just as deep underground as it’d always been, flaming torches burning just as dimly, and the vapor was a near-iridescent stream today, weaving and swaying around the remaining stone pillars and shattered glass roots and flowers like blood dropped into a bowl of water.

It was, though, he decided, colder in here. He felt it as he strode through the rows of pews, as he knelt before his master sitting on the throne, pulling the human to do the same.

Or perhaps that was just because the light beside him had gone out.

He could scarcely look at her. At what he’d done. He’d reinforced the Hex before transporting her here from his dungeon—thought that he’d needed to in order to combat the hell of a fight she was no doubt going to put up after what’d happened by the crater.

He needn’t have bothered.

After she’d screamed until her voice gave out, she’d just sat there, staring into space like she wanted nothing more than for someone to creep up behind her and slit her throat.

She’d not fought him when he’d put her under again, or when he’d taken her arm to transport them here.

He’d spent so long trying to get the fire that was her to dim, only to find that now that it had, he missed the burn.