Page 15 of Under the Iron Sky

Please, she thought.

Nothing. She hit him with another charge. Then another. Another.

She … couldn’t save him.

The reality of it finally hit. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice cracking. She blinked back the sudden burning in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

She glanced at the ceiling, unable to look at what she’d done. Maybe once upon a time she’d had the potential to be more. But then the world had changed.

Then those things had crawled out of the ground, and her fate was sealed.

A low chirping sound broke through her thoughts. Soraya’s eyes snapped back to the desk. The bird was … moving. He stared up at her, the new camera she’d fitted in his eyes whirling, and then, with the smallest of movements, hopped forward to nuzzle his beak into the back of her hand.

That little nuzzle broke the dam. Soraya couldn’t keep in the tears that streamed down her cheeks. Couldn’t hold back the sob that ripped from her throat as she clutched the tiny thing to her face and cried.

Her body convulsed, lungs threatening to collapse as she allowed herself to let go. She so rarely got to feel anymore. She’d witnessed so much death, seen so many bodies burned and torn beyond recognition. Sometimes she just needed to let it out. Let the grief wash over her, exorcise those emotions from her body.

She cried for Noah. For her father. For the cold, unfeeling thing her mother had become and the life their family should’ve had. The life everyone on this godsforsaken planet would’ve had if the Dar’rak had never invaded.

Soraya screamed and cried until eventually there weren’t any tears left. And she was empty. Again.

Noah’s funeral was a small affair.

Noreen had decreed years ago that graveyards were too open, that it was too risky for everyone to gather outside and “be sitting ducks for an attack,” so they opted for pyres instead. It was awful, not disposing of their dead in the proper Vordellian way. Knowing these souls would never feel the warmth of the suns on their burial sites sat heavy on everyone’s chests—but this is what the war had reduced them to.

This was what needed to be done.

So many people came to say their goodbyes. People made speeches. Gave eulogies of Noah’s life, his accomplishments—it was over far too quickly. Soraya barely heard a word of it.

She couldn’t look at the pyres, hadn’t been able to from the moment she’d stepped into the room.

A young man might’ve lay there, but that wasn’t what Soraya saw. She didn’t see the soldier he’d become or the man she’d trained to wield a gun.

Her baby cousin lay on that slab now. The little boy who used to chase her around the barracks like a lost puppy, the one she’d hidden from in her workshop so many times because his constant questions about the Dar’rak and magic and dragons annoyed her. She’d give anything to take it back now. To peek under her workbench and see him huddled there just one more time.

When they lit the pyres, Soraya still hadn’t moved. Too busy staring at the doorless archway at the back of the room, waiting for a pair of green eyes that never came. Not even to mourn her own flesh and blood.

Most began to file out when the burning started, but Soraya stayed. She always did. She stood there while the room emptied, a rusting metal bird perched atop her shoulder, and watched the flames lick higher up Noah’s body until they disintegrated him into nothing. And as the all-too-familiar bouquet of burning flesh filled the room, Soraya swore Noah’s death would not be for nothing.

5

“Thank you for helping me with this today.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Soraya finished distributing the last quills and inkpots on the desks, then picked up the pile of parchment and retraced her steps to lay three sheets on each desk.

As far as making do went, this wasn’t a bad classroom. Maps of Vordell and racks of weapons adorned the walls in place of windows, and each of the sixteen mismatched desks, arranged in four neat rows facing Raina’s stool at the front, had an old Sunflower, every petal and stem green, rusting and rotting, laid atop it. Neat and clinical, with just a dash of old beauty from how things used to be, it bore such a striking resemblance to Raina and Soraya’s own classrooms back at the academy before the invasion that Soraya almost smiled.

She ran a hand over a lily, what was once smooth shiny glass now rusted and grainy beneath her fingertips. She barely touched the thing, but a petal cracked and turned to dust beneath her fingers.

You’re just a soldier.

Soraya wiped the remains on her trousers, then went back to distributing the paper. “Although I’m not sure what good I’ll be. I don’t have patience for children.”

“The minimum conscription age is fourteen now,” Raina corrected with a sigh. “They’re hardly babies.”

“They’re still children.”

“And still older than you were the first time you killed.”