by Jay Kristoff
But as for people? The tiny sparks coursing through Grimm’s brain?
Nothing.
“I can’t…,” she whispered, sweat beading on her cheeks.
“Yeah, you can.” Grimm tapped his temple again. “Try.”
“I am trying!” she spat, her frustration rising.
“Try harder, love.”
“Don’t call me that!”
Grimm blinked sweetly. “Call you what, love?”
The bulbs above their heads exploded, Grimm cursing as he stepped aside from the shower of broken glass. The electronic screen on a nearby treadmill popped, the air conditioner rattled and fell silent as the room went black.
Lemon stood still in the aftermath, chest heaving, fingernails biting her palms. She drew a deep breath, sat down on the edge of the ring, legs hanging over the side, elbows and chin leaning on the ropes. Grimm moved slow, sat beside her. Not too close, but close enough to let her know he was there.
“…All right?” he asked after a long quiet.
“I’m all right.”
“You told me it works best when you’re angry.” He shrugged. “I was trying to get a rise outta you.”
“It worked.”
“Sorry, love.”
She turned on him with a glare, but found him grinning, hands raised as if to ward off a punch. His eyes were shining with mischief, his smile friendly.
“Not the face,” he chuckled.
She punched him hard in the arm. “You piece of…”
“Mercy!” he cried, flinching away. “Have mercy, milady!”
She landed a few more solid punches into his shoulder and bicep, found herself grinning along with him. His smile was infectious. The bass in his laugh made her chest vibrate in the best kind of way.
“You’re a shit,” she said, flipping her bangs out of her face.
“Oi,” he said, raising a finger. “Swear jar.”
They sat together in the dark for a spell. Not saying anything at all. She liked that about him. She always turned into a motormouth when she was nervous. It was hard to keep the words behind her teeth. And though being this close to him did make her nervous, for some reason the quiet felt right. She could feel the heat radiating off his skin. Wondering if he’d notice if she shifted a tiny bit closer. Wondering if she was that brave.
“Grandpa, eh?” he finally said.
“Yeah,” she finally sighed. “Mad, right?”
“True cert,” Grimm nodded. “But family’s Robin Hood. Family’s important.”
She nodded back, understanding what he meant all too well. You never know how badly you need something when you grow up without it. And Lem had spent most of her life alone. She’d had her first true taste of family with Evie and Cricket and Silas. But then it had been torn away, and she was starting to realize how desperately she missed it. And now, with the possibility of it in front of her again, not just a grandfather, but a home, people just like her, she was truly beginning to understand how important family was to her.
“…Where’s yours?” she asked, studying him sidelong.
He breathed deep. Brown eyes fixed on the dark in front of him. She could tell he was somewhere else then.
Somewhere not so long ago.
Somewhere bad.
“When the Brotherhood came for me…me mum and dad, they…”
Grimm shook his head, eyes shining.
“They say it gets easier with time, you know?” He sighed. “They’re liars.”
Lemon didn’t need to hear the details to hear the hurt in his voice. But she liked this boy enough to want to make it go away. Even though he made her nervous. Even though the last boy who kissed her got his nose broken. Even though she’d never been very good at this sort of thing. And so, she put on her braveface. Her streetface. Summoned the nerve to pull herself just a little bit closer. She took his hand, squeezed it hard enough that she hoped he wouldn’t notice the shakes.
“You’ve still got some family left, freak,” she said.
He grinned at her in the dark. Lemon felt warm all the way to her toes.
“Glad you’re here, love,” he said.
“Yeah,” she smiled. “Yeah, me too.”
The average time it takes a plastic water bottle to degrade is around four hundred and fifty years. The worst offenders take a thousand.
Preacher read somewhere that back before War 4.0 broke out and the ocean was still blue, the amount of plastic in the sea outweighed the amount of fish. But as the bounty hunter plunged off that cliff in Paradise Falls, clinging to a dimwit’s back and plummeting hundreds of meters into a canyon full of discarded soda and water and detergent bottles, he surely found it hard to feel bad about it.
Come to Daddy, lovely, lovely plastic.
He was more metal than meat. But it was still a hell of a long way to fall. Snowflake and he tumbled, end over end, toward the plastic below. The lifelike curled up into a ball in preparation for the hit, satchel strapped over his shoulder, Preacher strapped to his back. And as that swamp of bottles and wrappers and buckets and toys rushed up toward them, the bounty hunter shouted into the Snowflake’s ear over the roaring wind.
“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?”
Impact.
He couldn’t remember taking a worse hit in his life. He landed back-first, plunging into a cushion of styrofoam and polycarbonate, the wind knocked right out of him. His brain was rocked inside his titanium skull, steelweave ribs compressed to the point of shattering. But all that plastic served as a kind of crumple zone, diffusing the energy of their impact. Not saying it didn’t hurt like a flying kick to the lovegun, but as they tumbled down through the detritus and splashed into the river of slurry at the bottom of Plastic Alley, Preacher realized he was still alive.
Well, that’s good news.
Except now, they were sinking.
Less than good news.
He was more metal than meat, sure, but the meat part of him still needed oxygen. And with his cybernetics all fried, his life-support systems were offline, which meant he had to breathe the regular way.
Hard to do under a swamp of liquid plastic.
As he sank farther into the sludge, Preacher risked opening his eyes, rewarded with a sharp petrochemical burn, a sea of black. He realized the Snowflake wasn’t moving—probably knocked cold by the fall. From the bounty hunter’s limited experience, it seemed these lifelikes could regenerate from almost any kicking they took, given time. But they got hurt just like regular folks.
And it turns out lil’ Miss Carpenter is one of them.
And that was the confusticating part. The girl he was chasing was supposed to be a deviate, capable of frying electrics with a glance. Lifelikes couldn’t do any such thing. And yet, Preacher had seen that girl take a bullet to the belly and get right back up again. He’d seen her pull a man’s heart out with one hand. And she was posse’ed up with five other snowflakes. No way she was anything but one of them.
And that makes NO goddamn sense.
Still, for now, drowning was a bigger problem than the secrets of one Evie Carpenter. Preacher had no idea how deep this sludge went, and Snowflake and his satchel full of guns was just dragging him farther down into it. Partnering up with the lifelike had served a purpose, but with no way to swim dragging all those extra kilos, Preacher reckoned their partnership had reached its natural conclusion.
With his one good arm, he pulled off the straps holding him on to the Snowflake’s back, let the bonehead sink down into the black. Lungs burning, he swam upward, single arm thrashing, wriggling his hips like a fish. His chest was burning, heart hammering, no way to tell how far he was from the surface. He wondered briefly what it’d be like to die here. Whether he’d have any regrets.
He decided he should’ve learned to play the guitar. And maybe spen
t less time in the company of strippers. He resolved to attempt both as soon as possible, presuming he ever made it out of this fubar alive.
The bounty hunter burst up to the surface, sucking in a lungful of polluted air that tasted sweet as sugar. Pawing the black slurry from his eyes, Preacher realized he still couldn’t see much—surrounded on all sides by a cluttering, rolling sky of discarded plastic tubing, packaging, foam, hundreds of meters thick. The metal in his body was weighing him down, and he couldn’t afford to waste time, striking out in a random direction and hoping he might find some kind of shoreline.
The liquid he swam in was thick, hot, reeking. He lost track of time, but reckoned at least a half hour passed before he found stone—the rough-hewn walls of the old canyon rising up in front of him, tarred with plastic sludge. Clawing his way along the rock face, he looked for some way up through a translucent sky of bottles and cups and grocery bags. Wondering how he’d manage the climb.
And that’s when he heard it.
It wasn’t quite a growl—the noise was too wet for that. Talking true, it was more like a burp. He glanced over his shoulder, discovered he couldn’t see jack through all the plastic trash. But if he listened hard…yep…
Something out there was moving.
Toward him.
He pushed himself along the cliff face, fingers scrambling on the rock. He’d lost his heavy pistol in the fall, and that satchel of weapons was still strapped to the Snowflake, somewhere at the bottom of all this sludge. Preacher was beginning to suspect that dumping his partner might’ve been a bad idea.
Whatever was moving out there, it sounded big. Wet. Bitey. That could be a wonderful combination under the right circumstances, but down here it wasn’t really floating his boats. He wasn’t afraid to die. But given the choice, he’d much rather go on living—particularly after all the trouble this job had given him. And so, when he finally stumbled across a set of rough steps carved right into the canyon wall, he wasn’t ashamed to breathe a small sigh of relief.
Preacher started climbing. Dragging himself upward with his one good arm, one step at a time. He heard another shuddering burp behind him, something heavy swimming through the sludge. The bounty hunter climbed faster, one torturous meter after another, silently praying to the God that had never failed him.
After heaven knew how long, he finally crawled up above the plastic and out into the reeking, open air. He’d reached some kind of old lookout platform—a bluff carved into the canyon wall where old 20C tourists might’ve stopped to take a happy snap and post it on some long-dead social turmoil site.
The canyon was almost half-full now. Tubs and tubes and cups and caps and pipes and paneling and lids and jugs and modular storage solutions and plastic plastic plastic. Preacher craned his neck, blinked the black from his eyes. The stairs continued upward along the canyon wall. He just had to keep climbing. And then, guitar lessons and maybe a quick visit to the closest skinbar, because honestly, it’d take more than a little near-death experience to curtail his love of stripp—
Something whipped out of the plastic behind him with a revolting slurp—long, rubbery, covered in what appeared to be sticky snot. It wrapped itself around his waist and started dragging him back below the plastic. Preacher punched at it, gouged at it, cursing and thrashing. It looked a lot like a gray tentacle, run through with throbbing black veins. But he knew better.
It’s a tongue.
The bounty hunter clawed at his dead cybernetic arm, finally managed to open a hidden panel in the forearm and draw out the little pistol inside. It was a small caliber—barely a popgun, really—which is why he’d never bothered to pull it on the Snowflake. But right now, it was the only weapon he had. He cracked off half a dozen shots into the tongue, heard a chuddering, rumbling burble as it released him and whipped back under the trash. The bottle sea stirred, as if something big and furious was moving beneath it. And with an explosion of plastic lids and disposable diapers, the tongue’s owner burst out onto the steps below him.
It was a toad.
Well, talking true, calling this thing a toad was like calling the ocean a raindrop. If they had toads in hell, Preacher reckoned this one would be their nomination for president. It was as big as an auto, its mouth wide enough to swallow him whole. Its gray skin was covered in rotten slime, run through with pulsing black veins. Its eyes were a strange phosphorescent white, and stranger still, it had at least a dozen of them—scattered over its bulbous head. It smelled like a sewer on a summer’s day, and sounded like a drunk’s belly after a bad can of Neo-Meat™.
Licking the slurry off its eyes with its wounded tongue, President Helltoad looked at Preacher and buuuuurped.
“ ’Scuse you,” the bounty hunter growled, opening fire again.
The shots plunked into the creature’s rubbery skin. But the beast was just too damn big to get slowed by a couple of pinpricks, and Preacher’s pistol soon ran dry. The toad bounced up the stairs, pressed one massive webbed foot atop his chest. The bounty hunter’s eyes bulged. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t escape. He realized the black veins under the thing’s skin were moving—some kind of parasitic worm, maybe, riddling the host toad’s body. All told, it was about the most disgusting thing he’d ever experienced, and he’d once been forced to wear the same underwear for three months straight.
The helltoad leaned in, ready to slurp him up. Preacher mouthed a final prayer to the Lord, asking if the big fella had time for just one more miracle.
And that’s about when the beast’s head exploded.
Preacher flinched, pelted with a sticky blanket of slime, skull and brains. The headless beast twitched a little, then collapsed right on top of him, soaking him with another wash of dark blood. The smell was unholy, the weight unbearable, long black worms wriggling in the gore.
“Well, this is just plain embarrassin’,” he groaned.
Snowflake trudged up out of the bottle sea, covered head to foot in dark slime. His satchel of weapons was still strapped to his back, a heavy automatic shotgun was cradled in his arms. He stalked up the broken stairway, placed one boot on the corpse of President Toadly and looked down into Preacher’s eyes.
“Howdy,” the bounty hunter grinned.
The lifelike said nothing, holding that shooter like a fella holds his favorite stripper. His stare was brilliant blue, his face smeared black. He was deathly silent, and looking into his eyes, Preacher realized the boy was different somehow. Something in him had…clicked. For a second, the bounty hunter wondered if the next round in that shotgun was for him.
“Listen,” he said. “About leavin’ you in there to drown and all…”
The Snowflake reached down with his right hand, now hale and whole and perfect.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I didn’t take it personal.”
* * *
________
The sun was setting by the time Ezekiel trudged back into Paradise Falls.
There were no guards at the gates—the KillKillDolls seemed to have been mostly murdered by his siblings’ bloody rampage. Ezekiel figured it’d be a few more hours before the shock of it all wore off, and total anarchy broke out in the settlement. Time enough to get their bike and be on their way.
He stalked through the streets, shotgun in his arms, Preacher on his back. They were filthy, reeking of plastic and blood. The few shell-shocked citizens wandering the streets of Paradise Falls gave Ezekiel a wide berth. They could see it in his eyes, maybe. Feel it radiating off his skin.
Rage.
Rage like he’d never known. Rage at Gabriel and Uriel. At Faith and Verity. But most of all, rage at Eve. To see what she’d become. To witness how quickly she’d embraced the hate and vengeance and callousness that had consumed the rest of his siblings. But most and worst of all, to know why she’d come here. What she was looking for.
No, not what.
>
Who.
His precious Ana. The girl he loved. The girl who’d made him real. Now just a pawn. A thing. A prize to be hunted so his siblings could do all they’d promised; so Gabriel could open Myriad and resurrect Grace, so Uriel could unlock the secret of the Libertas virus and unleash a legion of rebel logika on humanity. And Eve was leading them right to her.
He couldn’t let it happen.
He wouldn’t.
He needed to find Lemon. To find Cricket. Eve and his siblings were six, and he was only one. He needed something to even the scales, and his friends were still his friends. He couldn’t just abandon them. But he knew the clock was ticking.
He felt helpless. Knowing that even now, Eve and the others were out searching other Gnosis holdings. And if they found Ana, if they unlocked Myriad, the carnage they’d visited on Paradise Falls would only be the beginning.
If Eve and the others got their way, humanity was done.
At the end of the block, Ezekiel found Muzza’s Repairs. The place was closed up, so the lifelike banged on the door with his new hand. It felt strange to have it back after so many days without. Remembering the cyberarm Eve had given to him in Armada, the fevered touch of her lips to his, skin against skin there on the workshop floor, feeling like he’d finally come home.
He banged on the door again. It was steel, reinforced, set with a small hatch, now sliding open. Four eyes peered at him from the slit.
“I’m here for my bike,” Ezekiel said.
“We’re bloody closed, mate,” said the skinny one.
“Yeah, bloody closed,” said the skinnier one.
Ezekiel opened the zip on the satchel of weapons he’d recovered from the grav-tank, let the pair get a good look at the hardware inside.
“I’m here for my bike,” he repeated.
Five minutes later, he was rinsing off under a high-pressure hose inside Muzza’s garage, lifting Preacher off his back so he could spray the man down, too. With the worst of the blood and slime off his skin, he ran his new hand back through his dark curls, strapped the Preacher onto his shoulders and wheeled the bike out into the blood-soaked streets of Paradise Falls. Mounting up, he kicked the engine to life, prepped to motor out of this hole and never come back again.
