Lifel1k3

  Ana shook her head. That’d been too close. If anything had happened to Lem . . .

  They drove on, the storm pummeling their little truck, all the world gone black. The headlights cut a swath through the darkness, glinting on the swirling shards, burning red as that strange lightning arced above their heads. The engine groaned and shuddered but held true. Dragging them on through the roiling night, closer and closer to Babel.

  Closer and closer to home.

  Ana glanced again at Ezekiel. The lifelike was wiping the blood and dirt from his face with his good hand. He’d just risked his own life, torn himself to shreds, to keep her in one piece. He hadn’t hesitated for a second. Her chest ached to see him hurt for her sake, filled with warmth to see him risk it in the first place. His vow in the ministry rang in her head. The truth of it now impossible to ignore.

  There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.

  She touched his arm, as lightly as feathers falling. “Thank you, Zeke.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything.”

  He smiled lopsided, and gave her a small bow. “You want me to take the wheel?”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  She slid over his lap, he slid underneath, the pair momentarily tangled together as they traded places. Ana took a deep breath, checking again for signs of pursuit. All she could see outside was darkness. Glass and grit were still pouring in through the driver-side window, so Cricket crawled over Ezekiel’s shoulder and duct-taped another floor mat over the hole, intentionally sticking his hind parts in the lifelike’s face as he did so. Ezekiel was too busy steering to wave him away. The wind eased off, and Cricket gave his metal tush one more rub in Zeke’s grille before crawling into the backseat once more.

  “Enjoy yourself?” the lifelike asked.

  “Immensely,” Cricket replied.

  Ezekiel glanced at Ana, shook his head. “We should be clear of the Glass in an hour or so. If the storm reaches as far as Babel, that’s all good. The leftover Freebooters will probably give up when they figure out where we’re headed.”

  She nodded. Risked a smile despite the bedlam and blood all around them.

  “That was some fancy shooting back there.”

  He winked. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “We make a pretty good team, huh?”

  “We?”

  She could see her smile reflected in the perfect blue of his eyes. She laid her head in his lap, felt the warmth of his skin through her rad-suit. Remembering.

  “Yeah.” Ana sighed. “We.”

  “I think I like the sound of that.”

  He put his arm around her, squeezed her against him. And despite all the bedlam, all the blood, it felt right. It felt real. It felt like the way she wanted to feel forever.

  Him and her. Together.

  Forever.

  1.26

  TERMINUS

  Red on my hands. Smoke in my lungs. My mother, my father, my sisters and brother, all dead on the floor beside me. Hollow eyes and empty chests.

  The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

  They have only one thing left to take from me.

  The last and most precious thing.

  The tempest followed them until dawn, smoky spears of light beginning to filter through the haze of dust and glass. Ana had eventually left Ezekiel to his driving, climbing over into the backseat and nursing Lemon in her lap. Her bestest was slowly coming to, murmuring softly. Her brow and eye socket were swollen and bruised, blood clotted in her lashes. Ana risked taking off the girl’s headgear again to wash the wound while Cricket and Kaiser looked on nervously.

  “Lem?” Ana murmured. “Lem, can you hear me?”

  “Nnnnn,” Lemon said.

  “Are you all right, Freckles?” Ezekiel asked.

  “No . . . ,” Lemon groaned softly. “Come kiss it b-better.”

  “She’s gonna be fine.” Ana smiled.

  Lemon opened her eyes a crack, hissing in pain. “What the hells . . . hit m-me?”

  “Cybernetically enhanced killing machine,” Ana replied.

  “Is it . . . T-Tuesday already?”

  “Just lie still. You might have a concussion.”

  Kaiser looked out through the windshield and growled.

  “Ana,” Ezekiel said. “You better come up here.”

  “Crick, give her some water,” Ana said. “Not too much, or she’ll be sick.”

  Ana leaned down, kissed Lemon on the brow.

  “You stay low, Lem. Keep your head down and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Too . . . late,” Lemon moaned.

  “Ana . . . ,” Ezekiel warned.

  Ana climbed into the passenger seat, squinted through the thinning glasstorm. Through the pale dawn haze, she could make out a skyline rising from the desert floor. Her blood ran cold, goose bumps prickling her skin. She was stricken suddenly with a barrage of memories. Sitting with her brother and sisters in pristine white rooms. A garden, full of flowers that existed nowhere else on earth. Music in the air and mechanical butterflies and a great library of books. Her father’s arm, strong about her shoulders. Her mother’s lips, warm upon her brow. A heaven in a world run to ruin.

  “Babel,” she breathed.

  It stretched up from the sand ahead, a spear of steel and glass trying in vain to pierce the sky. It was only in stories that irradiated objects actually glowed, but there was something in the air—the dust or glass that intertwined itself with the dawn’s light and the radiation lingering in the city’s bones—setting the metropolis aglow. It looked as if the whole city were burning with translucent flame.

  Unlike Armada, atop its crumbling ruins, Babel seemed almost part of the landscape, flowing up from the ground in a vaguely organic coil. The tower was really two spires, twisting about each other like a double helix of DNA. In its day, it had been a thing of breathtaking beauty. But that was yesterday. . . .

  The city around it was an empty shell now, all broken windows and encroaching rust. Where once the air had been filled with thopters and rotor drones, now only a single irradiated crow circled in the skies. Where once Babel had teemed with life, it now stood hollow and silent, a corroding tomb for the people who’d been murdered there. The day the machines stopped singing. The day her family died.

  Ana found her eye welling with tears. She hadn’t thought it would affect her so deeply, but seeing her former home was like seeing a ghost. All the fragments of her past life, all the blood and anguish and pain, immortalized in glass and chrome and isotopes that would take ten thousand years to degrade.

  “Are you all right?” Ezekiel asked.

  She simply shook her head. Mute and aching. This place wasn’t her home. It was a mausoleum. The place her childhood had ended, spitting her out into a life of rust and dust. But still, that was the life that had brought her Lemon. Kaiser and Cricket. And, yes, even her grandpa. She could feel those two people inside her head again. The girl she’d been and the girl she’d become. Looking at the tower, the place one girl had died and the other had been born, she didn’t know whether to feel sorrow or relief.

  Ezekiel saw the look on her face, took hold of her hand. His skin was warm and alive and real, and she entwined her fingers with his. Breathing a little easier.

  “I’m with you,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” she smiled.

  Ana squinted through the glasstorm and the grubby windshield, making out the dim shapes of the Daedalus encampment ahead. She could see huge machina—Titans and Tarantulas and Juggernauts—glinting in the dawn light. Heavily armored, legs like pillars, microsolar cells gleaming in their desert-camo paint jobs. They stood silent vigil or walked endless patrols through the dead suburbia outside Babel’s broken walls. She wondered what the pilots inside them had done to land such a crappy detail. How bored they must get out here, praying for something to shoot at.

  And, silly her, she was about to grant their wish.


  Just a few days ago, a single deranged Goliath had almost ghosted her solo. Who knew how many machina were waiting for her out there? All of them fully armed, max juiced, the pilots inside just itching to put a six-foot-under hurting on anything that strayed too close.

  “We’re not in WarDome anymore, Toto,” Cricket muttered.

  “Yeah,” Ana whispered.

  “I hope you’ve got your mojo warmed up.”

  “Me too.”

  Ezekiel squeezed her hand and smiled. “I believe in you, Ana.”

  “Great Maker, someone kill me . . . ,” Cricket groaned.

  The lifelike glared over his shoulder. “Not a lot of romance in your soul, is there?”

  Cricket arced the cutting torch on his middle finger. “Romance this, Stumpy.”

  They roared out of the glasstorm, into the swirling eddies and rolling clouds at the tempest’s edge. Thundersaurus had been stripped bare by the storm’s abrasive winds, the dawn gleaming on its buffed metal skin. Ana could see the Daedalus garrison more clearly now. It wasn’t so much an army as a police force, maybe a dozen heavy machina in total, here to ensure no looters plundered Babel’s irradiated secrets. But even if the pilots were half-asleep at the controls, a handful of those badbots were enough to deal with a motley scavver crew from Dregs with only a few popguns between them.

  Unless one of them happened to be a living silver bullet, that is . . .

  Ana closed her eyes, feeling for the closest machina. It was a Tarantula—a squat, eight-legged killing machine as big as a bus, bristling with pods of short-range missiles and twin autocannons. It swiveled its torso at the sound of oncoming engines, extended a radio aerial to transmit an alert to the rest of the Daedalus garrison.

  “Attention, unidentified vehicle,” the pilot announced through his PA. “Attention, unidentified vehicle. This area is restricted by order of Daedalus Technologies. You have thirty seconds to divert course or I will open fire.”

  Ezekiel gunned the accelerator. The Thundersaurus surged forward, leaving the glasstorm howling behind them. The Tarantula turned to face the oncoming truck, legs shifting in a ghastly imitation of a real spider, two pods of missiles unfurling at its back like vast, glittering wings.

  “If you do not divert course, I am authorized to use lethal force,” the pilot warned. “You have fifteen seconds.”

  “. . . Ana?” Ezekiel asked.

  “I’ve got this,” she hissed.

  She dragged back the sunroof, stood up for a better view. Sweating inside the snot-green plastic rad-gear, she felt the dust and sand pattering on her visor. Ana reached out, narrowed her eyes against the dawn light, locked them on the Tarantula. Picturing herself back in the WarDome. Remembering the taste of blood in her mouth. The pain. The terror. Dragging it all up from her belly, mixing it in with the anguish of seeing Babel again. The memories of her family. Alex. Olivia. Tania. Marie.

  Mother.

  Father . . .

  All of it. Every shred. Every drop.

  “Come on . . . ,” she whispered.

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Ana?” Ezekiel shouted.

  “I’m trying!”

  The pilot braced his machina’s legs in firing position. Ana curled her fingers into claws. The Eve in her refusing to flinch. To turn away. They’d met death before, after all. Spat right in its face. Clawed and bit and kicked their way back from the quiet black to this.

  This is not the end of me.

  This is just one

  more

  enemy.

  Static electricity dancing on her skin. Denial building up inside her, pulsing in her temples as the Tarantula’s missile batteries arced to life. Rage bubbling up and spilling over her lips as she raised her hand and screamed.

  And screamed.

  AND SCREAMED.

  . . .

  . . . and absolutely nothing happened.

  “Firing.”

  Missiles howled from their launch tubes, dozens of them streaking toward Thundersaurus, smoking vapor trails behind them. Ezekiel tore the wheel left, the truck tipping up onto two wheels for a torturous moment before crashing back to earth with a spray of dirt. The missiles roared in from the sky, exploding into boiling clouds of fire behind them. Deafening impacts shook the truck, Ana slipping back down into the cabin and hanging on for dear life. Another salvo of missiles hit alongside, blasting the floor mats loose from the broken windows. Ana felt the heat almost blistering her skin.

  “What . . . t-the hells?” Lemon groaned, lifting her bleeding head.

  “Lem, keep your head down!” Ana roared. “And get your seat belt on!”

  She held out her hand, trying to summon it again. Her power. Her gift. Whatever the hells you wanted to call it. The affliction that had seen her hunted by the Brotherhood, chased across a wasteland of radioactive glass by a cybernetically augmented killing machine. The curse that had seen the biggest CorpState on the Zona Coast put a contract out on her head.

  Trashbreed.

  Deviate.

  Abnorm.

  Fat lot of good it was doing her now.

  “Why won’t it work?” she hissed.

  The Tarantula let loose another volley, and only Ezekiel’s skill behind the wheel kept them from all being incinerated. The earth around them blossomed into beautiful flowers of flame and black smoke, shrapnel peppering their hull. Ana could see two Titans charging across the wastes in their direction—huge bipedal machina that made Goliaths look like toy soldiers. A Juggernaut was rolling right at them, too, tank treads cutting the dirt, autoguns blazing. Kaiser began barking out the back window, tail thumping against the seats. Cricket poked his head up to quiet the blitzhund down, his mismatched eyes boggling as he spied what had riled Kaiser up.

  “Um,” he said. “Point of order . . .”

  A spray of high-velocity rounds shattered the front windshield, Ana shrieking as Ezekiel pushed her below the dashboard. The engine blew a plume of black smoke, making a sound like bolts being dropped into a meat grinder. They were still at least two kilometers from Babel’s suburban sprawl, but if they could get into the streets, there’d be more cover. Ezekiel gunned the engine, hitting an old broken highway; Ana crawled into his lap and stretched her hand toward the machina now moving to cut off their path to the city. She closed her fist. Gritted her teeth. Tears in her eyes.

  “Dammit, why won’t it work?”

  Lemon groaned, trying to pull herself up in her seat. Cricket waved her down, double-checking her seat belt as he spoke.

  “Um, I don’t want to alarm anyone. But you might wanna look behind us. . . .”

  Ana peered through the busted rear window, heart sinking as she saw a familiar figure roaring out of the glasstorm. He was riding a different motorcycle, probably recovered from one of the Freebooters Ezekiel had shot. His chest was crusted with dry blood. Clothes shredded. Gas mask over his face. But still, there was no mistaking him.

  “Preacher . . . ,” Ana breathed.

  “Are you kidding me?” Ezekiel glanced into the rearview mirror. “What does it take to kill this fu—”

  The missile caught them on the driver’s side, striking the earth just below the door. Every remaining window in the truck exploded, glass spraying the cabin as Thundersaurus was flung into the air, spinning as it went. Lemon wailed, clutching her seat belt as the truck tried to fly. Ana wasn’t lucky enough to be belted in, Ezekiel folding his body over hers and roaring “HOLD ON!” as Thundersaurus crashed back to earth, flipping nose to tail in a hail of glass and flame. The world turned end over end, Ana cracked her skull against something hard, blinding pain seething through her Memdrive. No way up or down. Endless, agonizing moments as the truck kept rolling, crashing, splintering, finally skidding to a smoking halt.

  Blood on her tongue. Glass in her hair. Pain lancing through her skull. Ana groaned, peering out through the shattered windshield. Kaiser had been thrown loose in the crash and was lying motionless on the cracked asphalt
. She couldn’t see Cricket. The truck had landed on its roof, with Lemon suspended upside down by her seat belt, groaning and senseless. Any second now, another payload of missiles would come flying from those Tarantulas. She had to get out, had to stop them. . . .

  Ezekiel unbuckled his seat belt, collapsed almost on top of her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Blinding light in her head. Screaming in her ears.

  The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

  They have only one thing left to take from me.

  The last and most precious thing.

  Not my life, no.

  Something dearer still.

  “I . . .”

  She heard boots on gravel, the soft chink of approaching spurs.

  The Preacher’s voice, dry as shale.

  “. . . coordinates seven-seven-twelve-alpha. Priority one. Priority one. Check your fire, Omega, repeat, check your fire.”

  Ana heard heavy footsteps, the crunch of tank treads in the dirt. The hum of servos and the hiss of pistons. Her head was white-hot pain. Static ringing in her skull where she’d cracked it. She put her hand to her Memdrive, felt a deep split in the housing beneath its pseudo-skin. Her fingers came away soaked with blood.

  The four figures part, and a fifth enters the room. Male. Broad shoulders, silhouetted against the glare. The others look to him, expectant.

  “I can’t,” the newcomer says.

  “You must,” they reply.

  “I won’t.”

  The leader offers his pistol. “You will.”

  “Ezekiel . . . ,” Ana said.

  The newcomer wipes his hand across his eyes.

  But finally, he takes the pistol.

  “Oh god . . .”

  She looked into the lifelike’s eyes. That old-sky blue. Those eyes that had looked at her with such adoration as they lay together in her room. So much pain as he raised the pistol and aimed it at her head . . .

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “It was you,” she whispered.

  “What?” Ezekiel blinked. “What was me?”

  Tears blurring the world around her. Memories finally coalescing. The last remnants of those final hours. The five of them, standing there in that cell above the carnage they’d made. Gabriel, Uriel, Hope, Faith.