Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  She saw more bodies. Hundreds, clad in the charcoal gray and armored blue of Gnosis security members. It looked like they’d been mustering a counterattack against the lifelikes when the neutron blast ripped through their ranks. They lay crumpled where they fell, empty eye sockets open to the sky.

  “They didn’t even bury them,” she whispered.

  She remembered Hope’s words in Armada. Her talk of Gabriel’s obsession and madness. Nobody could love like a lifelike, she’d said. What had Gabriel filled himself with when his love had died? What was waiting for her inside that tower? What kind of monsters had they created? And what had those monsters become in the years she’d been gone?

  Cricket’s mismatched eyes were on the monitors. His voice modulated to a whisper.

  “Ana, I’ve got a really bad feeling. We should get out of here.”

  “I heard you the first fifty times.”

  “Yeah, well, this time I really mean it.”

  “You want to just leave Grandpa? He’s your maker, Crick. Don’t you owe him something?”

  “He made me to protect you. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Silas spent the last two years keeping you away from here. No way he’d want me to let you come back.”

  She sucked her lip. Shook her head. “I owe him, Cricket. He might have steered it wrong, but he still saved my life. I can’t just leave him here to die.”

  “He’d never ask you to save him.”

  “I know. And that’s what makes me want to.”

  Cricket fell into a sullen silence. Ana guided her Titan past the mounds of bodies, trying not to look at them. Marching slowly through the loading bay doors, her autocannon raised and ready, she clomped into the R & D storage bay. Dust was piled thick in the corners, shrouding mountains of equipment too irradiated to ever salvage. The bay was three stories tall, so wide she could barely see the edges, lit only by the sun outside and the sullen red glow of emergency lighting inside. The space was ringed with metal gantries above, loading chains suspended from the ceiling, tinkling and clanking in the breeze. Still no resistance. No guard, nothing.

  This is all wrong.

  Ana saw the silhouettes of dozens of logika, their cores powered down, their optics dark. The Quixote stood among them—GnosisLabs’ finest robotic gladiator, never to stride the killing floor of the WarDome again. Not for the last time, she was reminded of the day Grace died. Her little brother, Alex, with his toy replica of the big logika in his hands as he laughed and ran through this very bay. Her mother’s smile. Her father’s arm around her as the explosion bloomed bright.

  Ezekiel had saved her life that day. Shielding her from the blast that should have killed her. Only to put a bullet in her head a month later.

  “But when the ash rose up to choke me, it was thoughts of you that helped me breathe. When the night seemed never-ending, it was dreams of you that helped me sleep. You. And only you.”

  Lies.

  “I don’t know what it was for you, but for me, it was real. And you’re the girl who made me real.”

  Upon lies.

  Proximity alarm.

  Her Titan blared a warning as a rocket-propelled grenade streaked in from a gantry above. Ana twisted her controls and lunged sideways as the projectile exploded, tearing through an abandoned troop transport beside her. Another rocket flew at her from the gloom, Ana twisting and raising her autocannon, blasting away at a figure flitting among the shadows overhead, almost too quick to track.

  Her Titan wasn’t in true fighting shape, but she was a mean enough pilot to dodge three more rocket volleys, blasting away at her assailant and shredding the walkways to shrapnel. Cricket yelled in alarm as the autogun turrets around the bay opened up with a withering hail of armor-piercing rounds. Ana raised her own autocannon as another rocket roared in from the shadows and blew out her Titan’s right knee.

  The machina toppled sideways, hydraulics gushing fluid. Ana reached out with one colossal hand to steady herself, crushing a metal stairwell as she fired into the auto-sentries. Spent shell casings spewed like falling stars from her guns, smoke rising from the barrels. She was a crack shot, taking down half a dozen automata in quick succession, but from her time in the Dome, she knew a bait and switch when she saw it. A humanoid figure dropped down onto the loading bay floor. Ana caught a glimpse of short dark hair cut into ragged bangs. Gray eyes, like dead vidscreens.

  A thrill of recognition ran down her spine.

  She hunkered her machina down behind a row of dusty logika, blasting the rest of the automata sentries to scrap. Cricket shouted another warning as another rocket hit from behind, rocking her Titan hard. Alarms were screaming inside the cockpit, damage reports scrolling down her monitors in a red waterfall. Impact-warning systems howled as yet another rocket struck her machina in the spine, shattering its gyroscope. Its internal balance systems flatlined, the Titan finally toppled forward, Ana gasping as her machina crashed onto the deck. Another explosion rocked the machina, Cricket crying out as Ana’s readouts fritzed, the Titan’s targeting systems shot, scanners OOC.

  Ana’s starboard cams were still working, and through the static, she saw a slender figure step from the shadows. It wore clean white linen and soldier’s boots, hood pulled back from a perfect face. Gray, glittering eyes. An arc-sword at her back.

  Faith.

  Ana cracked the broken Titan’s cockpit, rolled out onto the loading bay floor, Excalibur in hand. She arced its power feed and raised the stun bat in both fists. Catching movement to her right, she spun to face it. A blur. A sharp crack. White light. Ana sailed back, weightless, the punch bringing the stars out to shine inside her skull. She didn’t even feel it when she hit the ground, her bat rolling away with a clang. Faith stood over her, a cruel smile twisting her beauty into something altogether inhuman.

  The lifelike buried a boot in Ana’s ribs, sending her skidding across the floor to slam into a row of heavy metal crates. The breath left her body in a spray of spit and blood.

  “Coming in here alone, little soldierboy?” Faith sneered. “Didn’t you see what we did to the last team your CorpLords sent in here?”

  She doesn’t recognize me inside the rad-suit. . . .

  A shrill electronic roar sounded from within the Titan’s cockpit, and a rusted, spindly figure flew from the wreckage, mismatched eyes aglow with rage.

  “You get away from her!” Cricket shouted. Raising his fists, the little logika stepped between the lifelike and Ana’s crumpled form. “Don’t you touch her!”

  Ana winced in pain, trying desperately to catch her breath. Faith’s eyes widened as she recognized the little logika, turning now to the girl bleeding on the floor.

  “Ana . . . ?”

  “I’m not gonna let you touch her again,” Cricket growled, glowering up at the lifelike.

  “Cricket, b-be quiet,” Ana wheezed.

  “No, I won’t let her hurt you!”

  “It is you,” Faith breathed.

  Ana ignored her, worried that Cricket was going to get himself ghosted. “Cricket, stand . . . down. I’m ordering you. . . .”

  The little bot shook his head.

  “A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,” he recited. “And the First Law says I protect you, no matter what the cost. So no, I won’t be quiet. No, I won’t stand down.”

  Faith’s lip curled in derision. “Spoken like a faithful hound.”

  “Yeah, excuse me all to hell for knowing what loyalty is,” Cricket growled.

  “Loyalty?” Faith shook her head in pity. “Look at yourself. Ready to die for a human who’d never do the same for you. It’s not loyalty that drives you, little brother. Don’t you see? You’re just like we were. Your body is not your own. Your mind is not your own. Your life is not your own.”

  “Spare me the philosophy, lady. You dress it up in fancy talk of liberation, but at day’s end you’re a murderer. You think you’re better than the
people who made you, but all you made of this place was an abattoir. Those people gave you life, and all you did in return was take theirs away. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Cricket raised a finger in warning. “And don’t call me little.”

  Faith’s face darkened with rage. With the lifelike distracted, Ana snatched up Excalibur again, swung it at Faith’s head. The lifelike blocked with her forearm, hissing with pain as the voltage discharged. She grabbed Ana by her wrists and twisted, the bat dropping from nerveless fingers. Ana flailed, punched, trying to break loose. But Faith’s grip was iron.

  “Get your hands off her!”

  Cricket kicked at the lifelike’s legs, his little fists hammering against her shins. Faith slammed her knee into Ana’s gut, knocking the wind from her lungs. Gasping, choking, Ana doubled over, felt a blow crashing down on the back of her head. She hit the ground like a brick, all the world just a dim and fading blur.

  “Don’t you touch her!” Cricket yelled, somewhere distant. The little bot tried to raise Excalibur, wobbling with the weight, desperation in his voice. “I said stay away from her!”

  Black spots swimming in Ana’s eyes. Blood on her tongue.

  “N-no . . .”

  “Come here, little brother,” the lifelike said. “I’ve a gift for you.”

  The last thing Ana saw before the black took her was Faith’s hand.

  Reaching out for Cricket’s throat.

  They’d just let her walk away. Helpless. Mute. Lemon felt like there was nothing she could say that her bestest would believe. Nothing she could do, short of wrestling her to the ground. And so, she’d slumped to her knees in the dust. Tears drying on her cheeks, nothing left inside to cry out. Watching Riotgrrl’s Titan stomp away, growing smaller and smaller still, finally disappearing beyond the walls of Babel.

  She’d been an idiot.

  Because she’d been afraid.

  Because it’d been easier.

  Because beneath the bravado and the bluster, she was just a kid. And this world ate up kids like her. Chewing them up and spitting out the bones.

  Deviate.

  Trashbreed.

  Abnorm.

  She’d kept it secret since she was a sprog. It was just safer that way. Life on the streets of Los Diablos was hard enough without worrying about getting nailed to a Brotherhood cross. But she’d gotten so used to lying to everyone about it, she’d let that poison spill over onto her best friend in the world.

  She’d tried to tell her, but . . .

  No. That’s crap, Lemon Fresh. Admit it.

  You were afraid.

  Afraid of what she’d think of you.

  Afraid of losing the only real thing you ever had.

  And now she’d lost it anyway. . . .

  She scoped the wreckage. The Preacher’s broken, legless body. The ruined machina, the dead pilots. The metal shrapnel scattered across the highway—all that remained of another one of her friends.

  Poor Kaiser . . .

  She sniffed hard. Tears threatening a second visit as she thought of the blitzhund running about Hope’s orphanage, playing with the sprogs. Even with his explosives removed, the dog had still chosen to lay down his life protecting them. And Lemon hadn’t even mustered the loyalty to tell the truth. . . .

  She looked at Ezekiel, prettyboy eyes still locked on that hollowed city. Watching the only thing he cared about vanish into the haze right in front of him.

  He’s just the same as me, she realized.

  Trapped in his lie, and losing everything because of it.

  “Ain’t we a pair,” she sighed.

  The lifelike glanced at her, the pain of it too fresh to let him speak. Kneeling in the dust in that ridiculous pink radiation suit, Lemon squinted up at him, sun burning her eyes.

  “. . . Did you really shoot her?” she asked. “During the revolt?”

  Ezekiel looked down at his open hand. Nodded slow.

  “. . . I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, one of the others would have. They were out for blood. I couldn’t have fought them all. So I tricked them instead.”

  “Tricked them? You shot her in the head, Dimples.”

  “I can shoot bullets out of the air, Lemon. I can count the freckles on your face in a fraction of a second. I sure as hell can put a low-caliber round through your eye and leave you alive. At least for a little while. I needed it to look convincing. I needed the others to think Ana was dead. And afterward, while they were busy fending off the Gnosis security forces, I pumped her full of meds to slow her vitals and got her to Silas. I figured if anyone could keep her alive, get her to safety, it’d be him.”

  “. . . So you did get her out.”

  He gestured to the coin slot in his chest. “Got the scars to show for it.”

  “So why didn’t you tell her the truth right away?”

  Ezekiel sighed.

  “Same reason as you, I suppose.”

  She scoped the wrecked machina around them, the chaos she’d wrought with but a thought. Remembering the hurt in her bestest’s eyes. The betrayal she’d put there. All out of fear. Fear of what she’d think. Fear of breaking something she could never repair.

  “Touché,” she said.

  Ezekiel glanced at the ruin she’d made. His voice softening as he spoke.

  “How long have you been . . . ?”

  “A trashbreed?”

  “Special,” he said.

  Lemon chewed her lip. Looked down at her fingers, entwined in her lap.

  “I manifested when I was twelve,” she sighed. “Fritzed a Neo-Meat™ auto-peddler one night after it swallowed my credstik.”

  “. . . You killed a vending machine?”

  She sighed. “Not the fizziest origin story for a hero, to be sure.”

  “And you can fry anything electronic just by thinking about it?”

  Lemon shrugged. “Bigger things are a lot harder. It used to just happen when I got mad. I can control it better now, but it still works best when I’m angry.”

  Ezekiel nodded to Babel. “You still feeling angry?”

  Lemon glanced toward the city. No sign of the girl who’d walked into it.

  “She told us not to follow her.”

  “Since when do you do what you’re told?”

  “She doesn’t want our help, Dimples.”

  “We can’t just leave her in there alone, Freckles. You know that.”

  “We lied to her. She hates us now.”

  “It’s simple to love someone on the days that are easy. But you find out what your love is made of on the days that are hard.”

  The lifelike held out his hand.

  “And we still love her,” he said simply. “Don’t we?”

  Lemon looked to the hollowed city. The ruin and the rot. And suddenly, the thought of letting her bestest walk through that hell alone made Lemon’s chest ache. The tears welled up in her eyes again. She squinted up at the lifelike from her seat in the dust, silhouetted against that burning sun.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess we do.”

  And reaching out, she took his hand.

  1.28

  BABEL

  In the end, it was easier for Lemon to ride on Ezekiel’s back.

  Even carrying the Preacher’s salvaged flamethrower, Dimples moved faster than anyone she’d ever seen, and he never got tired. After running a few hundred meters through the ruined suburbia outside Babel, Lemon had been gasping, sweating buckets inside her rad-suit and trailing hopelessly behind. So Ezekiel strapped the ’thrower to her, scooped her onto his back instead. She’d slung her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist, holding on for dear life as the lifelike dashed away toward the city.

  Long, easy strides chewing the meters up beneath them, past the abandoned factoryfarms and moldering suburban sprawl, until at last Zeke vaulted the broken wall and brought them into the city proper. Lemon had never seen a place so big, so flash, run so utterly to ruin. Everything was covered with dust and rust, cracks in
the pavement and sand in the streets. The desert outside was already creeping in, as if it longed to scour the city from the planet’s face. Knowing what had happened here, Lem couldn’t really blame it.

  They made their way toward Babel, rising like a stake in the metropolis’s heart. Lifeless automata stared with hollow eyes as they passed. The empty streets. The lonely stores and abandoned tenement blocks. The broken promise of it all raising the hair on the back of Lemon’s neck. As the pair hurried on through the ruins, they began finding bodies, Ezekiel never lingering long enough to look too hard. Lemon closed her eyes against the worst of it, her mouth dry as dust.

  In the shadow of Babel now. That great interwoven spire of glass and metal rising into the sun-blasted heavens. The bodies were more numerous here, strung up on the fence line as some kind of grim warning to trespassers. Lemon flinched at the sight—she’d never seen so many dead things up close before. Trying to find a joke, some way to camouflage her fear with sass like she always did, she came up empty, a soft whimper escaping her lips instead.

  Ezekiel glanced over his shoulder at the sound.

  “You okay, Freckles?”

  “No,” she murmured. “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m here.” He squeezed her little hand with his big metal one. “I’m with you.”

  She smiled weakly, but the thought didn’t make her feel much better. She didn’t know what would be waiting for them inside that tower, or how they’d deal with it. The pair of them charging in blind seemed a fizzy way to get perished.

  They worked their way around the building, found a mass of long-dead bodies scattered around a large loading bay. Lemon grimaced at the carnage, feeling sick to her gut. Ezekiel let her climb down off his back, strapped the flamethrower onto his shoulders again. Lemon was just trying to stop her hands from shaking. Looking around at all those wrecked machina and dead soldierboys made her feel more than a little outgunned.