Gearbreakers Read online

  Theo whoops and slaps his hand on the side of the truck.

  “Punch it, Nova!” he squeals, and the engine revs, wings of dust flying out beneath us. We streak across the desert, shrieking with glee at doing something so reckless, so important.

  We careen beside the railway track, wheels momentarily skipping across the chrome bolts before Nova yanks the wheel right, hurtling us into the sprawling cast of the Windup’s shadow. A shiver ripples up my spine, and I grin as we flip our masks on simultaneously, intercom piece crackling to life in my ear. Dirt thrown back from the Phoenix’s pounding feet clinks against the plastic visors.

  Fifty yards from the target. Thirty. Nova does something especially cruel to the engine, a pop of fire spitting from the exhaust pipe, a rush in my chest as the breath in my lungs is forced back, and then it’s ten.

  “Cavalry,” Arsen yawns into his microphone as the black neck of a submachine gun sprouts from the roof of the last train car, the gunman’s face shielded by a bulletproof riot helmet.

  Nova slams on the brakes, sending us lurching for a hold, and mere feet from the hood of the truck, the ground puckers and splits with a spray of bullets. The rounds tear toward us in a rupturing line, and Nova, humming in our ears, spins the wheel right, shoves the gear into reverse once we’ve carved a full one-eighty, and, bullets scraping the dirt we were just over, flings us backward at a breakneck pace.

  “Neck,” I say.

  “Yeah.” Milo brings the rifle to his shoulder, taking a quarter second to line up his sights, and buries the shot in the gunman’s throat.

  He falls back, then off the train entirely. He hits the ground and then he’s far behind us, last breath taken by the dust.

  As we dart up between train and Phoenix, Nova easing us as close to its running feet as she can, I jab my thumbs onto the cryo gloves’ buttons, tubes igniting with a luminous blue.

  “I’m primed!” I yell, leaning toward the Phoenix, one hand outstretched. Its left foot is dropping in front of us, with a force that would crack my teeth if they weren’t already braced together. As its step settles, I slash my touch against the ankle, the panels running along my glove’s palm and fingers bursting with cold energy. The broiling metal begins to steam.

  I pull back before the force of the Phoenix’s step can pull me from the truck, and at the same moment, Nova says, “Hand!”

  The sky disappears as a red-plated palm descends, reaching straight down to try to grab the car whole and chuck us into the desert.

  “Brake!” Theo shrieks.

  “Speed up!” Juniper cries.

  “What did I tell you about backseat driving?” Nova screeches back.

  “Nova, keep the speed!” Arsen digs around in his jacket and produces a small round orb, flinging it upward. It attaches itself to the descending palm, its tiny light letting out two meager flickers before exploding in a blinding flash.

  “Sticky bomb,” Juniper giggles, lifting a hand to bat away the shower of fragmented metal.

  She and Arsen turn toward the tracks, and he flashes a thumbs-up over his shoulder. “Ready when you are, Cap!”

  Their explosives are never pretty, but—between Juniper’s borderline sadistic corrosives and Arsen’s demolition skills—I have no doubt it’ll blow. They always do. I make a slight gesture to Theo, and his firearm flips in his hands, sight locking on the area of the Windup’s leg where my palm had rested for a half instant. Now, beneath the surface of the Windup’s skin, the cryo serum injected by my glove twists its way through the iron, devouring every particle of warmth that dares be in its path.

  The butt of Theo’s rifle collides with t he ankle, and the skin shatters like a pane of glass.

  “It’s charging up,” Arsen shouts, noting the sudden whirring sound in the air.

  “That’s your problem, not mine. I’m first,” I say, watching the leg swing away in the Windup’s next step, steam trailing from its wound. On its opposite side, the air around the thermal cannon is shimmering, prickled with heat as it readies its attack. “You’re second, Xander. June, Arsen, the train.”

  I don’t wait for them to respond; I don’t need to. The calf coasts back, and I’m flying from the pickup truck’s edge into the opening, suspended in open air for a tenth of a second before entering the mecha.

  By instinct and muscle memory alone, my hand seizes the ladder’s rung before I can slam into the opposite side of the calf, and I deactivate the cryo gloves before they splinter the metal. I press my body close to the ladder as the Windup takes another step, the force of it sending my breath to the front of my throat. Then the leg swings back, providing me a brief glimpse of both my crew and Xander barreling over the ridge that divides us. He makes it past the broken edge and grabs an open rung before he can crash into me.

  He takes off his visor and hood, gaze rolling up silently.

  We climb.

  Wires hang thick across the air once we reach the hips. We creep off the ladder and onto a support beam that spans the abdomen, and I put a hand on Xander’s head to keep him low, eyes scanning for any movement above us.

  “Go to the right hip,” I breathe. “Wait for my signal, and then jam the leg gears.” He turns to leave, and I grab his scrawny arm, tugging back my visor so I can look him in the eye. “Our intel says we’ve got two guards. Don’t be stupid about it. Call for help if you need it. This thing is going to fall hard and it’s going to fall fast. Don’t wait up for me. If you see an escape, take it. That’s an order.”

  The kid, retaining his infinite silence, nods again and retreats up the support beam, dipping under a curtain of wires before vanishing. I still remember the days when I wouldn’t let him out of my sight, let alone leave him to wander through a mecha unaccompanied. Not particularly because I was afraid of him getting killed, but because one of my crew members dying when I had just been named captain would’ve been highly embarrassing.

  Luckily, I’ve built up enough of a reputation that all of them know there’s no point in dying anyway, since, if they did so without my permission, I’d march down to the twin hells and drag them back through the gates myself.

  I tilt my head up, locating the revolving mechanism that controls the left leg, eyes sifting through nuts and bolts and gears, padded with wire arteries and clumps of electricity-bright artificial nerves. Why Godolia would want to construct the mechas so that their wound Pilots can feel pain is beyond me, but I’m not complaining. That just gives me more options.

  The thing about deities, I’ve learned, is that they all have a weak spot. And on the off chance that they don’t, I can always make one myself.

  “Hey!” someone shouts. My head snaps up to find that two silhouettes have materialized far above, the sharp outlines of guns in their hands. Crude, unimaginative weapons.

  “Catch me if you—” I sidestep as a bullet pings the metal of the mecha’s stomach lining, inches from my left ear. “—can. So—” Another round; I snap my arms to my chest, heart rattling in its cavity as my heel momentarily dips into nothingness. Soon as I right myself: “—rude. Wirefuckers. I don’t need this.”

  I slip away before the next barrage can start. Melting into the shadows, I pick my way through the patchwork of dark paths of whirling gears and shuddering wires.

  I jump a gap and drop low, sight lifted to the darkness above. Scurry along. This is my deity now.

  The instant their figures wander out of earshot, I leap onto a vertical support beam, grappling the giant bolts and using them as footholds to scale the Windup. The mecha’s momentum sends my teeth chattering, though that may just be the shock of adrenaline. Either way, I clench my jaw to avoid snipping my tongue off as I climb. The hip mechanism whirs above, its giant lever jabbing the air as the Phoenix runs.

  I reach a hand over the platform that supports the hip, an edge about six inches wide. Pulling myself up, I brace my feet against the landing, pressing my back against the support beam. Below me expands a straight hundred-foot drop, one that spirals cle
an through the leg to the bottom of the foot, where gravity would splinter my body into a million pieces.

  I click the cryo gloves on and place them against one of the gears. Threads of frost expand from underneath my fingers, crawling across the metal and around the crooks of iron, and the gear slows in its hinges.

  “Stop!”

  At my left, a guard stands twenty feet away on a thin support beam, rifle aimed between my eyes. Retracting my hand, I raise the cryo gloves above my head.

  “Hello,” I say. “Where’s your friend?”

  “Take off the gloves, or I’ll shoot.”

  I look at his face, which seems to still hold a significant amount of baby fat. Can’t be much older than me.

  “You better not miss.”

  “What?”

  I gesture around the air. “Bullets will ricochet if you miss. You might want to step a bit closer. I’m defenseless, anyway. Just make it quick.”

  He hesitates for a moment, fingers twitching over the gun. Then, like a person who has been raised from birth to regard the Badlands people as idiotic barbarians, he begins to slowly approach. All there is to do now is drop my hand onto the beam, tilt my head to one side to avoid the first bullet, and—wow, a second one, too? Really?—then, once the frost has rooted, kick.

  The beam shatters, and without its supporting bindings, the middle snaps underneath his weight, and then he’s falling, form tearing through strands of wires that offer no assistance to his outstretched hands. Two seconds later, a splat.

  I get it, I really do. Not everyone has the stomach to shoot a teenager in the head. But I’m not going to thank them for it; I’m not going to hesitate just because they do. I’m going to live with whatever I have to do because it means I get to live.

  I roll my neck around and look back toward the turbine.

  “Xander, now!” I call, preparing myself to smash a fist into the slowing gear.

  Nothing happens.

  The guard. Where’s your friend?

  I detach from the hip’s edge, both hands wrapping around the support beam, and then I’m sliding, the frost grip of the gloves decelerating my fall. I drop onto the area where we separated and then under the curtain of wires. Directly above, Xander teeters on the right hip mechanism’s edge, back pressed against the beam to suspend his weight, just like I taught him to. His hand clutches both a crowbar and his other arm. Blood is trickling through his fingers in large teardrops, oozing through his grip to pool at my feet.

  In front of me, a guard stands with a rifle leveled at his head.

  Xander’s gaze lists down to me, touching on my presence only for a split second before darting away.

  “What did I say about getting shot?” I snap.

  The guard’s head turns, the silver speckles in his hair and beard shimmering despite the darkness strung around us. He’s older, probably has been doing this for a while. He won’t miss the second shot.

  The reason he hasn’t yet? He’s taking his time.

  And they call us barbaric.

  Xander, meanwhile, looks back down at me. Kid hardly ever says anything, but I can always hear him, clear as day. In his silence, Xander says to me: Go rot.

  I roll my eyes and raise my hands. “You can let him go,” I inform the guard.

  He smiles. It’s almost fatherly, if you ignore the rifle in his hands, my crew member’s blood speckling the tips of his combat boots. “You volunteering to take his place, Frostbringer?”

  “Aw, you’ve heard of me.”

  “So I have,” he says. “The child who came across some subpar tech a few years back and now thinks she can take on Godolia.”

  I shift my feet slightly as the Phoenix’s movements take on a new, erratic gait. It’s possible my crew is being chased in circles around the desert right now. It’s more possible that Theo is fighting Nova for the wheel again, and Milo is trying to kill them both, leaving the Pilot pursuing them both confused and disoriented. I wish I could say this was an intentional strategy, but mostly, they’re just idiots. I also wish I could say I wasn’t basing this off past events.

  I lift one shoulder. “At least I aim high. What would it say about my self-esteem if I wanted to be something useless, like a … like a priest?” I consider. “Or a Windup guard.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that playing the hero only delays the inevitable?” the guard muses, shifting the barrel away from Xander and toward me. I breathe a sigh of relief. “Any last words?”

  “Yeah. Am I, like, really famous in Godolia?”

  He grins crookedly. “Yes, you and your other Gearbreakers are quite the irritation. Have you ever tried to scrape a flattened mess of flesh off the underside of a Windup’s boot? I’ve heard it’s rather time-consuming.”

  “I would guess. But killing you isn’t.”

  “I’d like to see you try, little girl.”

  I can’t help but smile at that. “No you wouldn’t.”

  I splay my fingers wide.

  The veins of the glove burst blue, then white, and a writhing spark of light splinters from the palm’s panels. Like a comet, the serum streaks across the air, its vicious luminescence a corrupt blight against the darkness of the mecha’s innards. The beam collides with the guard’s shoulder, and the light vanishes into its new host. Even as the shadows descend once more, I see a violent spasm skip along the tip of his finger: an attempt to pull the trigger. It’s no use. The frost has already set in.

  I wander over to him, observing the fear that glazes fresh across his eyes. I’ve seen the same expression time and time again, and when I was younger, I would sift through the agony-strained features for some hint of my own guilt. And, time and time again, I found not a smidge. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It just means that no one serving Godolia deserves a single thread of my mercy.

  “You see, the thing about ‘subpar tech’ is that it still hurts like a bitch,” I murmur, putting my glove on his shoulder. Beneath my touch, the cryo serum coils through his veins, dissipating every existing particle of warmth. “But only at first. No need to worry, now. You won’t feel this.”

  I squeeze, and he cracks apart underneath my fingertips, his last breath frozen in his lungs.

  I look up at Xander. “What are you waiting for? A parade?”

  The kid does something impressively offensive with his hands, flecks of blood wetting his black hair.

  I dust guard bits from my palm onto my overalls, kick the rest over the side of the beam. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get going. We’re late enough as it is.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ERIS

  I deactivate the gloves before Milo takes my hand and helps me out of the Windup. Xander’s already standing on solid ground, looking a bit too pleased with himself as Juniper and Arsen fuss over his bullet wound, black smirches of ash smeared across both their faces. Below us, the Phoenix lies still, limbs splayed against the sand at awkward angles. Its head, both eyes cracked and dull, rests against its shoulder. The Pilot is still hidden inside, neck snapped from the shock of the landing, by the looks of it. Hopefully with a few large pieces of glass scattered through them for good measure.

  I flip Milo’s visor up and pull on his hood until he’s low enough for me to kiss him. The barrel of his rifle, slung over his back, hovers close to my temple.

  “Everyone’s secure?” I ask, breaking away and turning. Over the curve of the Windup’s thigh, Nova has thrown open a train car door, and emerges from it with a black lump in her hand.

  “This is boring!” she declares, chucking the coal. It bounces harmlessly against the Phoenix’s paint job. She plants her palms on the small of her back and tilts her head to look at us. “Oh good, you’re alive.”

  Theo, who had been wandering across the Windup’s corpse, slides down its boot and lands hard in front of her. Her nose twitches in the cloud of flourished sand.

  “No thanks to your lunatic driving,” he jeers, freckled face twisting into a smirk.

  Nova puts he
r hand on his sternum and forces him back. “On the contrary, dipshit, my driving is superb. If you ever land an even shot in your life, then you can comment. I could do it better than you.”

  “Try it, then, princess,” he snaps, taking his pistol from his holster and dangling it in front of her. She reaches for it, and he yanks his wrist up, so she knees him in the stomach, proceeding to grapple for his rifle when he doubles over.

  “Rot!” she shrieks as he stands, her writhing form draped over his shoulder.

  Even if we have a repeat arm-breaking/semiblinding incident again, I can drive and shoot just fine, so I leave them to fight and jump onto safe ground, where Juniper has finished tying a bandage around Xander’s arm.

  “You did good, kid,” I say, receiving a rigid nod in return. “June, Arsen, did everything go smoothly with the train?”

  “All good,” they say simultaneously.

  “Good. A cleanup crew should be here soon to pick up the cargo,” I say, watching Nova run her hands through her hair, the coal on her palms streaking the blond strands black. Theo’s kneeling on the ground, forehead to the sand—clearly Nova managed to escape his hold with a low blow. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We all pile into the pickup truck, Nova in the driver’s seat and the rest of us loaded into the back, Milo with his leg resting against mine again. Theo, recovering quickly, drums his fingers against the filthy side, humming as the engine turns over. Nearby, patches of the landscape glint with sand melted into fresh glass—evidence of the Phoenix’s assault.

  “Didn’t have much trouble, right?” Milo asks.

  I shrug. “Easy as always. You?”

  The car jolts forward, makes a U-turn, and then suddenly stops short. From the front seat, Nova sucks in a breath, face completely colorless in the rearview mirror.

  “Uh … guys?” she calls, and all of us look up.

  “Oh shit,” Theo curses.

  Before us rests the Phoenix’s head, glaring down at us with a single ignited eye.

  “Theo, Milo,” I shout, even as sudden fear sparks through me. They snap to attention. “See if you can get a shot on the Pilot. Nova, get us out of here.”