by Jay Kristoff
“Our mark?”
“We are legion, Lemonfresh,” the woman said. “We are hydra.”
Lemon sucked her lip, unsure what to say. She supposed by “legion” that Hunter meant the whole of BioMaas—that the corporation had tasked a posse of folks toward Lemon’s capture. But still, she had no real idea what BioMaas’s agenda was, why they wanted her. Her nausea was kicking up and the heat was unbearable. She pulled off the cloak Hunter had given her, just to feel the breeze on her skin.
“S-so why’d they send you after me?” she finally asked.
Hunter lowered her rifle, slung it over her back once more.
“Because the Polluted—Daedalus—will eventually realize their error. They sent their cyborg tracker after Lemonfresh’s friend. The half-life.”
“Her name is Evie,” Lemon muttered, feeling stung.
Hunter nodded. “Daedalus believed she was the Gifted one. Once they understand Lemonfresh is the threat, they will set hounds to her heels.”
“Hold up,” Lemon said, blinking hard. “I’m no threat to anyone.”
“Lemonfresh can destroy the Polluted’s machines. All they have, all they are, runs on electrical current. And she is current’s bane.”
Lemon rubbed at her aching temples. Ezekiel had already told her as much—he’d said a weapon that could fry electronic tech with a wave of her hand could win the war between the long-feuding CorpStates of BioMaas Incorporated and Daedalus Technologies. Daedalus obviously agreed, which was why they’d set the Preacher on Eve’s tail.
And once they’ve figured out I’m the devia—
Without warning, Lemon rolled up onto her knees, vomiting all over her cloak. She groaned, holding her belly as it spasmed again. Running on empty, she dry-heaved anyway, cherry bob hanging in her eyes.
“Is she well?” Hunter asked.
“Is sh-she k-kidding?” Lemon moaned.
Hunter knelt beside the girl, concern shining in those golden eyes. She pressed a palm to Lemon’s brow, gently wiped the sweat off her freckled cheeks. Lemon felt a couple of deathbees crawling over her face, but she was feeling entirely too pukey to panic. Hunter leaned close, peered into Lemon’s eyes, inhaled deeply along her skin.
“She went to the glass land,” she declared. “Or the dead spire.”
“Babel?” Lemon winced. “Y-yeah, I might’ve…dropped in for a quick drink.”
Hunter scowled. “The death is in her. The sickness from its sundered heart.”
“…Radiation?”
Lemon’s stomach sank as Hunter nodded. She knew she’d sucked up a few rads when Gabriel tore her suit, but she didn’t realize she’d been dosed enough to get sick. Still, there was no fooling the churn in her gut, the fever burning on her skin. Apparently she’d worn a dose hard enough to hurt her.
Maybe worse?
“Am…am I gonna die?”
“We do not know. They could treat her in CityHive. But it is far.”
Fear crawled up her throat, cinching it tight. Lemon had seen firsthand what radsick could do to a person. Back when she was a sprog, a kid named Chuffs had scavved a leaky reactor out of an old war logika out in the Scrap, not knowing it was still hot. He’d been bleeding out of everywhere he possibly could’ve when he died.
“Can’t you radio them to come get us or s-something?” she asked.
Hunter’s face soured. “We do not use the tech of the oldflesh. We have sent word on the wind”—she motioned to her bees—“but it will take time to fly.”
Lemon swallowed hard.
“Time I don’t have?”
“We are not experts. We stay away from deadplaces. We do not sicken.”
Lemon clenched her teeth, trying to keep on her streetface. Her braveface. But after all she’d been through, cashing her chips out here in the wastes from a dose of radsick didn’t exactly strike her as exactly fair. She was only fifteen or sixteen years old. If she hadn’t got wrapped up in all this lifelike crap, Daedalus, BioMaas, she wouldn’t even be here. And now she was gonna get ghosted for it?
“This,” she declared, “is a little far from fizzytown.”
Hunter stood slowly, looking to the horizon.
“…Town,” she repeated.
Lemon tilted her head. “What?”
The BioMaas operative nodded.
“West. Near ocean. A settlement, carved from the deadworld. New Bethlehem. Old Gnosis city, now ruled by others. We have not ventured there since Gnosis fell. Very dangerous. But wealthy. They would have medicine.”
Lemon had never heard of the place, but that came as no surprise—she’d never left Dregs till a few days ago. The “very dangerous” part didn’t sound like a fistful of fun. But when you’re looking down the barrel at your own funeral, even doing something stupid sounds better than doing nothing at all.
The sickly feeling was swelling in her middle, stretching toward her bones. As Hunter reached down to help her up, she had to beg off for a minute to pull herself together. The operative busied herself with Mai’a instead, giving the horsething a drink from the flask, strapping her strange rifle to its flank. Lemon stashed her cutter back in her belt, finally pulled herself up onto her feet with a groan.
“Her cloak,” Hunter said, nodding.
Lemon eyed the garment. “Um, I’m not sure what the fashion is in CityHive, but I’d rather not wear my own vomit, if it’s all the same to you.”
Hunter took off her own cloak, wrapped it about Lemon’s shoulders. Again, Lemon was struck by the feeling of protectiveness, of Hunter’s concern for her well-being. It made her feel pulled every which way—angry that she’d been jacked from her friends, but glad she was in the hands of someone who actually seemed to give a speck whether she lived or died.
Lemonfresh is important.
She is needed.
Lemon offered her wrists to Hunter, but the woman shook her head. Truth was, the pair both knew Lemon had nowhere to run now. With Hunter’s help, the girl scrambled up onto Mai’a’s neck.
“Hold on,” the woman said, climbing up behind. “We ride swift.”
The horsething sprang into a gallop, the salt flats swallowed up under its smooth strides. Lemon could see mountains ahead, the beginning of a long, shattered road. She held on for dear life, fighting the churn in her belly, the fear slowly growing beside it.
Behind them, the wind picked up on the salt flats, the dust and grit scouring their tracks from the barren earth. It picked up Lemon’s abandoned cloak, vomit stains and all, sent it tumbling. Away from the place where the girl had crouched a moment before, knife in hand.
Carving two words into the sun-parched earth.
A message for the friends she hoped were following.
An arrow pointing west.
A warning.
New Bethlehem.
“What the hell happened here?”
In the ruins of a forgotten city, a would-be boy knelt on the broken earth. The corpse beside him was fly-blown, bloated beneath a furious sun. It was dressed in a bloodstained jersey, an old-style knight’s helmet stitched on its back. Loaded pistols were still holstered at the body’s waist, untouched.
“Never even got a chance to draw,” Ezekiel muttered.
The lifelike turned the body over. A dark stain marked the man’s swollen cheek, spreading across his face. Searching the ground around him, Zeke found a dead bee a few meters from the corpse, bar-coded yellow and black.
I’m on the right trail.
But none of this made any sense.
Ezekiel had been trailing Lemon and her captor through the gullies for hours. He’d salvaged a bunch of weaponry from the grav-tank munitions locker, stashed it all in a satchel that bounced on his back as he ran. The gully floor was mostly stone, and the tracks of the BioMaas agent’s transport were almost impossible to
spot. But whatever Lemon and her captor were traveling in, there was no way it was big or heavy enough to be hauling Cricket, too. And yet, when Ezekiel had arrived back at the stranded grav-tank, both Lemon and the logika were missing.
So where the hell did Cricket get to?
Truth told, despite the animosity between him and the big bot, he was worried about the pair of them. But Cricket was a seven-meter-tall armor-plated killing machine, and Lemon was a lone fifteen-year-old girl. A girl he’d made a promise to never bail on, only a few hours ago.
He glanced down at the scavver’s corpse again. Wondered what kind of person would’ve done that to a human. What they might have done to Lemon. He could only guess at their motivations for snatching her, but there was at least one certainty in all this mess:
If BioMaas wanted her dead, she’d already be dead.
So Ezekiel pushed the fear aside and ran on.
He cleared the broken maze after a few hours, emerging out of the long shadows and into an endless stretch of salt flats. Like the rest of him, his senses were better than human—he could count the beats of an insect’s wings, shoot a bullet from the air. But truth was, he hadn’t been built for this. He’d served with the Gnosis security forces inside Babel Tower, a place of luxury and impossible wealth. Of soft skin and gentle curves and lips that tasted sweeter than anything he’d ever known.
Ana.
She was alive. Myriad had confirmed it. She’d been critically injured in the assassination attempt on her father, yes, but she’d survived. She was hidden somewhere—some secret Gnosis holding or base out in this wasteland.
But where?
He’d searched for years after the revolt, looking for any sign. They said you never love anyone quite the way you love your First. But Ana had been his Only. The only thing that had kept him going. The only memory that had kept him sane. The thought of seeing her face again, of feeling her pressed against him…
And then he’d found her.
Or what he thought was her.
Eve had looked like Ana.
Felt and sounded and tasted like Ana.
Did I love her like Ana?
The girl he’d known in the impossible tower of Babel. The girl who saved him from the corroding scrap pile of Dregs. The pair of them, side by side in his mind, both now beyond his reach. Both had shown him what it was to feel alive. Both had taught him what it was to care for something more than himself. To strive to be more than just an imitation, a simulacrum, a parody of what it meant to be…
…to be human.
He shook his head, willed the image of their faces away.
You promised Lemon you wouldn’t leave her.
He nodded to himself, jaw clenched. As much as Ana meant to him…
You promised.
But the ground was bare rock, the wind scouring it like a blast furnace. He’d been walking for two hours now without a trace of his quarry—not a mark, not a scratch. He came to a stop, eyes to the setting sun. Nothing out here. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. Just endless kilometers of dust and blinding white and rusted ruins. The bones of a carcass long picked clean.
They’d had it all.
Humans.
And look what they did with it.
Ezekiel knelt, running his fingertips over bare and burning stone. Looking around him, he guessed the BioMaas operative had come this way for a reason; they were counting on being followed. He realized he’d been an idiot to even try to trail them on foot with nothing but keen eyes to track them. BioMaas wouldn’t send amateurs out looking for the weapon that’d end their cold war with Daedalus once and for all. They’d send their best.
Ezekiel stood slowly, turned his eyes back to the northeast.
They’d send their best.
Just like Daedalus did…
He took a long sip of water from his canteen, ran his hand through his mop of sweat-damp hair. Weighing the thoughts in his head, trimming the impossibilities, the shots in the dark, until he was left with only one. It would mean abandoning the trail for now, that Lemon would be at the mercy of her captors. It would mean leaving any hope of finding Ana or reuniting with Eve behind. It would mean a dance with the devil. But out here alone, blundering in the dust? No clues, no path, no way forward?
What other option do you have?
Just a few hundred meters from where Ezekiel stood, two words sat baking in the sun-parched earth. Two words that might have changed everything—avoided all the misery and pain and death that was to come. Just a few more steps forward, and he might have spotted them.
The message for the friends she’d hoped were following.
The arrow pointing west.
The warning.
New Bethlehem.
But with a sigh, Ezekiel turned and ran back toward Babel.
* * *
________
Preacher had been hurt worse. But only just.
It’d happened back in the CorpState Wars, when he was just a regular grunt, still ninety-seven percent meat. Fighting for Daedalus as the company claimed its place among the three most powerful corporations in the whole Yousay. To this day, he still didn’t know what hit him. He’d been pinned down by enemy machina when the explosion went off. He dimly remembered pieces of himself not being attached to himself anymore. Red on his hands. Screaming for his momma. Then he woke up in a Daedalus medcenter. Metal where the missing pieces of him should’ve been.
The Lord had saved his life that day. But it was Daedalus who plucked him from that carnage and made him better. Faster. Stronger. In return, they bought themselves a soldier who knew what it was to look dying in the eye. A soldier more machine than man. A soldier loyal to the death.
Which looked like it might be about now, come to think of it.
Preacher was crawling. He didn’t have much else to do, talking true. After that blitzhund blew his legs away, he’d been laid flat, knocked cold. He’d woken up on that broken stretch of highway outside Babel hours later, surrounded by a dozen broken machina. It looked like lil’ Evie Carpenter had worked her magic again—every one of those bots was fried to a crisp, and almost every cybernetic component in Preacher’s body had been cooked. His right arm was a lump of dead titanium with a red glove stuck on the end of it. His right eye was blind. His combat augs, his reflex stims, his comms, all dead.
He’d not had a chance to give his position when he called for evac, and lil’ Miss Carpenter appeared to have fried his retrieval beacon along with everything else. Which meant Daedalus probably didn’t know where he was.
Which meant he was probably gonna die out here.
But still, he crawled. Back across the Glass. Dragging himself with his one meat arm across shards of irradiated silicon, the mangled scrap metal that had been his legs trailing behind him. Hoping to find one of those wrecked Armada trucks, maybe. One with a working radio, maybe.
Wasn’t like him to just lie down and die.
But after a whole day and night of this crap, it surely was tempting.
The bounty hunter stopped crawling, rolled onto his back. His mouth was ash dry, coated with dust. He pulled off his black, beaten cowboy hat, held it up against the merciless sun.
“And God said, let there be light,” he muttered. “And I ain’t complainin’, Lord. I could just use a little less of it right now, is all. Maybe some kinda miracle if you’re in a giving mood? A little one’ll do just fine.”
And, as if on cue, Preacher heard footsteps.
Slow and steady, crunching on the black glass toward him. He thought he recognized the tempo, but without his augs, he couldn’t be sure. Lifting his head with a wince, he focused on the approaching figure with his one working eye.
“Well, well,” Preacher chuckled, leaning back on the glass. “Snowflake.”
The boy stopped a good forty meters away, leveled a pi
stol at his head.
Smart.
“I’m wondering if that skull of yours is bulletproof,” the boy called.
“Matter of fact, it is,” Preacher replied.
“You move sudden, we find out for certain.”
The boy advanced slowly, gun aimed steady. He looked like hell—bloodstained and filthy, a bulky satchel on his back. But last Preacher had seen the boy, that right arm of his ended at the bicep, outfitted with a prosthetic that predated the war. Now his arm extended below his elbow, and the bounty hunter could see five small nubs sprouting at the end of the stump.
“Well, you surely are a special one, ain’tcha?”
“Considering you survived a point-blank blitzhund explosion and a shotgun blast to the chest, I’m guessing I’m not the only one,” the boy replied.
Preacher reached into his shredded coat, stuffed a wad of synth tobacco in his cheek. “What’re you doin’ out here, Snowflake? Shouldn’t you be with your girl?”
“Well, one of them told me to go to hell, and I lost the other one. Along with my logika and my tank and what little remained of my good mood.”
Preacher nodded. “That does sound a goodly dose of misfortune.”
“Not really. In fact, this is my lucky day.”
“How you figure?”
The boy knelt beside Preacher’s head, barrel aimed right between his eyes.
“Because you own a blitzhund. And you find things for a living.”
He held up a grav-tank pilot’s helmet, smudged with spots of dried blood.
“And now, you’re gonna help me find her.”
Preacher looked down the barrel into all that black. He wasn’t anything close to afraid—he’d spat right in death’s eye before, after all, and he knew the reward waiting for him in the hereafter. But talking true, he was having an awfully tough time keeping the smile off his face.
He’d always been a man of the Goodbook. Always believed he was part of the Lord’s plan. He’d asked for a miracle, and as always, the Lord had delivered. He just didn’t think the heavenly father would send him a miracle quite so goddamn stupid.
