Page 155 of Under the Iron Sky

“What does this mean?”

Ikarus shifted toward her but Soraya was instantly moving away. “Don’t you fucking dare.” She raised a fist, ready to bury her knuckle-duster in his face. “Don’t think letting Raina escape up there changes anything. You are still my enemy––now more than ever.”

Panting, she stood, tossing Aleena’s crown to the floor, and stared down at him, trying to work through all that’d happened in the last few minutes.

The attack.

The Dar’rak securing another piece of the Arch.

Ikarus somehow being able to breathe Vordellian air.

And he’d let Raina go. For some reason, that was the one her mind couldn’t let go of. He’d turned her into a weapon that killed and destroyed without question, but then he’d stopped her from ending Raina. Why?

Something suddenly crashed into Soraya’s side. She slammed into a wall, warm blood streaming from her nose. She moved to spin around, fist raised, but someone was grabbing her neck and then she was on her back.

Across the ledge, she could just about see an Iron swiping a dagger between Ikarus’s wrists. The Links fell to the ground in two separate pieces, Light winking out, and the Iron pushed Ikarus’s helmet into his hands.

He immediately thrust it back onto his head, pushing the Iron away as he rose to stand on shaky legs. Still alive. How? How are you still breathing?

“Good thing we found you, sir,” the Iron was saying. “Another few seconds and you’d have been done for.”

Ikarus didn’t seem to be listening to him. He was staring at Soraya, the fire flickering from the torch at his back casting a long, horned shadow across the checkpoint floor between them. Which one was watching her on the other side of that helmet? Ikarus? Or the Demon?

The fingers around her neck squeezed, pinning her in place. “You’re lucky you’re so important to the Ancient One,” a horrible voice said from deep within the helmet. “Otherwise, we could’ve had some real fun.”

Trying and failing to shift out of his grip, Soraya watched a third Iron across the ledge. Saw him slowly creep across the checkpoint, fingers curling behind his back to pick one of Ikarus’s daggers off the floor with his magic. He made a fist, and the weapon thrust straight for the eye socket of Ikarus’s helmet.

Ikarus batted the blade away with a wave of his hand, his head whipping toward the Iron who’d just thrown it.

“What the hell are you doing?” the other Iron, the one who’d given Ikarus his helmet back, shouted.

“He’s not with us!” the Iron who’d attacked seethed through clenched teeth. “Before the two of you arrived, she said he let one of them go up there! She said it! I heard her!”

Bone-chilling silence followed for one heartbeat, two.

Then both Irons drew swords from across their backs, the sharp blades sighing as they met the cold air.

“You’re the fucking traitor!” one of them hissed, charging forward.

He’d barely taken a step before Ikarus was moving. Before he threw out a hand to that Iron now rushing at him, sword glinting in the torchlights, and made a fist.

The helmet might as well have been made of paper. Bone snapped. Metal shrieked. And before the Iron’s body had even dropped to the ground, what had once been skull and metal was now a crushed pulp no bigger than an apple, Ikarus’s power sweeping the checkpoint.

Soraya closed her eyes, feeling his magic cool the air around her to near freezing and when she opened them again, Ikarus’s hand was outstretched to the crumbled remains of the third Iron by her side, and the bodies of the other two lay on the floor by his feet.

54

The human base was in ruins. Aeris moved through the shadows, not of this world. He swept over charred bodies and around broken machines, not sparing any of their faces a glance, and made his way through hallways and rotting rooms, doing one final sweep of this place that’d been so full of life not so long ago.

To their credit, the humans had cleared out exceptionally quick. It’d only been a little over half an hour since Ikarus and their battalion had first stepped foot here, and there was already no trace of them. He supposed that wasn’t surprising though. They’d had fifteen years to perfect the art of scurrying away.

He made quick work of the hallway on this floor and when he found nothing, entered a flight hangar, the last room on his search.

It was already cleared out. Shouldn’t take him long to do a final sweep. Thank the darkness.

He strode to the edge of the deck, now corporeal again, and checked the mountain slopes below. Only a few Dar’rak remained, shifting through the rocks and crumpled metal left behind there to check for any last stragglers that could be taken for interrogation.

Aeris sighed into his helmet as he watched two soldiers drag a human woman out from beneath a Sentinel. Malakai was going to be busy.