Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(95)

Robb scoffed, shaking his head. “Erik’s a monster, Mother. He doesn’t care about family, he cares about himself. That isn’t a Valerio—”

“And you know what being a Valerio means?” she asked, her voice like dry ice.

“Yes!” And in that word was all the pent-up rage he had carefully stored. Every moment, every motive, every syllable, bubbling up until he couldn’t be quiet anymore. “Our family’s motto is Glory in the Pursuit—the pursuit of honor, of family, of love. It isn’t pursuit of your own glory. It never was. My father taught me that.”

“And he died for it, too,” said his mother, and she could have said anything else. Absolutely anything, and it would have broken his heart a little less. It would have made the next moment harder.

He stood, and bowed to her. “Then if he is not a true Valerio, neither am I.”

He waited for a moment as the wind carried his words through the rosebushes and willow trees, picking the dying petals of the moonlillies into the air. He waited for her to say otherwise, but she never did, and the hope that maybe, somewhere in that twisted, small speck of dirt she called a heart, she cared for him, went out in a breath.

Blinking back hot tears, he said, “I’ll leave after Ana’s coronation tomorrow so as not to draw suspicion to the family.”

“I will find you if you leave.”

“Then I will just escape again, and again, until you grow tired of finding me.”

Then, like she had done to him his entire life, he turned his back and left her in the quiet of the moon garden, alone.





Di


Eventually, the void split apart in a blaze of light. It swarmed him, rushing, rushing, until he could feel his hands and feet, and the sharp ache from the bullet that had grazed his face—and he awoke with a gasp.

“So you’ve come back online,” said a deep, dry voice. Lord Rasovant.

Di trailed his eyes up to the man sitting on the stool across from him, one leg over the other, watching. Once, the Adviser would have been a nice-looking man, but sixty years had pulled his skin downward and freckled his face with sunspots.

Blinking, Di tried to clear the fuzzines out of his head. He was bound to a chair in the center of a small, dark room. He had been here before. Moments before, it felt like. Papers were scattered beneath the chair legs, a pile of overturned books in the corner, a headless Metal underneath. The computer on the far wall was dark, crumpled in with the weight of Ana’s fury.

How long had it taken for him to reboot? Had he missed the coronation?

Captain? he called hesitantly, but there was no answer. The communications were still blocked.

He tested the handcuffs that bound him to the back of the chair, but they were stronger than normal handcuffs. Titanium, by the sound of them.

“Don’t waste your energy,” said the Iron Adviser.

“Let me go,” Di rasped. “You have no right to keep me here.”

The Adviser leaned over onto his knees and picked Ana’s pendant off Di’s chest, studying it with a thoughtful expression. “Identify AI,” he said.

There was a prompt—an instruction to comply. Impulsive, as if it was built in as a reflex. But he bit his tongue, focusing on the pain. D—

“A—person,” he forced out.

“Interesting.” Rasovant dropped the pendant and leaned back on his stool. “Identify AI,” he repeated.

The command was a fail-safe. A back door built into his code, and he heard the closed door rattling in his head. He felt the compulsion—but he was not a serial number. He had not been for some time. He was not a unit. He was not a commodity.

He was more than the sum of his parts.

“My friends,” he struggled out, “call—call m-me—Di.”

The man’s face twitched. “I will give you one more chance, Metal. Identify AI—”

“Di,” he repeated. Sharper. “Shall I—spell it? D-I.”

The Adviser struck him across his cheek with the back side of his ringed hand. Di glared up through his red hair, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

“Don’t look at me like I am the villain,” the Adviser warned.

Di gritted his teeth. “You turned Plague victims into Metals.”

“I could not create an AI smart enough without some layer of existing consciousness,” replied the Adviser easily, as if it was the most normal response. “The Plague was spreading, and we needed to stop it.”

“You made it so we could not feel. You took away the part of us that made us human—”

“Identify AI,” Rasovant tried one last time.

The reaction was so visceral and caught him so off guard that the words ripped out of him, this strange and jumbled mess of syllables he had not expected.

“I am Dmmm—”

But he choked on the words as that stranger part of him, the part that remembered the smell of sage and the fit of the uniform and that the globe of Eros squeaked, rebelled—I am, it screamed.

Rasovant’s jaw worked, as if he was about to say something, when the keypad to the door beeped.

Hope rose in Di’s chest, because it could be someone come to find him. Ana or Robb, or someone—

The door rose.

“Father, it is almost morning. Is brother awake yet?”