Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(71)

“Traitor!” someone cried, throwing a handful of trash.

It smacked the Metal in the face, stickiness oozing down its chin. Other people threw pieces of rotten fruit, dirt from beneath the willow trees, sticks from the kebabs sold at the stands. They pinged off the Metal’s dented body, and the Metal did not even care.

Di could only watch.

“Got some nerve coming here!” someone at Di’s elbow shouted.

A woman spit at it. “Go back where you came from!”

Di glanced around to see if anyone was coming to stop this, but the Messiers stood calmly at their posts, and the people outside the mob simply looked away. As though if they did not see the violence, they would not be a part of it. But he saw them. He saw all the people who averted their eyes and walked past, and all the ones crowded into the circle, spitting and hissing at a Metal who could not defend itself.

And oh, oh, was there an anger growing inside him. It bubbled, frothed, like a firestorm, burning so hot underneath his skin he thought he would explode.

“Murderer!” one called, before a hundred voices echoed, “Murderer! Murderer!” like it was the Metal’s name.

“You are mistaken. I am only here to honor the Empress,” the android tried to reason, but it was useless. It was reaching down to pull the knife out of its leg when another man with dark hair elbowed his way out of the crowd, flicking open a lighter.

“Maybe we should honor her by burning you!”

The temper inside Di turned his thoughts white-hot. The next he knew, he had the man by the hand and was twisting his arm behind his back. There was a crack.

The man gave a cry, dropping the lighter.

Di caught it, flicking the flame on, holding so tight to the man’s broken arm, twisting so terribly that bone protruded from the skin. And he thought how easy it was to break them. Humans. How simple.

“Mercy,” the man babbled, the whites of his eyes matching the bone Di had easily broken.

Di held the lighter closer to the man, until it singed his hair. “This will be a mercy—”

“Sir,” a metallic voice cut through his ire, and he blinked, coming back to his senses. He faltered, as the human in his grip whimpered, the smell in the air matching the stain seeping onto his trousers.

“Mercy,” the black-haired man sobbed.

Di let go.

Around him the crowd retreated as far as they could, many of them with looks of wide-eyed terror. Someone pulled out a holo-pad, then another person, and another, until he could feel the streams of newsfeeds lacing across him, around him, sending communications upward and outward across the galaxy.

Until he caught sight of a girl. Flaxen hair. Purple dress. He recognized her instantly—the servant from Astoria, the one who’d been with Rasovant. She held his gaze and grinned.

“Monster,” she called.

Someone else echoed. “Monster!”

“Monster!” The word rippled like a rock in the ocean.

“Di?” Siege asked. “Di, what’s happ—”

The man whimpered on the ground, the bone protruding, and Di could not recall how he had hurt him. He could only remember a white-hot rage.

The feeling in his chest squeezed, twisted, turning sour and bitter and horrible. Everything was too much—the smells of sweet ales and kebabs, the shadows through the willows, all the voices grating, ill-harmonized sounds that formed around flaps of fleshy lips—words.

I cannot do this.

Not here. Not in this body.

Monster, the humans screamed. Monster, said the newsfeeds.

There were so many glitches, too many sensations—he could not adapt. He hated his train of thought. The tangents. The opinions. The bias. And the pain. He did not like the pain. Like daggers raking through the wires of his mind. It all needed to stop—this second. Now. Now. Now.

Monster—

NOW.

A rushing, electrical charge spread out from his center, to his outer extremities, pulsing like a wave. He felt every holo-pad, every newsfeed, every comm-link like kite strings reaching into the sky—every word, every syllable, every letter—

M O N S T E R

—and destroyed each one.

A holo-pad burst in a woman’s hand; then another exploded, another, and another, rippling out like a wave, with Di at the epicenter.

The crowd shrieked, dropping their electronics as the charges pulsed through them, singeing their skin, blackening their fingertips. They quickly forgot him, the word they repeated sinking beneath the swelling chaos.

Di turned back to the Metal and plucked the knife out of its leg. “Can you stand?”

The Metal nodded. “You are not human.”

“No,” Di agreed, but he was no longer a Metal anymore, either. He did not know what he was. “With them distracted, you can escape. Quickly.”

The Metal nodded and limped off into the frantic crowd.

Di took one last look at the broken-armed man crying on the ground, wanting to help him, to splint the bone and—

He tore himself away, as far from anyone who had seen his monstrousness as he could. Another holo-pad exploded near him, and a woman shrieked. He couldn’t stop it. The trail of electricity followed, rippling out around him in a wave.

Against the wall, the Messiers stood, dull-eyed and dormant, as if they’d been knocked offline.

A short, high beep sparked across his comm-link. E0S.