Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(92)

“And the glitches led us to the Iron Shrine, and Mokuba, who led us to the Tsarina again.”

“Which led us here.”

“Led you here,” she corrected.

“To you.”

He took her hand, twining their fingers together, and kissed her knuckles, his lips so light it melted the anger in her bones and left butterflies instead.

Suddenly, out in the hallway, a door slammed. Ana jumped, startled, as the sound of the distinct march of Messiers returned. This time she could hear the guards opening doors, checking each room.

“We must leave,” he said, squeezing her hand tightly. “Let’s go home.”

Home. She wanted to go home more than anything else.

He pulled her toward the open parlor window. It dropped out into the garden, where moonlilies were beginning to open again like springtime buds on Eros. “I have memorized the guard patrols. We can jump down into the garden and leave the way I entered. Riggs parked a skysailer for us on the docks—”

“Check the next one down,” snapped a familiar voice out in the hallway. Rasovant. “The intruder has to be here somewhere.”

Ana and Di froze until another door opened. Not theirs yet, but closer. It was only a matter of moments before the Messiers opened theirs. Rasovant was relentless. Even if they fled, he wouldn’t stop until he found them again, and he would find them. Perhaps not now, but in some other corner of the universe. They would never truly escape.

“Di,” she whispered, stopping him from climbing over the windowsill. “I can’t.”

He turned back to her, confused. “What?”

“I can’t go,” she repeated, and her voice warbled with the weight of those words. “If I don’t stay, then Rasovant will create his army and innocent Metals will die. But if I survive until my coronation, I can dismantle the HIVE. I can destroy Rasovant—”

“And if you die?”

She tried to smile. “Apparently, I’m a lot harder to kill than people think.”

Di looked away, probably trying to calculate another way for her to leave before Rasovant and his Metals found them—she knew him. She knew he would try again and again and again. And she loved that about him. He was her Di, good and selfless and logical, but it was the .02 percent that she did not know that surprised her.

He turned his dark eyes back to her and said, “Then I will stay with you.”

The good-bye she had formed on her lips fell away. “What if someone finds out you’re a Metal? You should be afraid of the HIVE—”

“Of course I am afraid,” he replied, and it hit her, finally. That he felt, and that it didn’t matter that he was afraid. “I could not stay with you in Astoria because I was a Metal—but now I have the chance. Let me try.” He brought her hand up to his cheek and pressed his face against it. “Tell me to stay by your side.”

She wanted to. The way he looked at her, as though she was the moon in his night sky, made her braver than she thought she could ever be. Brave enough to realize that there were no good good-byes.

She was afraid of Messiers finding them—of finding him. Would Di be HIVE’d? And if he could now feel, would it hurt? Or would he simply slide away like rain across a starshield? There and then gone?

She didn’t want to find out.

So she memorized how the light from the windows slanted across the sharp edges of his face, the way he leaned toward her like a shield, how there were a thousand stars in his eyes, which sometimes made them shine as silver as moonlight—as they did now.

In any other universe, she and Di probably would have met in a room like this, with plush carpet and dour-faced portraits, and sat on the fainting couch by the window. They would’ve talked for hours.

She would have liked him. Maybe someday, she would’ve liked to marry him, too.

But in this universe, for a moment she existed where he existed, and that was enough.

“Next room!” snapped the Iron Adviser. The Messiers’ march was so loud, it rattled the antique china on display in the curio cabinets. They were coming for their door, overriding the locked keypad.

“I want you to stay,” she whispered, taking off the half-melted pendant and tying it around his neck. Because it would protect him. Because it had protected her for so long. “But you can’t.”

And for a split second his face began to fracture, the metal heart inside his chest breaking, before she shoved him out of the window with all her might, and sent him tumbling into the garden below.

Bleeping, E0S swirled out of the window after him as the Messiers unlocked the parlor door. She turned to their blue-eyed stares with a pleasant smile.

“We are searching for an intruder,” the first Messier said.

Of course they were. “Good luck,” she said with a smile.





Di


Di hid behind a statue of the Goddess until the patrol passed the entrance to the garden.

His mind was numb, his fingers rubbing the pendant she’d given him—the slightly melted ouroboros—as another group of Messiers passed, moving in perfect precision.

She had pushed him away; she didn’t want him to stay.

You knew you could not, he thought, but he wanted to so badly, it ached in places so deep, he could not think.

He did not want to feel anymore. How foolish he was. Humans did not love Metals, and Metals could not love. And she would rather stay and fight than leave with him. The irrational, emotional part of his programming hated it, but the Di he used to be understood. The lives of many outweighed the lives of the few. And Ana was stubborn enough to know it.