Page 60 of Under the Iron Sky

A loud cracking sound tore through the room. Ikarus gasped, jerking back so suddenly he fell off the end of the bed and smacked his head on the floor, and even Soraya couldn’t help the cold terror that overcame her when she looked down at his father’s chest and saw not blood and bones, but a hollow black hole.

Cold fingers suddenly dug into Soraya’s arm, and she whirled around just in time to catch a pair of murderous gray eyes before the room snapped out of existence.

Ikarus slammed her into the wall the moment they reappeared in the dungeon. “What the hell did you just do?!”

The rage in his eyes made her forget how to form a sentence. “I don’t know … I didn’t even know I could … I … I’m sorry.”

Ikarus’s gaze burned white hot, the grip on her shoulders loosening for a moment before his hands flew to her throat and squeezed. “If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?” Soraya tried to pry his fingers away, but his hold was too tight. He shook her against the wall so hard her vision blurred. “Ancient One’s orders or not, if you ever do that again, I will fucking kill you!”

She didn’t get the opportunity to argue with him, or point out the thin line of blood that trickled from his left nostril, before he released her and disappeared with a crack.

Panting, Soraya stared at the space where he’d just been. She slid down the wall and onto the floor, her mind filled with screams, burning golden eyes, and a fractured voice from a scared little boy she hadn’t realized was so utterly broken underneath all that blood-soaked armor.

18

“She did what?”

“It’s not funny, Malakai.”

“It really is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Malakai’s booming laughter bounced off the windows of the building they were trying to hide in. “Oh, but it really is. Soraya fucking Tollmere—God Killer and general nightmare for all things that go bump in the night—managed to get into your memories, without a lick of magic in her veins!”

Contemplating if he’d ever wanted to strangle someone more in his life, Ikarus turned to the floor-to-ceiling window and went back to studying the abandoned streets of Lumirel below.

Standing in the center of a long corridor on the top floor of what’d once been a grand theater, they had a view of the entire eastern district of the capital thanks to the four glass walls that met in a slightly angular dome ceiling above. Not an ideal spot for a lookout, but given that this room and the world outside were the type of pitch black that rendered humans practically blind, he felt it safe enough to stand here.

No stranger to darkness, Ikarus’s eyes catalogued everything in near-perfect detail as they swept from one end of the street to the other, every scratch in the abandoned carriage by the fountain, every broken sunflower and bone on the floor.

He’d never have believed this place was alive once if he hadn’t seen it in the human’s memories. He’d seen her walk these streets nearly a dozen times now on her way to school, often with those two friends who might as well have been stitched into her hip: Raina, the red-haired little girl who always seemed to know everything about everything, and that boy, Theron, he thought his name was. The one the human was always smiling at as though he’d hung the fucking suns in the sky just for her. Ridiculous. He was showing up more and more as she got older, always with an excuse to wrap an arm around her.

Ikarus scanned the streets for any sign of movement, seeing the past as clearly as if he’d lived it himself: the crowds of people waiting at the bottom of the monorail station steps, the holographic displays advertising a new scent or dining spot that’d just opened somewhere in the kingdom. All gone now.

Rust and rot replaced glittering steel and gold, and countless skeletons were strewn across the floor. Some were even fused into the floors of this very room, as though they’d been unlucky enough to be hiding here when a pyromancer had discovered them and they’d been melted where they stood. The sight would’ve been chilling had it not been such a common occurrence these days. Bare skeletons completely stripped of flesh didn’t make your skin crawl when you’d seen thousands of them.

He checked his helmet was secure again, leaving nothing to chance. They’d all seen far too many times how quickly you could choke on just a few short breaths of Vordellian air. Potent, poisonous, nasty stuff—soon to be a thing of the past, once Ramapheal had all the pieces of the Arch and willed it away so they could finally be free of Belvador’s shackles for good.

He still couldn’t believe he’d been up here without a helmet that day in the sky, even if it was just for a few seconds.

If Serone hadn’t dropped the jet in a fit of panic when the human had pressed that gun against his temple, distracting the human enough for him to snatch his helmet back just before she and her craft had plummeted into the mountains …

He tried to push the human out of his mind, to focus on the magic thrumming through his veins or the occasional drip, drip, from a burst water pipe somewhere in the building, but his thoughts kept finding ways to wander right back to her.

She’d gotten into his head. Darkness below—that human, with no magic or powers of any kind, had gotten into his memories. Pried his carefully crafted mental walls apart as though he was a piece of broken metal that she could disassemble and rebuild as she saw fit.

I’m sorry.

What did she have to be sorry for? Him? What he’d endured? Ikarus almost snarled at the thought. He would sooner take a sword to the throat than live one second in a world where she, a fucking human, felt sorry for him.

Monsters, Ramapheal had always called the Vordellians. Vicious, bloodthirsty beasts that were so consumed with their need to control everything that they’d banished an entire civilization to hell because they couldn’t share.

Strange, then, that they didn’t seem all that vicious from what he’d seen so far. He imagined they’d get to that soon enough, though. The God Killer was still young. He’d no doubt see plenty of cruelty in her future.

About half an hour later, Ikarus left his vigil to press a hand to the wall and send a pulse of power through the building. If the hostages he’d interrogated last night were correct, he’d be able to hear the team that’d been sent to destroy the last stalker nest any moment now. Too bad for them it was a wasted mission. The last queen and all her eggs had already been moved from the bottom floor of this theater.

Although he had to admit they had balls coming here at all, given how close the nest had been to a Tower, and therefore at least a dozen armored guards at all times.