by Jay Kristoff
“Next time we meet? I don’t think it’s going to turn out the way you want it to.”
He wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant. Eve was furious, he knew that. About the lies Silas and Nicholas Monrova had heaped on her. The false life they’d built her. She had a right to be angry. With them. With him. But Lemon had been correct—even if he did love Ana, a part of him had loved Eve, too.
Is that why you’re headed back there?
So soon after leaving?
It was more than the fact she was Ana’s doppelgänger. Eve had a strength and determination he’d never seen in the original Ana. A fire and resourcefulness, born from years of clawing out a living in a trashpit like Dregs. But if Eve threw her lot in with Gabriel, or worse, their brother Uriel, if she used that fire to aid his siblings in ridding the world of the dinosaur that had been humanity…
What could she become?
“Um…Dimples? Dimples, do you read me?”
The lifelike slowed his pace, tapped the receiver on his headset.
“Lemon?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Um, that depends. What do bees eat?”
“…What?”
“Seriously, what do they eat?”
Ezekiel rubbed his chin, wondering what the girl was on about. “Well, I’m not an expert or anything. But I think they probably eat honey?”
“…Not people?”
“Nnnno. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t eat people. Dare I ask why?”
“Oh, spank my spankables…”
“Freckles? Are y—”
“Dimples, help!” came the crackling plea. “There’s a cr—”
A squeal of static washed over the headset, and the transmission died.
“Lemon?” Ezekiel tapped the headset. “Lemon, can you hear me?”
Nothing. No reply at all. But he’d caught the fear and adrenaline in her voice, and with a curse, he turned and began running back the way he’d come. No easy loping stride this time, but a furious, flat-out sprint. His teeth were gritted, his arm pumping, boots pounding the dirt. He yelled her name into the commset, got no answer, the fear in his belly blooming into a freezing panic.
He’d told her to stay in the tank. She should’ve been safe there. What on earth could’ve gotten to her inside a shell of rad-proofed armor plating?
Unless she got out…
You never should have left her.
He ran. Fast as he could. He’d never pushed himself as hard in his short life, his heart thundering, veins pumping acid. He was the peak of physical perfection, generated in the GnosisLabs to be more than human. But in the end, he was only bone and muscle, blood and meat. Even pounding the dust as quick as he could, hours had passed by the time he arrived, the sun burning high in the sky, his skin and clothes drenched with sweat. The gully was deathly silent. Like a tomb. Like that cell in Babel in the moments after he and his siblings had murdered the Monrova family. As he’d raised the gun to Eve’s head and whispered those two meaningless words.
“I’m sorry.”
The tank was exactly where he’d left it. But the hatch was open, and worse, there was no sign of Lemon or Cricket. Ezekiel drew his heavy pistol, crept through the rocks, listening intently with his enhanced senses and hearing nothing. He leapt up onto the tank, peered inside, saw it had been partially stripped—the computer gear, the cannon ammunition, the radio equipment was all gone. They’d tried to bust into the weapons locker, but hadn’t been able to burn through the metal.
In front of the scorched cabinet door sat Lemon’s helmet, spattered with vomit and a few drops of blood. And beside it lay a couple of squashed bugs.
No…not bugs…
Bees…?
He knelt by the little corpses, picked them both up and cradled them in his palm. His eyes were good enough to count the freckles on a girl’s face in a fraction of a second, track a moth in a midnight sky. Squinting at the insects, he saw the pair were twins—not just similar, but identical, down to the number of hairs on their bodies, the facets of their eyes. And turning them over on his palm, the lifelike saw the stripes on their abdomens were arranged in a tiny pattern.
A bar code.
The lifelike closed his fist.
“BioMaas,” he whispered.
When Ezekiel mentioned pony rides, Lemon was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind.
Maybe the beast had been a horse once, back before BioMaas gene-modded it beyond all recognition. It still had four legs, so that was kind of good news. But as far as Lemon knew—and granted, she’d only ever seen them in the virtch because they’d been extinct for decades—most horses wore their skeletons on the inside.
She was sitting near its neck, her wrists bound in translucent resin. The strange woman sat behind her, one arm about her waist to make sure she didn’t fall. The beast they rode was black, its hide covered in bony ridges—more like organic armor than actual skin. Its eyes were faceted like a fly’s, and Lemon was pretty sure its legs had too many joints. Instead of a mane and tail, it had long, segmented spines that clicked and shushed together as it moved.
They were riding south along the gully at a full gallop. Lemon’s captor was pressed to her back, and the girl realized she could feel a deep buzzing inside the woman’s chest when she exhaled. It made her skin want to crawl right off her bod.
“Where you taking me?” she asked.
“CityHive.”
The woman’s voice trembled like an old electric voxbox, as if her whole chest vibrated when she spoke. It was almost…insectoid.
“The BioMaas capital?” Lemon blinked. “What for?”
“Nau’shi told us about Lemonfresh. Lemonfresh is important. She is needed.”
Nau’shi was the name of the BioMaas kraken that had scooped her and Evie and the rest of her crew out of the waters of Zona Bay. A crew member named Carer had told Lemon the same thing before she’d climbed into the kraken’s lifeboat: “Lemonfresh is important. She is needed.” At the time, Lemon had just figured Carer didn’t have her boots laced all the way to the top. But now…
“I’m no kind of special, okay? So why don’t you just let me go?”
“We cannot, Lemonfresh,” the woman replied. “Only a matter of time before the Lords of the Polluted realize their error.”
“…The Lords of the Polluted?” the girl scoffed. “Is that some new drudge band I shoulda heard of?”
“Daedalus Technologies.”
“Wha—”
“Hsst,” the woman hissed.
Lemon fell silent as a fat bumblebee buzzed down from the sky, coming to rest on the woman’s shoulder. The girl craned her head, watched with horrified fascination as the bug crawled inside one of the hexagonal burrows in the woman’s throat. The woman’s golden eyes blinked rapidly as she softly sighed.
“Trouble ahead.”
“…What kind of trouble?”
“Oldflesh,” she growled.
These gullies seemed to go on forever—probably torn into the earth when the Quake created Zona Bay. Some of the cracks were hundreds of meters across, almost as deep. Lemon and her captor entered the remnants of a town that had collapsed into the fissure when the ground opened up. Toppled buildings and rusty autowrecks, the shell of an old fuel station, long sucked dry. What might’ve been an old sports arena had split clean down the middle, one half toppled nose-first into the rocks. Lemon saw a sign, faded from decades beneath the sun. The same helmet that had adorned the shirts of those scavvers that had jumped them yesterday was painted on it, chipped and faded lettering beneath.
HOME OF TH V GO KNIGHTS
st 20 7
Ahead, two tenements had collapsed together to form a crude archway. Lemon saw their path led right between them. The walls were steep, there was no room to dance—it
was a perfect place for an ambush, true cert. Lem felt her heart beating faster, remembering the bushwhacking that had buried their grav-tank. Her eyes roamed the empty windows above, but she couldn’t see zip.
At some unspoken command, the horsething came to a halt on the open ground. The air about them hummed with bees, her captor’s eyes gleaming gold.
“Let us pass, oldflesh,” the agent called. “And remain in this living grave. Or stand in our way, and be sent to your next.”
Lemon caught movement in the ruins around them—a handful of scavvers in those same grubby gold shirts, armed with stub guns and rusty cutters. Heavy footsteps crunched on the asphalt ahead, and Lemon saw a brick wall of a man striding slowly toward them. He wore that old knight’s helm scrawled on a bloodstained jersey, a couple of six-shot stub guns at his belt. His armor was made of hubcaps and rusty street signs.
“Lo, gentlemen!” he drawled to his crew. “On my life, a challenge!”
“Challenge!” roared one of the scavvers.
“Chaaaaallenge!”
The big scavver fixed Lemon’s abductor in his stare, fingers twitching over the shooters at his waist.
“By my heel, ma’am,” he smiled. “I accept.”
The woman didn’t move, but Lemon heard a small humming noise in the back of her throat. The big scavver’s grip closed around his guns just as a fat yellow bumblebee landed on his cheek. He cursed, flinching as the bee sank its stinger into his skin. Lemon heard a chorus of surprised yelps from the buildings around them.
The big scavver swayed, wide eyes fixed on the BioMaas woman. Lemon could see a tracery of fine red veins creeping out along his face where the bee had stuck him. He gasped, clutched at his throat like he couldn’t breathe. Gurgling as he fell to his knees. And quick as a morning-after goodbye, the scavver toppled facedown, dead as the dirt he was kissing.
“Insert fancy swears here…,” Lemon whispered.
From the sounds she heard in the ruins, she guessed the rest of the scavver crew were suffering the same fate as their boss. Lemon heard strangled cries, a few choking prayers. And then?
Nothing but the hymn of tiny wings.
She twisted to look at the woman sitting behind her, her belly cold with fear. Her captor’s face was impassive, dark skin filmed with dust. This close, Lemon could see her dreadlocks weren’t hair at all, but the same kind of segmented spines as the horsething’s mane and tail. Her eyes glittered gold in the scorching light.
“It’s a good thing I already puked this morning,” Lemon said.
That golden stare flickered to her own.
“Lemonfresh has nothing to fear from us.”
“Ooookay?” Lemon said. “Having trouble believing that one, but let’s just run with it for now. Since we’re being all chummy and whatnot, you got a name? You BioMaas folks are usually called what you do, right? I mean, I could just call you Terrorlady or the Doominator, both of those seem to fit pretty good. Am I talking too much? I tend to talk too much when I’m nervous, it’s kind of a reflex thing, I’m trying to get better at it but honestly you have a chest full of killer bees and I think I just felt one land on my neck, so if—”
“We are Hunter,” the woman said. “She can call us Hunter.”
“Right,” Lemon nodded. “Of course you are. Pleased to meet you, Hunter.”
“No, Lemonfresh. Pleasure is ours.”
“…Oh yeah? How you figure that?”
“Look around.”
Fearing some kind of grift, Lemon kept her stare fixed on her captor.
“Look,” Hunter insisted. “Look hard. Then tell us what she sees.”
The girl risked a glance at the wreckage of the old town. The empty shells and dead cars. The sun was burning white, bleaching everything beneath it whiter still. The men who’d wanted to make them corpses had been made corpses themselves. Everyone scrapping and killing over trash that people would’ve just thrown away back in the day. The wind was a whisper, the only thing growing was a thin desert weed, spindly roots digging into the shattered concrete and slowly prying it apart.
In a decade or two, all that would be left of this place was rubble.
“I dunno,” Lemon finally shrugged. “The world?”
“Yes,” Hunter nodded. “And Lemonfresh is the flood that will drown it. The storm that will wash all of it away.”
Hunter smiled, all the way to her eyeteeth.
“Lemonfresh is going to change everything.”
* * *
________
“I don’t feel so fizzy.”
They’d been riding for the best part of the day, and the sun was hot enough to give an aspirin a headache. Hunter had reached into her saddlebags, given Lem a spare cloak, the same rusty desert red as her own. Lemon pulled up the hood to shield her from the scorch, but that only made her sweat buckets and feel sicker.
She’d been tasting off-color since that morning, talking true, but she figured it was just the leftovers from the bad meat, the sad from seeing Grandpa die, leaving Eve behind. Her heart still hurt when she thought on it all, and she didn’t have much else to do. Feeling miserable and all the way helpless. But as the day ground on, the sickness in her belly had roiled, and finally, as they neared sundown, come bubbling up out of her mouth again.
There wasn’t much to puke—just the water she’d been sipping from an odd, leathery flask in Hunter’s saddlebags. But she kept heaving long after her insides were outside, holding on to her belly and wincing in pain.
“I gotta sit…,” she begged. “I gotta sit still for a minute….”
Hunter slowed the horsething’s pace, brought it to a gentle stop. Sliding off the strange beast’s back, she lifted Lemon down onto dry, cracked earth. They’d cleared the maze of gullies a few hours back, and now they were deep into a stretch of blinding salt flats. The ground was like rock beneath her feet. The glare was blinding. If Lemon squinted to the east, past the broken foothills, she could make out the irradiated edge of the Glass.
Thinking of Evie in that tower.
Thinking of the cardboard box she’d been found in as a kid.
Thinking she’d been abandoned all over again.
She thumped down on her hind parts in the dust, toying with the silver five-leafed clover around her neck and feeling sick all the way to her bones. Watching as Hunter unclasped her strange organic armor, peeled it back to expose her honeycombed throat beneath. The woman hummed an off-key song that reminded Lemon of the wind when it stormed in Zona Bay. A dozen bumblebees crawled out from Hunter’s skin, took to the wing, up to the sky and back off to the north.
“That…,” Lemon whispered, “is the freshest strange I’ve ever seen.”
“They will watch,” the woman said.
“For what?”
“Pursuit.”
“You mean my friends.”
“And those not.”
The woman massaged the translucent resin that bound Lemon’s wrists, and the bonds came away like soft, warm putty. Stashing the resin in her cloak, she handed Lemon the leathery water flask, nodded gently.
“Drink,” she urged. “Long road to CityHive.”
Hunter turned to the salt flats behind, slung her strange long-barreled rifle off her back. The weapon was pale, oddly organic, looking like it was made out of a collection of old fish bones. Hunter held it to her shoulder, peered down the long telescopic scope at the horizon. Her back was turned, and Lemon was keenly aware of the cutter in her belt, drawing out the blade with a slow, steady hand.
Fortunately, Lem was also mindful of the dozen ultra-poisonous-if-sorta-cute-and-fuzzy killer bees flying in lazy circles around her captor’s head. And deciding that getting ghosted by bugs was a less than fizzy way to cash her chips, the girl kept the blade hidden in her palm.
Lemon had grown up hard in Dregs. She
prided herself on knowing bad news when she saw it. And though Hunter was all the wrong sort of trouble for the wrong sort of people, Lemon didn’t sense any hostility from the woman directed at her. If anything, she seemed…protective? The way she spoke, the way she wrapped an arm around Lemon’s waist as they rode. Standing close and guarding her like a keepsake.
Whatever BioMaas wanted Lemon for, they obviously wanted her alive. But the girl sure as hells wasn’t happy about getting snaffled from her friends.
First chance I get, I gotta…
What?
Run? On foot? Out here in the wastes?
Dammit, Fresh, being gorgeous just won’t cut it here. Time to use that Brain thing people keep telling you about.
Lemon sucked her lip, searching inside her skull for some sort of plan and coming up empty. Hunter reached into a saddlebag, fished out a small rectangular package wrapped in wax paper. Unfolding the wrapping, she held it out on her palm. Lemon squinted at the offering, saw it was a block of mottled green…
…actually she had no idea what it was.
“Does she hunger?” Hunter asked.
“That’s food?”
“Algae. Insects.”
Lemon felt her gorge rising again. “Thanks, I’ll skip it.”
Hunter shrugged, shoved the block into her mouth and chewed soundlessly. Lemon took a swig from the water flask, spat the taste of vomit from her mouth.
Might as well get her talking…
“So how’d you find me, anyways?” she asked.
Hunter ran a hand down the horsething’s flank. “Mai’a smelled her.”
The beast shivered, the mane of spines rasping against each other.
“Look, sorry,” Lemon said. “I know it’s been a while since I had a shower. But I didn’t think I stank bad enough to track me from the BioMaas capital.”
Hunter’s lips curled in a motherly smile. “Had scent from Lemonfresh’s blood sample taken aboard kraken. Nau’shi’s Carer did not realize how important Lemonfresh was, or she never would have been released in first place. But we knew where Lemonfresh came ashore. Tracked her from there. A Hunter never misses our mark.”
