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  To the reckless, lovestruck kids.

  (The former may be lethal, but the latter makes it worth it.)

  CHAPTER ONE

  SONA

  It makes sense that, when the times were desperate enough, when the people were frenzied enough, at a certain point we went past praying to deities and started to build them instead.

  I never truly appreciated that before.

  Then my eyes open, and I choke at the sight of the bleeding heavens.

  Even as I grapple for the edges of the bed, dry heaving over its side, even as the red sky burns above me, I understand. The logic of it all. The brutal, human need for greater beings.

  Human.

  I blink once, slowly, waiting for the rest of my thoughts to align.

  They left those, at least.

  I sit upright, bringing my hands around to inspect, noting how my fingertips still twitch at my command. They look like mine. All the calluses are still there, hard and smooth like river stones across my palms. I peel back my left thumb, searching for the thin, pale scar that marks its base, where again and again I would bury my nail to suffocate the quivering of my hands.

  My hands will never tremble again, but not because I am absent of fear now. In that respect, they have not changed me at all.

  There is no scar.

  This, too, makes sense. Calluses have use. Scars have memories and not much else. Keep the soldier and discard her flaws, and make her a God.

  I press the nail of my forefinger to where the scar should curl.

  Coil inward, tighter, tighter, knuckle flashing white, wait patiently for the skin to give—

  The small sliver splits open. A red drop rolls off my skin and breaks against the tile floor.

  They did not take away my blood, but they did take my pain.

  I will not get that back until I am synced with the Windup.

  My Windup.

  I look back up again to watch the red morning sky, still scattered with specks of aether and a pale moon that remains resiliently pinned despite the blush of the horizon.

  If I opened my mouth, I could ask the ceiling to flicker to a star-choked cosmos, or an eternal thunderstorm, or any of a million other fantastical images. Only the best amenities for the Academy’s top students.

  I do not speak. Whatever I wish for will still be glazed with red, just like the walls, just like my limbs. I am terrified that my voice has changed. They could have altered it in any way they pleased, or taken it altogether. Just like they took my pain, my breath, my eye.

  It does not matter—whatever projections splay across the ceiling, they are nothing more than a collection of mirages against cold concrete. Just pretty things suffocating hard truths. I have long learned to be cautious of pretty things. Of beauty, of the grace of Gods formed from steel and wire …

  It is all just warm skin hiding wires and bolts and the sharp edges of microchips.

  Move. The thought flourishes, brittle with panic. You need to move, or the fear will seal you here.

  I peer over the side of the bed. Slowly touch a toe against the ground, testing my weight, waiting for some seam to split the length of my leg, some part of me they forgot to seal up when they were finished bestowing the Mods.

  I put my other foot to the ground and ease myself fully off the bed.

  I do not unravel.

  I do not even waver.

  There is no longer a need for breath, and without the rise and fall of my chest, I feel so very still. My panic is a soundless, hollow thing.

  The lights lining the mirror flicker on as I enter the bathroom. The tiles that encase the walls are pure black. Blue stone flecks the white marble sink. I know this. I know this, but as much as I cling to the memory of shades past, everything around me bleeds crimson.

  Although … bleeds is not quite the right word for it.

  I have made things bleed before; that red is always contained. It stains clothes and floorboards and lips, only things that I have permitted it to.

  But this hue laps at my feet like ocean waves and corrupts the air I struggle to remember not to breathe, and it does not feel like victory.

  This damn eye.

  The left eye, to be exact. The distinction is important. One is artificial, one is not. One holds red and soaks the world through with it, and the other belongs to me.

  It takes a while for me to drag my sight from the counter to the mirror, and when I do, Windup Pilot Two-One-Zero-One-Nine is there to catch my gaze. She wraps her fingers around my arms, parts my lips and folds my shoulders inward, and pulls a grating, splintering sound from my throat—part gasp, part ragged cry.

  Right before the sound dies, it skips into a laugh.

  What the hells have I done?

  The Pilot moves her hands from her arms to her face, taking inventory of the features. Her father’s strong jaw, the curls that bow against it. Her mother’s soft nose and mouth, the fine, lovely shape of her eyes—but mine are larger, like they were drawn into place with an unhurried hand, or so she used to say.

  They never dreamed that their daughter would hold so much more than bone and blood.

  “My name…” The whisper comes at a crawl. “My name is Sona Steelcrest.”

  Their daughter is still here.

  “My name is Sona Steelcrest. I am still human.”

  I am still here.

  They could not carve me away completely, not without also removing the pieces that they wish to use. That they need to use.

  How lucky I am, to be perfect now.

  I pause, then place my palm over the left eye.

  Color comes crashing back into place as the Mod disengages. Black spills against the tiles and brown pours into my hair and my eye. It is all so much better than the red that gleams beneath my hand, the red that they forced into me.

  How lucky I am that when the Academy surgeons were sifting about—ripping away those pesky human imperfections—they did not burn their hands on every venomous thought that festers under my skin. That they did not think to look closer, where across each vein and bone, I have carved out the promise that in time, I will take them apart, too.

  I pull my palm away slowly, leaving their eye closed, and stare at the half-blind girl staring back. She is wrought of bolts and wires and metal plates. She is wrought of bone and blood, and of rage.

  “My name is Sona Steelcrest. I am still human.” I take a breath, allow it to coil through me, to ignite me. “I am here to destroy them all.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SONA

  There are seams, fissures in the skin, cutting a neat box into both of my forearms.

  When I touch one and feel only me, I think to myself, The panel is grafted with your own skin, your own nerves, and this is why you do not have to cry.

  Heat curling behind my eyes, I weigh one arm in my hand, switch, weigh the other. Feels the same. Feels fine. My teeth dig graves in my bottom lip.

  A knock s
ounds at the door.

  The room’s mirage wavers before vanishing completely, depriving me of the false morning sky, and instead reveals the concrete-bound window that overlooks the vastness of Godolia. As the crown jewel, the Academy sits at the very center of the city, the epicenter of a tightly packed metropolis expanding fifty miles in each direction. Everything past the walls is considered the Badlands, dotted by resource villages and ravaged by wars past—and to the borders of this continent, the city-nation of Godolia owns it all.

  From this far up, the only things I see are the other skyscrapers with enough height to best the ghostly fog, reaching up out of the mist like the lonely cypress trees of a marsh.

  When the door slides open, I salute with a firm hand, forefinger steady on my brow, eyes dropped to the visitor’s combat boots.

  “At ease,” Colonel Tether says evenly.

  I now have permission to raise my sight, but I am still not permitted to look him in the eye. Students are never allowed to look the superiors in the eye.

  I was unaware of this rule during my first week as a student of the Windup Academy, an instance that provoked this man’s heel to seek purchase in my stomach, as well as my side when I had the audacity to drop to my knees. Twelve years old, gasping for air on the floor, it was not until I was done gagging that I realized how lucky I was. Lucky that I was hurt instead of discarded, tossed back out on the city streets from where they first plucked me, that when I was broken and starved they fed me. Lucky that when I was alone and lost, they gave me the chance to be worshipped, to be a divine thing.

  Because they are merciful.

  Godolia is a merciful place.

  Tether steps closer. I do not move.

  He must be able to see it—this throbbing disgust, the sick, overwhelming feeling of wrongness eating away at my every natural piece. How could he possibly miss it when it is all I can focus on, when it is all I can do to keep my feet sealed in place?

  “Steelcrest,” Tether murmurs low, “are you ready to become a Valkyrie?”

  Despite myself, my heart skips a beat, and in the wake of it, a laugh nearly unfurls from my throat. We are small. We are mortal. And I am being asked if I am ready to become a God.

  There is nothing else I could possibly say. “Yes, sir.”

  He turns on his heel and starts at a brisk walk, leading me out of my bedroom and away from the residential wing, down a flight of stairs and onto the classrooms level. We pass the simulation domes, where children who span the ages of twelve to sixteen are encased inside luminescent glass barriers, arms outstretched toward the images flickering within their headsets. From behind their eyepieces, they see armies of autonomous mechas, helicopters rigged with submachine guns, and green tanks with cannons aimed at their heads. From within their domes, they shift their stances to evade, protect, and eliminate.

  One dome we pass holds a girl, her hair tied back into twin tails that end just below her ears. She is barefoot and wears the Academy student uniform: black cargo pants and a gray shirt, dark in the places her perspiration has saturated the material. I do not know what virtual war she sees behind her eyepiece, but I know the moment she loses. Her guarding stance is weak, timid. Her sight flickers to the left behind the green-tinted glass, and she raises her arm, up, up, up—and hesitates.

  Whatever is attacking her does not. Her defense breaks. Her small body is flung to the ground with an earsplitting cry, and her hands clutch at her ribs. She cannot be more than thirteen.

  I keep walking.

  The simulations told me I was damn good at this. At war.

  They told the Academy I was ready to kill, to give me a mecha.

  But those were simulations. Child’s play, for any child feral enough.

  We enter a glass elevator. Tether jabs one of the silver buttons with his thumb before tossing a sickly grin over his shoulder.

  “You look nervous, Steelcrest.”

  “No, sir.”

  I listen for the small click that signifies the doors have sealed.

  “I should remind you,” he says, turning, head bending toward mine. “You do not have my permission to die during the test run.”

  I skim my thumb over my sleeve, over the thin gap carved into the skin there. “Or what?”

  His grin freezes. “I’ve misheard you.”

  “You have not.” I look up, sifting leisurely through his vulgar, stonelike features. Across the stubble of his chin, the curl of his mouth, the unfortunate poise of his nose. “If I die during the test run, without your blessing … what will you do?”

  My gaze claws its way onto his.

  I do not know what color his eyes are, and I do not care to.

  There is no tech in his left iris, and it marks the absence of his ability. Perhaps a smidge of skill exists buried beneath the layers and layers of petty arrogance, but it could never measure up to the power that the Academy has implanted in my veins.

  “You are out of line, Steelcrest,” Tether growls.

  “And you forget yourself, Tether,” I say softly. “It would not be fun for you to hurt me anymore. Not when there is no pain to make me scream, correct?”

  The elevator slips down into the haze, and the glowing infestation of my left socket becomes the only source of light amid the dark.

  “Besides,” I say to his shocked silence, “how much of me do you dare damage now?”

  I am truly asking. He wants to break me into jagged little pieces; I can tell by the twitch in his jaw, the way lines in the skin around his mouth go taut and pale. He can want all he likes.

  He does not speak.

  The elevator sinks beneath the smog, and the city bursts into view. Skyscrapers spiral upward into the haze, as if the shining beasts have the strength to support the heavens themselves. Every edge and crook is beaded with soft light, and from my tainted sight, it is as if everything is painted over in a glittering, crimson luminescence. It pours into the streets winding below, crooked and teeming with movement.

  Strings of twinkling lights and paper lanterns are woven thick over the streets, sidewalks and roads alike congested by streams of people. Food vendor carts blast steam from underneath their painted plastic tarps. Skeletal girls teeter in pointed heels on street corners, wrapped in silks glazed with the streetlights, beckoning to the passersby who gawk with wide eyes.

  It smells clean inside the elevator, like crisp linen and a tinge of bleach. I imagine the stench of sweat and dirty rainwater and car exhaust of the streets below. But I have not been outside in seven years. Perhaps things have changed.

  Like me. Now, I do not know which smell I detest more. Inside or out, this whole city is suffocating.

  These are the fortunate people, down below, even pressed together as they are, living under Godolia’s protection rather than its gluttony. The only thing they had to do was happen to be born as one of its citizens, rather than one of the Badlands’. This has always been the way of the world: Some are born with luck, and the rest scramble to survive whatever the lucky ones might do with it.

  The elevator enters the earth, plummeting down into complete darkness once again. Our descent slows, and my disgust thickens as the doors peel back.

  We have arrived at the Windup hangar.

  Where the mechas are assembled and garrisoned.

  Where they rest after returning from the Badlands, and get the blood and carnage under their feet washed away and glossed over in an innocent, clean coat of paint.

  Tether snatches my wrist, towing me along faster. His fingernails nip at my skin, but I ignore the dull prickling and allow my eyes to wander across the Windups that tower all around us, their gleaming metallic heads nearly touching the two-hundred-foot ceiling.

  My lip curls. Their sheer size is a ludicrous; it is terrifying, and this is its purpose: to inspire and gorge on that very human feeling of smallness, of helplessness.

  The mechas are given humanlike features, their iron skin molded meticulously to hold anger in their brows, lips taut i
n concentration, daggerlike eyes narrowed in their determination. When they are wound by a Pilot, their dimmed pupils will ignite into a smoldering crimson hue.

  Once I begin the winding, once the wires the Academy forced through my bloodstream connect with the mecha’s central power core, those eyes will be mine. The Valkyrie will be me, and I will be it, and I will move each part with the same ease with which I moved my fingertips.

  The mechas stand divided by their respective units, polished head to toe, glittering sadistically beneath the industrial lights. To our left, the Berserker Windups, who possess more than enough artillery in their palms and their ribs to level a skyscraper. Next, the Paladins, reaching only eighty feet in overall height but serving more as battering rams than anything else, with a yard-thick layer of iron serving as skin. The Phoenix Windups shimmer with a red finish, even without this eye cloaking my view, signifying the flames they spit from the thermal cannons substituting for their right arms. Any creature that dares come close to their wound state will be met with near-instant second-degree burns.

  “Steelcrest,” Tether barks. We have stopped, and I go cold, all at once, sick with the urge to run from the feet of the deity before us. We are here too quickly. I cannot do this. I cannot possibly do this.

  But I have to look. Because it is mine. Because it is going to be me.

  I close my left eye, tilt my chin back and up, up, up—and swear that arrogant smirk across her ivory lips quirks a bit higher.

  Greaves that shimmer gold guard her lithe shins, stretching close to five times my stature. Past that, a collection of black steel armor plates are bolted the length of her hips to her chest, breaking into clefts around her shoulders and spilling down her arms in an assemblage of ruthless, needlelike spikes, tinged by snowcap white. And far, far above, she looks outward with a ruby-speckled gaze that flickers dangerously beneath a furrowed brow. A knight’s helmet, black and trimmed with gold, is etched with feathers. Her steel hands, clasped together as if in prayer, are encased within a pair of chrome-plated gloves, and between them, a black longsword rests between her palms. Iron outlines its blade, tip providing the barest kiss to the ground in front of us.