Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(37)

For a brief moment, he was glad he was in a dusty, stale ventilation shaft being followed by a bloodthirsty Metal if only so Jax couldn’t see him blush.

Stop it, you can’t kiss him if you die thinking about kissing him, he chided himself, crawling through the ventilation shaft.

“Do you think anyone could survive out here for seven years?” asked Jax, but Robb was thinking it, too. “With these murder-bots?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think these androids have been activated for long. Maybe they were triggered when we came onto the ship. Some sort of defense mechanism?”

“I . . . don’t know. The Dossier got a weird ping before the ship lit up like a firework. It had a weird code, weird permissions.”

Robb paused to rest for a moment, holding his side painfully. It wasn’t bleeding yet, but if he didn’t pull another stitch crawling through these vent shafts, it would be a miracle. “So you think someone woke these androids up and is now controlling them? Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“We don’t have that kind of tech— I’m here.”

Through the slats in the grate, he could see a warmly lit room. There was a small glowing orange ball in the center of the room, clamped into place by four prongs on the ceiling and floor.

A solar engine. Fusion-based. Rare, and high-tech. He’d read schematics on them at the Academy, but he’d never thought he would see one in person. At its full power, if the ship was not hidden behind Palavar, the core would’ve shone as bright as the sun.

He squinted as he looked through the slats at the rest of the room, but it seemed to be empty.

I want it to stay that way, he thought, and quietly kicked the vent cover out. It clattered to the ground and he slid out, landing on his feet.

Pain shot up his side again, making him grit his teeth.

“We have to turn off the power,” said Jax through the comm-link. “There should be a few wires coming out of the engine.”

“Here we go with the should again,” he muttered, rounding the solar core—when he noticed a person sitting at the engineering console.

Quickly, he drew his sword.

“Don’t move,” he called, “or I’ll kill you.”

“What? Who are you talking to?”

The shadow in the chair did not make a move to reply. In fact, the person did not move at all.

Robb flicked his eyes over to the screens above the console. An emergency notification blinked with the status of the escape pods. For a ship this size there were two, but only one was accessible on the screen. The other was outlined in red: EJECTED.

“Valerio? You still there? Robb?”

Ignoring Jax, Robb crept up to the engine console and jabbed the corner of the chair to turn it around. It rotated, slowly, but the body didn’t move. He fell back a step. A dead man slumped in the chair, his face so mummified Robb couldn’t recognize it, skin dried to the bones, with what was left of a beard and short-cropped dark hair.

The dead man still held a hand to his stomach, where the suit was black with dried blood. Robb checked the breast pocket for some sort of identification. A holo-pad with an ID, or an Ironblood insignia—

The corpse’s clothes were stiff like cardboard from where the man had bled out. It was a slow death, it seemed. Robb checked the man’s cuffs, his other pockets, and finally his lapel.

It was discolored, as if a pin should have been there. A broken circle to anyone who didn’t know what the missing pin looked like.

But he knew.

The Valerio family crest, a snake eating its own tail. An ouroboros. There were only four in existence, passed down through the family line. One belonging to his late aunt, his mother, his brother, and . . . his father.

Robb took an involuntary step back.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The ship was supposed to be abandoned. He’d have to follow clues to the next place and find his father alive and well, living happily in a small town on Iliad—

“Robb? You really need to turn off that power!”

He pried his fingers under the communicator on his space suit and ripped it off. He didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t want to answer.

Grief coiled inside him like a snake, squeezing his insides. All these years, he’d known his father was dead. He’d known, deep down, but he’d never wanted to believe it. His mother had told him. His brother had insisted. But Robb held on to the sliver of hope that maybe—maybe . . .

Yet here his father sat, abandoned on the Tsarina, his casket empty in the Valerio cemetery.

All because—because what? He’d decided to die here instead of fifty years from now, at home on the Valerio estate? Abandoning his family, his wife, his sons—him?

All those years, his mother had been right. Mercer Valerio was dead. He was dead because he went to the Iron Palace on the wrong night and got swept away in the Rebellion.

Deep down there was the little boy who thought his father was invincible. The boy who remembered sword training in the floating garden on Nevaeh, long weekends learning how to pilot a skysailer. The faces his father made behind his mother’s back when she scolded Robb. His father’s wide shoulders, and the way he hugged with all of his body, and the laugh that rolled and rolled like mountains—

Robb couldn’t stay here anymore. In this stupid room. It was suffocating. And the corpse was staring at him. He tore out into the hallway, his eyes burning—