Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  I can’t help myself. I don’t even want to try.

  “Don’t cry,” I whisper, my lips brushing his skin. “Don’t cry.”

  He opens his eyes and I see myself reflected in the color of our long-lost sky. And for the first time in my life, I feel like someone actually sees me. Drowning in those pools of a beautiful blue that only exists in old pictures. He feels so warm, but goose bumps are rising on my skin, my stomach thrilling as I sense something in him shift. He glances down to my lips, his breath coming quicker as he leans closer. Hovering like a moth at the flame.

  And then his mouth is on mine and his hands on my body, and though I’ve never kissed a boy before and though he’s nothing close to a boy at all, he feels every bit as real as I dreamed he would. His lips are soft and his touch is gentle, pressed to my cheeks and running through my hair. Our lips melt together and it’s all I can do to remember to breathe. His mouth roams lower, down along my jaw to my throat, faint stubble tickling my skin and weakening my knees. I hold him tight so I don’t fall, aching and sighing, his teeth nipping my neck as my hands roam his back. I hold him as if all the world were a storm and I’m sinking, drowning, and it’s only him keeping me alive.

  And I know this isn’t real, but I’ve never known anything more real in my life.

  And I know it’s wrong to want him, but that just makes me want him more.

  And I cup his cheeks and draw him back up to look at me, and as we sink toward another long, aching kiss, just before our lips meet, he whispers it.

  He whispers my name.

  “Ana . . .”

  My name is Ana.

  My name is Ana.

  Afterward, we lie on my bed, the scent of old roses and sweat in the air. His arm is around my shoulder and my head is resting on his bare chest, and though he’s not a real boy, I can still feel his heart beating. Still taste him on my lips. Every part of him is real, and every part of him is mine.

  “No one can know about this,” I whisper.

  “No,” he sighs.

  “My mother. My father. They’d never understand.”

  “I know.”

  “A part of him would be flattered, I think.” I smile, run my fingertips along Ezekiel’s skin and watch it prickle. “To know he’d made something so perfect.”

  “You’re the perfect one, Ana.”

  I scoff and give him a playful slap. “My beautiful liar.”

  The flattery is appreciated, but we’re only pale shadows beside them. We’re only human, and the lifelikes are so much more. But my Ezekiel rolls me onto my back and stares down at me, and I see my reflection in his eyes.

  “I mean it,” he whispers. “No matter how perfect they make us, they can’t make us human. It’s your flaws that make you beautiful, Ana. It’s the imperfections that make you perfect. Being what I am, I can’t help but see them. Or love them.”

  I open my mouth to speak, but he silences me with a kiss that I feel all the way to my fingertips. I lie back on the sheets and let him adore me, and when I open my eyes, he’s looking at me in a way no one ever has or will again.

  “I used to wonder sometimes why they made us,” he says. “If there could ever be a reason for something like me to exist. But now I know.” He runs his fingers down my cheek, over my lips. “I was made for you. All I am. All I do, I do for you.”

  The words take most of my breath away, and his kiss steals the rest. And as we lie entwined in the dark, he holds me close and breathes the words I’ve waited so long to hear.

  “I love you, Ana.”

  It’s been four days since Raphael . . . since he did what he did.

  Three days since Ezekiel and I . . .

  Mother thinks we’ve all been cooped up in Babel too long. Father, especially. She’s organized one of our rare trips to Megopolis, a visit to WarDome. GnosisLabs’ finest logika, the Quixote, is fighting for a championship title there tonight. The logika and machina bouts are a violent spectacle to keep the mob entertained. Gnosis and Daedalus creations and the great living constructs of BioMaas brawl and bash at each other, and everyone goes home feeling a little less like fighting the real war we all know is coming.

  My little brother loves the bouts. Alex wants to be a Domefighter when he grows up. Father says he should use his gifts to build, not to destroy, but Mother indulges him. He’s beside me now as we walk to the shuttle, skipping with excitement. The R & D bay is vast, nestled at the foot of the tower, lined with flex-wings and grav-tanks and the hulking figures of our logika army. In Alex’s free hand he holds a tiny replica of Quixote that he built himself. He made me mechanical butterflies for my fifteenth birthday.

  Alex is his father’s son.

  The real Quixote is on the other side of the bay, being loaded for transport. The logika is enormous, its fists like wrecking balls. It frightens me a little—this thing created only to destroy. But Alex whoops when he sees it, dancing with his toy in his hand.

  “Twelve thousand horsepower!” he cries. “The best they’ve ever built in the labs. Doctor Silas showed me the new modifications they made to the targeting array last week—it can hit a five-centimeter bull’s-eye at six kilometers!”

  Marie is holding my other hand, and she laughs at Alex’s excitement. My sister looks at me and squeezes my fingers. Gives me a secret, knowing smile.

  I told her about Ezekiel and me. Of course I did. I had to tell someone or else I’d have burst. And though the thought of Raph still turns our days from blue to gray, Marie couldn’t help but squeal her delight, dragging me down to the floor and insisting I give her every detail. She closed her eyes and smiled as she listened, sighing from her heart. Hopeless romantic that she is, she told me the best loves are forbidden ones.

  She seems more in love with the idea of it than I am.

  The other lifelikes are still being tested by Doctor Silas, Faith among them. But Gabriel and Ezekiel are part of Father’s security detail, and despite what happened to Raphael, Father refuses to travel without them. Grace is at Father’s side, as always, tapping away at her palmglass. She’s like his shadow now, his majordomo, his right hand.

  I wonder what he’ll do if the board votes to cut it off.

  I steal glances at Ezekiel as we walk. He’s dressed in a Gnosis security force suit of armored black and charcoal blue. It fits him like a glove, tight in all the right places, and I try my best not to stare. He prowls like a wolf, scanning technicians and deckhands and flight crews, but every so often, I catch him looking at me and I have to hold back my smile.

  Gabriel is dressed the same as his brother. But if Ezekiel is a wolf, then Gabe is a lion—I’ve seen footage of big cats in the archives, and Gabe moves just like them. Proud. Majestic. His eyes are like knives. His every movement precise. But he seems just the tiniest bit off today. Perhaps thoughts of Raphael are preying on his mind. Perhaps it’s being so close to Grace that’s distracting him. The way I’m distracting Zeke.

  Perhaps that’s why neither of them spots the bomb.

  The shuttle is waiting, with its smooth lines and soundless rotor blades. Alex pulls free of my grip and runs toward the real Quixote, keen for a closer look. Marie and Mother hurry off to wrangle him, and Tania and Olivia are laughing. Father puts one arm around me as he walks and talks to Grace.

  Ezekiel is beside us. Stealing glances. Gabriel is behind us, hanging close to Mother as she gets Alex under control. Our security detail includes a dozen more men, all heavily armed and armored. Four of them march up onto the shuttle’s ramp and into its belly. I hear a dull clunk under the rhythmic tread of their heavy boots.

  A tiny electronic ping.

  Ezekiel’s eyes widen. Father and I step up onto the ramp. Grace cries a warning. They move then, the pair of them, and it seems like all the world is in slow motion. I hear a dull whump. Feel a tremor. And then Zeke has my shoulders, crying my name and wrenching me from Father’s arms as the explosion blooms.

  He’s so impossibly strong—nothing so gentle as our
night in my room. I feel my shoulder pop as he slings me backward, as if I were the toy logika in Alex’s hands. I see Grace stepping in front of my father and shoving him away as the blast erupts behind her. I see her rendered in silhouette against the flames, see that long blond hair catch fire as the shuttle blows itself apart, shattering her like glass.

  Pain rips through my legs, my chest. Fire. Shrapnel. All the world is cinders and I’m utterly weightless, landing with a crunch and tumble-skidding across the bay. Blood in my mouth. Stars in my eyes. And as the darkness swells up on black wings, I can hear my mother screaming. My brother screaming. My sisters screaming.

  My name.

  They’re screaming my name.

  “ANA!”

  My lashes flutter against my cheeks and my eyes crack slowly open. The world feels too bright and everything is too loud. Ezekiel is on one knee beside my bed, fingers entwined with mine. A gentle ping sings from the machines beside me, chiming with every beat of my heart.

  “I thought I lost you,” he whispers.

  He tenses, cocking his head. And quicker than silver, he stands, strides to the corner of the room and places his hands behind his back as if standing guard. I hear distant footsteps, and the door slams open and a man is there, wide-eyed and euphoric.

  “She’s awake?”

  “Just now, sir,” Ezekiel replies.

  The man rushes to my bedside and takes my hand. “Can you see me, Princess?”

  I blink hard. Confusion and pain. “. . . Father?”

  “My beautiful girl.” His eyes fill with tears, and he’s on his knees beside the bed, pressing my knuckles to his lips as he echoes Ezekiel. “I thought I lost you.”

  I’m in a white room, in a soft white bed. There are no windows, and the air is metallic in the back of my throat, filled with the chatter of machines. Every part of me hurts. All the room is spinning and I can barely move my tongue to speak.

  “. . . Where am I?”

  “Shhh,” Father whispers, squeezing my hand. “It’s all right, Princess. Everything is going to be all right. You’re back. You’re back with us again.”

  Father’s head is wrapped in bandages, his eyes shadowed and sunken. The skin on his face is red, as if singed by flame, and suddenly I remember. The shuttle. The explosion.

  “I . . . what . . .”

  “Shhh, hush now.”

  “Was anyone hurt?” I croak, my heart hammering.

  Father can’t meet my eyes.

  “. . . Grace?” I ask.

  He sighs. I see Ezekiel hang his head.

  “Oh, no,” I breathe.

  Poor Grace.

  . . . Poor Gabriel.

  What will he do without her?

  “I’m sorry, Princess,” Father says. “I was blind. But my eyes are open now. This attack came from within Gnosis. They don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve here. They never will. And I’m taking steps to ensure this never happens again.”

  Father’s voice is dark, his eyes darker still. His face makes me frightened, and for a moment, I feel I don’t know him at all.

  This is not my life.

  This is not my home.

  I am not me.

  “Father . . .”

  “You rest easy now. You’ve been brave enough for one day.”

  He presses a button on the machine beside me, and I feel a chill creep into my arm through the IV at my wrist. I look to Ezekiel. I want so desperately to hold him. For us to be together again, far from here, far from this. But he doesn’t move a muscle. And as sleep takes me, I hear Father’s voice, his vow, hissed through gritted teeth.

  “No one hurts my children. No one will hurt you again. I promise, Ana.”

  And I remember.

  Ana.

  My name is . . .

  1.12

  REVELATION

  “My name is Ana Monrova,” she breathed.

  The girl was on her hands and knees, beneath the surface of a black sea.

  A homunculus of spare parts beside her, bewilderment in his plastic eyes.

  A beautiful boy, who was nothing close to a boy, watching silently.

  She hung her head.

  Tasted ashes.

  Ashes and lies.

  “My name is Ana Monrova. . . .”

  1.13

  LEMON

  She woke in blackness.

  Spots of luminous green. A subsonic hum. A thudding rhythm echoing in the walls around her. Lemon Fresh winced, spat the taste of oil off her tongue. She was on a soft slab, hands and feet encased in translucent resin. Her belly felt full of ice and greasy flies.

  Her memories were fragmented, bloodied around the edges. She remembered the throwdown with the Brotherhood and Fridge Street boys. That lifelike descending from the sky like some angel of death and blowing their favorite bits and pieces all around the yard. The frantic flight from Dregs.

  Everything else was kinda blurry, talking true.

  She had no idea where she was. No idea what had happened to that murderbot with the spankable tail section, or Crick or Kaiser or Evie or even Grandpa, for that matter.

  Grandpa.

  It was stupid to think of him that way. She’d only known him a year. But he’d been kind to her, in a world where kind only came at a price. He’d given her a roof when most creeps only ever offered a bed. Fifteen years in the stinking scrap pile that was Dregs, and Silas and Eve were the first people who’d ever given her more than a taking.

  Funnily enough, take was exactly what she’d tried to do to them.

  Lemon had been living hard on the streets of Los Diablos since she was a sprog. Hanging with the other gutter runners a year back, she’d caught some talk about an old man who worked wonders with tech troubles. Mechanical genius, folks said. Could fix the broken sky, they said. Figuring a gent like that would be carrying some decent scratch, she’d followed Silas and Eve through the LD sprawl one day. And when the moment was right, Lemon cut the old man’s pocket and lifted three shiny credstiks, right into the greasy palm of her hand.

  Sadly, she was so fizzy at the sight of all that scratch, she lingered too long. Eve had spun around and collared her. Lemon fought and bit and broke away, leaving Eve with nothing but a torn poncho in her hands.

  Lemon figured she’d gotten off free and clean. Didn’t count on Kaiser, though. Didn’t know blitzhunds could track you over a thousand k’s with a single particle of your DNA.

  They found her in some fetid corner of the Burrows. Curled under a cardboard roof, clutching the credstiks to her chest like a mother holding a newborn sprat. She’d woken to the blitzhund’s growl. And old Silas Carpenter had looked around at the squalor she lived in, and he’d spoke with a voice like she supposed fathers would use.

  “You ever want a decent meal,” he’d said, “come out to Tire Valley and look us up.”

  “You’re too old for me, Gramps,” Lemon had replied.

  He’d laughed then, a laugh that had turned into a racking cough. It’d be six more months before it gripped him so tight he couldn’t walk, but the cancer had him by the insides, even back then. And still, he’d managed to smile.

  “I like you, kiddo,” he’d said.

  He’d let her keep the credstiks. And when she fronted up to his door after the scratch ran out, he fed her, just like he’d said. And though she never called him Grandpa to his face, it’d always be the name he wore inside her head.

  She wondered where he was now. Where Evie was. If they were okay.

  If she was okay . . .

  “Helloooo?” she called. “Anyone there?”

  She heard a whimper, soft and electronic. Craning her neck, she saw Kaiser on a slab beside her, his gut leaking wires and broken feeds. He tried to paw toward her, but he was bound in the same translucent resin that held her hands and feet in place.

  “Heyyyy, boy. Good to see you.”

  The blitzhund wagged his tail, eyes glowing softly.

  “You didn’t happen to bring a hacksaw, by an
y chance?”

  Kaiser whimpered, pressed metal ears to his head.

  “Figures,” she sighed.

  Lemon’s vision was adjusting to the dark now—she could make out a little more of the room around her. The walls were wet and pulsing, run through with a pale green phosphorescence arranged in patterns that looked like . . . veins. The room was concave, corrugated with hard, bony structures beneath the fleshy surface.

  Are they ribs?

  Strange protuberances covered what might have been a control panel next to her, but she couldn’t crane her neck far enough to see. Struggling against her bonds, she felt them give slightly, then tighten even more. The sensation made her queasy. The walls shuddered around her; a low, warbling tone rippled through the slab at her back. It was as if the whole room and everything in it were—

  A hole in the wall opened, like a fist unclenching. Lemon saw a figure in the corridor beyond, a boy a little older than her. As he stepped into the pulsing light, she saw he was pale, no hair on his scalp or brows. He was encased from the neck down in what looked like black rubber, covered in dozens of strange nodules. His eyes were entirely black and too big for his face, and his fingers and toes were webbed. He had six on each hand and foot.

  Kaiser growled, eyes glowing brighter.

  “Um,” Lemon said. “Hello, sailor.”

  The boy said nothing, squelching (that was the only way she could describe it) to her side and, without ceremony, jabbing a long sliver of what could’ve been glass into her arm.

  Lemon yelped in pain and laid down the choicest curse words in her repertoire (they were choice with a capital C). Unfazed, the boy squelched over to the thing that looked like a control panel. He inserted the bloody sliver into a small slot, placed those strange hands on the controls and made a series of sounds in the back of his throat, glottal and wet. And as Lemon scowled, the room itself replied in that same low, warbling tone.

  “What’s with the jabby-poky, skinnyboy?” Lemon demanded. “Is that how you always act on a first date? Because with a face like that, I’d be trying flowers.”