Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  All her life, she’d been surrounded by tech of the old world, repurposed and recycled and rusted through. But if this was the future BioMaas had in store for the planet—living machines and thousands, maybe millions of creatures all working in perfect harmony—she found it hard to fault them for leaving the tech of the past behind.

  “How long have you worked here?” she asked Carer.

  The woman frowned. “We have always worked here.”

  “No, I mean how many years have you served on Nau’shi?”

  Carer stopped and looked at Lemon in puzzlement. “We are Nau’shi.”

  A long, quavering call echoed down the corridor, and Carer’s eyes widened.

  “Ohhhhh,” she moaned.

  “What is it?” Lemon asked.

  “The polluted.” Carer double-blinked back her tears. “They are hurting us. . . .”

  A doorway down the corridor yawned open, and a tall, heavyset man with similar clothing to Carer’s barreled out, face twisted in fury. He was followed by several lumbering insect things, each as big as he was. They were covered in translucent shells and armed with massive claws.

  “Aaaaand you’d be Facepuncher, I presume,” Lemon said.

  “Unnatural!” the man bellowed, spit flying.

  He hefted what looked like a hybrid of a pistol and a spiny sea urchin, took aim right at Lemon. Kaiser bucked in Carer’s arms and snarled.

  The girl dove to the floor as the big man opened fire with his pistol thing, spraying the air with long black spines. But as the shots sailed harmlessly over Lemon’s head, she tracked them down the corridor and finally slapped eyes on their actual target—the six-odd feet of sexy murderbot charging down the hall right toward them.

  “Hello, Dimples,” Lemon sighed.

  “Hey, Freckles.”

  Ezekiel moved like lightning, like silk, like liquid, running up the curved wall and tumbling over Lemon’s head through the burst of fire. Rolling down into a crouch, he swung a length of iron rebar at the shooter’s knees, chopping his legs from under him. Carer screamed, the man howled, clutching his shattered bones. Even with one arm, Ezekiel was impressive, swinging at a bug thing and splitting its head in two. The second beast chittered, taking a long, bleeding gouge out of the lifelike’s side. Ezekiel gasped, blood spraying, piroetting on the spot and plunging his weapon through the last beast’s carapace, nailing it to the wall. It snarled, coughed, its half a dozen hooks twitching feebly as it died.

  Carer began wailing as the creature perished, falling to her knees and dropping Kaiser to the floor. Ezekiel kicked the pistol thing away from the big man’s outstretched hand, tore his rebar out of the shuddering wall and pointed it at the fellow’s head.

  “Unnatural,” the man hissed. “Polluted!”

  “Please don’t move,” the lifelike said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Lemon was looking at the slaughtered bug things. Back at Carer, on her knees and weeping, reaching out toward the dead creatures with a trembling hand.

  “I think you already did, Dimples. . . .”

  “Lemon!”

  She looked up, saw Eve at the end of the corridor, Cricket on her shoulder. Lem rolled to her feet with a whoop and charged into her bestest’s crushing hug.

  “Riotgrrl!” Lemon pulled back, nose wrinkling. “You look like ten miles of rough road. And you smell like my pits after a hard day’s work.”

  “When have you ever put in a hard day’s work, Lem?” Eve grinned.

  “I’m too pretty to sweat. How you doin’, Crick? Keeping our girl out of trouble?”

  The little bot waved dramatically at their surroundings. “Apparently not.”

  “Kaiser!”

  Spotting the injured blitzhund, Eve dragged herself free of Lemon’s embrace and thumped down the corridor, skidding to her knees at Kaiser’s side. She pulled the cyborg up into a fierce hug. “You okay, boy? I was worried about you!”

  Kaiser wuffed and wagged his tail, slurping at Eve with his heat-sink tongue.

  “We need to move,” Ezekiel warned.

  Cricket nodded. “Again, hate to agree with Stumpy. But moving. Yes.”

  Eve picked up Kaiser, struggling with his weight. Lemon was watching Carer and the guy Ezekiel had clocked. The pair were on the floor, the man holding his broken leg. When he shifted his weight, he and Carer both gasped in pain.

  What was it Carer said?

  “We are Nau’shi.”

  With an apologetic smile, Lemon crawled to the groaning man.

  “Listen, sorry in advance, okay?”

  “Wha—aaaaaaaa!” The man bellowed as Lemon poked his broken knee. He rolled around on the floor, tears in his strange eyes as he roared, “Why would she do that?”

  “Lemon?” Eve raised her eyebrows. “Why would you do that?”

  Lemon pointed to Carer. The woman’s face was twisted in pain, and she was holding her own leg and groaning too.

  “These people,” Lemon said. “These bug things. This whole place, it’s like one big . . . one, yeah? Every piece is part of the whole. They’re not just the crew. They are the ship. All of them.” She looked at the groaning man. “You’re one of the defenders, right? What should we call you? Thumper? Biff?”

  “Sentinel,” he groaned.

  “See?” Lemon grinned. “I met another called Salvage. Their names aren’t names, they’re titles. Salvage sorts the things they find in the water. Sentinel here is like internal security. And this,” Lemon said with a flourish, “is Carer.”

  “So?” Cricket asked.

  “So she cares for things on the ship. It’s what she’s built for. It’s what she is.”

  Lemon turned to the woman, stared into those strange black eyes.

  “Carer, is there a way off Nau’shi? Some way for us to leave without hurting anyone or anything else?”

  The woman’s eyes widened at the mention of nothing else getting hurt.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Will you take us there?”

  The woman blinked twice. Licked at dry lips.

  “. . . We like Lemonfresh.” She glanced at Ezekiel. At Cricket. At Eve’s cybernetic eye and Memdrive. Revulsion was plain on her face. “Even though Lemonfresh walks with the polluted, we like her. We do not want her to go. She is important.”

  “If we stay here, Nau’shi is just going to keep trying to hurt my friends,” Lemon said. “And more of Nau’shi is going to get hurt. We have another friend in trouble, Carer. Someone we care about a whole lot. You understand that, right?”

  Carer looked at Sentinel, who growled and shook his head. She looked to the dead bug things, the bloody iron bar in the murderbot’s hands. The countless creatures around them, crawling across the ceiling and slithering through the walls. She slowly nodded.

  “Is that a yes?” Lemon asked.

  The woman looked at Lemon. Blinked her strange black eyes.

  “That is a yes.”

  1.16

  LOST

  Eve clomped along the corridor. Her biceps were burning with Kaiser’s weight, but she was just overjoyed to have him back. Carer was helping Sentinel, his arm slung over her shoulder. The woman winced whenever her companion took a step, as if she felt every bit of his pain. If what Lemon had said was true, the kraken and its crew would have sensed the deaths of every leukocyte they’d ghosted in its belly. They’d only been defending themselves, but Eve still felt awful. Even if those things had been trying to eat them . . .

  Lemon was walking beside Sentinel, helping Carer with the man’s weight. Ezekiel was out in front, rebar in hand. Eve watched the way he moved. Head low, eyes narrowed, prowling like a wolf. She remembered the warmth of him against her skin. The way she’d felt in his arms. Protected. Loved.

  It all felt like so long ago.

  It all felt like yesterday.

  The corridor widened, the heartbeat growing louder. Eve saw that the walls were lined with leukocytes—the beasts nestled into grooves and runnels, watch
ing with glittering, flint-black eyes. If things went wrong here, they were going wrong all the way. . . .

  “Hope you know what you’re doing, Lem,” she muttered.

  “Yeah,” the girl replied. “Me too.”

  Carer led them along pulsing corridors and through archways of living bone. Finally, they found themselves in a broad, damp chamber, wide as the WarDome. The walls were run through with luminous green veins. Hundreds of leukocytes glared at them from their niches, that great thudding pulse filling the air.

  Sitting in the chamber’s center was what appeared to be a ship. It was dark and beautiful, shaped like some huge, twisted cuttlefish and covered in a translucent nautilus shell. Two great eyes, each as big as Eve, shone in its flanks. She was reminded of the constructs BioMaas would send to the Megopolis WarDome—armored behemoths that would throw down with Daedalus and Gnosis machina and logika in front of the roaring crowd. The behemoths were just as punchy as anything robotic in the Dome. But when they were cut, they didn’t leak oil or coolant. They bled instead.

  Carer touched the ship’s flank, and it quivered. A long crack in its shell folded open to reveal a chamber inside, large enough to fit twenty peeps in comfort.

  “This is Lifeboat,” Carer said. “Lemonfresh should tell her where she wishes to go. Lifeboat will take Lemonfresh to those she cares for. Safe and swift.”

  “Thank you, Carer.” The girl smiled.

  “Be wary in the deadworld.” Carer glanced to Eve. “It brims with pollution and pain. But we will tell CityHive about Lemonfresh. She is important. She is needed.”

  “Oooookay.”

  Lemon gave the woman a quick, uncomfortable hug and bundled into Lifeboat. Ezekiel took Kaiser, climbed in after Lemon, Eve following with Cricket on her shoulder.

  “We’re sorry,” she said, looking into Carer’s strange eyes. “We didn’t understand the harm we were doing. We were just defending ourselves.”

  Carer stared at Eve. Blinking slowly.

  “You are unnatural.” She motioned to Eve’s cybernetics. “You are polluted. You and all your kind. It is in your nature to destroy. It is all you know how to do.”

  “And what would you have done to us,” Ezekiel asked, “if we hadn’t fought our way out of that stomach?”

  “Right,” Cricket growled. “Sounds plenty destructive to me, Blinky.”

  “It’s all right, Crick.” Eve patted the little bot to quiet him. “Again, I’m sorry, Carer.”

  The woman stepped back without a word as the nautilus shell slid closed. Lemon glanced at Eve, rolled her eyes and whispered, “Boots not laced all the way to the top on that one.”

  Eve’s hand went to her Memdrive. The optic where her right eye used to be. “Polluted.” “Unnatural.” Just one more insult to add to “deviate” and “abnorm.” Just one more group of folks who hated her. She wondered if there was anywhere on earth that would accept her for what she was. Anyplace she fit at all.

  She looked across Lifeboat’s gloom, found Ezekiel staring back at her. He looked at her like she was real. Like no one had looked at her before or since. But it wasn’t the puppy love of a newborn lifelike in a pristine white tower anymore. It was harder somehow. Fiercer. Tempered by miles and years and dust and pain.

  She broke her stare, focused on the ship around her. The interior was crafted of the same dark, spongy material as the kraken’s innards, run through with the same luminous veins. The shell was semi-translucent, carved with odd sigils, and through it, she could see the vague shapes of Carer and the chamber outside.

  “I thought BioMaas tech looked weird on the outside,” she muttered.

  “I don’t like this,” Cricket said. “The sooner we skip this party, the better.”

  “So where we going?”

  “We gotta find Mister C, right?” Lemon looked back and forth between Eve and the little logika. “That Faith lifelike snaffled him. We gotta steal him back.”

  Eve felt her stomach turn. Dreading telling Lemon the truth of where she’d come from. The lies Silas had told her. She wondered if Lem would look at her the same way again. It was already hard enough being a deviate. How would Lemon react when she found out her best friend was a total stranger? That her name wasn’t even her name?

  Eve put her aching head in her hands. It was too much to even consider right now. She was exhausted. Filthy. Starving. They needed time in the shade. Someplace to—

  “We need to lie low,” Ezekiel said, and Eve could have kissed him then. “Kaiser needs repairs. I’ve still only got one arm. And it’s been a while since either of you slept.”

  “Or ate.” Lemon sniffed her filthy tank top with a grimace. “Or showered. Ew.”

  “We could try Megopolis?” Cricket offered. “Big city? Lots of places to hide.”

  “We’re never getting past border security into Megopolis,” Eve said. “We’re not accredited citizens. None of us have Daedalus CorpCards.”

  “I know a place.” Ezekiel glanced at Eve. “But I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

  “So it’ll fit right in with the rest of my day, is what you’re saying?”

  “I have a friend on the mainland,” he said. “Near the coast. A city called Armada. It’s a free settlement, only loosely affiliated with Daedalus. My friend runs a ministry there in the Tanker District. And she owes me a favor.”

  “She?” Lemon asked. “Not a crazy ex-girlfriend, I hope?”

  Ezekiel smiled his crooked smile, and Eve felt her heart lurch sideways in her chest.

  “Not quite,” he said. “But if you’ve got a better idea, Freckles, I’m all ears.”

  Lemon grinned at Eve, bouncing in her seat. “He calls me Freckles now.”

  “Can I come to the wedding?” Cricket asked sourly.

  “You can be my bridesmaid, you little fug.”

  “I told you not to call me little!”

  The pair exchanged a salvo of rude hand gestures as Eve pursed her lips in thought. Ezekiel’s plan didn’t seem a bad option. There was no one and nothing for her in Dregs to count on, except maybe a Brotherhood cross and a handful of nails. She didn’t know anyone on the mainland. They had no scratch. No fallback.

  She glanced at Lemon, eyebrow raised. “Any thoughts on Armada, Number One?”

  “Always wanted to see the Big City,” the girl shrugged.

  “I’m not sure about this, Evie,” Cricket warned.

  “And I’d be real worried if you were, Crick.” She nodded to Lem. “Let’s do it.”

  “Lifeboat,” Lemon called. “Take us to Armada.”

  Eve heard a series of wet clunks as she was rocked sideways in her seat. A brief sensation of weightlessness, the sound of rushing water. The glow through the translucent shell grew dimmer as they slipped out into the ocean. She could make out the kraken’s vast shape, silhouetted against the light above. Huge, bullet-shaped heads. A seething mass of tentacles, each as long as a skyscraper. Armored skin, caked with barnacles.

  She could feel the gentle motion as Lifeboat swam away. Hear the ship’s soft pulse, surrounded by the ocean’s silence. It was strangely peaceful, like a heartbeat in a lightless womb. Sitting there and enjoying the lull, if only for a moment. Letting the water wash over her, dragging some of the pain away with it.

  After a few minutes, she found her eyelids growing heavy. Afraid to sleep, she looked to Lem for some conversation, found her bestest already slumped in her chair, eyes closed, chest softly rising and falling. Kaiser was at Eve’s feet, optics glowing in the dark. She glanced up, found Ezekiel watching her.

  Those too-blue eyes.

  Those bow-shaped lips.

  She couldn’t trust him. Even though she remembered him, part of her felt like she didn’t know him at all. But still, sitting with him, just the two of them . . . it somehow felt so familiar. He’d been such a huge part of the life she’d known before, and she could feel some part of herself being drawn back. Like iron to a magnet. A warm, sweet gravity, tingling with
promise. Slowly pulling her closer. How easy would it be, to just fall back into it? To close her eyes and reach out her hands and just let go?

  But still, she could feel it between them. The question, burning now in her mind.

  And she wasn’t falling anywhere without answers.

  She kicked off her boots, drew her legs up under her. Lemon murmured in her sleep, snuggled closer, threw an arm around her neck. Eve felt warm then. Safe. The hurt eased off, just a touch. But she could feel it waiting in the wings. Watching her in the dark.

  “So,” she said.

  “So,” Ezekiel replied.

  She swallowed. Breathed deep. “So tell me the rest of the story. I remember waking up in the medcenter after the explosion. But I don’t remember the revolt.”

  “Well, you did get shot in the head,” he murmured.

  She touched her Memdrive. Her optical implant whirred in the gloom.

  “How did it happen, Ezekiel? And why?”

  “. . . Are you sure you want to hear that?” the lifelike asked. “You’ve had a lot to take in already. A whole new life to absorb. We can wait a few days.”

  “I hate to say it,” Cricket began, “but I agree wi—”

  “No!” Eve glanced at Lemon as the girl stirred in her sleep. Trying not to wake her, Eve leaned forward and glared into Ezekiel’s eyes. “I’ve lived up to my neck in lies for two damn years. They were my family, Ezekiel! This is my life, and I need to know the truth about it. The revolt. Gabriel and the others. How did it all go so wrong?”

  “. . . Do you really w—”

  “Yes. Really.”

  Ezekiel looked into her eyes. The soft motion of Lifeboat rocking them side to side. The water shushing past them like a lullaby.

  “It was the bomb, Ana,” he finally murmured. “The explosion that destroyed Grace. Put you in the medcenter. After that, your father trusted no one. His family had been attacked from within Gnosis. Maybe Dresden. Maybe someone else. Either way, he resolved to remove the board members, using the greatest weapons he’d ever built.”