Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

night.”
    “Yes. But I only included my opinion of you.”
    With a grin, she rolled onto her back and looked up at him. “What is your opinion of me?”
    “Fairly positive.” He laughed when she wrinkled her nose at him, shook his head. “That is all I’ll say.”
    She flicked her thumb against his leg, but smiled when he pulled her closer, lay against her side. He drew in the clean scent of her hair, brushed his fingers through the springy curls. With a sigh, she rested her head on his shoulder.
    Warmth filled his chest—and a careful hope. “You don’t have to find Källa now.”
    “No.”
    “What will you do?”
    “I don’t know.” She looked up at him. Flickering lamplight painted a warm glow across her cheek and nose. “We need to get away from here, first.”
    “Yes.”
    “What do we do about Lorenzo?”
    Stop him, if they could. But di Fiore’s fate was second to David’s primary concern. “I’m more worried about getting off this glacier before they attempt to launch that capsule.”
    “Do you think the ice will collapse?”
    “I don’t know. Lorenzo is concerned about his father’s reputation—and destroying this camp might seem like a good way of making certain that no one ever talks about what truly went on here.”
    “Then killing the people in Vik, too.”
    “Yes. Di Fiore might play with them for a while, but eventually he’d want to silence them.” And they knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do it.
    “So he’ll leave everyone here to die—except he’d take Olaf with him.”
    “Yes. The boy is a di Fiore.”
    Annika nodded against his shoulder. Almost absently, her fingers rolled the runes at his throat, clicking the bones together. “He and Källa have an agreement: She won’t kill him until after his father is gone. I think he’ll leave her behind to die, too.”
    “Do you think she’ll wait?”
    “She made the promise, so yes. Unless she believes that he’ll take her son—and then may the gods help him. Or not.” She lay quiet for a moment, her fingers twisting, clicking. “If we have to stop him—kill him—I’ll do it this time.”
    David frowned. He folded his fingers over hers, stopped the nervous rolling. “We’re not taking turns.”
    “I know. But you shouldn’t be the only one to bear that burden.”
    “And I’d rather not lay it on you simply to spare myself.” He never wanted her to wake up, feeling the snap of bone beneath her hand. He never wanted her to lie in bed, wondering whether a man she’d killed had a wife, children, and a name. He never wanted her to spend hours trying, yet again, to think of any other option, to imagine any other choice—and knowing that even if one did presentitself to her, that it was already too late. He never wanted her to feel as damned helpless as he had. “If it comes to that, we’ll do what we have to. But I’m more interested in protecting you than killing him, and making certain we leave this camp alive.”
    “Yes.” She tilted her face up, pressed her lips to his jaw. “What did you end up writing in your journal?”
    “About di Fiore’s experiment. I hate everything that Lorenzo is doing…but if Paolo’s capsule flies at all—even if it fails to reach the edge of the glacier, let alone the moon—I won’t be sorry to have seen it.”
    “I won’t, either. It would be a different world if we looked up and knew a man had been up there.”
    “Yes.” They’d see everything in a different way. Nothing would seem impossible. “That is what di Fiore might have read.”
    “In your journal?”
    “Yes—in that last entry. It was after we spoke on Phatéon ’s deck—when you told me to decide whether everyone in Hannasvik suffered a sickness.” He felt her tense against him, reassured her, “I didn’t write that. Only that now and again, something comes along to change the way I think. Something that completely changes how the world looks. A few years ago, the Society published a journal written by a man in England during the early years of the Horde occupation. He must have been infected, his emotions dampened, but he still wrote—and even though it is all physics and numbers, there must have been passion behind it. A need to pursue his science, which the Horde’s tower hadn’t been able to take away from him.” In David’s experience, there was always passion behind every great discovery and invention. “The journal had been hidden in an attic for over two hundred years, and