Page 78 of Under the Iron Sky

They were here and gone in seconds. Soraya understood none of them.

She bent over Ikarus again, sealing her mouth over his one more time—

His eyes flew open.

Hands dug into her waist. The world spun, then she was on her back and Ikarus was rolling on top of her, his ragged breath like cool mist against her face.

Her arms shot up to defend herself, hands shoving into the bare skin of his chest. His heart was soaring beneath her palms.

She stared up into his eyes, no longer the dull gray of the Iron Sky, but warm and alive, that gold slice in his right iris shimmering like a single ray of sunlight breaking through clouds—

Something beneath them cracked. The ground split open, and together, they fell.

24

Ikarus was dreaming. He knew this not because he was staring at the back of a seven-year-old version of himself or because that version was sobbing quietly, an indulgence he hadn’t allowed himself in a very long time, but because his mother was alive.

Pyres burned all around him, each conjuring a wall of putrid-smelling black smoke that made his stomach lurch. He knew that smell anywhere.

His mother watched from a dark stone bridge high above the fires. She was always watching.

The human appeared beside her, golden hair near glowing in the light from the pyres, and it all came rushing back.

A graveyard of metal.

Golden shields smashed into his face.

Promises of death.

And then … lips against his mouth. Lips that’d tasted like ash and fire. Of power and warm sunlight so foreign and sweet they’d had him lurching up despite the burning agony roaring through his chest just to get another taste.

The memory was ripped away, and then he was sitting upright against a cold, flat surface, those same green eyes leaning over him.

Ikarus flinched, baring his teeth like some fucking animal, and tried to drag himself away from her and the strange tools in her hands.

He barely made it an inch before he slammed into a wall of rough stone.

Pain lanced across his back, echoes lashing somewhere deep in his chest. He hissed, his body instinctively curling forward—then realized that the human was still crouching over him and straightened.

There was no room to escape her.

The ledge they’d landed on couldn’t have been wider than four feet either way. Climbing out wasn’t an option, given that the three walls of black stone were mostly smooth, curving around them like an obsidian tomb, and to his left—a sheer drop into pure, hair-raising blackness that looked like it had no end.

Darkness was everywhere, fought off only by the small holographic dials coming out of her left bracer, illuminating them both in a pale blue light that faintly reminded him of one of his mother’s paintings, of a woman trapped underwater, looking up at someone on the surface.

The vapor was strong down here, burning his nostrils and throat like it hadn’t in years. He tried not to let the crammed space and clear lack of an easy way out frighten him. He took a deep breath, then another. Another.

Breathe deep.

Those words were an anchor in a storm, pulling him to shore through this haze that was so often his own thoughts and fears and paranoia.

It usually worked. He tried now, but a sharp stabbing sensation pinched his chest when he did anything other than take a shallow breath.

“What were you doing just then?” he snapped.

The human blinked, a slight furrow between her thick brows. “Nothing.”

There was a deep scratch across her cheek and a cut on her nose that weren’t there before. She must’ve scraped her face on the fall down here. Even with her back pressed against the opposite wall, there were barely inches between them.