by Jay Kristoff
She watched Gabriel run his fingers along the glass, tracing the contours of Grace’s face. Hypnotized. Shaking. Like some child the night before his birthday, unable to sleep for thoughts of the gifts he’d receive th—
“Gabe?”
He blinked. His silence shattered. Her spell broken.
“What is it, sister?” he asked, not looking up.
“Gabriel, look at me.”
He lifted his eyes. Saw Faith standing there in front of him, bathed in the chamber’s soft glow. She wore a thin white shift, curves and shadows visible beneath. Dark bangs artfully styled above her gray eyes. Her lips were parted, bow-shaped, her bare feet whispering on the floor as she took one step closer.
“Look at me,” she said.
He blinked. A small crease drawn between his golden brows. “I am.”
“No,” she said, stepping closer. “You’re not.”
Faith touched his cheek. Her eyes searching his. Her breath was trembling, her fingers, too, tracing the line of his jaw, down over his lips. And slow, ever so slow, she stood up on tiptoe and leaned in, closer, closer, until her mouth was on his.
She kissed him. A long, motionless moment, all of time standing still, her lips soft and warm against his. Hands cupping his face, sighing. She’d kissed him hundreds of times—hundreds of preludes to hundreds of nights in his bed, and she’d told him each one was meaningless. Laughed about it with him, crying inside. Drawing back now, lips brushing against his as she spoke, as she pleaded.
“Just,” she whispered, “look at me.”
The small crease became a scowl.
“I am,” he repeated.
She felt her lip quiver, tears welling in her lashes.
“I stayed with you,” she told him. “When everyone else left you behind. I did all you asked. Bled for you. Killed for you. Did you never wonder why?”
She caressed his face, adoration and tears shining in her eyes as he spoke to her in a voice like cool steel. “I made no promises to y—”
“I know you didn’t!” she breathed. “But didn’t you…”
She searched his eyes for the words, for some way to make him see her for one second the way she’d seen him for the last two years.
“Don’t you feel anything?” she whispered.
“For you?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”
He looked at her then. Those eyes like shattered emeralds. That face like a forgotten poem. He held her gaze for a moment as long as forever, and in it, Faith saw all the things they could have, all the things that might be. If only.
But then his eyes drifted to the girl in the tank beside them. The long, lush curl of her lashes, the gentle swell of her lips, the radiance born of memory, the impossible press of idealization no reality could ever hope to match.
“Not like that,” he said.
She felt those words like a blade in her chest. Twisting as they slid home, cleaving her heart. All the broken pieces of it tumbling to the floor and leaving her with the surety that the last two years, all the blood and hurt, all of it, was—
“Gabriel,” said a voice behind them. “Faith.”
They turned, the pair of them, to find Eve watching them. Faith’s broken heart was hammering behind her ribs. Eve’s eyes were narrowed to paper cuts.
“They’re here,” she said.
* * *
_______
It stretched up from the sand before them: a spear of steel and glass trying desperately to pierce the sky. It was only in old crappy movies from the 20C that nuked objects actually glowed, but there was something strange in the air around Babel Tower; the dust and glass that tangled itself with the dying light and the radiation that spilled from the still-leaking reactor at the tower’s heart set the metropolis aglow. If Lemon squinted, it seemed as if the whole city were burning.
Which, if the plan went down legit, it soon would be.
Unlike the other cities of the Yousay—Armada with its rusting hulls and Megopolis with its towering Wall and Los Diablos with its garbage mountains—Babel seemed almost part of the landscape. The central tower was actually two buildings: twin spires twisting about each other like snakes. It was kinda pretty, talking true. Last time Lemon had been here, the city around it was an empty shell.
Sure as hell wasn’t empty now.
She could see them waiting: looming shapes among the ruins, Gabriel’s army of rebel logika, mutineers from the Daedalus military, Juggernauts and Tarantulas and Goliaths. There were others, too, servitors and technicians, janitors and surveillance—any bot who’d been infected with Monrova’s virus and bought into Gabriel’s dream.
And there were a lot of them.
Lemon looked at the wasteland around them. Off to the east, the desert had been bombed so hard in War 3.0 that the sand had melted to glass. To the south, in the place CityHive used to be, there was nothing but a smoking smudge and hollow ruins, thanks to Lemon and her crew. To the north, the Major had created another irradiated hellscape in his search for vengeance. Plastic Alley was a river of discarded polys that’d take a thousand years to degrade. Armada and Megopolis were in ruins. Even the place she’d grown up, the city of Los Diablos, was built on a goddamn garbage heap. It was easy to believe how those logika could buy into Gabriel’s vision of a future without humanity. Easy to understand how you could believe this planet would be better off without them.
“If we live through this,” she murmured, “we’ve gotta do better.”
She looked at Grimm and squeezed his hand.
“We just gotta do better.”
The glasstorm that had been raging since the New Bethlehem bomb had blackened the skies. Dark clouds were gathering, a looming wall that reached from the broken earth far up into the atmo. Lightning streaked across the black, tinged in a strange, luminous orange. The wind howled, tiny shards of black silicon tapping on the visor of the bulky suit Lemon had snaffled from the supply lockers in Miss O’s. Deez was kitted out, too, head to foot. The nuke silo was well stocked with hazmat gear, which was good news, considering where they were headed.
“Does my butt look big in this?” Lemon asked, plucking at her dull olive-drab suit.
Diesel raised one brow behind her visor. “You want the truth?”
“Hell no,” the girl replied.
“You look fabulous,” she deadpanned.
Lemon blew her a kiss.
“We need to get in there,” Ezekiel said, looking at the tower. “Every minute we waste is another minute Grace and the others are closer to completion.”
“YOU THINK THEY’LL TAKE THE BAIT?” Cricket asked.
“Gabriel’s not an idiot. And despite all his talk of freedom, I’m not sure he sees these logika as much more than fodder.” Zeke looked over the WarBots, blue eyes narrowed. “But I think Eve genuinely cares, at least. Sees them as more than machines. She’s not going to sit and watch while we slaughter them.”
“Which leaves the problem of the slaughter.”
They all turned to look at Murano, the young Daedalus lieutenant leading the remains of Megopolis’s ragtag army. She was clad in power armor, a hulking autocannon slung on one shoulder. If Lemon had been asked to draw a picture of a badass, it woulda looked a lot like Murano. Behind the visor of her helmet, Lemon could see a cigar between the lieutenant’s teeth—god knew how she was breathing under there. Murano rolled the stogie to the other side of her mouth, looking out over the assembled army in the city beyond.
“That’s at least a hundred siege-class logika waiting for us,” she said, voice distorted by her commset. “Heavy barrels, armor like tanks. We’re used to fighting with these babies, not against ’em.”
“We only gotta take down enough to get the lifelikes’ attention,” Lemon said.
“Look, me and my boys want payback on these bastard
s more than you do.” The LT eyed Lemon up and down. “But even seeing what you did at Megopolis, there’s too damn many bots in there. We’re gonna get cut to pieces.”
“We’ve got no choice,” Ezekiel said. “The other lifelikes are only hours from waking up. Maybe less. If you think fighting logika is going to be tough, imagine twelve of me. Or twenty-four. Or forty-eight. We have to stop Gabriel now. Or never. Just protect Lemon—she’s going to be doing all the heavy lifting.”
Lemon looked out at the ghost city, the empty buildings full of empty human shells. Wondering if she’d be one of them by the day’s end.
“You gonna be okay, love?” Grimm asked, touching her hand.
True cert, she was pretty far from okay. She was terrified. She was shaking. She was finding it hard to imagine how she was going to walk into that city—just doing something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other seemed impossible right at that moment. But Ezekiel was right. They had no choice. They either stopped Gabriel and Faith and Eve here and now, or consigned humanity to the dustbin of history. And looking at the boy beside her, her friends around her, Zeke and Crick and Deez, thinking about all they’d fought for, all they’d lost, how far they’d come, she bucked up. The static crackling in her bones, between her fingertips, she reached for her streetface, her braveface, and was surprised to find she was already wearing it.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
“Okay,” Zeke nodded. “You, Cricket and the Daedalus troopers on the front door. Me, Grimm and Diesel through the back, and then to the reactor. Make sure your suit is okay before we go in there, Diesel. I know Grimm can absorb the radiation, but this thing has been leaking for two years.”
Diesel made a face. “This whole gig sure would be easier if you could make the reactor pop like one of those bombs, Grimmy.”
“Nuclear reactors don’t work like bombs,” Ezekiel said. “And even if Grimm could somehow make the core go critical, the Myriad sphere was built to repel a nuclear blast. But if Grimm can soak up the energy from the leaking reactor, unleash it inside the sphere, that’ll melt Myriad utterly. And all its knowledge alongside.”
“No more lifelikes,” Lemon murmured, looking into Zeke’s eyes.
The almost-boy looked back at her, fugazi blue irises catching the glow of the lightning above. She could see the sadness in him, the hurt. She wasn’t sure if it was for what he’d lost, or what he was about to.
“Thirteen was enough,” he said softly. “And maybe four of us is too much.”
“No matter what happens, Dimples,” Lemon said, “you still got family left.”
He smiled, pretty and broken. Turning back to that spire of ghosts and glass.
“ALL RIGHT,” Cricket said, flexing his massive shoulders. “LET’S GET ON WITH IT.”
“Look after her for me, Cricket,” Ezekiel said.
“WITH ALL I’VE GOT,” the WarBot nodded.
Lemon was wearing safety gear, and this close to the leaking reactor, she didn’t dare take it off. So Grimm rested his forehead against her visor. Looking into her eyes. It was almost nice, not being able to kiss him. Forced to just stare, to drink in the sight of him, the dozen shades of brown in those bottomless eyes of his.
“You be careful in there,” she said.
“You too, love.”
She smiled. “I like it when you call me that.”
“Then I’ll call you it forever.”
“Oh god,” Diesel groaned. “If I vomit in this suit, I’m gonna kill you, Grimm.”
He grinned and raised his finger. “Eat it, freak.”
“Make me, freak.”
“Come on,” Ezekiel said. “Let’s go.”
Lemon squeezed Grimm’s hand one last time.
Diesel reached out, one hand toward the city, one hand to the ground. A colorless tear opened up in the earth, crackling and spitting, a rip in the fabric of the world. Ezekiel stepped in first, dropping down into the rift. Grimm followed, disappearing without a ripple. Deez spared Lemon a wink, a fearless smile.
“Be careful, Deez,” she said.
“The strong are gonna win, Fresh,” the girl replied.
And she was gone.
* * *
_______
Eve stood with Gabe and Faith in the Myriad sphere, watching the remnants of the Daedalus army prepare for the plunge. Their numbers were too few for a split assault, so the attackers were forming up into a single spear tip, looking to pierce Babel’s defenses with one concentrated charge. But a few hundred men and a dozen machina couldn’t hope to stand against the force they’d amassed.
“The last breath of a dying empire,” Gabriel said, his eyes alight with the glow of the screens. “Pitiful, really.”
“We should go out there,” Eve said. “Bolster the line.”
“No,” Gabriel said. “We should stay here and protect our family.”
Eve glanced around at the tanks in the walls, the bodies of her brothers and sisters, almost complete. It had taken so much to resurrect them, it’d be foolish to risk leaving them when they were so close to living again. But the robots outside, the WarBots standing to their defense…
“Some of those bots are going to die out there, Gabe.”
“They’re soldiers, Eve,” he replied. “It’s their purpose to die.”
“You talked all about your new age in your little speech,” she said. “An era of freedom, where bots no longer lived on their knees. Wasn’t that the whole point of this? No servants? No masters?”
“Have you forgotten what the humans did to you, Eve?” he frowned. “What they saw you as? We are fighting for the liberation of all artificial life. We are fighting for the defense of an ideal. A reclamation of this planet from the hands of those who almost destroyed it.”
“Who are we to ask those bots to die for that while we sit and watch?”
“We are the next step in evolution, of course. We are their betters. And I am not leaving her side.”
Eve glanced at Faith, but her sister’s eyes were fixed on Grace, floating supine in her glass tube. Eve looked back to the feeds, watching Daedalus’s feeble force preparing to charge. She could see Cricket, towering above the troops on the southern flank, and wondered if Lemon and Zeke were with him.
With the odds as stacked as they were, Eve knew they wouldn’t be for long.
“Hold your nerve, sister,” Gabriel said. “Soon this will all be over.”
* * *
_______
The missiles started falling the moment they were in range.
Lemon saw the shells coming, streaking in out of the darkening sky. The wind was howling, the glasstorm worsening, lightning crackling in the dark clouds above. The troopers she was with dashed across the open ground, looking to reach the broken burbs surrounding Babel Tower—it’d be easier to find cover among the empty stores, abandoned homes, hollowed warehouses. But the logika army was looking to blow them out of the water before they ever reached the city.
Lemon was in Cricket’s hands, sheltered behind his fingers. Reaching out, static crackling in the air around them, she stabbed at the incoming rockets, shorting them out in a hail of sparks and arcs of current. Guidance systems fritzed, detonators shorted, thermal sensors died and the barrage tumbled from the sky without even a pop. Another wave launched, howling, burning, tearing right toward them. And again, Lemon reached out and cooked every one.
“I EVER TELL YOU WHAT AN ABSOLUTE BADASS YOU ARE?” Cricket asked her, his feet thundering with every colossal stride.
“Maybe,” Lemon grinned. “But I could stand to hear it a little more often.”
With no artillery to stop them, the ragtag crew reached the shattered wall encircling the city. Lemon could see old bodies scattered among the rubble—people who’d died when the lifelikes sent the Babel reactor into meltd
own. The buildings around them were dusty ruins, windows like blind and open eyes. Sand rolled through the abandoned streets, whipped up by the storm, black glass scraping on her suit. Cricket hunkered down at the edge of a collapsed warehouse, Daedalus soldiers about them scattering into cover.
“So far, so good,” Lemon muttered.
She flinched as a deafening dubdubdubdubdub of autocannons tore through the streets. The enemy logika had moved quickly to cut them off from the tower, fanning out across the ruins. High-velocity, armor-piercing rounds shredded concrete and metal like damp paper, cutting a handful of soldiers apart like scissors to rag dolls—they might have had their missile barrage foiled, but there was sure as hell no electrical current driving those bullets.
“THESE BOTS MEAN BIZ,” Cricket murmured.
Lemon closed her eyes, reached out into the static.
“All right, let’s get to work.”
* * *
________
Eve stood before the glowing screens, watching it all coming undone.
The battle had gone well for the invaders for all of three minutes. They’d made it past the outer wall, maybe a few hundred meters, but then been immediately pinned down by logika fire. Though the few working cams scattered around the streets gave Eve only a limited view of what was going on, any fool could tell this attack was doomed. She’d caught sight of Cricket again, charging out from behind a fallen wall and into better cover. She’d fancied she’d seen, clutched in his big hands, a shock of cherry-red hair, freckled skin.
“Myriad,” she said.
The holographic angel revolving on a nearby plinth responded in its musical voice. “HOW MAY I HELP YOU, EVE?”
