Page 56 of Under the Iron Sky

Ikarus shrugged faintly. “None yet, but it’s someone high-ranking, given some of the information they’ve leaked.”

“A Crimson then.” Aeris took a small sip from his goblet, his eyes moving quicker over the stalls now, eliminating suspects who no longer fit.

From Ikarus’s other side, Malakai laughed. “Ooooh, does this mean we’re suspects? Are you here to interrogate us now?” He held his wrists together and dropped to his knees. “Please be gentle with me, boss. I bruise like a peach.”

Ikarus grabbed Malakai by the collar of his shirt and hauled him back to his feet. “Can you take nothing seriously?”

Still laughing at his own joke, Malakai skipped over to the bar, where he picked up several bottles, examined them, then shrugged and poured full-bodied shots of each into a glass and swirled them around.

“I thought they were just rumors,” Aeris whispered. At least Ikarus could always rely on him.

Whispers had been swirling for two years now, hushed in dirty taverns on the lowest levels of this hell, in war barracks and on training missions, and even here, in the Pitt, where drunken gossip flowed almost as freely as blood and gore.

The rumors never lasted long. Ramapheal was quick about getting anyone who so much as whispered the words “spy” or “Ma’varea” in as quickly as possible—but they always came back, poking up through the stones like weeds that’d never die.

Few knew the truth: that the spy was still out there and could’ve been any one of the creatures now booing in the stands as the human snatched a shard of broken spear off the floor and rammed it into the Dar’rak’s back, as though they weren’t doing the exact same thing.

17

Much to Soraya’s ever-growing irritation, it took Ikarus three days to get the next door in her mind open to watch the memory inside. The next one took him two days. Then one. And in the three weeks since she’d been captured, he’d torn his way through her childhood, leaving a pile of rusting doors in his wake.

The doors didn’t open for him immediately, thank the suns. He still had to fight tooth and nail for hours at a time, but walking into that first memory had started something, loosened some hinge in her mind, and now the doors were falling open like collapsing dominos.

Soraya lost days meditating, filling entire halls with her memories, making sure to keep her most secretive ones far out of Ikarus’s reach.

She couldn’t keep him away forever. He’d find his way to something damning eventually, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t slow him down until she figured a way out of this hellhole.

The process always left her exhausted. When she was out of her mind, she often just lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling for minutes at a time, trying to catch her breath.

Theron.

Raina.

Twiigs.

Jinx.

Soraya pictured their faces after every session. Pictured the bases they had yet to lose and all the people inside. Thousands and thousands of civilians and children, every one of them dead if she let something important slip. The people who would pay the price if she failed.

It was for them that she fought Ikarus, that she tried to claw his eyes out each time he got close and traced every inch of her cell each night until her fingers were red and raw from searching for a loose brick she might’ve missed.

It was strange to watch herself “before.” To relive those memories of the girl who used to look at the world with such wonder and think anything was possible. It was stranger still to watch it with Ikarus standing by her side.

Despite the apparent importance of his task, the urgency in him seemed to vanish as soon as he forced open a new door. Soraya expected him to move on each time he saw that the door led to yet another boring childhood moment, but instead he strode through her life leisurely, often finding a wall to lean against or a bench to sit on, and just … watched her grow up, as if the small moments of her life were somehow just as important as where the Vordellians were keeping their pieces of the Arch or any secret strategies they might’ve had.

He seemed vaguely fascinated by their human activities, like he almost enjoyed observing how the “lesser species” lived. She caught the way his brow furrowed slightly when he’d watched her younger version, dressed in a medic costume complete with a clear clipboard and white robes, shout at the technicians sent to help a “sick” Bertok that time he’d gotten injured while helping her mother hunt an escaped criminal through the streets. Or the slight cock of his head when the memory of her laying her first “trap” had played out—in Soraya’s defense, that palace guard had deserved it, she just hadn’t expected someone who carried guns that big to be that scared of the spiders she’d hammered together out of bits of metal, or for him to jump so high and smack his head on a nearby wall when the bucket of scrap spiders had fallen from the ceiling. He was wearing a helmet so he wasn’t that injured, but there was lots of shouting afterward.

Thankfully, her father and Aleena had seen the funny side. Noreen had not.

As time went on, Ikarus staying to watch her memories became more unnerving than him actually getting access to them. There was nothing here for him, no secrets to learn or strategies to steal and yet, every time, he stayed.

Why was that?

Soraya stood in the hallway of her mind, arms folded across her chest, and watched him try to open the latest door.

He was tense today. Each swipe of his arm was sharp and precise like the cleaving of a blade. Did that mean Ramapheal wasn’t pleased with his progress? Had he punished him? She could only hope.

One more swipe, and the door swung open with a groan.