Lifel1k3

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “Get in. Find Ana. Get out.”

  “. . . That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s not exactly complicated, is it? I mean, as far as master plans go.”

  “We don’t know how many of them are in there until we get inside.” Ezekiel crouched behind a rusting armored personnel carrier, surveyed the scene. “So we move quick, and we move quiet. Hopefully Ana and Cricket haven’t gotten far.”

  “What if all your murderbot brothers and sisters are up there waiting for us?”

  “We use our secret weapon,” he said.

  “Okay, now you’re talking.” Lemon sighed with relief. “Fabulous as it is, I knew you weren’t dense enough to just march into certain doom with nothing but a smile. Is this secret weapon inside? What’s it look like?”

  “About five foot two. Red hair. Freckles. Kind of cute.”

  Lemon blinked.

  “. . . This secret weapon of yours sounds disturbingly familiar, Dimples.”

  “Listen,” Ezekiel said. “All the systems in that tower, the lifelikes—in fact, every living thing on earth? They need electrical current to function. You can stop machina and logika with a wave of your hand. Who knows what you can do to a lifelike or a living person?”

  “You think now is a good time to find out?”

  “I think now is a good time for both of us to stop being afraid.”

  Lemon thought about that. About being frightened and what it had cost her. The lies she’d told because of her fear. The lies she’d lost herself inside.

  It wasn’t possible to live in a world like this without being scared, she knew that. And being afraid was okay sometimes—fear was what stopped the Bad Thing eating you. But she realized it wasn’t being frightened that had cost her the things she loved. It was becoming paralyzed by it. Instead of asking for help, she’d closed herself off. Instead of opening up, she’d shut herself down. She didn’t want to make that mistake again. Didn’t want to lose herself to it anymore. Ana needed her. Cricket needed her.

  It was okay to be afraid.

  You just couldn’t let that fear stop you.

  “All right.” Lemon looked at the ruins around her. Back into Ezekiel’s eyes, searching for the strength to take that terrifying first step. “But before we go in there, I need to ask you something. And I need you to be straight with me, okay?”

  The lifelike nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  Lemon flashed a small smile. “You really think I’m cute?”

  Ezekiel laughed, his dimple creasing his cheek. She laughed with him, the feeling warming her insides. And in it, in him, in them, she found exactly what she needed. Taking a deep, trembling breath, she lifted her boot and took that terrifying first step.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The pair dashed across to the entrance. Lemon clomped and cursed in her oversized rad-suit as Ezekiel charged out ahead and into the bay. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness after the glare outside, but eventually, among the rows of lifeless logika and abandoned hardware, she made out the wreckage of Ana’s Titan. It was lying broken and blackened among a few thousand spent shell casings. Smoking sentry automata hung limp from the walls, spitting sparks. Excalibur lay on the concrete. But of Ana herself, Lemon saw no sign.

  Ezekiel cursed under his breath. “We’re too late.”

  Lemon bent down and picked up the stun bat. She caught sight of something in the wreck, breath catching in her throat.

  “Oh no . . .”

  Kneeling by the ruined Titan, she gathered up a broken little body. Spindly arms and legs, heat sinks like a porcupine’s quills running along his spine. Her eyes filled with tears, rage burning away her grief and swallowing her fear.

  “Cricket,” she whispered. “Those bastards . . .”

  “They got Ana,” Ezekiel said. “There’s only two places they’d take her. To the cellblocks in Security Division, or straight to the Artificial Intelligence levels to try and break into Myriad’s core.”

  The lifelike looked at her cradling the little logika’s broken body in her arms.

  Cricket’s head was missing.

  “Lemon, are you listening to me?”

  She sniffed thickly. Nodded. “Yeah. I hear you.”

  “With Myriad locked down, I’m not sure how many of the automated security systems are still running. It looks like they’re on emergency power in here. I need you to fritz the camera systems, any automata turrets we might find. You think you can handle that?”

  “I . . . I think so.”

  “Security Division is closer. We’ll check the cellblocks first.”

  “. . . Okay.”

  “Ana needs us now. You have to be strong.”

  She sniffed again, laid Cricket’s body gently on the ground. Grief closing her throat, blurring her sight. Strapping Excalibur to her back, she silently vowed that whoever had done this to him would get their payback in spades.

  “I’m sorry, Crick,” she said.

  Lemon tossed her bedraggled bangs from her eyes. Blinked away those hateful tears. She stood slowly, looking Ezekiel in the eye. Her jaw was clenched. Her hands were fists.

  “Let’s go get our girl.”

  The old man was dying.

  He’d been dying for years, truth told. The cancer had Silas by the bones even back when this tower hummed with life, when the machines sang and his walking stick kept the time. But in the years since the revolt, the disease had spread through his body. A guest who’d overstayed its welcome. A promise he couldn’t break. And now Silas Carpenter was dying for real.

  It seemed fitting that he’d die here in this tower, where it all began. He was slumped in a holding cell, somewhere in Security Division. The walls were transparent plasteel, the door had a small slot for meals to be passed back and forth. There were old bloodstains on the floor. He wondered dimly if this was the room where they’d killed Nic. Alexis. The children. He’d never seen the bodies, but when Ezekiel had appeared out of the smoke and chaos in those final hours with that broken, bleeding girl in his arms, the tears in the lifelike’s eyes had told Silas all he needed to know. His best friend was dead.

  And their dream was dead along with him.

  It had started out so pure. So true. They’d wanted to change the world, Nicholas and he. Reclaim it from the ruins and make it whole again. The lifelikes were meant to make that possible. Humanity at its most perfect. Its most passionate. More human than human. After Raphael’s suicide, Silas had known the project was flawed. That they’d made a mistake, playing at being gods. But after the bomb that killed Grace, after Ana ended in the hospital . . . Nicholas was never going to see reason after that. His rage and ego just wouldn’t let him. Pride cometh before the fall, they said.

  And what a fall it’d been.

  Silas put his hand to his mouth, coughed wetly, smearing his fingers with blood. His chest burned with every breath, tears welling in his eyes. They’d not even given him meds for the hurt. Faith had hauled him across the desolation of Dregs and Zona Bay and the Glass and laid him at Gabriel’s feet like a prize. At first, Gabe had been overjoyed to see him. But when it became apparent that Silas could no more unlock Myriad than he could sprout wings and fly, Gabriel’s joy had turned to sullen fury. They’d locked Silas in the dark, feeding him cans of processed slop to keep him an inch from death’s door.

  Not for much longer.

  He coughed again, tasting salt and death. They hadn’t given him any safety gear, and he’d been soaking up Babel’s ambient radiation for days. His gums had started bleeding last night. His fingernails, too. It was just a race now to see what would kill him first: the Big C or good old-fashioned internal hemorrhaging.

  He deserved it, he supposed. An ending like this. He’d tried to make it right. He’d given her a life, at least. Away from this graveyard and its ghosts. With any luck, she was far from here, Ezekiel and Cricket by her side. They’d steer h
er true, even if he couldn’t. For all his failures, he’d given her some hope. And in doing so, given hope to himself.

  It was all he had left.

  “Hello, Silas,” said a voice.

  He looked up through his tears, smudging the blood across his mouth. It hurt to breathe. Hurt worse to speak. And so he simply nodded, looking at Faith with a maker’s eye. Pale skin and dark hair and a voice like warm smoke. She was beautiful, no doubt. One of their finest. But tragic somehow. Broken. An angel who’d torn off her own wings.

  The lifelike was smiling, hate shining in those gray eyes. Silas wondered where it came from. Faith’s persona had been modeled on Ana’s, and the Ana he’d known had always been kind. She had a streak of rebellion in her, true, but never a viciousness. Somewhere along the line, Faith had become something different. Taken Ana’s rebellious streak and turned it to outright defiance. Violence. Cruelty.

  Was it the Libertas virus that had filled her so full of rage? Or had it been there all along? The same darkness that made Raphael strike that match? Gabriel pick up that gun?

  Perhaps it was just the way of things now. Life was hell outside those walls, sure and true. In this world humanity had made, it was only natural, wasn’t it? To hate the ones who forced this life upon you?

  But he still had his hope. For her. They couldn’t take that away from him.

  No, he’d take that to his grave.

  And then Silas saw the figure draped over Faith’s shoulder. Wrapped up in a snot-green radiation suit, arms hanging limp. He focused bleary eyes on the suit’s visor and, through it, caught sight of a tangled blond fauxhawk.

  The heart seized in the old man’s chest.

  “N-no,” he wheezed.

  “She came to save you, Silas, isn’t that sweet?” Faith smiled all the way to her eyeteeth. “Perhaps she loved you after all. You humans and your adorable frailties.”

  “N-nuh—” Silas coughed violently, clutching his ribs.

  Unable to breathe. To think. To speak.

  “N—”

  No.

  “I’m taking her to see Gabriel,” Faith declared. “And then to Myriad, I suppose. See if our wayward princess can’t undo her daddy’s locks. But I didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you down here in the dark, old man. So I brought you some company. Someone to talk to. An old friend, I believe.”

  Faith tossed something small and metallic into the cell. The object bounced and clanked along the concrete floor, skidding to a rest at the old man’s feet. With a wince of pain, Silas reached down, cradled it in his bloody hands.

  Mismatched eyes, now unlit.

  An electric voice box, now silent.

  Cricket’s severed head.

  “I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted,” Faith said.

  The lifelike spun on her heel, stalked out of the cellblock.

  The old man clutched the little logika’s remains to his traitorous chest.

  And he felt the hope inside him die.

  “Ana.”

  The girl groaned, eyelashes fluttering. Her body was aching, her optic itching, her head pounding like a kick drum. Some part of her knew there was pain waiting when she opened her eyes. And so she screwed them shut to blot out the light.

  “Ana. Wake up.”

  The voice was soft and deep. She felt a hand on her shoulder, a gentle shake. She could hear a familiar hum, the voice taking her back to sweeter days. Flowers in the garden and music in the air. For a moment, she thought she was back in her room, soft white sheets and clean white walls. The days before the revolt. The days before they . . .

  They . . .

  She opened her eyes. And there he was. Tousled blond hair and eyes like green glass and a face so beautiful it made her heart hurt to see it. To remember him as he’d been on the day she first met him, the sweetness in his smile and the kindness in his eyes. Cradling Grace in his arms in the garden as they asked her to keep their secret. Standing above her brother with pistol in hand and the stink of blood hanging in the air, little Alex’s eyes wide and bright with fear when he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  Because what answer could there be to a question like that?

  “Gabriel,” she whispered.

  The lifelike smiled the way the moon smiles at the stars. Pressed his fingertips to his lips, visibly trembling with excitement. He looked the same as the last time she’d seen him, wreathed in gunsmoke inside that cell. His eyes a little wider, perhaps. Bloodshot from lack of sleep. His hair unkempt. But he was even dressed the . . .

  Oh god . . .

  Gabriel was dressed the same. Exactly the same. White linen, slightly grayed with time, tiny spatter patterns on the fabric.

  Old bloodstains.

  “Better to rule in hell,” the beautiful man smiles, “than serve in heaven.”

  “It’s so good to see you again, Ana,” he breathed.

  She lunged at him, fingers clawing. There was nothing but rage inside her then, the blackest hatred she’d ever felt, rising in her throat and strangling her scream. She wanted to crush that beautiful face with her bare hands. To put her thumbs into those pretty green eyes. But she found herself pinned—handcuffed to a wheelchair they must have taken from the med wing. The metal bonds around her wrists cutting into her skin, the pain in her ribs and head flaring bright as she thrashed.

  “You bastard, let me up!” she roared.

  “VOICE SAMPLE RECEIVED,” said a soft, musical voice. “PROCESSING.”

  She paused at that, breathing ragged, tossing stray locks from her eyes.

  “. . . Myriad?”

  She looked around her, finally taking in where she was sitting. The space was huge, circular. Emergency lighting flickered and hummed, casting a blood-red glow over the entire scene. They were on a broad metal gantry above a vast, open shaft running through the heart of Babel. A wide metal bridge led to a pair of huge steel doors, sealed at her back. The platform she sat on encircled a great sphere of dusty chrome, almost a hundred meters across. Its surface was almost flawless, scarlet lights in the shaft above and below gleaming on its shell. Etched in the sphere’s skin, directly in front of her, was the outline of a hexagonal door. On it, written in what might have been dried blood, were three simple sentences.

  YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.

  YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.

  YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

  The door was scorched. Pitted with tiny dents. Scored with thousands of small scratches, as if someone had tried blasting, beating, hacking their way through it. And still, it remained closed. It was inset with a single lens of crystal-blue glass, pulsing softly, flaring into brighter light as that musical voice spoke again. On a small metal plinth beside the door, the tiny figure of a holographic angel with luminous, flowing wings was slowly spinning in an endless circle.

  “VOICE SAMPLE CONFIRMED. IDENTITY: ANASTASIA MONROVA, DAUGHTER, FOURTH, NICHOLAS AND ALEXIS MONROVA. PROCEED?”

  Gabriel pressed his fingers to his mouth again, stifling the almost hysterical laughter spilling from his lips.

  “Yes, Myriad,” he said. “Yes, please.”

  “THIS IS POINTLESS, GABRIEL. YOU WILL NOT FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR HERE.”

  “I said proceed!” Gabriel snarled.

  “PROCESSING LOG-IN REQUEST. PLEASE WAIT.”

  Ana finally realized they were on the Artificial Intelligence levels, right in the core of the tower. The Myriad computer was the figurative and literal heart of Babel, connected by enormous lattices of optical cable and wireless networks to every other system within Gnosis. Its interface wore the shape of that holographic angel, but it was actually a vast series of liquid-state servers and processing cores, housed within this single gleaming sphere. Its shell was meant to withstand a nuclear blast, its knowledge preserved even if the city around it died. Ana remembered it from her childhood—a constant companion, watching and hearing and touching every part of her life within the tower.

  Only now it had shut its
elf down. Locked itself off rather than see its knowledge used by the things that had destroyed its creator.

  And only a Monrova could open it again.

  Four huge logika stood on either side of that sealed door. They were all Goliath-class: eighty-tonners with sky-blue optics, glowing purple in the blood-red light. They wore the perfect circle of the GnosisLabs logo on their chests, standing like statues and staring impassively. A human was in danger—the Three Laws were being broken right in front of them. And yet, they weren’t lifting a finger to help her.

  Ana scoped the closest bot’s ident number, tagged on its chest.

  “7849-1G, help me,” she commanded. “Get me out of this chair!”

  The Goliath didn’t move a single metal muscle.

  “I said help me!” she shouted.

  “You might try a ‘please,’” Gabriel said. “If your father ever taught you how to say the word, that is.”

  Ana looked at the lifelike. He was disheveled, barefoot. Thinner than he’d been. Hollowed cheeks and tangled hair. Ana glanced at the nicks and scratches in Myriad’s shell. Gabriel’s Three Truths, scrawled in dried blood on the chrome. Beside the creed, she saw tiny dimples in the metal, spattered with old blood. Little groups of four, side by side. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds.

  Knuckle dents, she realized.

  She scoped Gabriel’s hands. Strong and white and flawless. Imagined him down here, night after night, beating those hands to bleeding on this door. Waiting until they healed so he could begin pounding on it again. The secrets to resurrecting his beloved trapped behind it. Forever beyond his reach.

  “No one can love like we do. And when two of us love each other . . .”

  She looked up into those glass-green eyes, boiling with madness and obsession. And for the first time in a long time, she was truly afraid.

  “I apologize for your restraints. But I’m quite unsure what your . . . gift is capable of doing to one of us.” Gabriel waved at the logika looming around the door. “You can destroy Goliaths, at least. So, best for your hands to remain bound. If you so much as wave them at me, I’ll have Faith break them both.”

  Ana saw the female lifelike standing nearby at the gantry’s railing, jagged bangs draped over flat gray eyes. Looking at Ana’s hands with a dark smile.