Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(85)

By Rasovant.

The next thing she knew, Robb’s father was shaking her awake, and the fire was everywhere. Her nightmare—the one from the Caterina—it had been real. And that meant . . .

She touched her cheek, her burn scars.

Di had saved her.

She scrambled to her feet again. She needed to tell Robb that she remembered—when she noticed the red keypad again. And hesitated.

A chill crept down her spine, the kind she got with the thrill of a hunt—a part of her she’d thought had died with Di.

A sealed room in the burned tower that was off-limits and continuously guarded? It was the perfect place to hide something, if she were to hide it. And only secrets needed locks.

She tried a few numbers that came to mind.

The keypad blinked red each time.

“I hate technology,” she muttered, and slammed her hand against the sealed door in frustration—

But then she got an idea.

It was too tightly closed to pry open with her bare fingers, but maybe she could with an object. Rolling the prone Metal over, she wrenched a rectangular slat from its face. That would work.

She might not have been tech savvy, but Great Dark take her if she didn’t know how to break into a damn room.

Jamming the slat of metal into the seam in the door, she pushed as hard as she could, door groaning, until it opened with a snap.

Cautiously, she stepped inside.

It was a small room, no bigger than the infirmary on the Dossier. Spare robotic parts cluttered the countertops beside dog-eared books, scattered diagrams, holo-pads full of schematics, maps of the kingdom—and what theoretically lay outside the asteroid belt. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with medical texts on anatomy and brain chemistry, and studies of failed AIs.

She slid a glass holo-pad to the side to get a better look at one of the schematics. The image looked like a memory core.

There were photos on the counters of Plague victims, their limbs blackened, others amputated. Before Rasovant created Metals, the androids in the kingdom had not been sophisticated enough to treat the Plague victims, and the doctors who went to help the sick eventually became ill, too.

Against the near wall, a dusty computer console woke up to her entry.

“Good evening, Gregori,” it said, a staticky blue holo-screen appearing over the console.

Rasovant? Tensing, she glanced back to the entrance—but there was no one there. She was alone.

The computer meant her.

“I have five thousand forty-three abnormal readings from our data cores. Would you like to examine them?”

A YES-or-NO dialogue box appeared on the screen.

The computer wasn’t an AI but one of those older analog consoles Siege had told her about, older than the Dossier’s consoles.

YES, she pressed.

The screen expanded to fill half the wall, bringing up vitals for thousands of names, maybe more. The computer monitored RAM and processing speed.

At least a quarter of them were marked blue, others dark and flat-lined.

D204. D710. D1489.

Her breath caught in her throat. They were Metal vitals. The blue-colored ones must have been HIVE’d—there were so many—and the dark ones smashed. The others, judging from the spikes and dips in vitals, were rogues. There were so few of them left.

She paused the screen once it reached the beginning of the list, a number she knew best of all. D09.

But his vitals weren’t dark. Her eyebrows furrowed—why weren’t they dark?

Hope fluttered in her chest as she keyed up the prompts.

D09 COORDINATES, she typed.

“Error. Cannot locate.”

She pressed her lips together and tried again. D09 STATUS.

“Unknown.”

She slammed her hands against the keyboard. Took a deep breath.

It’s wishful thinking, Ana, she told herself. It didn’t matter if this computer knew. She knew. He was dead.

And she wasn’t here to remind herself of that.

This must have been Rasovant’s lab from before the Rebellion. He said it had burned, but here she was, standing in it. This was where it all started. His research, his breakthroughs, his studies.

Everything that could have saved Di was right here. Schematics of memory cores, blueprints, answers. It hadn’t been lost after all. But why did Rasovant hide it? Why not share this information with the kingdom to understand Metals? To save ones like Di?

Could Di have been saved? She had to know.

Bittersweet, she typed in MEMORY CORES.

“Gathering content.”

Screens upon screens popped up over each other, each denser in content than the last. Photos. Videos. Case studies. Experiments. Schematics of memory cores. There were notes with case files, different experiments detailing human consciousness and the quantity of memory. Different processing speeds—

And then there were photos of Plague victims, the black patches on their skin—as though their flesh was rotting away. She’d heard stories. She’d seen photos. But nothing as terrible or as extensive as this.

The computer must have been confused. It was bringing up Plague files.

METAL CREATION, she tried.

“Content gathered.”

But nothing had changed. Frustrated, she prompted the console again.

“Error. Content gathered.”

“How is it . . .” Her words lodged in her throat. She looked at the case files again, the experiments, the studies on the Plague, the contagion rate, the lack of a cure. The growing number of Metals, the experiments on human memory, the megabytes needed, the RAM, the processing speed, the—