Page 70 of Under the Iron Sky

There had to be more to her plan. There wasn’t even an active crack in the east anymore, not for hundreds of miles. He squinted, head throbbing as he tried to follow the path she might’ve taken. She’d need to climb that mountain ridge over there—not the steepest climb, but certainly a challenge without equipment. She’d manage it, though. Out of pure spite for him, she’d clear that range, then stick her middle fingers toward this castle when she crested its peak, just because she could. The terrain leveled out quite nicely for her after that. There were a few Arakna nests hidden across the plain, but she was smart enough to avoid those, then … What?

Whatever her plan was, Ikarus was determined not to let her succeed.

21

Soraya was in a wasteland of black rock and pulsing red cystals.

Her thighs were burning from running up all those cavernous ridges, palms and fingertips torn to ribbons from where they’d been so steep she’d had to drag herself up, no time to consider another path or take it easy—only that she needed to go, go, go, get as far away from Ikarus and that awful castle as she could before he woke up and hunted her like a dog.

And he would. There was no doubt in Soraya’s mind.

She had to be getting close now. Willed that she was with every fiber of her being.

She’d cleared the mountain ridge quicker than she’d expected, and had managed to sweep through this expanse of flat rock without falling or being dragged into any of the large, web-lined burrows that stretched across the flat, rocky plain for miles in every direction.

Soraya didn’t let herself wonder if they were empty, only prayed that if they weren’t and she was being hunted by the spider creatures beneath, they were the half-humanoid kind. At least then she had a decent chance of not being devoured while she was still alive.

She hoped.

Although if that fate was worse than being captured by the creature no doubt hunting her from above, she couldn’t decide.

Lungs burning, Soraya cleared the last of the burrows and shot toward a gap in the black stone in front of her. Her legs screamed at her to stop, to take a moment to breathe.

She ignored them.

The gap seemed to get narrower the further she ran. She squinted, desperately searching for a shape in the distance.

Please let it be here. Soraya hadn’t let herself hope until this moment.

After so many hours in that window marking every mountain down here, she had a pretty good idea of where she was. And if she was right. If she was lucky—oh, please, please, please let her be lucky just this once …

She let the red crystals in the wall light her way, let them guide her through twist after twist, trying not to feel like she was a rat trapped in a maze—

Until something glimmered in the darkness straight ahead. A square sort of shadow quickly materialized around it, getting bigger and bigger as she approached, and Soraya could’ve wept because right there, its metal body and wing glittering against all this black rock like a lost star desperately clinging to life, was a fighter jet, the words FLAMING SWORD shining beside the image of a rising sun beneath the cockpit.

She’d been right. She’d thought she’d seen a glimmer of gold in the distance that first morning in the dungeon, a wink of light when the red crystals had pulsed and the vapor had moved in just the right way, here one second and gone the next—but she hadn’t let herself believe it until now. Hadn’t dared to hope.

But this was it.

This was the Flaming Sword battalion. The armed force that’d swept across what’d once been the southeastern coastline for a crack at the start of the war, ready to strike the enemy in their home territory, only for the ground to suddenly swallow them whole.

Her mother had been assigned to recover this team. She hadn’t found anything—assumed everyone, machines and soldiers alike, had been crushed under all that stone—but oh how wrong they were.

Light was one of the only power sources that didn’t decay with time. That team had sunk in the first few years of the war, when there’d been plenty to spare and the military objective wasn’t concerned with preserving it, but instead blasting as much of it against the enemy to burn them out as quickly as possible.

Soraya turned in a circle, feeling like she’d stepped into a dream as she beheld the rest of the rotting arsenal. Because it wasn’t just machines and bones that lay around her now, but an entire vault of power. Pure Light, not the diluted shit they fought with nowadays that’d been stretched to save as much as possible, but real burning power, a ghost of what her planet and people had once been.

There had to be at least forty other fighter jets, most with broken wings or cracked canopies. She spotted several massive wheeled cannons and battle carriages. No familiars, but … could that enormous round head poking up from that rock over there …

She made her way toward it, suddenly unable to breathe as she jumped over broken bodies and smashed metal to that giant rot-covered form crumbled on the floor.

Standing at nearly twelve feet tall and fitted with countless cannons and blades hidden in secret panels all over, Sentinels like this one had been pillars in the Vordellian army once upon a time. They weren’t sentient like familiars, but metal suits that could be worn like armor or piloted manually by bracers.

This one was a little banged up, but the armored plates of its body were apparently thick enough to stop it being smashed to pieces when it’d fallen down here.

When a roar boomed in the distance, Soraya’s head shot toward it. Ikarus was awake. She probably had fifteen minutes at most before he found her.

Plenty of time to jump in one of these jets and make her escape like she’d planned, but … A pit formed in her stomach as she glanced around at the sea of black and red rock. It all looked the same to her, but Ikarus had been born here. He likely knew this place better than his own reflection, and he’d already shot her out of the sky once.