The closer they drew to the floating garden, the louder her heart thundered in her ears. Crashing an Ironblood’s party couldn’t be that difficult. She’d gone through worse. The mine on Cerces was worse. This would be easy. This was just a garden.
Just a few Ironbloods.
The floating gardens of Nevaeh were renowned across the kingdom for their beauty and exotic flowers. Ironblood-owned, and Ironblood-funded, the islands rose and fell over the cityscape like the cycles of the moon, and anyone who didn’t have pretty noble blood couldn’t visit.
And sneaking onto the Valerios’ floating garden . . .
She wasn’t sure if she was just desperate—or foolish, too.
Anxiously, she checked the bullets in her Metroid .56; an older pistol Captain Siege had given her three years ago when she turned fourteen.
“Count your bullets and remember where they land,” Captain Siege had warned. She put a hand over Ana’s to steady her aim. “Once you steal a life, you can never give it back, so easy on the trigger. Exhale. Feet apart.”
Ana did as she was told and let the captain fix her posture, straightening her back and crooking her elbow, and she found her aim easing toward the target, her finger effortlessly squeezing the trigger. Bull’s-eye.
“On your way to being a fine captain, I’d say,” Siege had said with a grin.
Ana still remembered that moment, how those words filled her with pride.
She hadn’t killed anyone yet, hadn’t started counting her bullets, but she’d come close. How desperate was she for those coordinates?
The skysailer slipped between the lines of traffic toward the underside of the garden. From this high up, the people in the streets looked like dots of moving sand. Or bugs. If the Moon Goddess existed, did she look at humans that way? As faceless little termites scurrying around, ruining perfectly good foundations?
Ana had never believed much in the Goddess. She only knew the origin story, as sweet as a bedtime lullaby. How, in a kingdom of shadows, the queen bore a daughter of light who chased the Dark away.
But would the Moon Goddess protect an outlaw like her?
Ana prayed anyway, like the old women had in the shrine. Goddess bright, bless my stars and keep me steady.
“Twenty-five feet and closing,” Jax told them, and added, “Try not to get yourselves killed.”
“It is a priority not to,” Di replied, earning a glare from Ana as she spun the barrel of her pistol shut and holstered it.
The skysailer coasted into the marina under the garden, where guests’ skysailers sat parked in rows upon rows of ship ramps. The plan was to go in through the service entrance—hopefully unannounced. The Valerios’ guests used the main entrance on the garden level, so the odds of being found down here were slim to none. Besides, Ana rather liked going in the back door—she didn’t have to knock.
“Remember,” she said through the comm-link to Jax, watching him drop away into traffic again, “keep low until I get the coordinates, and then—”
“It’s not my first rodeo, love,” he interrupted, laughing.
“I do not like this,” Di protested as they hurried across the docking ramp toward the service entrance. “There should be more security—”
The door to the service entrance slid open.
A Messier, clad in uniform blue and black, stepped out. It shifted its blue gaze from her to D09, and lingered on him. Ana went silently for her gun. She didn’t like way the Messier stared, as though nothing ticked inside its metal head. Nothing thought.
Ana glared at Di. “Happy now? Security.”
“You are trespassing,” the Messier said, and turned its HIVE’d eyes to Di. “And you are rogue.”
“I am,” Di agreed, then punched his hand into the weakest part of the Messier’s torso and ripped a small glowing square out of its body. Strings of optical wires came with it, stretching like sinew.
With one final tug, the wires popped away. The Messier’s eyes flickered out, and it dropped onto the docks. D09 pushed the body over, and it fell and fell and fell into the city, until Ana couldn’t see it anymore.
She looked back at the glowing square—the Messier’s memory core. It was so small, no bigger than a sugar cube, like Di’s, sitting damaged in his metal chest. It held everything a Metal was, everything they could be. But this one was dark, barely glowing at all—HIVE’d.
He crushed it in his grip, and she flinched.
“Are . . . are you sure you needed to do that?”
“I lack the capacity to be unsure. It was already HIVE’d. Shall we continue?”
“But—”
“This way.” He led her through the automatic doors and into a dimly lit hallway. Irrigation pipes above their heads hummed with water, leading them toward what smelled like the kitchen. Floating garden cuisine used only produce grown in the garden. It must have been nice, having food that wasn’t dry-sealed and tasting like dust.
The smell of baked goods and meats led them to the kitchen, and up a staircase to the garden. There wasn’t door at the top but a curtain of honeysuckle vines. From between them came the sound of a full string quartet playing lively melodies over the chatter of high-society gossip. She relished the noise for a moment, and the scent of magnolias and chocolate twisted into a perfume that made her mouth water.
She peered out between the vines, not daring to move them, afraid of being seen. Ironbloods were only Ironblooded because their lineage could be traced to the Goddess’s court—or so the Cantos of Light said. But in the midst of lavender roses and orange daffodils, green grass and ivy vines, the Ironbloods looked almost ethereal in their glittery dresses and jeweled coats.
“How do you plan on infiltrating the party?” Di asked. “We are hardly Ironblooded.”
“I didn’t get that far. Gimme a minute,” she muttered. Grease-stained trousers and a patched frock coat were’t quite Ironblood attire. She chewed on her bottom lip, glancing into the kitchen at the cooks.
Di began, “Perhaps we can—”
Coming out of the kitchen, a waiter with a tray of champagne flutes stopped dead in the doorway. He wore the crimson-and-gold colors of the Valerio house, and a black collar around his throat, humming gently.
A voxcollar.
She’d only seen them on prisoners in Cercian mines to keep them silent, to stop them from inciting a rebellion. Why were they on the Valerios’ waitstaff?
The waiter gave a long, slow blink. He looked about her height.
She slid her burgundy coat back to reveal her pistol. “Sorry, but I’m going to need your clothes.”
Ana finished tucking the crimson dress shirt and bib into too-loose pants and swirled her hair up into a bun. She figured they had twenty minutes before someone found the waiter they’d locked in the pantry—she hoped, at least. He couldn’t scream with that voxcollar on unless he wanted a thousand volts of electricity straight to the neck.
She grabbed the tray of champagne flutes as she left the kitchen and hoisted it onto her shoulder. Di waited for her at the top of the stairs, the curtain of honeysuckle vines a vivid green and yellow against his still frame.
In the garden, Ironbloods chatted to one another from behind delicately laced fans and white-gloved hands, their pleasant smiles like masks.
To hide all the rot underneath, Ana thought bitterly as she searched for that damned Ironblood in the crowd. It didn’t help that she’d barely gotten a good look at him. Sharp jaw, crooked smile. Goddess, all the men looked the same in their starched evening coats the rich color of flowers, accented with brassy buttons and family insignias. Jesper. Carnelian. Malachite. Umbal. Wysteria. Valerio . . .
It was a viper den.
She pursed her lips before finally saying, “I think you should stay in here and look for the Ironblood underground. He could try to give me the slip.”
“He does not even know we are here, and I will be of more assistance to you in the garden. I could pose as a Messier.”
“And what’s the chance of you glitching again soon?”
He did not respond for a long moment. “Seventy-four-point-six percent.”
“It’s getting too high,” she said softly. “Don’t be difficult, please.”
“I am being pragmatic. It is a large party and—”
She turned around and grabbed ahold of his hands, looking up into his moonlit eyes with all the conviction she had.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. She genuinely believed it, too. “You know I won’t get into trouble without my best friend.”
“That is not as reassuring as you may believe.”
She squeezed his hands tightly, even though he couldn’t feel it. “I’ll always come back for you,” she whispered, reaching up on her tiptoes to press her forehead against his cool metal one. “I promise you on iron and stars.”
She wanted him to promise, too—but she knew he wouldn’t.
Metals didn’t have emotions, so how could she love something that would never—could never—feel the same? She often told herself, when her heart fluttered or her cheeks burned, that she didn’t love him.
That she couldn’t.
But, every time she tried to picture herself without him, there was only a great darkness in her head. She didn’t know who she would be without him, and she never wanted to know. Her heart beat, and his wires hummed, and they were Ana and Di—and there were no words for that.
So she pressed her lips, briefly, against his metal mouth, and whisked herself out through the vines and into the party.
Goddess, she needed fresh air.