Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(96)

His hope turned to lead. He recognized the voice. It was young, sweet-sounding—flaxen hair and a purple dress. Something was wrong with her—something that made his skin crawl. How had she rendered him unconscious in the garden? What was she?

“Brother?” he asked in growing alarm. There was only one other thing that ever called him “brother.” “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

The girl smiled, “What we want for every Metal.”

A clawing, desperate fear slithered up his throat. No—he could not be HIVE’d. Then he would join that program, the one wanting to kill Ana. He could not kill Ana.

He would not.

“But I am not every Metal,” he tried to reason, turning back to Rasovant. “You created this body so it could feel and understand emotions, right? What would you get out of HIVE’ing me? What purpose was this body for then?”

The Adviser’s mouth twisted. “It was an experiment. Because, you see . . . you’re right. When I created Metals, I took away your emotions. I didn’t realize how important they were. None of my creations retained their memories. This was not a problem but a curiosity. Where did I go wrong? Memories, it turns out, are laced with emotions. A happy memory, a sad one. One cannot exist without the other. Then my son began to die.”

Di’s eyebrows furrowed. “Your son?”

“He was brilliant. He was good—a talented medic. And the Emperor sent him down to treat a strange disease that would later be known as the Plague. Of course, he contracted it—”

The uniform he now wore, belonging to a son who died during the Plague. A sterile hangar, the smell of sickness, voices crying out, begging, his hands blackened beyond—

The room swam, and Di blinked. That was . . .

“—So I thought of a way to save him—and all the others lost to this incurable Plague—but after I made my son a Metal, he didn’t remember me. No Metal remembered who they were, even though their memories were there, captured and frozen, but entirely inaccessible. I spent years researching emotional programming, fine-tuned rational processors, until I built the body you now inhabit. But then that mess with the Rebellion,” he said flippantly, as if killing the Emperor and his children were but an asterisk. “And this body”—he gestured to Di—“was lost to me.”

“You don’t sound all that distraught.”

“It is all in the Goddess’s plan,” he replied, and turned his gaze to Di again. They were dark and listless, as though he were already dead. “But tell me, do you remember anything from your previous life, Metal? Does this body work, at least?”

Di clenched his teeth. Did this body work? It was a question with innumerable answers. Did he know what it was like to touch? To smell? To taste? —Oh, he could recount every moment. The feel of Ana’s warm skin, the scent of her, moonlilies and stardust, and her mouth that tasted like stardust. He knew the fit of Siege’s warm coat across his shoulders, the sound of the crew happy to see him alive, and the smile on Ana’s lips, and how it made him want to kiss them to make sure they were real.

Yes, it worked.

And with every moment more, every experience, every memory, a piece of him he could not recall lit up, slowly, like a forgotten shrine filling with candles. Memories, from the person he was long ago, drifting in and out of his processors in a waltz. They were his.

They had been him.

But Rasovant did not deserve that sort of answer.

The old man shifted in his chair, annoyed at Di’s silence. “Identify AI,” he commanded one last time.

Di did not even have to fight the prompt—he did not want to anymore. He did not have to. The words tumbled out of his mouth as if they had always been waiting on his tongue, the whisper between his processors of I am, I am, the words just out of reach.

“I am Dmitri Rasovant.”

Rasovant’s face went red. “Liar. My son is dead.”

“And he would have rather not seen the monster you became,” Di agreed.

That made the Adviser angrier. But somehow Di knew it would. Like the smell of sage on the uniform. Like the fit of a pistol. Like the constellation of scars across Ana’s cheek.

All these memories—of a life he lived before, and the one now—collided like galaxies.

“I will save this kingdom, Metal,” the Adviser snapped. “The Goddess gave me an army before I knew I needed one. Don’t you see? It is all in Her plan.”

“You’re a madman. You killed the Emperor”—Nicholii, a man Dmitri had known when they were kids together, in that other life—“and his children and blamed it on Metals to create your army.”

“I did what I had to!” the Adviser cried. “I—”

“Calm, Father,” said the flaxen-haired girl, putting a hand on Lord Rasovant’s shoulder. “Sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.”

Rasovant nodded, as if the idea actually calmed him. “Yes, like the new Empress—”

“Ana is not a sacrifice!” Di snarled, a flash of anger flickering against his chest. His vision filled with static, electricity humming over his wires as it had in the square, turning fury to power, singeing the old man’s beard, taking hold of the numerous decorative medals on his breast—none of which he was worthy of anymore—