“I have long awaited this moment, Aja.”
“Ah, my father ’s favorite pet.” Aja examines Ragnar. “Has the Stained convinced you he’s tamed? I wonder if he told you how he liked to be rewarded after a fight in the Circada. After the applause faded and he cleaned the blood from his hands, Father would send him young Pinks to satisfy his animal lusts. How greedy he was with them. How frightened they were of him.” Her voice is flat and
bored of this ice, of this conversation, of us. All she wants is what we have to give her, and that is a challenge. After all the Obsidian bodies behind her, she still is not tired of blood. “Have you ever seen an Obsidian rut?” she continues. “You’d think twice about taking off their collars, ruster. They have appetites you can’t imagine.”
Ragnar steps forward, holding his razors in either hand. He unfastens the white fur he took from
the Eaters and lets it fall behind him. It’s strange being here surrounded by wind and snow. Stripped of our armies, our navies. The only thing protecting each of our lives: little coils of metal. The hugeness of the Antarctic laughs at our size and self-importance, thinking how easily it could snuff out the heat in our little chests. But our lives mean so much more than the frail bodies that carry them.
Ragnar ’s step forward is a sign to Mustang and Holiday in the trees.
Aim true, Holiday.
“Your father bought me, Aja. Shamed me. Made me his devil. A thing. The child inside fled.
The hope vanished. I was Ragnar no more.” He touches his own chest. “But I am Ragnar today, tomorrow, forever more. I am son of the Spires, brother of Sefi the Quiet, brother of Darrow of Lykos, and Sevro au Barca. I am the Shield of Tinos. I follow my heart. And when yours beats no more, foul Knight, I will pull it from your chest and feed it to the griffin of the…”
Cassius scans the craggy rocks and stunted trees that cup the snowfield to his left. His eyes narrow when they fall upon a cluster of broken timber at the base of a rock formation. Then, without warning, he shoves Aja forward. She stumbles, and just behind her, where she stood, the head of their remaining Gray explodes. Blood splatters the snow as the crack of Holiday’s rifle echoes from the mountains. More bullets tear into the snow around Cassius and Aja. The Fury moves behind the third Gold, using his body as cover. Two bullets slam into his scarabSkin, penetrating the strong polymer.
Cassius rolls on his shoulder and uses much of the last juice from his pulseFist. The hillside erupts.
Rocks glowing. Exploding. Snow vaporizing.
And under that noise is the sound of a bowstring releasing. Aja hears it too. She moves fast.
Spinning as an arrow fired by Mustang from the woods careens toward her head. It misses by centimeters. Cassius fires on Mustang’s position on the hill, shattering trees and superheating rocks.
Can’t tell if she’s hit. Can’t spare the seconds to look because Ragnar and I use the distraction to charge, vision narrowing, slingBlade curving into form. Closing the distance over the snow. PulseFist glowing in his hand, Cassius turns just as I bear down on him. He fires the pulseFist. It’s a weak charge that I dive beneath, hitting the ground and rolling up like a Lykos tumbler. He fires again. The pulseFist is dead, battery drained from firing on the hillside. Ragnar hurls one of his razors at Aja like a huge throwing knife. It flips end over end in the air. She doesn’t move. It slams into her. She spins backward. For a moment I think he’s killed her. But then she turns back to us, holding the razor by the hilt in her right hand.
She caught it.
A dark fear sweeps through me as all of Lorn’s warnings about Aja come rushing back. “Never fight a river, and never fight Aja.”
The four of us smash together, turning into a clumsy mash of cracking whips and clattering blades.
Scrambling and twisting and bending. Our razors faster than our own eyes can track. Aja swipes diagonally at my legs as I go for hers; Ragnar and Cassius aim for each other ’s necks in quick no-look thrusts. Identical strategies, all. It’s so awkward we all almost kill one another in the first half second. Yet each gambit misses by a hair.
We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language. All that hateful breed of human Dancer told me about before I was Carved, the ones Lorn lived among and despised all the while.
I shatter the weird peace first. Lashing forward in a tight series of thrusts at Cassius’s right side, peeling him away from Aja so Ragnar can take her down singly. Behind Cassius, Mustang stirs from