TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  Ezekiel could understand that.

  Looking into Lemon’s eyes, he knew how hard it would be to let another girl he loved go. But she met his stare, tears shining in that pretty green, brave to the last, fearless and beautiful and strong. And as his hand slipped down toward his pistol, she nodded.

  She knew.

  “Ezekiel, don’t,” Gabriel hissed.

  “Zeke?” Grimm shouted. “Zeke!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I’m—”

  BANG.

  Gabriel lurched forward, a gaping hole where his right eye used to be. Another dozen shots rang out, one after another after another. Lemon fell to the deck, gasping, choking, as Gabriel staggered forward, bloody flowers blooming at his chest, gouts of red flooding between his fingers. His body hit the railing, teetered, even now desperately clinging to this half life that had been thrust upon him. But the pistol rang out again, bangbangbang, before it clicked empty, and with a final gurgling sigh, Gabriel crumpled to the floor.

  Eve stood, tall and fierce, on the threshold, a smoking pistol in her hand. She was spattered with blood and ash, blond fauxhawk hanging in her eyes. Striding over to Gabriel’s body lying ruined and bleeding against the railing, she pressed her boot to his chest. And with a small grunt, she pushed.

  Ezekiel watched the body fall out into the reactor shaft, tumbling end over end as it plummeted soundlessly into the blood-red abyss.

  Eve watched it fall, her murmur almost lost under the reactor wind.

  “Don’t touch my sister,” she said.

  They used to call it Kalifornya, but now they called it Dregs.

  Grandpa had told Lemon this place wasn’t even an island before the Quake. That you could motor from Dregs to Zona and never touch the water. A long time ago, this was just another part of the Grande Ol’ Yousay. Before the country got bombed into deserts of black glass and Saint Andreas tore his fault line open and invited the ocean in for drinks. Before the Corporations fought War 4.0 for what was left of the country and carved out their citystates beneath a cigarette sky.

  She grew up here, even though the streets of Los Diablos were no place for a kid. The capital of Dregs was a rusting cesspit. A reminder of humanity’s greatest age, and greatest folly. Built in the heart of a scrap pile, Los Diablos wasn’t a city, it was a meat grinder, chewing up people and spitting out the bones. If you were born here, you grew up sharp, you grew up hard or you didn’t grow up at all.

  Lemon had taken the first option.

  “So remind me why we came to this pit, Fresh?”

  Lem turned to look at Diesel, who was eyeing the LD sprawl with the kind of disgust she usually reserved for strawberry ice cream. Fuel depots and eats-vendors. Bot clinics and parts dealers. Even an old Brotherhood chapel, those ornate Xs painted over with a perfect circle and a large, handwritten sign.

  ALL WELCOME

  She didn’t know if it’d last. Part of her didn’t think it could. Maybe people would always look for something different to hate on. Maybe, after seeing how close they’d all come to running out of future, people were finally learning from the mistakes of the past. Talking true, tomorrow never came with a guarantee.

  Passersby were peering at them with either bold curiosity or slack-jawed awe, depending on whether they’d seen newsfeeds about the fall of Megopolis. Whispers were running the grubby sprawl all around them. But Lemon stood in the middle of the street, scoping the crush of people, the decrepit buildings, the long stretch of the Scrap outside the city limits, and true cert, it felt like she’d come home.

  “We’re here because we gotta do better,” Lemon replied. “Because we were supposed to make a garden out of this place, and instead, we made a garbage pile. And I don’t have all the answers for how to fix it. But there’s some jewels in that data we snaffled out of Myriad before Grimm melted it to a puddle.”

  The boy tipped an imaginary hat. “Raising the temperature is my specialty.”

  “It was pretty hot,” she grinned, squeezing his hand.

  “Someone kill me,” Diesel groaned.

  Lemon knelt down, picked up a crumpled plastic bottle out of the gutter.

  “Monrova was working on a way to recycle polys out of Plastic Alley, turn ’em into fuel. He was improving the Daedalus solar cell design, too. Talkin’ true, the guy was a genius before he went pants-on-head crazy.” She nodded to two figures in the distance, standing atop a mountain of scrap. “And turns out we got a true cert genius on our crew. An amalgamation of the brightest minds in all of creation.”

  “Allegedly,” Grimm muttered.

  “Well, on paper, anyways.” Lemon grinned. “Point is, we gotta do better. And we got some tools to help us get rolling on that. And the best place to start doing better is your own backyard.” She waved at the sprawl around them. “Sort out your own mess before you start poking your face parts into someone else’s. Because this place is my home. And you gotta take the first step somewhere.”

  Grimm slipped his arms around her waist. Leaned down until their noses were touching. And Lemon looked up into his eyes and saw the way he looked back at her, and it made her feel alive, all the way to her bones.

  “What’s that word you use to describe someone both beautiful and brilliant?”

  “Brilliful,” she smiled.

  He leaned down and kissed her, soft and achingly sweet, and even though she felt electricity crackling along her skin, the temperature around her slowly rising, she knew it had nothing to do with their gifts. His lips were fires and his hands were raw current, making every piece of her tingle. Every piece of her feel at home.

  “You’re brilliful, love,” he murmured.

  She smiled. “I like it when you call me that.”

  “Which one, brilliful or…”

  “Love,” she said, touching his cheek. “Love.”

  His lips curled into a smile. “Then I’ll call you it forever.”

  She kissed him again, standing on tiptoe to rest her forehead against his.

  “Let’s just work on tomorrow, okay?” she said, tossing the plastic bottle in a nearby dumpster. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a hard day.”

  “Worth fighting for, though,” Diesel murmured.

  “True cert,” Grimm sighed.

  Lemon nodded.

  “True cert.”

  * * *

  _______

  Eve trudged along the mountain, eyes on the metal at her feet. Grav-tank hulks and corroded shipping containers. Piles of engines and discarded parts, rusting hills and brittle plastic plains that would take a thousand years to degrade. With a small sound of triumph, she knelt among the pieces and fished out a small glass globe, wires hanging out the back of it. Holding it up to the burning sun, she could see the interior was intact, the relays good. She reached into her satchel, pulled out a lump of wires and chips, comparing the input jacks.

  “EmTech 78b optical lens,” she murmured. “Perfect.”

  “Enjoying yourself?”

  She turned toward the voice, saw him standing there, tousled hair and bronze skin, a hint of the coin slot bolted into his chest peeking out through the collar of his shirt. The idealization of everything his maker thought a young man should be. And she supposed Nicholas Monrova had been right in the end. That Ezekiel had turned out to be everything he’d dreamed. Not just strong and fine and beautiful. But brave. And loyal. And possessed of a belief that there was some good in everyone. That you weren’t defined by what you were, but by what you did.

  And what he’d done, in the end, was show her how.

  “Kinda,” she said, squinting against the light. “Reminds me of the old days. Scavving with Lem and Kaiser and Crick for parts so I could fight Dome.”

  Ezekiel nodded to the persona core in her hands.

  “You know, you could’ve j
ust implanted him in a WarBot body again. There was plenty of wreckage around Babel.”

  Eve shook her head. “Talking true, I think Cricket always kinda liked being little. Gave him something to complain about.”

  “You think you can rebuild him?”

  “I’ve forgotten some of it,” she said, touching the part of her skull where her Memdrive used to be. “But I remember enough.” And she smiled then, sure of it, and herself. “He’ll be good as new. He’ll be better.”

  Zeke gave the back of his head a rueful scratch. “He’ll probably still be mad at me. He was never my biggest fan, you know.”

  “Hence the plan to start him off in a small body.”

  Ezekiel chuckled, and Eve tried her best to ignore the butterflies that tumbled through her stomach at the sight of that goddamned dimple. He dragged his dark curls back from his pretty eyes, sunlight playing on his skin.

  “I hope you notice I’ve refrained from saying I told you so.”

  Eve blinked. “Told me so what?”

  He looked off to the north, over the black ocean and the black sands, toward a spire of ghosts and glass. “That what you were made to be doesn’t matter. How some computer program sees you doesn’t matter. The things you do become the person you are. But I figured I should mark the occasion somehow.”

  He reached around behind his back and brought out a ring of discarded wiring and tin, twisted into a circlet that was about the size of her head.

  A crown, she realized.

  He stood in front of her, close enough for her to feel the warmth of his skin, see the blue of a pre-Fall sky shining in those pretty eyes of his. And smooshing down her fauxhawk, he placed the crown of scrap parts atop her head.

  “Your Majesty.”

  She smiled, adjusting the fit. “Every good queen needs a noble knight.”

  “And a court jester,” he scoffed.

  “…And a king?” she asked, hopeful.

  Eve stepped a little closer, looking up as that perfect smile faded away, replaced with longing, with devotion, with love. Reaching up to trace the line of his cheek with her fingertip, she watched the goose bumps rise on his skin, felt his pulse quicken beneath her hand. She knew every part of this lost and broken boy, and not just from the memories of the girl she’d never been. The things they’d done, the moments they’d shared since she first found him out in the Scrap, they were hers and hers alone. And while Eve could still see the specter of Ana Monrova between them if she squinted hard enough, she knew the girl was only a ghost now. That this boy hadn’t trusted her, hadn’t believed in her, hadn’t loved her for who she’d been, but who she was.

  And who was she? In the end?

  She was a girl who loved him back.

  Eve slipped her arms around Zeke’s waist. This boy who’d always felt so real in her arms. And she kissed him, kissed him for all he’d done, and all he was, and all she knew he’d be. Kissed him as if she were a queen, and he her king, there in that empire of scrap, rusting under a cigarette sky.

  They heard the scrape of a boot on steel, a soft voice.

  “Sorry, am I interrupting?”

  Eve eased away from Zeke’s lips, her own curled in a smile.

  “S’okay, Lem,” she said. “Come on up.”

  Ezekiel extricated himself from her arms, dropped into a shallow bow.

  “I beg your leave, my queen.”

  She laughed, and he straightened, turning on his heel and making his way down the mountain of scrap. Making her way past him, Lemon threw him a wink.

  “Hey, Dimples,” she smiled.

  “Hey, Freckles,” he replied.

  Eve looked out over the ocean as Lemon made her way up beside her. The two girls stood atop the pile of corroding metal, discarded parts, broken machines. Staring out at those black waves, the shattered shore, the wastes and the ruins and the cities beyond. A country so broken it might not be worth fixing. A shade so dark it was hard to see the light. But they stood, side by side, staring out at the world, and each of them felt the taller for the girl at her side.

  “I missed you, Riotgrrl,” Lemon said softly.

  “Well.” Eve sighed, soft as clouds. “I’m back now.”

  “Gonna be a job,” Lemon said. “Cleaning this place up.”

  “We got a good crew,” Eve replied.

  Lemon frowned, shook her head. “We got better than crew.”

  Eve cocked an eyebrow, looked at her bestest sidelong.

  “We got family,” Lemon smiled.

  Eve smiled, tears shining in her eyes. “Glad you’re with me, sis.”

  “First rule of the Scrap, sis,” Lemon said, crying, too.

  Eve reached down and squeezed her hand.

  “Stronger together.”

  “Together forever.”

  fin

  Many thanks must go to the following, in no particular order:

  Melanie, Cat, LT, Laini, Amie, Marie, Beth, Kiersten, Barbara, Karen, Artie, Amy, Alison, Ray, Stephanie, Ken, Natalia, Jake, John, Kelly, Jenna, Adrienne, Kristin, Kate, Elizabeth, Amy, Jenn, Joshua, Arely, Trish, Anna, Jess, Sophie, Deb, Tash, Jack, Josh, Tracey, Marc, B-Money, Rafe, Weez, Batman, Glen, Paris, Spiv, Surly Jim, Bill, Tom, Maynard, Oli, Chino, Burton, Ian, Al, Marcus, John, Winston, Paul, Jeff, William, Scott, Jason, Cherie, Jamie, Alan, George, Jenny, Mike, Veronica, Chris, Tony, Kath, Kylie, Nicole, Kurt, Jack, Max, Poppy, Sam, and, of course, Amanda.

  This book wouldn’t be what it is without you.

  CHRISTOPHER TOVO

  JAY KRISTOFF is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Illuminae Files and the Aurora Cycle trilogies, and, for adults, the Lotus War trilogy, the Nevernight Chronicle, and the Empire of the Vampire trilogy. He is 6'7" and has trouble operating a toaster but still respects machines as a necessary evil in our world. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and a rescue dog that he thinks is made of 100% organic parts.

  JAYKRISTOFF.COM

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