TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  Preacher touched his throat. Faith tensed for a spring.

  “Nest, this is Goodbook,” he drawled. “I’m on level thirty in detention. Situation is under control. Divert all tactical response to thirt—”

  The first shot punched through Preacher’s belly, exploding outward in a gout of red. The next half dozen moved up his torso, smashing through his metal parts, his meat parts, sparks flying, blood spraying. The bounty hunter staggered, turned on the spot, pistol dropping from nerveless fingers.

  “Goddamn…,” he whispered. “Snowfl—”

  Six more shots plowed into his chest, point-blank range, muzzle flashing. His arms pinwheeled, he staggered back. And with the smallest of gasps, lips curling in what might have been a smile, he collapsed to the floor.

  Ezekiel lowered his pistol, his face grim.

  “I might be a trusting sort. But I’m not a total idiot.”

  Gabriel hissed, voice roiling with hatred. “What are you doing here, traitor?”

  “He’s with us, Gabe.” Faith looked into those glass-green eyes. “We came here together.”

  “I’m here for Ana, Gabriel,” Zeke said. “She’s upstairs with Eve. You want to help me get them, or waste more time hating me?”

  “That seems to be up to you.” Gabriel spread his hands to take in the cell around him. “Do you trust me not to kill you the second you open this door?”

  Without hesitation, Ezekiel turned his weapon on the control panel opposite Gabriel’s cell. He emptied the rest of his clip, pistol bucking in his hands as the plastic and glass exploded. The buzzing field of blue around the cell sputtered and died. With a gentle push of his palm, the door to Gabriel’s cell swung wide. Faith threw her arms around him, crushing him tight, her belly filling with butterflies as she felt Gabe squeeze her briefly back.

  “It’s good to see you,” he murmured, looking into her eyes.

  Faith had to resist the urge to kiss him with every part of her being.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said. “Eve is up on thirty-two.”

  Gabriel reached down and picked up Preacher’s pistol from the slick of red at their feet. The bounty hunter’s chest was blasted wide, coolant and blood mixing on the floor, cybernetics lifeless and dark. Gabriel spat once into the Preacher’s face, looked at Ezekiel and smiled.

  “Let’s go fetch our sister back.”

  Eve ran. Fast as her feet would carry her.

  The pain in her body was a dull ebb, the fatigue and delirium of the past few days just an echo. She was free, alive, aflame, and there was no way in hell she was falling back into Daedalus’s clutches again. She knew she should have been bolting for the closest exit. But she also knew she had very little chance of making it out of this alive—that avoiding Daedalus’s clutches again probably meant dying, that her promise to Drakos, while spat with fury deep as her bones, was nothing more than bravado. And if she was going to die here…

  I can’t just leave her behind.

  She burst into the VR suite, kicking the doors open and shattering the glass. Four Tech logika looked up from their consoles and monitors, optics burning blue. Her heart twisted to see them—these poor creatures were every bit the slaves that she’d been. They couldn’t help but obey their programming, the Three Laws that bound them into servitude. Once, she’d been just like them.

  “Get out,” she told them. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Self-preservation was the Third Law—least important on the hierarchy, but still, hard-coded into their heads. And after one glance at her eyes, one brief assessment of the threat she presented, the logika retreated from the room.

  The alarms were screaming, the PA shouting. Eve knew more logika were on the way—Sec bots, heavily armed, ordered to take her alive at Drakos’s behest, drag her back to that operating theater so she could be subjected to one last violation, one last torture for the sake of Nicholas Monrova’s dead dream.

  She’d die before she let that happen.

  But first, she had to say goodbye.

  Eve could see her against the wall, plugged into banks of equipment, floating suspended in that tank of frozen blue. Ana Monrova. The girl she was made to replace. The empty space she’d been created to fill. Once, Eve had wanted nothing more than to see this girl dead, to silence the voices in her head, to erase the child she’d been made to be and discover who she truly was. Now, as the alarms sang and the Sec bots charged ever closer, it looked like Eve would get her wish.

  So why did that feel wrong?

  Eve ran her hand along the frozen glass. Looking down into the face that was a mirror of her own. The face of a girl who had laughed and lived and loved, just as fiercely as Eve had. Ana Monrova was small. Mostly powerless in life. But she’d done what she could to save the ones she loved, protected people that others had treated like machines. Like things. And looking down into the girl’s face, beautiful and serene and cold, Eve knew it in her chest.

  She would have stood up for me.

  “So I have to do it for you,” she whispered.

  Ana didn’t deserve this. To be a pawn in a game. One part of a keychain to unlock a madman’s dream. She deserved more than this half life, this hell their father had subjected her to, this frozen limbo between living and dying.

  She deserved to rest.

  Eve’s hand hovered over the power supply to Ana’s life support. All she need do was pull. One simple movement, and the poor girl could finally sleep.

  But what would she be without Ana Monrova?

  Would she be anything at all?

  The sound of approaching feet rang under the droning alarms. Eve only had moments left. She couldn’t leave Ana like this. Pressing her fingers to the glass, she hung like a crooked portrait, as frozen as the girl beneath her hand. Her fingers closed tighter around the power cables, curling into a shaking fist. And a voice cried out behind her.

  “Eve!”

  She was surprised to feel her heart surge at the sound. Memories of warm skin and soft lips and whispered promises swimming in the back of her mind. She turned and saw him, charging into the room like some knight on horseback in an old history virtch, and her breath caught in her throat. Tousled dark hair and plastic blue eyes. Olive skin and broad shoulders and a face from a 20C fashion zine. The boy she thought she’d loved. The boy who wasn’t a boy at all.

  “Ezekiel?”

  A small frown creased her brow. An impossible thought that somehow sent a giddy warmth from the tips of her toes to the top of her crown. It was ludicrous to think it, after all that lay between them. It was even more ludicrous how stupidly happy it made her feel.

  “You…”

  She licked at dry lips, forced the words from her mouth.

  “You…came to rescue me?”

  He held her gaze for a moment that seemed to last forever. She remembered the feel of him. The taste of him. The bliss of him. And then his eyes slipped to the girl in the frozen coffin beside her. And Eve felt her heart shatter like glass.

  “…Oh,” she whispered.

  “Eve…,” he murmured.

  He met her eyes then. She could see the pain in them. The memories of the past between them—skin to skin and mouth to mouth in Armada, fist to face and boots to ribs in New Bethlehem. She’d hated him. She’d hurt him. She’d loved him. And looking past the smoke and blood, through the clouded blue of his eyes, despite everything between them, she could see…maybe he…

  “Eve!”

  She glanced over Ezekiel’s shoulder, heart surging as she saw Gabriel and Faith. The four of them, the last lifelikes left alive, all together again. She tingled with goose bumps, an electric thrill rolling over her skin at the thought of it. Her hand drifted to the wetware interface in the pocket of her cargos, the secret to unlocking Monrova’s secrets beneath her fingertips. She might even make it out of
this alive now, might live to see her vow come true, to strike a match and light a fire that would burn this whole rotten place to the ground.

  Gabriel’s eyes drifted to Eve’s other hand, curled around Ana’s power supply.

  “We need her blood,” he said. “For the DNA lock on Myriad.”

  “You’re not hurting her, Gabriel,” Ezekiel said, turning to their brother.

  “You know this must be done, Ezekiel,” Gabe hissed, gesturing to the hollow, lifeless readouts on the monitors. “Look at her. She’s just an empty shell. A weapon Daedalus might use against us. The knowledge inside Myriad is our birthright. No one else must be able to claim it.”

  “You’re not hurting her,” Zeke spat.

  Gabriel sighed. “Faith, talk some sense into him.”

  But Faith’s eyes were fixed on Ana, floating still and silent inside her coffin. Through the memories they shared, Eve remembered Ana’s time spent with Faith. Sitting alone for hours in her room, talking about life and love, whispering secrets to each other, laughing so hard they’d both end up crying. Faith had been Ana’s dearest friend, her trusted confidante, close as blood. And Faith had repaid her by helping to murder her family. But now…

  “Faith?” Gabriel said, turning to look at her.

  Faith’s face was frozen, unblinking telescreen eyes fixed on the girl who’d loved her like a sister. The alarms continued to sing.

  “There are flex-wings on the roof,” Ezekiel said. “We can bring her with us.”

  “For the love of…,” Gabriel raged. “Bring her with us to what end? Put aside your pathetic human frailties and open your eyes. She’s gone, Ezekiel!”

  “No!” Ezekiel shouted, pounding the muscle over his heart. “She’s still here!”

  Gabe shook his head. “We have no—”

  “Gabriel.”

  All eyes in the room turned to Eve as she spoke. She met her brother’s stare, fingers still pressed against frozen glass.

  “We can bring her with us,” she said.

  Ezekiel met her eyes, his smile like a knife in her chest. “Help me with her.”

  Faith was already at the stairwell, holding the door open, by the time they’d uncoupled Ana from the monitor arrays, pushing her coffin forward on its magnetic cushion. A patrol of two Sec logika charged around the corner, only to be dismantled by Gabriel in a handful of heartbeats. But more were on the way now, their footsteps ringing on the floor, dozens upon dozens.

  “We have to move!” Faith cried.

  They ran, Eve dragging the coffin, Zeke pushing, hefting the weight between them as they charged up the stairwell. Faith took the lead, blasting a few more drones and tearing the head off a Sec logika that burst through the door of level thirty-five. The stairwell was soaked in blood-red light, the alarms piercing.

  “How tall is this building?” Eve gasped.

  “Next level,” Faith said, charging on. “Quickly!”

  Faith kicked her way through the final door, out onto the roof of the Spire. There were four landing platforms up here, three heavyweight flex-wings, crates and a small forest of cable and radar dishes. Bright floodlights pierced the pall of fumes, howling wind blowing Eve’s fauxhawk back from her eyes.

  A burst of gunfire raked the armor on Faith’s chest, a grenade sailed at them as they burst out the door. Faith caught the device and hurled it back at the twenty men and logika waiting for them. They leaned out from their cover and opened fire, bullets spanging and sparking off the metal stairwell. Zeke gasped and dragged Ana’s coffin back into cover. Gabriel charged out in a blur, Faith beside him. Eve exchanged a glance with Zeke, and then they were moving, too, hurling themselves through the floodlit dark, swaying between the spraying hails of bullets, the bright blooms of exploding thermex, the percussion of machine-gun fire.

  Three days of torture rang in Eve’s head. Three days of rage, bottled and now unleashed. There was a savage kind of poetry to it—the four of them moving together, one grim dance, one awful purpose. The last models in the 100-Series, the most advanced life-forms on the planet, now just machines once more, weapons, tools of war, dancing among the screaming men and singing bullets, twisting and turning, bending and breaking. Eve felt a shot pierce her belly, and she almost smiled at the pain. She felt blood on her face and almost licked her lips. The release of it, the perfect, awful beauty of it, threatened to swallow her whole. And when they were done, the four of them stood there on the windswept landing and looked at each other, and each of them knew, knew with a certainty Eve felt in her bones, that no matter what their maker had called them, no matter what Drakos or these other roaches might name them, they were alive.

  Really, truly alive.

  “IS IT ALL RIGHT TO COME OUT NOW?”

  Eve spun on the spot, saw a spindly logika with a cream-white hull trimmed with gold filigree pop his head up from behind a stack of packing crates.

  “All’s well, little brother,” Faith nodded, wiping the blood from her face.

  “Who the hell are you?” Eve demanded.

  “THE SENSATIONAL SOLOMON,” the logika replied, tipping an imaginary hat. “AT YOUR SERVICE, GOOD LADY.”

  “He’s a friend of Cricket’s,” Ezekiel said.

  “Cricket…,” Eve breathed, heart singing at the sound of her friend’s name.

  “Faith, get one of those flex-wings started,” Zeke said. “Eve, help me.”

  Eve could hear engines incoming over the city—more aircraft scrambled by Daedalus. She followed Ezekiel to the stairwell, grabbed Ana’s coffin and began hauling it backward, Zeke pushing it on. She heard an engine kicking over behind them, rotors beginning to spin. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Faith behind a flex-wing’s controls, Gabriel beside her, glaring. For a split second, she wondered if their brother might be enraged by this display of sickly human sentiment. If he might leave them behind. But Faith gunned the engines, roaring at them to hurry.

  Solomon was waiting at the bottom of the flier’s landing ramp, urging them on. A Daedalus flex-wing soared overhead—a recon sweep to get the lay of the land. It would only be moments before more of them arrived, before the shooting started.

  “Hurry!” Ezekiel gasped.

  “I am hurrying,” Eve spat.

  They reached the loading ramp, Eve’s muscles stretched taut as they hefted. Faith slammed a fist down on the controls and the ramp started to rise, bringing them up into the flex-wing’s belly. Eve looked down into Ezekiel’s eyes, saw they were transfixed on Ana’s face, welling with relief.

  And then, looking out over his shoulder, she saw movement in the stairwell door. Her heart sinking in her chest, her mouth opened in a scream.

  “Look out!”

  Preacher stood at the stairwell, chest ruptured, raining sparks, blood slicked on his chin. The bounty hunter raised his pistol, face twisted in grim hatred. Eve saw it unfold in slow motion, the muzzle flashing, the pistol bucking in his hand, the shells flying. A handful struck Ezekiel, bouncing harmlessly off the power armor he wore. A half dozen more struck the hull of the flex-wing, pattering like rain against the armor plating. But with a sickening crunch, the bright song of shattering silicon, three shots punched clean through the shell of Ana’s cryo-tank. The first sailed through the blue liquid, skimming just above her thigh. The second struck her in the ribs, her body flinching in her dreamless sleep. And the third crashed through the glass, kissed her temple, crimson flowers blooming inside the blue.

  “NO!” Ezekiel roared.

  The loading ramp slammed shut, the engine screamed.

  “HOLD ON!” Faith shouted.

  The flex-wing banked sharply, and the rattling bellow of autocannons ripped the smog. Eve was flung sideways, clinging onto the wall to keep her footing. Solomon went flying with an electronic yelp. And thrown off balance, Ezekiel sprawled over it as if to shield it with h
is own body, Ana’s cryo-tank toppled sideways and burst all over the deck.

  The thudthudthud of bullets raked against their hull, the roar of tortured engines rang in Eve’s ears. Their flex-wing shook as Gabriel opened up with their forward guns, the howl of missiles split the night. Faith’s shout rang over the PA.

  “We need someone on the rear guns!”

  Faith looked at Ezekiel, his face filled with anguish, his mouth opening and closing in silent pleas as he scrabbled among the broken glass, lifting Ana’s broken body in his arms. Horror and grief washed over Eve at the sight, but there was no—

  “Eve!” Gabriel roared. “Ezekiel! Get on the guns now!”

  Eve dragged herself to her feet, threw herself up the small service ladder and into the tiny cockpit at the rear of the flex-wing, slid into the gunner’s chair. The console before her lit up as she wrapped her fists around the controls. They were streaking through the Megopolis skies, the city laid out below in all its filthy neon glory. Antiair batteries were opening up on them now, smog around them bursting with flak. Eve could see at least a dozen flex-wings on their tail, heavy fliers and smaller, quicker fighters, the air about them ablaze.

  Faith wove their ship in and out of the sagging concrete towers, over and under the long lines of power cable, looped like vines between the buildings. The guns let loose at Eve’s command. For a moment, she was able to lose herself in it, the staccato rhythm of the cannons, the rolling patterns of tracer fire, the sight of her pursuers bursting into flame. She might have been back in WarDome then, back in Los Diablos when her life was simple, when she was just one more skinny scavvergirl trying to eke out a living from the world’s metal bones. Cricket shouting orders in her ears. Lemon cheering from the sidelines. Anywhere but here, anytime but now, the thought of what awaited her back down below just too awful to look at for more than a moment.

  But between Faith’s flying and Gabriel’s shooting, the lifelikes soon cut a swath through their pursuers, streaking out over the Wall, then the Rim, then out into emptiness beyond Megopolis. They were better, faster, and the Daedalus forces had been caught on the back foot, never expecting an attack in the heart of their empire. Her guns cut the air behind them to pieces. Half a dozen flex-wings tumbled from the skies, trailing black smoke and bright flames. The others pursuing them slowed after a few hundred kilometers, finally breaking off the chase—Eve guessed with war against BioMaas on the horizon, Daedalus wasn’t willing to strip their defenses. Faith brought them down low, skimming barely twenty meters off the ground to foil their radar, great twin plumes of curling dust ripped up in their wake. And as her guns fell silent, as the last of the hounds on their tail dropped off their pursuit, all too quickly, Eve realized it was over.