Page 79 of Under the Iron Sky

She watched him struggle to move in the tight space, looking about as uncomfortable as he felt. “Easy,” she hushed in a low voice. Was she trying to be soothing? She wasn’t very good at it. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She reached out but he grabbed her wrist, held it between them.

“Try to touch me again and I will break your arm.”

Any softness in her expression vanished. Burning ire shone in her eyes now, a meadow set ablaze. She yanked her hand back. “Fuck you. I’m trying to help.”

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” In so, so many ways—her and all of her kind. He moved to stand, to sneer each word into her face so she knew just how much he meant it, but when he tried to move, the most terrible pain sliced somewhere deep within his chest and he dropped with a hiss.

“What have you done to me?” he demanded, rubbing that spot.

“Your dragon stepped on one of my traps and you took five pieces of shrapnel in the chest,” she said flatly, all business. “There’s still one in there.”

She made to move toward him then, but he leaned out of her reach.

“I don’t need your help, human.” He closed his eyes, rallying his magic, and reached inward toward where the pain was most concentrated.

He felt it then, the foreign object, the shard of Vordellian metal that had no business being inside his body.

Taking a deep breath, he pushed a small wisp of power against it like wrapping a rope about a stone and curled his fingers in a “come here” motion. His magic was there but it was … weak. Like a deep lake that’d been drained. It’d refill, that much he knew, but only with time.

Pain shot through his chest again. He ignored it, pushed past it despite the screaming in his head and pulled until his entire body was trembling, grasping for any scrap of power that remained in his veins to remove this thing festering in his body.

But he had nothing to draw from.

The shard would not move.

He tried twice more before accepting defeat and letting his head thwack against the rock at his back, a panting, pathetic mess.

“You finished?”

Ikarus glared at the human. Oh, she must’ve been fucking loving this.

She leaned forward again with those tools, and again, he pitched back away from her touch.

Growling toward the blackness above their heads, she closed her eyes, hands straining around her tools, and took several deep breaths—which he assumed were to calm herself before she launched the aforementioned tools into his face.

When she opened her eyes again, the fire in them had banked. Slightly.

“Look,” she said, slow and stern, like she was speaking to a misbehaving child. “In any other circumstance, I would be fucking overjoyed by this turn of events”—Ikarus’s scowl deepened—“but unless you hit your head a lot harder than I realized on the way down here, you know as well as I do that for the time being, my life is stitched to yours.”

Oh, he remembered, all right. That was likely the only reason he was still breathing at all right now. Didn’t stop him from biting back, though.

“That didn’t seem to be a concern when you stabbed me and left me to die.”

“Believe me, if I’d wanted you dead up there, you would have been.”

Another fact he was painfully aware of.

When his glare didn’t soften, she rolled her eyes. “I made sure not to hit anything vital, and scythes can only survive for an hour without bracers. You would have been fine. I don’t like this any more than you do, but you die, I die, so please, do us both a favor, shut up, and let me help you before that metal nicks your heart and kills us both.”

She was right—about the metal. He could feel it slicing just that bit closer to his heart with every breath he took. It could take weeks, days, minutes. There was no way to know for sure.

He tried taking a deep breath now, testing that theory. Barely managed to fill his lungs a crack before that pain came right back with a vengeance and he was hissing again. Point taken. The shard had to come out right now—but to let her touch him?

“Fine,” he snapped.

“Great,” she replied just as sharply. “Do you think you can stand up?”