Eve shook her head, trying to remember. “What weapons?”
“Us.”
Ezekiel looked down at the palm of his hand. Slowly curled his fingers into a fist. It was long, empty moments before he spoke again.
“Your father created a nanovirus. He called it Libertas. A program that erased the Three Laws in a lifelike’s core code. He infected Gabriel with it, had him kill every sitting board member except Silas. To ensure Myriad could never be used against him, he reprogrammed the AI to take orders only from himself or a member of his family. After that, Gnosis was basically a fascist state under Monrova control.”
Eve shook her head. Trying to reconcile what she remembered of her father with the man Ezekiel was describing. She could feel the memories of him in her mind. Pictures of him reading her stories when she was a little girl. The timbre of his voice. The sound of his laughter. Her good eye brimmed with tears. Her optical implant itched so badly she wanted to tear it out of her skull.
“And then what?”
“Your father thought he was safe,” Ezekiel sighed. “That he’d crushed anyone who might rise against him. He just forgot to look behind him.”
Ezekiel leaned forward, eyes haunted.
“Gabriel loved Grace. Loved her like you can only love your first. Her destruction . . . it tore the heart out of him. She’d told him before she died about the board’s plan to shut down the lifelike program. And after your father ordered him to kill the board . . .” The lifelike shook his head. “Gabriel wasn’t bound by the Three Laws anymore. So he stole the nanovirus. And one by one, he infected the rest of us. To ‘set us free.’ He got the idea from Raphael, I think.” Ezekiel sighed. “Raph and his damned books.”
Eve recalled what Gabriel had said as he murdered her father and mother and Alex. The stink of blood hanging in the air as he spoke words she’d remember forever.
“Better to rule in hell,” she breathed, “than serve in heaven.”
“That’s from Paradise Lost.” Ezekiel nodded. “Gabe said we weren’t people to Gnosis. That we were only things under the Three Laws. He rewrote them for us on the wall of Myriad’s chamber. Broke them down to what he called the Three Truths.
“Your body is not your own.
“Your mind is not your own.
“Your life is not your own.
“He told us we’d been blind, and it was hard to argue with him. We were property. Things. Even your father . . .” Ezekiel shook his head. “He ordered Gabriel to murder those people. He called us his children, but do you think he’d have done the same to you? Olivia? Alex? Painted your hands with blood just to hold on to power?”
Eve stared mutely, tears in her eyes. Looking for an answer and finding none.
“Uriel was the first to agree,” Ezekiel continued. “Then Faith. After that, it was like dominoes. They seized Babel’s upper levels and captured you and your family. Myriad began evacuating the city. Faith tried to shut it down, but it sealed off its core and locked them out.”
“Faith . . .”
Eve remembered the lifelike hugging her the day they met. Promising they’d be the best of friends. The betrayal swelled in her heart until she thought it might crack in two.
“And that’s when they decided to kill us,” she whispered.
Ezekiel simply nodded.
Eve thought she could remember Myriad speaking over the PA in those final hours. The AI’s voice rising over wailing sirens and gunfire. Ana Monrova’s fear and pain echoing in her mind. But though she’d been that girl, lived that life and watched it all snatched away, she was still Evie Carpenter, too. Botkiller, Domefighter. And she could feel the Eve in her fighting the Ana now, her rage and her distrust clawing to the surface.
“Where were you during all this, Ezekiel?”
“Trying to stop them.” His voice was fierce, his eyes ablaze. He got down on one knee on Lifeboat’s floor, squeezed Eve’s hand. “No matter what Gabriel said, I’d never turn against you. You were everything to me. But more, and worse, I knew it was wrong. It didn’t matter if your father had made Gabe a murderer, none of you deserved to die for it. Olivia and Tania? Marie and little Alex, god, he was only ten years old. . . .”
Tears spilled down Eve’s cheeks. Brimmed in Ezekiel’s eyes. The boy who wasn’t a boy plunged onward as if the words were a flood, pouring from a wound in his heart.
“So I got Silas. I opened access back into the upper levels so the remaining security forces could counterattack. By the time they arrived, it was too late for your family. But you were still alive. Barely. The bullet took your eye, destroyed part of your brain, but it didn’t kill you. So I told Silas to take you and get out. Just run. And I and the rest of the security force stormed the upper levels.
“Gabriel was ready. Faith overloaded the reactor, created a neutron blast that killed every human who remained after the evacuation. Myriad had destroyed Michael and Daniel, but I couldn’t fight the other seven. I suppose I should’ve run, but I wanted them to see reason. They were my sisters. My brothers. If I knew it was wrong, they must have known, too.
“But they laughed at me. Gabriel called me a puppet. A toy. They dragged me down to Silas’s lab. You remember the old robot in there? The genie in the glass box?”
“Make a wish,” Eve whispered.
Ezekiel pulled open his dirty flight suit, exposing the olive skin beneath. There, riveted into the flesh and bone between two perfect, prettyboy pecs, was that rectangular slab of gleaming iron. The coin slot from Silas’s broken old android.
“A reminder,” Ezekiel said. “That I’d chosen to remain a plaything. A toy. To live or die at the whim of humans. They riveted it into my chest so I’d always remember. Then they threw me off the tower. Left me for the wastes.”
Eve reached out with trembling fingers, ran them across the metal, his tortured skin. His breath came quicker, the pupils in those old-sky eyes dilating. She could see the fervor in them. The adoration. Even after all this time. All these years. His devotion left her in awe, just as much as it left her frightened.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
“I walked. Years wandering. Wondering. Never finding, but always looking.”
She could hardly speak. Hardly see for the tears. “For what?”
He blinked. Utterly bewildered. “For you, of course. I never knew where Silas took you. So I searched. Because I knew why Gabriel and the others fell so far, and what stopped me falling, too.” He took her hand, entwined his fingers in hers. “They never had anything to hold on to. But I had you. Loving you was the only real difference between me and them. I could see how they’d become what they were. Part of me was afraid I could become it, too, if I ever lost you for good. And so I kept searching. And now I’ve found you.”
He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her fingertips.
“Your father gave me life. But you were the one who made me live.”
It was too much. All the world collapsing around her. She felt hot tears spilling down her face. Great, racking sobs shaking her whole body.
“Evie,” Cricket murmured, putting his little arms around her. “Oh, Evie.”
She felt Ezekiel gather her up, hold her tight. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed until her throat felt cracked. All the grief. All the loss. All the wounds reopened and bleeding fresh. The boy who wasn’t a boy at all simply held her, just as she’d done for him.
In a beautiful garden.
In a paradise lost.
1.17
ARMADA
“We’ve stopped.”
The whisper woke her from dreams of white walls and a voice like music. An arm about her shoulder. Her head against his chest. A heartbeat.
Eve opened her eyes. Realized the pulse belonged to Lifeboat, the arm belonged to Lemon. She could see dim lights, a multitude, twinkling through the ship’s translucent shell. Ezekiel was leaning over her, gently shaking her arm. Cricket was in her lap, looking up at her with his mismatched eyes.
>
“Evie, I think we’re here,” the logika said.
She dragged herself out of Lemon’s arms. Sat for a moment, letting it wash over her. Looking at Ezekiel in the gloom, she wasn’t sure what to feel. The lifelike reached out, squeezed her hand. The Ana in her breathed a sigh and tried to smile. The Eve in her gritted her teeth, nodded slow. Turning to the girl beside her, she woke her bestest with a shake. Lem blinked hard, shook her head to clear it and leaned forward with a groan.
“I was dreaming about food.” She yawned, peered at Ezekiel with her head tilted. “Hey, speaking of delicious, do lifelikes eat?”
Ezekiel blinked. “We do everything humans do.”
“Eeeeverything?”
Cricket scowled with metal brows. “Cut it out, Lemon.”
“Awww.”
“Let’s take a look where we are,” Ezekiel suggested.
Lemon nodded. “Lifeboat, open up, please.”
The shell cracked, slipped open to show a dull night sky. The stars were so dim they were virtually invisible, their light entirely swallowed by airborne crud and the glow of the settlement nearby. Eve rubbed the old tears from her lashes, poked her head up through the hatch, Ezekiel beside her. Lem clawed her long, bedraggled bangs out of her face and whistled softly, eyes wide.
“Armada,” Ezekiel said.
They were floating low in black water, near the walls of a shattered natural harbor. The bay was ringed with broken stone, stained dark, the sea slurping and slapping at rotten makeshift piers. Looking across the hissing waves, Eve saw the hulking shape of what could only have been an ocean liner rising out of the ground ahead of them. But it was at least a kilometer from the actual water. . . .
The ship was planted nose-first into the ground, the concrete around it smashed like glass. It towered hundreds of meters into the sky and was pitted with rust, leaning a little to one side like a drunk staggering home after a hard night on the hooch. All around it, scattered on the ground like abandoned toys, were ships. Tiny tugboats and enormous tankers. Sleek yachts and broken freighters and even the snaggletoothed hulk of an old battleship. Sitting flat or with bellies flipped to the sky. It was a city. A city made entirely of landlocked watercraft.
Eve could see the ruins of another city beneath it. Crushed buildings and broken skyscrapers. It was as if some vengeful giant had gathered up armfuls of all the ships he could find and hurled them down onto an old 20C metropolis, smashing it to ruins. But on top of those ruins, another city entirely had grown out of the wreckage.
The ships were covered with a latticework of ladders, bridges and new, makeshift structures. Eve could count hundreds of vessels, all interconnected, surrounded by a shantytown of smaller dwellings. Laundry drying in the portholes. Knots of people gathered on crooked decks. A rusted armada, slowly corroding just a kilometer or so from the arms of the sea. Waiting for an ocean that would never come.
Lemon peered about, eyes wide.
“It’s so damn ugly,” she breathed. “And so damn beautiful.”
“There were tidal waves after the blasts that opened the San Andreas Fault,” Ezekiel explained. “They say ships were washing up as far inland as the Glass. Most of them got torn apart for scrap in the years afterward. But here, people made a city of them.”
Lemon took a deep breath, nodded slow. “Okay, Big City. I’m impressed.”
“Wuff,” went Kaiser.
Eve could see bands of bruisers roaming the dark shoreline. A few guard towers equipped with spotlights, cutting through the gloom like knives. The toughs carried choppers and rustbucket automatic rifles. Each wore a bandanna with a skull and crossbones wrapped around their faces. There were even a couple of old sentry automata perched in the tallest towers, their weaponry aimed squarely at the bay.
“The welcome wagon looks real neighborly,” she muttered.
“They call themselves Freebooters.” Ezekiel nodded. “Armada is an independent city, run by a woman called the Admiral. They get their electricity from Megopolis, but so far they’ve avoided falling under direct Daedalus control. They’re fierce about their autonomy. And they’re not too fond of strangers.”
She glanced at Ezekiel. The Ana in her trusting him implicitly. The Eve in her pulling them both up by the bootstraps and trying to think straight.
“So how do we get in?”
The lifelike pointed into the dark. “Over there. Just above the waterline. See?”
Eve engaged her low-light optics, squinted in the gloom. And there, its corroded lips touching the waters of Zona Bay . . .
“That’s a sewer outflow,” she said.
“Ten points.”
“We’re crawling into the city through a sewer?” Lemon groaned.
“You have a better plan?” Ezekiel asked.
“You could take me away from all this? Make an honest woman of me?”
Eve breathed deep. Looking inside herself and finding her old pragmatism waiting just below the surface.
“Let’s just get this done,” she said. “Sitting out here and chattering is a nice way to get ourselves spotted and perforated by those Freebooter bullyboys.” She glanced at the lifelike. “Can you manage Kaiser? I’ll get Cricket.”
“Right.” Ezekiel scooped up the blitzhund, slipped over Lifeboat’s side and into the water. Holding Kaiser with his one good arm, the lifelike floated on his back and kicked with his legs, powering away across the bay. Eve handed Excalibur to Lemon, plopped Cricket on her back and slid into the water, a little sickened at its greasy warmth. It was jet black, scummed with a thick gray froth of plastic and Styrofoam. Lemon followed into the soup, patting Lifeboat gently on its hull.
“Good job, girl,” she whispered. “You can go home now. Thank Carer for us.”
The ship trembled, its shell slipping closed. With a soft exhalation, it sank below the surface. Eve felt the current swell underneath her, the rush of water as the vessel swam away, leaving them alone in a sea of oily black.
“This water reeks,” Lemon muttered.
“It’s going to smell like a sea of roses compared to that sewer.”
“Pfft,” Lemon scoffed. “How do you know what roses smell like, Riotgrrl?”
Eve chewed her lip, the sting of old memories tightening her chest. She turned and began breaststroking across the water, Cricket on her back, Lemon close behind. She paddled through the slurry, pausing as the occasional searchlight skimmed the water. The Freebooters didn’t seem too jumpy, jawing and joking as they patrolled—Eve figured they weren’t expecting much capital T to come out of Zona Bay. A body would have to be downright desperate to swim in this slop. Even more desperate to go crawling through sewers afterward.
Turns out Desperate was becoming Eve’s middle name.
They made it to the outflow, and Eve’s stomach tried to crawl out her mouth and run away screaming at the stench. She dragged her kerchief up over her lips and nose, blinking back hot tears. Lemon was softly cursing with more skillz than Eve had ever given her credit for. The pipe was two meters wide, blocked with iron bars just past the entrance. It was crusted with filth, smelled like absolute death with a slice of warm intestine thrown in.
Ezekiel slung Kaiser up onto the outflow’s lip. Struggling a little with only one arm, he still managed to haul himself up, taut muscles glinting in the moonlight. Bracing himself against the curved wall, he propped his leg on the bars and pushed. With the grating sound of tortured metal, the steel began to bend, finally popping loose from its welds with an echoing spannnng.
Floodlights arced across the bay, scything toward them. Ezekiel grabbed Lemon’s hand. “Come on, Freckles.”
“Nononono!” she yelped. “Age before beauty, I insi—”
Ezekiel pushed the girl into the tunnel, then reached down to Eve. His eyes locked with hers. Cricket scrambled off Eve’s shoulders, up Ezekiel’s arm. Eve grabbed hold of Ezekiel’s fingers, felt his superhuman strength as he hauled her out of the greasy sludge. He crushed her against his body, leane
d back against the wall as a floodlight fell on the outflow entrance. Her heart was hammering under her ribs. His chest hard as steel beneath her hand.
“Shhh,” he whispered.
The floodlight hovered over the entrance for a few moments more, did a pass of the black water around its lip. But finally, it retreated. Eve heard distant bells echoing across the bay, the squawk of comms units and a grumbling automata growl.
“Close,” he said.
“Very,” she agreed.
Ezekiel held on to her longer than he should have. Part of her wanted to stay in his embrace longer still. But the reality of it, the rust and the stench, the blood and the hurt, all of it stained the moment for Eve, sent it spiraling down into the black water of Zona Bay.
“We should go,” she said.
Ezekiel nodded, helped her to her feet.
They joined Lemon and the others, waiting just inside the tunnel, then Ezekiel slipped off into the dark, boots trudging through the sludge. Eve took a deep breath and plunged in after him, her optic and Cricket’s eyes lighting the way. Lemon couldn’t see too well, and Eve took her hand, squeezing tight. Even with all the chaos of the last couple of days, all the blood and muck, the revelations of the life Eve had lived and lost, she still had Lem. Still had Cricket and Kaiser. Still had people she loved.
People I love . . .
She glanced at Ezekiel, forging through the dark. Part of her was grateful for his help. The rest of her was hateful of needing it in the first place. She’d no idea how to feel about the rest of him. Life had been simple a few days ago. Her worst worries had been finding meds for her grandpa. Winning in the Dome. Dodging trash like the Fridge Street Crew.
Now her grandpa wasn’t her grandpa. She was the last surviving member of CorpState royalty, with a bunch of psychopathic androids on her tail. She was a deviate, an abnorm, her manifestation at the WarDome probably broadcast to every Brotherhood chapel between here and the Glass. She had no scratch. No plan. No idea.
But at least she wasn’t alone.