Page 165 of Under the Iron Sky

Death came—then passed him by.

Screaming, Ikarus threw his helmet into the side of the observatory, and dropped to his knees, head falling into his hands.

He’d needed to see for himself. Soraya knew that, because it was exactly what she’d have done if their situations were reversed.

She hated that she knew that. That they were so alike, even after everything.

She couldn’t kill him. Soraya had to remind herself of that with every step. Emelda was right. They needed to have this conversation—but could she get through it without scorching a hole through his head? Would she die too if she did? Ramapheal had lied about so many things, was their blood connection just one of many?

This wasn’t the time to sort through them.

Ikarus was as still as any of the stars behind them. His eyes were closed when she stood beside him, head bowed forward as though in silent prayer, just like it’d been on their last night in Illieck. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.

Soraya had felt sorry for him that night. Thought there might be something worth saving beneath all that blood and death he’d wrapped himself in for years.

Then he’d put her under the Hex. Then he’d turned her against her own people.

It would be so easy to kill him right now. She could do it. One movement, and she’d blow a hole right between his eyes like she’d fantasized about so many times. It was no less than he deserved. No less than what he’d done to countless people a hundred times over now, a thousand.

Her fingers twitched. Gods how she wanted to …

Later. After she’d learned where his head was at.

Unholstering a gun from her thigh, Soraya reached for him.

Warmth met cold. And the moment her fingers brushed against the side of his head, she was pulled into a dark hallway just like the ones in his castle.

Three tall arched windows stood at the end.

Dozens of small memories lined the walls, not full windows like the ones she was walking toward, but small peepholes covered with metal shutters that rattled violently in their frames as she walked beneath them, a hundred different voices trapped inside, all of them screaming. She ignored those.

The first window held a bedroom, where a Dar’rak man with gray skin and a rotting face lay choking in a bed by a roaring fire, a silver-haired child beside him.

The next was a parlor room where that same boy, now a few years older, shook as he clutched a silver-haired woman to his chest, screaming.

I would do it all again … every moment … for you, my boy.

Soraya didn’t bother to look at what was in the third window before she stepped through. She found the real Ikarus standing at the very front of the crowd by his younger self, a weeping Emelda clutched in his arms.

Ikarus did not turn around as she stopped beside him. Soraya watched him carefully, waiting for any sign he was going to attack or push her out of his mind. When none came, she let her eyes flick forward, to where Varena was being led onto a wooden stage, a leather gag in her mouth.

“Why are you watching this willingly?”

“I watch this memory every day.” There was no emotion in Ikarus’s voice. “Every fucking day, I stand here, and I watch my father die, then my mother, then Varena. I watch them all to remind myself why I have to do the things I do. Why I need to be cruel and merciless. Why it doesn’t matter if it tears me apart because it’s to make sure that something like this never happens again.”

A few feet away, Varena was made to kneel before the crowd.

When Ramapheal was handed the ax, an echoing panic flickered in Ikarus’s eyes. Still, he didn’t turn away. “I convinced myself that it was all worth it before. That as long as I served Ramapheal, as long as I did everything he asked of me, what little remained of my family would be safe. I’ve devoted my entire life to him—given him everything I am and ever will be because I thought it was the only way we were going to survive. That he’d make good on his promise to free us from this place if I brought him the pieces of the Arch, and then today—”

He squeezed his eyes closed, pain rippling across his features as he placed the heel of his hand against his chest and rubbed it across his sternum.

Eyes still closed, he drew a deep breath through his nose. “It means it was all for nothing.” His voice was strangled like he’d been screaming for a lifetime—maybe he had, just in here, where no one else would know. “Everything I’ve done … all of it was for nothing.”

The memory faded like smoke caught in a breeze.

When they were on the cliff again, Soraya standing while Ikarus knelt before her, she could’ve sworn the three yellow orbs on the other side of the Iron Sky burned a little brighter than usual, as though Helliana and both her daughters were trying to sneak a peek at them.

“Why were those three memories the only ones without shutters?” Soraya asked. Probably not the most important question right now, but she asked it anyway—because what was the point of any more secrets between them?