Lifel1k3

  “I’d never do anything to hurt you, Eve.”

  “I want to believe that.”

  “Believe it,” he breathed. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.”

  Eve shook her head. Feeling that hateful itch in her optic that meant she was starting to cry again. She forced the tears back, punching and kicking.

  Sick of crying.

  Sick of it all.

  “Marie used to say the best romances were the forbidden ones,” she murmured. “I’ve been thinking really hard about that. Wondering if that’s the reason we did it. You and me. Maybe each of us was just rebelling in our own way. Any way we could.”

  “It was more than that.”

  “Was it?”

  He walked across the deck, knelt in front of her. Took her hand gently in his. And looking into her eyes, he spoke as if she and he were the only two people in the world.

  “Two years I searched for you,” he said. “Two years of empty wastes and endless roads. Of not knowing if I’d ever see you again. But when the ash rose up to choke me, it was thoughts of you that helped me breathe. When the night seemed never-ending, it was dreams of you that helped me sleep. You. And only you.”

  “Ezekiel, I . . .”

  “You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to promise me a thing. I don’t know what it was for you, but for me, it was real. And you’re the girl who made me real.”

  “That’s a hell of an ideal for one person to live up to, Ezekiel.”

  The lifelike sighed, ran his hand through his dark hair. “I’m sorry. I know how it must feel to be looked at the way I look at you. But you’ve had seventeen years to learn to deal with all the emotions inside your head. I’ve had two. Imagine having all your capacity for love and hate and joy and rage and only a couple of years to learn to handle all of it. Sometimes it feels like a flood inside my mind, and it’s all I can do not to drown.”

  Eve remembered Dresden’s warning to Silas and her father about that same thing.

  Had that been what led Raphael to kill himself?

  Is that what drove Ezekiel’s feelings for her? Taking a childish infatuation and turning it into the focus of his life? He’d been her first love, and she couldn’t deny what he’d meant to her, how seeing him again now was making her feel, but . . .

  Does he even know what love is?

  “I know what I sound like when I say this,” Ezekiel confessed. “But I can’t help it. You were my everything. You still are. And you always will be.”

  The boy who wasn’t anything close to a boy brought her hand to his lips, kissed her bruised knuckles. Despite the storm in her head, his words were cool water, washing away the hurt in her heart. His words were fire, lighting a flame in her chest. He leaned close, kissed the tears from her eyes, first her real one, then the implant where her eye used to be. His lips were soft. His touch electric. As real as anything she’d ever known.

  She opened her eyes and found him staring at her in the gloom.

  She didn’t know what she wanted.

  She knew exactly what she wanted.

  She shouldn’t go there, and she knew it. It’d be a mistake to fall back now. It was all too real. Too raw. She needed to get her head straight. To sleep. To think. And even though she could feel part of herself being dragged back toward him, Eve resisted. She wouldn’t be doing it for the right reasons. She’d be doing it to drown the hurt. To fall into his arms and forget herself. And truth was, she’d done enough forgetting to last a lifetime.

  But, god, it was hard to push herself away. . . .

  “I should let you rest,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  She was exhausted. Aching. Bones like lead. But the thought of sleep, of the dreams that might find her when she closed her eyes . . .

  “Will you stay with me?” she asked. “I mean . . . just until I fall asleep?”

  He smiled. Eyes shining.

  “I can do that.”

  Eve kicked off her boots, curled up under one of the blankets. She heard Ezekiel walk to the balcony, opened her eyes a crack and saw him standing there, silhouetted in the flickering light. A statue standing vigil. A watchman on the wall.

  When the ash rose up to choke me, it was thoughts of you that helped me breathe.

  When the night seemed never-ending, it was dreams of you that helped me sleep.

  “Goodnight, Ezekiel.”

  “Goodnight, Eve.”

  She closed her eyes. Drifting into the dark. And when the dreams came, they weren’t of lifelikes marching into the cellblock in their perfect, pretty row. They weren’t of metal fingers curling closed or gunsmoke or blood or all she’d lost.

  She dreamed of him.

  Only him.

  1.21

  FIX

  Solder and sparks. Acetylene and rust. Sweat and curses.

  Eve was bent over Kaiser’s chassis in the ministry’s workshop, rewiring his ambulation systems. The workshop was sealed behind a bulkhead and heavy door. Her tools were third rate, the parts even worse. But if she could be grateful to Doctor Silas Carpenter for one thing, it was the chips in her Memdrive. All his know-how about biorobotics and mechanics and computers, hardwired right into her brainmeats.

  Talking true, she’d never felt as at peace as she did when surrounded by machines. Up to her elbows in some old salvage or machina, unbreaking the broken and smiling as it began to sing. The Ana in her remembered her father in GnosisLabs, the way his brilliant mind had worked. In her mind’s eye, she could see her little brother, Alex, bent over his tool bench. The same joy on his face that she felt now. Eve was reminded of happier times in Dregs, working on Miss Combobulation in the Dome’s work pits. She knew where that love had come from now. It hadn’t just been the chips Silas had put in her Memdrive. It had been something deeper than that. Deep as the blood in her veins.

  But then she remembered Hope’s words. Her WarDome bouts. The baying crowd. Oil and coolant, spraying like blood. The spectacle and slang, all used to disguise the horror of what it really was.

  “OOC” instead of “murdered.”

  “First batter” instead of “executioner.”

  “WarDome” instead of “Killing Jar.”

  Had it just been about the scratch? Or had it been something more?

  Had she been Ana, even back then? Avenging herself the only way she could?

  She’d been hard at work since before dawn, pausing only long enough to have a lukewarm shower and scrub herself with some industrial soap powder. Ezekiel hadn’t been there when she’d woken, but scrounging around the junk and detritus of Hope’s workshop, she’d found a little something to surprise him with later. A thank-you she hoped he’d understand. It was bundled up in a strip of tarpaulin on the workbench beside Kaiser.

  Lemon and Cricket swung by the workshop with a bowl of Neo-Meat™ (“Sweaty undies flavor!”) for breakfast. Her bestest perched herself on the bench and watched Eve work, chattering about the kids in Hope’s care. Most were runaways, the unwanted and the unneeded. A settlement this grim, cracks this big, there were bound to be people who fell right into them and just disappeared.

  “Hope takes them all in,” Lemon said. “Anyone under eighteen. Gives them a place to sleep. Schools them. Tries to fix them up with work after they leave.”

  “Yeah,” Eve muttered. “She’s a regular saint.”

  Lemon sucked her lip, wisely changed the subject. “How you doin’, puppy?”

  Kaiser wagged his tail, gave a small wuff. Lemon peered over Eve’s shoulder, squinting at the long red cylinder in the blitzhund’s open chest cavity. It was marked with a small skull and crossbones, stamped with the word EXPLOSIVE.

  “Is that his thermex?” Lem asked. “Salvage told me he disabled the detonators.”

  “Yeah,” Eve nodded. “I’m thinking about taking it out altogether. I can jury-rig it into a grenade without too much trouble.”

  Cricket looked up from a scrap pile he was searching. “That??
?s a bad idea, Evie.”

  “Why? Can’t say I was ever too keen on the idea of my dog blowing himself up.”

  “He’s not a dog,” Cricket warned. “He’s a blitzhund. And his job is to protect you. It’s like Grandpa said. We get hurt so you don’t have to.”

  “He was never my grandpa, Crick.”

  “Whatever you want to call him.” Cricket’s metal eyebrows descended into a frown. “You’ve got a cybernetically augmented bounty hunter on your tail. Someone with a ton of creds wants you dead or alive. Kaiser exists to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I don’t want any of you getting hurt for my sake. It’s not right.”

  “We just want to protect you, Evie.”

  “And I want to protect you, too. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s wrong because we’re not human. We exist to serve you.”

  Eve shook her head. Struck for the first time how wrong it was. The way humanity treated bots. The way she treated Cricket. He’d helped her build Miss Combobulation. Helped her ghost those eight logika in the Dome. Had she ever stopped to ask what he thought about it? Or had she just told him what to do?

  He had feelings. They might be code and electrics, but that didn’t make them less real. Hope’s words were like a splinter in her mind. She couldn’t get around the wrong of it all. She couldn’t pretend Crick and Kaiser were her friends when she treated them like . . .

  “I don’t want servants, Crick,” Eve said. “I know sometimes I don’t act like it. But you and Kaiser have always been more than that. You’re my friends. And I’m not going to let you put yourself in danger for my sake.”

  “We do it because we love you.”

  “You do it because you’re programmed to.” Eve set aside her tools, looked the little bot in the eye. “That’s not love, Cricket. And I don’t want it to be that way anymore. It’s not fair. It’s like Raphael said: You deserve a choice. Metal or meat. Blood or current. Everyone deserves a choice.”

  The little logika tilted his head. A tremor of anger hissing in his voice.

  “You think the only reason I stick with you is programming, huh? And part of you wonders, if I was given the option, I’d turn on you, maybe? Like they did?” He shook his head. “You’ve been hanging around these murderbots too long, Evie.”

  “Crick, that’s not what I meant. . . .”

  The little logika hopped off the bench. And bristling with indignity, head wobbling, he marched out the door. Eve sighed, rubbing at her itching optic. Headachy and just plain tired. The world was moving too fast. Upside down and all the way backward.

  “He’ll be okay, Riotgrrl,” Lemon murmured. “Easy on the take it.”

  Eve looked at the cylinder of thermex in Kaiser’s chest. At the door Cricket had just left by. It was true, what she’d said. Every word of it. Maybe being around Ezekiel had opened her eyes to it. Maybe it was memories of Raph. Or Hope. Ana’s voice inside her head. Probably all of it. But whatever the reason, she’d had enough.

  Picking up her screwdriver, she unfastened the explosives, removed them from the blitzhund’s chassis. She rigged the detonator with a makeshift pin and trigger, Kaiser taking note, watching carefully all the while. They’d still have some boom if that bounty hunter tracked them down again. It just wouldn’t be bolted inside her dog, was all.

  She leaned down, planted a kiss on Kaiser’s pitted metal brow. The blitzhund licked her hand with his heat-sink tongue.

  Free to choose.

  She bolted Kaiser’s chassis closed, engaged his ambulation systems. The blitzhund sat on the bench, snuffling the air and looking uncertain. Eve backed off, clapped her hands against her knees. “Come here, boy. Come on.”

  Kaiser looked to his back legs, gingerly testing them. As he realized he could move again, his tail began wagging furiously, beating against his hull with a series of dull clangclangclangs. He bounded down off the bench, running in circles and barking.

  “Clever boy!” Lemon jumped to the floor, clapped her hands. “Come here, Kais!”

  The blitzhund did a few laps of the workshop, metal claws skittering on the deck, wuffing for joy. Eve patted him on the head, opened the workshop door and let him loose into the ministry proper. Kaiser went bolting through the room, bounding over the cots and beds, the younger children watching, wide-eyed. He pranced among them, rolling over onto his back to let the more adventurous scratch his metal tummy, back legs kicking.

  Lemon gave Eve a squeeze. “Good work, Riotgrrl.”

  Eve stuffed the thermex grenade into a satchel, along with her surprise for Ezekiel. The girls walked out into the main room, Eve forgetting her hurts and smiling wide as she watched Kaiser rolling with the sprogs. Trying to savor her tiny victory. See the beauty in a moment, even if it was something as simple as watching her dog play with children.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Lemon declared. “About whether your past makes you what you are. That’s all our memories are, right? The pieces of our yesterdays that make us who we are today?”

  Eve thought about it for a while, finally nodded. “Sounds right.”

  “So you’ve had some bad days, no doubt,” Lemon said. “But I figure, instead of letting your yesterdays bring you down, maybe you can concentrate on building some happier memories today. And that way you’ll have them for tomorrow?”

  Eve chewed on that for a spell. Wondering if she was missing something. Maybe it was true what Lemon was saying. Her memories told her story, but only she could decide who she was going to be because of them. Did all the hurt and shadow in her past really matter? Or could she decide to not let it define her? She didn’t have to deny it. Maybe she just had to accept it. Maybe it was time to acknowledge who she’d been yesterday, and decide who she wanted to be tomorrow.

  Eve looked at her friend sidelong and smiled.

  “You’re one of the good ones, Lemon Fresh.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone. I got a rep as a gorgeous good-for-nothin’ to maintain.”

  Eve put her arm around her bestest’s shoulder, and the girls sauntered on into the ministry’s heart. The kids playing with Kaiser were a motley mix of different ages. Daniella, Hope’s assistant, was teaching a small clutch of young ’uns with a makeshift chalkboard. Eve spied Ezekiel sitting at a battered table in a corner, playing cards with a group of sprogs. His tiny stack of bottle caps told Eve that for all his merits, the lifelike wasn’t much of a gambler. But he was smiling and joking, laughing aloud when a skinny gutter girl caught him trying to filch a few of her bottle caps on the sly.

  “That’s cheeeeeating!” she cried.

  “You got me,” he grinned.

  Eve wandered over with a smile, hands in pockets.

  “You should quit while you’re behind. They’ll have your shirt soon.”

  “I just got it, too.” The lifelike pushed the skinny girl his remaining bottle caps. “Don’t spend them all at once.”

  He’d changed out of his high-tech flight suit, found some battered old jeans and a black T-shirt that was a little too tight. The sleeve where his right arm should have been was filled out better than she’d expected. Rummaging in her satchel, she pulled out her gift, dropped it in his lap.

  “Present for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Open it up, Braintrauma.”

  Ezekiel complied, peeling away the tarpaulin. Wrapped inside was a cybernetic arm.

  It probably dated back to before the war. The cerebral relays were the old crappy kind that needed to be jacked into the nervous system directly at the spine. It was ugly, bulky, all pistons and bolts and smeared in grease. But it worked well enough—Eve had fixed most of the glitches between bouts of working on Kaiser.

  “Figure it’ll tide you over till your old one grows back,” she shrugged.

  The boy who wasn’t a boy looked her in the eye. Dimple creasing his cheek as he smiled his crooked smile, letting loose a storm of mechanical butterflies in her belly.
br />   “Thanks.”

  “Get your shirt off.”

  Ezekiel’s eyebrow rose. He looked around at the assembled children, back to Eve.

  “Ummmm . . .”

  “Keep your pants on, Braintrauma. I need your shirt off to install the arm.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Lemon said. She scanned the room, found a beat-up old recliner chair with the stuffing leaking out of it, dragged it near to Ezekiel, dropped into it, reclined backward and pulled her goggles down over her eyes. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  Two dozen expectant pairs of eyes were now fixed on the lifelike.

  “. . . Mmmaybe we can do this someplace private?” he suggested.

  Eve grinned. Motioned to the workshop. “Step into my office.”

  The pair walked across the tanker’s innards to the workshop and closed the door behind them. Lemon sighed in disappointment, pulled the goggles off her head. She scoped the assembled urchins, the moldy playing cards on their makeshift table.

  “You wanna play?” a skinny boy asked.

  “Hells no?”

  “You scared?”

  Lemon yawned. “I don’t get out of bed for bottle caps, Stinky.”

  The children glanced at Daniella to see if she was looking. Having confirmed the coast was clear, each pulled a handful of credstiks from inside their clothes, flashed them at Lemon.

  “So. You wanna play?” the skinny boy asked again.

  Lemon looked the kid in the eye. Fingered the stolen creds in her cargos.

  “All right, you little snots,” she muttered. “Let’s dance.”

  “What’s your name?” Stinky asked as Lemon pulled up a chair.

  The girl cracked her knuckles. Picking up the cards, she fanned them out over the table, swept them up into a riffle shuffle, dovetailed them into a perfect stack and set them down before the wide-eyed children. She dropped her stiks on the table and smiled.

  “You can call me Daddy.”

  1.22

  IMMOLATION

  “Is this going to hurt?” Ezekiel asked.

  “As much as getting your arm ripped off in the first place? Probably not.”

  Ezekiel sat on the workbench, side-eyeing the bulky cybernetic limb.