Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  And him.

  They have only one thing left to take from me.

  The last and most precious thing.

  Not my life, no.

  My love.

  “You . . .” She choked on the word, unable to breathe.

  “Ana . . .”

  She scrambled backward through the broken window, out onto the dusty road. Blinding sunlight. Tears fracturing the world into a million shining pieces. The Preacher stood there, a pistol in one hand, what must have been a flamethrower in the other. Cricket crawled out from beneath the truck, dented and wobbling. The little logika shuffled to Ana’s side and put his arms around her.

  “Are you okay?”

  Half a dozen siege-class machina were gathered on a small ridge above them, lighting her up with targeting lasers. Autoguns and plasma cannons and missile batteries focused on Thundersaurus’s ruins.

  But Ana’s eyes were locked on Ezekiel. Horror. Anguish. Rage. The picture of him lifting the pistol in that cell, aiming at her head.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  I hear the sound of thunder.

  And then I hear nothing at all.

  “You shot me . . . ,” she breathed.

  Cricket looked back and forth between Ana and the lifelike. “What?”

  “Get him away from me,” she gasped.

  Gunfire. Six bullets, blasting the asphalt in a neat semicircle around her.

  “Settle down there, missy,” the Preacher warned.

  “Ana . . . ,” Ezekiel pleaded.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed.

  The Preacher fired again into the air, hollering at the top of his lungs.

  “EVERYBODY JUST CALM DOWN, GODDAMMIT!”

  Silence rang as the shots faded, the bounty hunter nodding to himself as if satisfied. He holstered his pistol, waved the flamethrower at the wreckage and spoke with a graveled voice.

  “You might wanna crawl outta there, Snowflake. ’Less you want me to forget my manners and ventilate Miss Carpenter’s head. She’s still worth some creds dead, after all.”

  The Titans turned their weapons on Ezekiel as the lifelike crawled from the wreckage. Their optics aglow, autogun barrels beginning to spin up.

  “Operative, should we terminate?” the pilot asked.

  “Negative,” the Preacher said. “All y’all, hold fire unless I spit an express kill order. This warrant is priority one. Board certified, you read me?”

  “Roger that. Holding.”

  The bounty hunter pulled off his gas mask, reached into the tattered remnants of his coat. Ana could see that his chest had been shredded by her shotgun blast, but she could make out metal beneath the flesh she’d minced. He fished around inside his pocket, stuffed a lump of synth tobacco into his cheek. Raised his flamethrower in Ezekiel’s direction.

  “You just stay on your belly, Snowflake. I seen what fire done to your big sister back in Armada. So don’t move unless you fancy the smell of barbecue.”

  Ana blinked the tears from her eyes, fear of the Preacher momentarily overcoming the rage and hate boiling in her head. She scoped Kaiser, still lying motionless in the dust. She spied her satchel close beside him, the glint of red on the thermex grenade inside it. But it was so far away. . . .

  She looked at the Preacher. Down the barrel of his pistol. She was back in that cell again. Blood on her hands. On her face. Her family in ruins all around her. Gabriel standing above her. Tousled blond hair and eyes like green glass. Myriad’s voice in the background, pleading with the lifelikes to stop. Uriel’s handsome face, now twisted and cruel, framed by long black hair. Hope’s eyes still filled with uncertainty despite the blood already on her hands. Faith, once Ana’s dearest friend, her stare now empty and cold.

  And him.

  “Why the waterworks, missy?”

  Ana glared up at the bounty hunter, trying to push the tears back, punching and kicking. But they were too big. Too much. Looking at Ezekiel, the anguish on his face, the world opening up beneath her and dragging her down, down, down.

  “Ana . . . ,” he pleaded. “Let me explain. . . .”

  “Shut up!” Cricket shouted. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  She couldn’t feel her skin. Couldn’t breathe. Everything. All of it. Lie after lie after lie. Curling up into a ball and wrapping her arms around her legs and listening as the fragments of her life shattered like bloodstained glass.

  The Preacher looked from the broken girl to the almost-boy.

  “Mmmf,” he grunted.

  The bounty hunter spat into the dirt, flamethrower still trained on Ezekiel as he walked around to the other side of the wreckage. The machina pilots watched on impassively, scopes locked on Ana and Ezekiel, just a word away from unleashing murder. She wondered if that would be better. To close her eyes and listen to the bullets’ hymn.

  Preacher tapped the side of his throat, brow creased in concentration.

  “Nest, this is Goodbook. Repeat, Nest, this is Goodbook. Package secured, one bounty, one person of interest. All the trouble he’s caused me, I figure the tech boys might wanna take a peek inside this snowflake’s head. I’m gonna need evac from—”

  The man blinked at a strange sound, turned to look behind him. There on the ground, sitting on his haunches and wagging his tail, was a rusty metal dog. He’d looked almost real once, but his fur had started wearing off a year back, so Eve had stripped him to the metal and spray-painted him in an urban-camo color scheme instead. He looked skeletal now, all plasteel plates and hydraulics.

  She liked him better that way.

  In his mouth was a red cylinder. It was marked with a small skull and crossbones, stamped with the word EXPLOSIVE. It had been jury-rigged like a grenade, and, clever dog that he was, the blitzhund had figured out how to pull the pin.

  His eyes were glowing blood red.

  “Kaiser . . . ,” Ana whispered.

  “Wuff,” the dog said.

  BOOM.

  The thermex ignited in a blistering halo, the explosion near deafening. Blasted with dust and heat, Ana closed her eyes against the shockwave, Cricket bowled over beside her. She climbed to her knees, screaming Kaiser’s name as the fireball rose high into the sky. Black smoke churned, metallic scraps falling from the sky like rain, the Preacher lying wide-eyed and motionless, the lower half of his body blown away.

  “Hostile! Hostile!” the Tarantula pilot cried. “Ghost ’em!”

  Ana felt an impact at her back, strong arms around her. Ezekiel picked her up and dragged her behind the truck’s wreckage as the machina opened fire. She was screaming Kaiser’s name, tears in her eyes as the bullets flew, smashing through the hull, thunk-thunk-thunking into the engine block. Cricket ran for cover, skidding behind the wreckage as the air filled with thundering booms. The Titans and Juggernauts were moving to flank them, feet and tank treads crunching in the dirt, only seconds away from a clear shot.

  Only seconds till they were dead.

  “Ana, I’m sorry,” Ezekiel whispered.

  A Juggernaut loomed out of the sun. Autoguns raised.

  Cricket stood in front of her, trying to shield her with his tiny body.

  “Get away from her!”

  Ana stared down the barrel and saw peace. Quiet. The Eve in her raging against it with every fiber of their being. And then she heard the clink of glass. A soft curse. A hand wrapped in a pink plastic glove reached out from inside the Thundersaurus’s wreckage.

  “Stop,” Lemon whispered.

  The Juggernaut shuddered. Flinched as if struck by an invisible hand. Sparks burst from its optics as Lemon Fresh closed her fingers into a fist and, with a thought, with a gesture, with a word, fried every circuit and relay inside its metal shell.

  Lemon crawled from the wreckage, bullets punching through the metal around her. Brow dripping blood, eyes narrowed. Arms held out, palms upturned, fingers curling into claws as the scream tore from her throat.

  “STOP!”

  An electric concussi
on. A static shockwave, tasted more than felt. The machina around them shuddered. Rocked back on their suspensions or wobbling on unsteady legs, pilots screaming as they were cooked alive inside their cockpits. And with a series of awful metallic groans, the hiss of frying relays and bursts of sparks, the big bots tottered like marionettes with cut strings and crashed dead and still onto the dirt.

  Every.

  Single.

  One.

  Ana stared at her bestest.

  Dumbfounded.

  Incredulous.

  “. . . Lem?”

  The girl dropped her hands to her sides. Dragging in great, ragged breaths. And Ana suddenly understood. All of it made sense.

  All of it . . .

  Machines had only been fritzing when Lemon was around. But Lem had always been out of sight, or Ana too busy to notice exactly what she was doing. Too busy rocking with the Goliath in WarDome. Too focused on the Fridgeboys in Tire Valley. Too intent on the Preacher’s blitzhund in the Armada subway. But Lem had been almost out cold when they’d arrived at Babel, and Ana’s power hadn’t worked because . . .

  Because it wasn’t her power.

  “. . . trashbreed.”

  “. . . deviate.”

  “. . . abnorm.”

  Lemon lifted Popstick with a growl. “Don’t call her that.”

  Ana thought it had been her. Lying there on the WarDome floor, holding out her hand and screaming and thinking she’d become something more, when all the time . . .

  This whole time . . .

  “No . . . ,” Ana breathed.

  Lemon looked at Ana, eyes brimming with tears, her voice trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Riotgrrl,” she said. “I . . . I tried to tell you so many times. . . .”

  Lies.

  Upon lies.

  Upon lies.

  And this, the last, was just enough to break her.

  1.27

  BREAK

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  Metal feet, crunching on broken concrete and shattered brick. A dozen screens lit up in front of her, her limbs encased in control sleeves and boots. Hydraulics hissing, engines humming through the cockpit walls as Ana strode through the desolation of an abandoned suburbia, closer and closer to the shadow of Babel.

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  They were the only words she’d had for them. Either of them. Ezekiel’s agony plain in his eyes. Lemon’s hurt clear in her voice. So many apologies. So many excuses disguised as explanations. For every one of them, Ana had the same reply.

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  Ezekiel had been the one who put the bullet through her skull during the revolt. At Gabriel’s command. He hadn’t saved her life, he’d tried to kill her. And Lemon had been the one who fried that logika in WarDome. She’d been the deviate everyone was after, too scared or ashamed to ’fess up to it. Her lie had set Daedalus Technologies and the Preacher on their tails, and because of him, Kaiser had . . .

  Poor Kaiser . . .

  Had he done it out of love? Or because he’d been programmed to protect her?

  She honestly didn’t know which was worse. . . .

  Ana had grabbed her satchel of tools from the roadside. Dragged a pilot’s corpse from a slumped and broken Titan and gotten to work. She couldn’t wipe the tears from her eyes because of her rad-suit, had swallowed them instead. And pushing all her hurt aside, she’d set about getting the machina right-ways again. Ezekiel had tried to take her hand, get her to listen.

  “Ana, please, I did it to save you. . . .”

  She’d rounded on him with spanner raised, a breath away from caving in his skull.

  “Don’t touch me, fug,” she’d growled.

  “Ana, you have to listen to me, please. I’d never turn against you. I did it to trick them. I shot to wound you, not kill. I saved the most important thing in the world to me, don’t you understand that? I saved you, Ana.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me, Ezekiel?”

  “I . . .”

  Her eyes were narrowed to paper cuts, her fury boiling in every word.

  “I trusted you. And the insane thing is, part of me still wants to believe you. Maybe you did try to fool the murdering bastards you called brothers and sisters. You’ve been making a fool out of me since I found you on that scrap heap. But the one thing I asked you to do was be straight with me. The one thing. And you couldn’t even give me that.”

  She turned her back, jaw clenched.

  “Ana . . .”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  The lifelike had stood there, explanations dying on those sweet, bow-shaped lips. And she’d climbed into the machina and gotten back to work.

  Despite everything, Ana still had the know-how Silas had given her. But whatever Lemon’s failings, she’d done a fine job of frying the machina—it’d taken Ana almost an hour to get it up and moving again, and even now, it was only running at 40 percent capacity. But she couldn’t bring herself to linger out there any longer. Couldn’t stand to look at them. Lemon had been the next to shuffle up in the apology train, head bowed and wringing her hands.

  “Riotgrrl . . . ,” Lemon had said. “I tried to tell you.”

  Ana hadn’t looked up. Hadn’t said a word. Everyone had lied to her. Silas. Ezekiel. The last best friend she’d had ended up putting a bullet in her sister’s brain. And if Faith’s betrayal had been murderous, somehow Lemon’s hurt even worse.

  The girl’s shoulders slumped. Her voice a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t follow me, Lemon,” Ana had finally said. “I mean it. I catch sight of either one of you again, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Lemon took a step back at that. Hand at her chest as if to hold in the ache.

  “. . . But where will I go?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  She’d left them both on that broken highway, with the Preacher’s body and the tiny pieces of shrapnel that had been Kaiser. They’d begged her to listen. To wait. To stay. But she’d turned her back on them both. It had been bad enough when she’d discovered the life Silas had built her was a lie. Bad enough when she’d remembered Faith and Gabriel’s betrayal. But now that Ezekiel and Lemon had deceived her, too? How could she trust either of them ever again? How could she call either of them her friend?

  She pushed the question aside, leaving it in the dust. Intent now only on Babel. The murderers within. She didn’t even know what she wanted anymore. But whatever it was, she knew it lay inside that tower.

  “Are you sure about this?” Cricket asked her.

  The little bot was nestled on her shoulder as she piloted the Titan down the highway. The only one she could count on. The only one left to trust.

  “I’m sure,” she replied.

  “You don’t have to do this. We could turn back now. Just run away again.”

  “Again?” She shook her head. “Crick, I don’t think I ever left this place.”

  “Listen, I can see you’re hurting. But there’s still folks who love you.”

  “I know you do, Crick.” She reached out and squeezed his little metal hand. “And I’m sorry about what I said in Armada. You’re the only one who’s always steered me true. I’ve never doubted you. But even if they didn’t have Grandpa, somehow I was always going to end up back here. This is where it began. And this is where it ends.”

  He looked at her with those glowing, mismatched eyes.

  “I’m just worried about the kind of end you’re looking for,” he said.

  Ana clenched her fists inside the control gloves and marched on. The Titan climbed through the shattered wall encircling the ruined city, crunched and clomped through the broken streets, closer to that winding spire of glass and steel. A lonely, cancerous crow called in the skies above. Her reckoning, dead ahead.

  She remembered this place like she’d left it yesterday. The lives and dreams born here, dying in a sun-bright shear of neutron radiation. She could see withered bodies scattered among the
ruins, skin like rags. Had they looked to a god to save them in those final moments? Or to the man who’d simply styled himself as one? Who’d built himself angels to destroy all he’d created?

  Father . . .

  Closer to the tower. Buildings with hollow eyes and open mouths. Bodies growing thicker. Cricket sat silently on her shoulder, his stare locked on that colossal structure. Her Titan’s Geiger counter was crackling in the redline, the radiation outside still hot enough to ghost her with a few hours’ exposure, and it was only getting hotter as they approached Babel’s reactor. Dust rolled like clouds of phantoms through the abandoned streets, shapeless and howling. On they stomped, wrapped inside their metal shell with only the lonely dead and each other for company.

  No sign of life. No sound but the endless, whispering winds.

  No resistance. No automata. No sentry guns.

  “This is too easy,” she said.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Cricket muttered.

  At last, they stood before the tower, ringed by a broken security perimeter of metal and wire. Ana saw the wrecks of Daedalus machina all around her, a winged-sun logo emblazoned on their hulls. The bodies of soldiers wearing that same logo were strung up on the security fence in the hundreds. A lifeless parade, silently screaming. It looked like an entire division—perhaps the remnants of an invasion force that had tried to seize Babel’s secrets and been beaten back by whoever, or whatever, still lived inside it.

  “Hell of a KEEP OUT sign,” Cricket said.

  “They don’t like visitors, I guess,” Ana muttered.

  She knew her best point of entry would be through the Research and Development division’s storage bay, where Gnosis used to store their machina and logika. The place Grace had died. The place Gabriel’s descent into madness had begun. She knew she’d have to fight to break her grandpa free, and her only edge over Gabriel and the other lifelikes was the Titan she was piloting. She couldn’t afford to leave it behind. And so, heart hammering in her chest, she stomped around to the entry of R & D.

  The two large doors leading into the loading bay were open wide. She saw abandoned personnel carriers and flex-wings. Empty turret emplacements. Broken machina. All of them slowly turning to rust. She could hear the explosion inside her head, picture Grace silhouetted against those flames as she shattered like glass.