by Jay Kristoff
“Abe,” she whispered. “Shit…”
The boy was in a bad way, the flesh of his stomach and chest a melted, bubbling mess, wordless moans of pain torn up right from the heart of him. The detonator was melted to useless slag. Abe’s face was contorted with agony, but even worse…
“We’ve got no way to trigger the bomb,” Zeke said.
Diesel met Zeke’s eyes. The unspoken weight of it hanging between them. With no disruption in CityHive, with the Directors still at the heart of the BioMaas web, the swarm would be unstoppable. Even now, it was probably tearing its way through Megopolis. Grimm, Cricket, Lemon, all of them…
“They’re dead,” Diesel whispered.
Zeke glanced at the scanners, the incoming horde of H-Ks, down to the city untouched below them. “Can you start Rifting us back to Megopolis? Maybe if we—”
“N-no,” Abe gasped, grabbing Diesel’s arm. “No.”
“Abe, the detonator’s wasted, we got no way to blow it.”
“I c-can do…it,” he breathed, dragging off his ruined harness.
“Abe—”
The boy shoved Diesel aside, hair whipping about his eyes as he stood and staggered toward the warheads. His face was bloodless, hands shaking as he drew a multi-tool from his belt.
“I thought you said this thing had to go off perfect!” Diesel shouted.
Abe gritted his teeth, began unscrewing the bolts. “It…it d-does.”
“Well, how you gonna do that without the detonator?” Diesel demanded.
Abe looked up into the girl’s eyes.
“M-manually,” he said.
* * *
_______
They ran.
Slakedogs flooding over the walls. Hunter-Killers filling the skies. Behemoths charging through the streets. Lemon was in Cricket’s arms, her nose still bleeding. Grimm sprinted along beside them, the heat seething inside him. He could feel it swimming in his veins, boiling in his eyes, see it reflected in his mind’s eye—that mushroom-shaped calamity roiling in the skies above New Bethlehem and, somehow, as he’d reached into it and made it his own, taking seed under his skin.
The Daedalus troopers who’d survived the collapse came behind, blasting away at the seemingly endless wave of BioMaas beasties. Preacher was bringing up the rear, roaring at the top of his lungs.
“Is that all you got, you godless bastards? My momma hits harder’n you!”
“THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” Cricket shouted.
“What the bloody hell happened to Deez and Zeke?” Grimm spat.
“I KNEW WE COULDN’T COUNT ON HIM!” Cricket turned and let loose with the last of his shoulder missiles. “I KNEW IT!”
A Hunter-Killer swooped low, spitting green acid. Grimm set the air about them boiling, burning the creature out of the sky. But the city was overrun. The swarm coming from all directions now. Glancing back, bleary-eyed, Grimm could see two redheaded figures stalking down the street toward them, surrounded by drooling slakedogs, slavering behemoths and Hunters. Black fingernails. Black eyes. Lemon was already exhausted—she didn’t have the strength to take on another one, let alone two.
It would only be seconds before they were all brown bread.
“Is there any way out of this city?” Grimm yelled.
“Airfield six blocks from here!” Preacher roared, blasting at the incoming swarm.
“Mate, we’re not gonna get one block in this!”
“Only other option is the Spire! There’s flex-wings on the roof, maybe we—”
“WHERE IS IT?” Cricket shouted, cradling Lemon to his chest and laying waste to a handful of ’dogs.
“There!” Preacher shouted, pointing to a glittering spike of solar panels and cable, topped with relay dishes. “Daedalus HQ!”
“Well, we c—”
A burning flex-wing dropped out of the sky, crashing onto the pavement and exploding in a ball of flame. And above the roar, the cries of the scattering soldiers, Grimm heard the most awful sound of his young life—Lemon screaming in pain. Turning aside as the shrapnel flew, dragging the fire out of the air, he redirected it in a blast that immolated an incoming wave of slakedogs. Feeling the heat swell and stretch inside him. Screaming for release. As the smoke cleared, he caught sight of Cricket, the big bot crouched in a protective ball, Lemon in his arms. But much as the big bot had tried to shield her, she’d still taken a hit—a chunk of shrapnel carving a deep gouge through her brow, up into her hairline.
“Lemon!” Grimm shouted.
“I’m o-okay,” she gasped, blood spilling down her face. “I’m ’k-kkay.”
And that was it. The last of it. The thought of dying himself was something he could deal with. But of everyone in this cesspit of a country, she was the one who mattered most. And seeing her bruised, bleeding, red on her hands and in her eyes and on those lips he’d pressed to his own just a few hours ago…
“Get her out of here,” he growled.
Grimm stood up tall, felt the heat breaking loose under his skin. The fire of New Bethlehem rising up inside him, like it had done with Deez, with Lemon, overflowing the well in his chest. Cricket looked at him, and in those burning blue optics, Grimm could see himself, skin growing darker, the air about him rippling like a heat wave, white-hot plasma spilling up and out of his eyes.
“I’ll hold them off,” the boy said, turning to the incoming mob.
“G-Grimm, no!” Lemon whispered.
Grimm looked at her over his shoulder, the image of her shivering in the heat, tinged red by the flames spilling from his eyes.
“Get her out of here, Cricket.”
“No!” she cried. “Not you, t-too!”
He smiled. “Love you, Lem.”
And he turned away. Turned his back on happy, on the one who mattered most. On the girl he believed in. And he looked at the oncoming horde, cutting the remaining soldiers down, all teeth and eyes and gnashing fangs, the warped reflections of the girl he loved coming behind them set to unmake the world. The air around him rippled, a nimbus of white heat. The concrete under his feet blackened and cracked. A blazing wind whipped about him, howling down the street. And he squared his shoulders and he gritted his teeth and he nodded. Because he knew, sure as that nuclear fire seething at his fingertips, bright as the immolation waiting just beneath his skin, that maybe sometimes the strong didn’t survive.
But they were still going to win.
Grimm opened his arms.
And the sky caught fire.
* * *
_______
“Collapse in sectors five through twelve!”
“Air wing is completely unresponsive, Director!”
“Tracking hostiles within two blocks of the Spire.”
“Sir, you need to evacuate!”
Danael Drakos stood in his Command and Control center, watching his empire unravel. Desperate reports from dying soldiers blaring over comms. The pulsing red glow of the BioMaas swarm on the wall-mounted monitors, spreading out through his beloved city like an infection. So many alarms were screaming now, it was impossible to tell one from another. Security breach. Perimeter breach. Airspace breach. Drakos’s head was splitting.
The scene in the Spire was chaos—most of the roles in C & C had been filled by logika with computational abilities beyond the human beings they’d replaced. But after Libertas was unleashed, Drakos was left with plain old meat to do the job. His people were loyal, but inexperienced. At the eleventh hour, he saw what a risk they’d taken, placing so much faith in the hands of machines.
“We should never have listened to you, Drakos!”
He turned, his suit immaculate, eyes glowering, not a hair out of place. Behind him stood the assembled members of the Daedalus board. Old men and women with nip-tuck skin and sculpted faces, watching their earthly power unravel.
“I told you that deviate should have been eliminated immedi—”
A pistol cracked, louder than the alarms, the reports of the dying, the cacophony around him. The board members dropped with bloody chests and bloody faces, the commtechs around him followed. Drakos’s personal security detail—four stimmed-up ex-military beatsticks—drew their weapons as the Director stumbled into the console behind him. A figure wove through the darkness, twisting one guard’s head so violently it almost came off, emptying her pistol into another’s face. The two remaining men opened fire, muzzle flashes lighting up the red-alert gloom, and in that strobing flare, Drakos saw her. A tousled blond fauxhawk, sharp cheekbones, hazel eyes, burning with the purest malice he’d ever seen in his life.
She twisted aside, took a bullet in the arm, slipped behind one soldier, breaking his elbow and snatching up his pistol as it dropped from nerveless fingers. The second fired again, and she twisted the first around, using him as a shield against the incoming hail. The lead sparked and thunked into the man’s armor, and she kicked him savagely in the spine, sent him flying into his comrade, finishing both with neat shots to the head.
She turned to him, blood dripping down her arm, smoking pistol in her hand.
“Hello, Danael,” she said, raising the pistol.
“Miss Monrova,” he replied.
She glanced down the hallway to the R & D section. The VR suite therein.
Bloody lips twisted in a smile.
“Feel like a trip to the beach?”
* * *
_______
Grimm’s heat wave crackled outward, a fan of white-hot nuclear fire. Lemon could still see him in the midst of it if she squinted, a tiny black silhouette against the eye of the sun. The swarm melted, fried, burned, blackening and splitting, shrieking their agony. And Lemon was helpless to stop it.
“Lemme g-go!” she gasped, struggling against Cricket’s grip.
“No!” the big bot roared, continuing to run.
“Crick, lemme…” She blinked hard, pawing the blood from her eyes, near-blind with sticky red. “Lemme down or I’ll cook you!”
“THEN COOK ME!” he shouted. “YOU’RE NOT GOING BACK THERE!”
“This way!” Preacher shouted, leading them on, rifle smoking in his hands. They were maybe half a block from the Spire. But turning the corner, Preacher skidded to a halt, breath hissing between his teeth.
“Shit…”
Lemon peered through the blood in her eyes, heart sinking. Between them and the Spire stood about a hundred slakedogs, a dozen behemoths, tearing the soldiers defending the building to pieces. A few of the creatures turned to face them, fangs bared, claws tearing the concrete, eyes glittering dark. And among them, Lemon caught sight of a slender figure, clad all in black, blood-red hair and ebony eyes, narrowing as it caught sight of her.
“She,” it hissed, raising its finger, “is no longer important.”
Cricket looked down at her, cradled her softly to his chest.
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, KIDDO,” he whispered.
* * *
_______
Diesel blinked. “…What do you mean, ‘manually’?”
“I mean exactly what you th-think I mean!” Abe shouted. “Help m-me!”
The flex-wing rocked as Zeke saw the first incoming bursts of fire. The H-Ks had zeroed them now, wheeling around to open fire again. More of those firefly things were coming up from the city below. In a minute, the whole swarm would be back on them again, and without Abraham’s barrier…
The kid was yelling instructions to Diesel, the girl tearing off housings, ripping out wires under his guidance. Abe was barely standing, the stink of burned flesh filling Zeke’s nostrils—he had no idea how the kid was still upright, talking true. But his bloodshot eyes were wide, bright, and after a few desperate moments, he stood, clutching a stripped cable in either fist. Looking Ezekiel dead in the eye.
“Bay d-doors!” he shouted.
“Abe, no,” Diesel said. “We can’t just—”
“This is their only chance!” the kid roared, blood on his lips. “It’s what you do that counts, remember? So let me do this!”
Ezekiel met the boy’s stare. Saw the determination. The acceptance. The fire. Tears welled in Diesel’s eyes as she shook her head. “No, us freaks stick together!”
The flex-wing rolled and twisted, the Hunter-Killers swarming in the air all about them. Abraham looked Diesel in the eyes. No time for denials or speeches. No time for farewells. No time for any of it. The wound at his belly would kill him anyway. Abraham was a dead man walking. And as bad as it hurt, all of them knew it.
Ezekiel’s finger hovered above the release.
“I’ll g-give you as long as I can,” Abe said. “Rift fast, Diesel. And Rift far.”
Abe met Zeke’s stare, his eyes shining.
“Do it!”
Ezekiel stabbed the button. The doors yawned wide. And trundling forward on rails, the warheads and the boy who’d cobbled them together both plummeted out into the black. Hunter-Killers swarmed, spraying the air with acid, but Zeke saw the air around the falling boy ripple—one last moment of power in that swelling, bloody night. He felt Diesel’s hand on his shoulder, heard her roar in his ears.
“Dive!”
He tipped their nose down, and there before them, a colorless tear opened in the sky. They plunged through, Diesel’s hand outstretched, sound snuffed out like a candle. A split second later they emerged, screaming, still diving, kilometers from the falling boy. Zeke only had a second to get his bearings before they were Rifting again, again, Diesel’s power dragging them farther and farther from that unborn conflagration, falling like a star through the CityHive sky.
Every second was a century. Every heartbeat an age. Zeke’s breath locked in his lungs, hair on his skin rising, dread uncoiling as every moment ticked by without that awful light. He wondered for a moment if something had gone wrong. If Abe had failed or died before he could strike his final blow.
He wondered.
And then—
* * *
________
Ten thousand eyes looked skyward.
Ten thousand iterations of the same patterns.
Carers and Hunters. Sentinels and Builders. Slakedogs and Lumberers, behemoths and Scuttlers, and, finally, Directors.
The dark above was alight with pretty greens, radiant and glittering. The interlopers would soon be vapor. It struck the Director as strange: sending one tiny ship where an armada would have failed. In the back of their minds, through the genome that bound them all into one, they could feel the army at work in Megopolis. The beauty in the butchery. The flood, finally, completely, washing all of it away.
When it was done, there would be harmony.
A world without chaos.
No form without design.
Each task assigned to a pattern perfectly suited to accomplish it.
Balance.
They looked skyward through a multitude of eyes.
And finally, amid the glittering wings, they saw a shape.
A falling boy, astride an engine of calamity.
The night above was beautiful.
And then?
Sunrise.
It was a scream of perfect agony.
Ten thousand throats, open and wailing. A chorus of cries, ringing out across the ruined city. The defenders of Megopolis were on their last legs, breathless, bloodied, just moments from the end of everything.
And then salvation.
Every creature, every construct, every clone. H-Ks and behemoths, Hunters and slakedogs and clones, all of them clutched their heads as if their brains were being torn apart, raising their voices in a single gut-wrenching scream of pain. And then, as one, they collapsed where they stood, or fell from the sky like stones, twitching an
d drooling and fitting where they lay.
“…They did it.”
Lemon looked around at the sea of collapsed bodies. Bewilderment and relief rushing over her in cool waves. The blood on her lips cracked as she smiled.
“They did it!”
Preacher surveyed the fallen swarm, his customary calm cracking not a millimeter despite the fact they’d all been somehow saved from certain annihilation. Unquestioning, he reloaded his rifle, stuffed a wad of synth tobacco into his cheek.
“Don’t just stand there,” he bellowed to the men around him. “Get killin’!”
The soldiers obeyed, the tattered remnants of the Daedalus army now turning on the helpless BioMaas swarm and setting about the grim task of butchery. Lemon slowly climbed down from Cricket’s arms, still unsteady on her feet. Her brow was still dripping blood as she staggered through the mess to stand over a limp and broken form. She found herself looking down on a familiar face, black eyes open wide. One of twelve stolen shapes, twelve tools of destruction carved from her very cells, the personification of the violation BioMaas had put her through. This close, she didn’t look like a horror. Didn’t seem like something capable of all this destruction. The clone looked lost. And afraid. And hurt.
Lemon touched the scars at her belly. The girl at her feet reached out to her, fingers shaking. Lips mouthing nonsense. Slick with drool. And Lemon reached out in turn. Into the static. Tears running down her ash-streaked face.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
And Lemon turned her off.
All around her, gunshots rang out in the street. Preacher barking orders to the soldiers dashing off into the haze, executing as many of the swarm as they could. The stink of blood and acid was rank in the air. Lemon was overcome with it—the scale of the horror, all this death—wondering if she’d ever be able to wash it off.
