Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(83)

Her hand sank to her hip before she realized she didn’t have her pistol. She’d never missed it more.

Another voice whispered, sounding a thousand miles away.

“Hurry up!”

She knew that voice, didn’t she? From somewhere. If only she could remember.

“Follow us, Ana!” called a third voice.

“Wait,” she whispered. She could almost taste the memory on her tongue. A little girl running through secret corridors, bare feet scurrying across the floor. “Wait a second—please!”

She stumbled after the voices, her hands pressed against the walls, rushing across the years of dust and cobwebs.

“What are you waiting for, Ana?” one of the boys said. The eldest. “Hurry up!”

Rhys—

He let her taste the sweets from the kitchen. The scent of cinnamon. Warm brown eyes, a melting smile. He used to kiss her bruises when her middle brother, Wylan—a cocky smile and a mess of black curls—knocked her down when they pretended to be outlaws. All the horseplaying would scare her youngest brother—Tobias. Valerio blue eyes and a small smile and a love of violins and sweet candies and stories.

Rhys. Wylan. Tobias.

She remembered.

A sob caught in her throat. They had died. They had not escaped. They had never escaped—they were still here. Still in the ashes and soot and dust of the palace.

And she had forgotten them.

She stumbled to a stop, leaning against the wall with a hand over her mouth, trying to keep herself quiet. Tears burned in her eyes. Her brothers. They’d been there the whole time, waiting just at the edge of her memories.

“Aren’t you coming?” Wylan’s voice echoed off the walls.

“It’s dark in here,” the youngest complained.

She closed her eyes. This couldn’t be real—they couldn’t be real. This was a trick. Like the redheaded Metal in the ballroom—a trap.

“Scared the Great Dark’ll eat you?”

“Stop scaring him, Wy,” Rhys chided. “Ana, come find us!”

She would—if only she knew where they were. Had she taken a right? Or two lefts? She couldn’t remember how to get back to her door, and she could barely see the hands in front of her. Swallowing her fear, she continued toward the laughter.

Until, like dawn breaking over the edge of the moon, the glowing outline of a door came into view. She rushed toward it, pressing herself against one side to swing it open, and she tumbled through.

Her elbows hit the hard marble and she hissed at the sting, ash rushing up around her in a cloud. She coughed in it, squinting her eyes against the bright gray light. Ash coated her tongue, stale and tasting like cinders.

Shakily, she got to her feet.

It was a room, but not like any she’d ever been in before. It was burned, charred wood crumbled against the floor, resembling a bed and chairs and a wardrobe, all covered in seven years of ash and dust. Black marks slithered up the sides of the marble, a wall of bright bay windows letting the silver light of Eros’s other moons into the room.

It was the North Tower.

She stepped lightly over the blackened wood, the bent metal scraps and bits of trash, when movement caught her eye. She looked up, but it was only herself in the remnants of a dressing-table mirror. The glass was fractured, split into dozens of pieces. A girl with a shaved head and long eyelashes, a latticework of scars crossing one side of her face.

When she was younger, she used to look into the mirrors in the Dossier’s bathroom and imagine what her parents looked like—if she’d gotten her hair from her mother or her eyes from her father, but she was a mixture of two people she didn’t know. Two strangers staring back through the mirror.

But things were coming back in slow, steady trickles—like remembering a dream. Her smile came from her mother, and her ears, and her temperament. Her eyes came from her father, but the quirk of her lips came from a woman with fiber optics in her hair and a coat the color of blood.

Even when she remembered her parents, she missed Siege more.

Something snapped behind her.

Ana lurched forward and grabbed a piece of the mirror and whirled toward the noise. But no one was there. The mirror cut into her hand, and a thin line of blood trickled down her arm.

It would’ve been really nice to have a pistol right about now.

Where had those voices gone?

As she began toward the door that hopefully let out into the main hallway, she heard footsteps.

Slow, sliding.

She froze.

There was something behind her.

She looked over her shoulder. A Messier stood on the opposite side of the room, the silvery moon making its metal skin shine.

She pulled at the door—but it was melted shut. The knob broke off in her hand.

“Goddess’s spark,” she cursed.

The blue-eyed Messier picked up a piece of broken mirror and lunged.

She dodged its first attack, snagging up a blackened metal tray from the floor, and deflected the next. The sound of the mirror shard against the tray made a loud ping, and shattered in the android’s grip.

“Stop! I’m not an intruder!” she tried to reason with it. “I’m Princess Ananke—”

“Burn,” it snarled in her eldest brother’s voice. The Metal’s eyes deepened to a bloody red.

Then it said in Tobias’s sweet tenor, “You should have burned.”