by Jay Kristoff
Cricket shook his head. Solomon erased his first note on the board with an old rag, quickly scribbled another.
Splendid!
If Cricket had lips, he could have kissed the effete little rustbucket. He settled for propping the bot on his shoulder instead—if he was going to rescue Abraham and escape this wretched city, it only seemed fair to bring Solomon along for the ride. With the smaller bot holding tight, Cricket grabbed hold of the hatchway lip, hauled himself up into the sunlight. The square beyond was mostly deserted, but Cricket knew exactly where the citizens would all be gathered. Nothing like a public execution to pull in the faithful.
A few scavvers and vagrants watched Cricket as he marched through the town square, Solomon on his shoulder. The guards on the gate pointed at him, a street preacher squinted up at him, Goodbook in hand. But without a backward glance at any of them, Cricket started stomping for the marketplace.
A Brother in a red cassock stepped into Cricket’s path, mouth moving, hand upheld. Presumably the man was ordering him to stop, but Cricket couldn’t obey an order he couldn’t hear. And so, he just clomped right on by, past the bell tower and double doors of the desalination plant, the WarDome posters, the murals of Saint Michael. He could see the crowd gathered farther ahead, see figures on the Brotherhood’s awful little stage. Sister Dee, pacing back and forth and spewing fire through her bullhorn. Black-clad Elite about her, faces grim. And there, hanging limply on the arms of two Disciples, blood dripping from his split brow, was Abraham.
Solomon scribbled quickly on the whiteboard, holding up another note.
“For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him may have life everlasting. Can I do any less? For my faith, for this city, for all of you?”
Sister Dee’s words, shouted to the adoring crowd. Cricket felt his fingers tightening into fists as he marched forward, watching the mob applaud, faces upturned in rapture. The woman’s cunning was impressive—turning her son’s impurity to her own advantage. Turning the words of the Goodbook into a weapon of hate. Turning the promise of hereafter into a tool to accrue power here on earth. It was a brilliant racket. There was no way to prove it right or wrong until it was too late.
It’s genius, really.
Cricket shook his head.
“IT DOESN’T TAKE A GENIUS TO APPEAL TO THE WORST IN PEOPLE. ALL IT TAKES IS AN ASSHOLE AND A MICROPHONE.”
He watched Sister Dee’s hands, watched the mob sway and roll, watched the pitch build higher and higher. Wondering how they’d come all this way, been through so much, and learned so little. The supposed faithful. The so-called pure. In truth, they were grubby and emaciated. Desperate and ugly. Blind and complacent. Willing to murder innocents whose only crime was being born different. All to maintain their illusion that they were somehow superior. That their hatred and fear were justified, that their cause was righteous, that this was somehow anything other than murder.
He felt Solomon’s metal fist rapping on the side of his head, saw the logika was pointing behind them, frantically waving the whiteboard.
Peril, old friend!
Turning about, Cricket saw a posse of cassock-wearing thugs on his tail. They were armed with rusty assault rifles, and from the looks of things, they were screaming at him. Turning back to the square, he could see the crowd was now looking in his direction. He guessed the city sirens had started wailing.
The Brothers and Disciples began shooting. But Cricket was a WarBot, seven meters tall, seventy tons of him, armor-plated and combat-ready. The faithful scattered as the Brothers and Disciples attacked. He unfolded the chaingun from his forearm, the missile pods from his back, sprayed a burst of bullets into the air to encourage the stragglers to get the hells out of his way. The crowd parted like a sea, eyes wide, mouths open, terrified.
Stomping through the square, Cricket reached the stage, looked down on Sister Dee. She’d taken the time to fix her skullpaint, brush her hair. Maintaining the illusion of perfection. The daughter of a saint. The paragon so devoted to the cause that she was willing to sacrifice her own son for the sake of purity.
She raised her finger at him, screaming orders he couldn’t acknowledge. And though he couldn’t hear the words, he could still speak them.
“YOU MAKE ME SICK.”
He lifted his hands, sprayed a burst of flame-retardant foam into the woman’s chest, knocking her and her thugs onto their backsides in a wash of bubbling white. The men holding Abraham were sent flying, and the big bot reached down and picked the boy up from the foam, cupping him in one massive hand to shield him from the gunfire. Solomon started banging on the side of his head. He turned on his heel, roaring at the Brotherhood and Disciples remaining in the square.
“ALL OF YOU GET OUT OF MY WAY! I DON’T WANT TO H—”
A rocket hit him in the chest, bursting on his armor and nearly toppling him backward onto the stage. Behind him, he saw a posse of Brotherhood armed with heavier weapons, accompanied by a tall, potbellied machina—the Sumo they used to guard the front gates. The pilot leveled his rocket launcher at Cricket, fired another burst. The remaining mob panicked, running in all directions. Cricket cradled Abraham to his chest and grabbed a nearby 4x4, snatching it up in one mighty fist.
Wielding the car like a shield, he fended off an RPG blast and a third volley from the Sumo’s launcher. It was an odd sensation—feeling the impact, seeing the flames, but not hearing a whisper of the explosions. The world felt bigger. Vast and hollow and ringing empty. Solomon was pounding on the side of his head, holding up a very neatly written note on his whiteboard.
Perhaps we should flee?
More Brotherhood boys and Disciples were posse’ing up now—though he couldn’t hear them, Cricket imagined alarms screaming all over the city, the bell tower in the de-sal plant tolling. The newcomers were bringing more heavy weapons, and they didn’t seem to share Cricket’s compunctions about innocents getting caught in the crossfire. He knew if he stayed here much longer, someone was going to get really hurt. And so, despite his WarBot body, all the combat training Abraham had installed in him, Cricket decided to follow Solomon’s advice and do what he did best.
He ran.
He could feel bullets spanging off his armor, Solomon clinging to his shoulder for dear existence. Still holding the 4x4 in front of him as a shield, he lowered his head and charged past the Sumo, goons scattering from his path.
Down the thoroughfare, past the tinshack stalls and de-sal plant, footsteps shaking the ground. He saw the gate before him—five meters tall, half a meter thick, iron-reinforced. Cradling Abraham to his chest, he raised the 4x4 like a battering ram and crashed into the doors, his whole body shuddering at the impact. But with a rush of twelve thousand horsepower, steelweave muscles pushed to breaking, he smashed out through the double gates in a hail of bullets and shrapnel.
He stumbled, lost his balance and fell face-first onto the road beyond. Solomon went flying off his shoulder, tumbling to rest twenty meters away. Cricket unfurled his fist, saw in his palm that Abraham had regained consciousness, holding his bloody brow and wincing. A scattering of travelers and traders were queued up in a line outside the gates, staring at him and the chaos in the city beyond in bewilderment. Cricket’s internal alarms were blaring, damage reports rolling in. And hauling himself up on his hands and knees, he found himself staring into a pair of bright blue plastic eyes. A handsome face. Perfect bow-shaped lips, parted in astonishment.
…Ezekiel.
The lifelike sat on a motorcycle in the middle of the road, real as life and twice as stupid. His clothes were cruddy and torn, dark curls plastered to his forehead with sweat. His olive skin was smudged with dust, and neat clean circles had been drawn around his prettyboy blue eyes by the goggles he now pushed up onto his brow. He was looking at Cricket with incredulity, grinning like an idiot, speaking words Cricket
couldn’t hear.
Sitting in the sidecar of the motorcycle was a big black dog that looked vaguely familiar, and a man Cricket definitely recognized—black cowboy hat, black coat, red glove on his right hand and a white collar about his throat.
The Daedalus bounty hunter that had chased them across the Yousay.
The man who’d killed Kaiser.
Almost killed Evie and Lemon.
Preacher.
And he was riding shotgun for Ezekiel?
Cricket couldn’t hear his own voice. But still he felt the need to ask anyway.
“WHAT THE FLAMING HELLS ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
“Cricket?”
Ezekiel couldn’t believe his eyes, but he found himself grinning anyway, simply overjoyed to see the big bot again. But his smile faded as he looked the logika up and down—the red paint, the ornate Xs, a white skull on his face. He was holding a boy in his palm, bloodstained and bewildered and covered in what might’ve been fire foam. Zeke had no idea how, but it looked like Cricket had become property of the Brotherhood….
“What happened to you?” Zeke asked. “Is Lemon wi—”
An explosion blossomed at Cricket’s back, knocking the big logika forward onto his hands and knees. Zeke winced at the rush of heat and flame, slipping off the motorcycle seat on instinct as the citizens in the convoy around him screamed.
Looking past the fallen WarBot, he saw dozens of Brotherhood bullyboys streaming out from New Bethlehem’s broken gates. A tall Sumo-class machina arced up its chainguns, the cassock-wearing thugs lifted their weapons, and before Ezekiel could blink, he found himself in a blazing gun battle.
He rolled sideways away from the motorcycle, Preacher diving from the sidecar in the opposite direction. Jojo bounded clear as a stray RPG round whizzed over Cricket’s head and blew their long-suffering bike to smoking pieces.
“What the hell are they shooting at us for?” he roared.
Cricket didn’t seem to hear, staggering to his feet with smoke pouring off his hull. Zeke hunkered down behind a dusty RV as Preacher took refuge in the shade of a rustbucket 4x4. The citizens in the convoy were already running for better cover, machine-gun fire from the Brotherhood helping them on their way. Cricket charged at the Sumo, tracer rounds bursting on his armor as he crashed into the big machina and started tearing the chainguns off its hull. The bloodstained boy scrambled into cover next to Ezekiel, red spilling from his split brow.
“Are you all right?” the lifelike asked.
The boy wiped the blood and foam off his face, slowly nodding. He was maybe nineteen years old, wearing dirty coveralls and steel-toed boots. Dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, his face bloodied and bruised. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, then had the living daylights beaten out of him by it.
“Cricket, what’s happening?” Ezekiel roared.
“I’M AFRAID HE CAN’T HEAR YOU,” said a muffled voice nearby.
Zeke squinted through the dust and smoke, saw a tall, spindly logika with gold filigree sprawled under the same RV he was crouched behind. The bot kept his head low, an inane grin flashing in time with every word he spoke.
“Why not?” Zeke demanded.
“I DISABLED HIS AUDIO CAPABILITIES SO HE COULDN’T FOLLOW ORDERS ANYMORE,” the logika explained. “WE’RE UNDERTAKING A DARING ESCAPE, YOU SEE.”
“Who the hell are you?” Ezekiel demanded.
“MY NAME IS SOLOMON, GOOD SIR,” the logika replied, offering its hand. “A PLEASURE TO MEET YOU. THE YOUNG MAN BESIDE YOU IS MASTER ABRAHAM, A FORMER RESIDENT OF THIS CITY NOW LOOKING TO RELOCATE TO FRIENDLIER CLIMES. YOU’RE A FRIEND OF DEAR PALADIN, I TAKE IT?”
“…Who the hell is Paladin?”
“NOT TOO BRIGHT, I SEE,” Solomon said. “YOU MUST BE BEST FRIENDS, THEN.”
Preacher stuck his head up from behind his dirt buggy, roaring over the gunfire. “Zekey, I hate to interrupt the chit’n’chat, but there’s a posse of god-botherers in fancy dressing gowns tryin’ to murder us here?”
Ezekiel ducked low as a burst of machine-gun fire peppered his cover. Cricket had torn the weaponry off the Sumo, but he’d taken a few hits himself, smoke billowing from his dynamo and right arm. Zeke was pretty sure the Brotherhood were shooting at the boy, not him and Preacher. But whatever was happening here, they seemed to have walked right into the middle of a war zone.
“Listen, have you seen a girl named Lemon?” he asked Solomon. “She might have come in with Cricket? Redhead? Cutoff camos and big boots? Five foot nothing?”
“LEMON FRESH? THAT PINT-SIZED, FRECKLE-FACED HOOLIGAN?”
“That’s her!” Zeke grinned. “Where is she?”
“I’VE NO IDEA. THE LITTLE ANARCHIST APPEARED FOUR DAYS AGO, FRIED ME LIKE AN EGG, STOLE MY MERCHANDISE, THEN WALTZED AWAY WITHOUT SO MUCH AS AN APOLOGY.”
“Yeah, okay that’s definitely her,” Ezekiel muttered.
He cracked off a few blasts with his shotgun, shouted across at Preacher.
“She’s not here!”
“Then we ain’t got no reason to be getting shot at!” the bounty hunter replied. “So maybe get hold of your WarBot buddy so we can git the—”
Ezekiel heard an engine roar overhead, a spray of autocannon fire. Bullets ripped up the road, cut a handful of Brotherhood boys off the New Bethlehem walls. The lifelike’s heart surged in his chest as he saw a flex-wing with Gnosis logos on the tail fins roaring in out of the cigarette sky. The flier zoomed over the city walls, sprayed another burst of bullets into the Brotherhood and sent them scattering.
Cricket caught sight of the flex-wing, too. The big bot paused in remodeling the Sumo’s insides, roaring over the engines, the gunfire, the screams.
“FAITH!”
Ezekiel followed the path of the flex-wing, guessing who might be inside it. The lifelike knew Cricket couldn’t hear him, so he yelled across at Preacher instead.
“You see them?”
“Yeah, I seen ’em!” the man replied, firing off a couple of half-hearted shots.
“This place was a Gnosis outpost before the company collapsed!”
“You figure lil’ Miss Monrova is in residence?”
Ezekiel’s heart thumped faster at the thought, but he tried to keep the emotion in check. The thought of seeing her again. After all this time. After all those years…
“Why else would they be here?”
“Found religion, mebbee?”
“We can’t risk them getting their hands on her!”
Preacher looked up over his cover at the small army of Brotherhood now gathering on the walls. “Bad odds, Zekey.”
“You know what’s at stake here!”
Preacher scowled. “If I were less of a gentleman, I might be pointing out that we could really use a Daedalus army helping us about now.”
“You can say you told me so later!”
The bounty hunter spat a long stream of brown into the dirt, scruffed his blitzhund behind the ears and sighed. Unslinging the shooters from his hips, he nodded. “Alrighty. Let’s go melt us some snowflakes.”
The flex-wing made another pass over the Brotherhood boys and Disciples, cutting a bloody swath through their thinning line. Ezekiel heard a deafening explosion as the flex-wing unloaded into what was presumably a fuel dump beyond the walls, and the ground shook as a rippling blossom of flame rose into the sky. He lost sight of the flier as it looped back through the rising smoke, but the good news was that it’d certainly got most of the Brotherhood’s attention now. And Cricket had the rest.
The big logika seemed to have decided the gate was too crowded, and had started climbing over the wall instead. He dug his metal fists into the concrete, tore through the razor wire and broken glass and jumped back into New Bethlehem with a heavy thud. A few Brotherhood boys were peppering his hull, but his armor was thic
k enough to shrug it off. The closest thugs got sprayed with a gout of thick white foam from Cricket’s palms. But the city sirens were wailing, flames rising, and Zeke could see more machina stomping in from the surrounding fields of gene-modded corn.
Time to move.
Zeke didn’t know who this Abraham boy was, only that he was a friend of Cricket’s. Grabbing the boy by his greasy coveralls, Solomon with his other hand, he jumped into the cabin of the RV he’d been hiding behind. Preacher leapt up into the back, his blitzhund following. And with his teeth gritted, Zeke planted his foot and tore through the shattered New Bethlehem gates.
The square beyond was in chaos, the buildings on fire, the air a black, choking haze. The flex-wing was buzzing through the smoke-smeared sky overhead, spraying indiscriminately into the crowd. But something about this didn’t feel right….
“THEY SENT FAITH AS A DISTRACTION IN JUGARTOWN!” Cricket yelled. “THE REST OF THEM WILL BE AT THE GNOSIS BUILDING!”
Ezekiel squinted across the square, saw the desalination plant rising above the other shanty shacks and burning buildings. It was wreathed in dark fumes and smoke, a corrosive stink. But through the flames spreading across New Bethlehem’s square, he could still see the faded GnosisLabs logo on the wall.
“GO!” Cricket yelled. “I GOT BUSINESS WITH THESE TWO!”
A chaingun unfolded from Cricket’s forearm, and twin pods of missile launchers unfurled from his back like insect wings. The big bot started firing on the flex-wing, and the few remaining Brotherhood boys seemed to decide the flier was a bigger threat than the bot, and joined in on the bullet party.
Ezekiel stomped the accelerator, tires squealing as he tore across the burning New Bethlehem square. Citizens scattered as he wove the RV through the settlement, skidding to a smoking halt in front of the desalination plant.
The building squatted on the edge of the bay like an old, broken king. Its facade had been modified into the crude likeness of an oldskool cathedral, with double iron doors and a big stone bell tower. But in reality, it was an ugly bloated hulk with fat storage tanks and a tangled knot of hissing pipes. Thick smoke spilled from its chimneys, laying down a pall of fumes over the black water beyond.
