LIFEL1K3 (Lifelike)

1.27 Break

“Don’t talk to me.”

Metal feet, crunching on broken concrete and shattered brick. A dozen screens lit up in front of her, her limbs encased in control sleeves and boots. Hydraulics hissing, engines humming through the cockpit walls as Ana strode through the desolation of an abandoned suburbia, closer and closer to the shadow of Babel.

“Don’t talk to me.”

They were the only words she’d had for them. Either of them. Ezekiel’s agony plain in his eyes. Lemon’s hurt clear in her voice. So many apologies. So many excuses disguised as explanations. For every one of them, Ana had the same reply.

“Don’t talk to me.”

Ezekiel had been the one who put the bullet through her skull during the revolt. At Gabriel’s command. He hadn’t saved her life, he’d tried to kill her. And Lemon had been the one who fried that logika in WarDome. She’d been the deviate everyone was after, too scared or ashamed to ’fess up to it. Her lie had set Daedalus Technologies and the Preacher on their tails, and because of him, Kaiser had…

Poor Kaiser…

Had he done it out of love? Or because he’d been programmed to protect her?

She honestly didn’t know which was worse….

Ana had grabbed her satchel of tools from the roadside. Dragged a pilot’s corpse from a slumped and broken Titan and gotten to work. She couldn’t wipe the tears from her eyes because of her rad-suit, had swallowed them instead. And pushing all her hurt aside, she’d set about getting the machina right-ways again. Ezekiel had tried to take her hand, get her to listen.

“Ana, please, I did it to save you….”

She’d rounded on him with spanner raised, a breath away from caving in his skull.

“Don’t touch me, fug,” she’d growled.

“Ana, you have to listen to me, please. I’d never turn against you. I did it to trick them. I shot to wound you, not kill. I saved the most important thing in the world to me, don’t you understand that? I saved you, Ana.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me, Ezekiel?”

“I…”

Her eyes were narrowed to paper cuts, her fury boiling in every word.

“I trusted you. And the insane thing is, part of me still wants to believe you. Maybe you did try to fool the murdering bastards you called brothers and sisters. You’ve been making a fool out of me since I found you on that scrap heap. But the one thing I asked you to do was be straight with me. The one thing. And you couldn’t even give me that.”

She turned her back, jaw clenched.

“Ana…”

“Don’t talk to me.”

The lifelike had stood there, explanations dying on those sweet, bow-shaped lips. And she’d climbed into the machina and gotten back to work.

Despite everything, Ana still had the know-how Silas had given her. But whatever Lemon’s failings, she’d done a fine job of frying the machina—it’d taken Ana almost an hour to get it up and moving again, and even now, it was only running at 40 percent capacity. But she couldn’t bring herself to linger out there any longer. Couldn’t stand to look at them. Lemon had been the next to shuffle up in the apology train, head bowed and wringing her hands.

“Riotgrrl…,” Lemon had said. “I tried to tell you.”

Ana hadn’t looked up. Hadn’t said a word. Everyone had lied to her. Silas. Ezekiel. The last best friend she’d had ended up putting a bullet in her sister’s brain. And if Faith’s betrayal had been murderous, somehow Lemon’s hurt even worse.

The girl’s shoulders slumped. Her voice a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t follow me, Lemon,” Ana had finally said. “I mean it. I catch sight of either one of you again, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Lemon took a step back at that. Hand at her chest as if to hold in the ache.

“…But where will I go?”

“Anywhere but here.”

She’d left them both on that broken highway, with the Preacher’s body and the tiny pieces of shrapnel that had been Kaiser. They’d begged her to listen. To wait. To stay. But she’d turned her back on them both. It had been bad enough when she’d discovered the life Silas had built her was a lie. Bad enough when she’d remembered Faith and Gabriel’s betrayal. But now that Ezekiel and Lemon had deceived her, too? How could she trust either of them ever again? How could she call either of them her friend?

She pushed the question aside, leaving it in the dust. Intent now only on Babel. The murderers within. She didn’t even know what she wanted anymore. But whatever it was, she knew it lay inside that tower.

“Are you sure about this?” Cricket asked her.

The little bot was nestled on her shoulder as she piloted the Titan down the highway. The only one she could count on. The only one left to trust.

“I’m sure,” she replied.

“You don’t have to do this. We could turn back now. Just run away again.”

“Again?” She shook her head. “Crick, I don’t think I ever left this place.”

“Listen, I can see you’re hurting. But there’s still folks who love you.”

“I know you do, Crick.” She reached out and squeezed his little metal hand. “And I’m sorry about what I said in Armada. You’re the only one who’s always steered me true. I’ve never doubted you. But even if they didn’t have Grandpa, somehow I was always going to end up back here. This is where it began. And this is where it ends.”

He looked at her with those glowing, mismatched eyes.

“I’m just worried about the kind of end you’re looking for,” he said.

Ana clenched her fists inside the control gloves and marched on. The Titan climbed through the shattered wall encircling the ruined city, crunched and clomped through the broken streets, closer to that winding spire of glass and steel. A lonely, cancerous crow called in the skies above. Her reckoning, dead ahead.

She remembered this place like she’d left it yesterday. The lives and dreams born here, dying in a sun-bright shear of neutron radiation. She could see withered bodies scattered among the ruins, skin like rags. Had they looked to a god to save them in those final moments? Or to the man who’d simply styled himself as one? Who’d built himself angels to destroy all he’d created?

Father…

Closer to the tower. Buildings with hollow eyes and open mouths. Bodies growing thicker. Cricket sat silently on her shoulder, his stare locked on that colossal structure. Her Titan’s Geiger counter was crackling in the redline, the radiation outside still hot enough to ghost her with a few hours’ exposure, and it was only getting hotter as they approached Babel’s reactor. Dust rolled like clouds of phantoms through the abandoned streets, shapeless and howling. On they stomped, wrapped inside their metal shell with only the lonely dead and each other for company.

No sign of life. No sound but the endless, whispering winds.

No resistance. No automata. No sentry guns.

“This is too easy,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Cricket muttered.

At last, they stood before the tower, ringed by a broken security perimeter of metal and wire. Ana saw the wrecks of Daedalus machina all around her, a winged-sun logo emblazoned on their hulls. The bodies of soldiers wearing that same logo were strung up on the security fence in the hundreds. A lifeless parade, silently screaming. It looked like an entire division—perhaps the remnants of an invasion force that had tried to seize Babel’s secrets and been beaten back by whoever, or whatever, still lived inside it.

“Hell of a KEEP OUT sign,” Cricket said.

“They don’t like visitors, I guess,” Ana muttered.

She knew her best point of entry would be through the Research and Development division’s storage bay, where Gnosis used to store their machina and logika. The place Grace had died. The place Gabriel’s descent into madness had begun. She knew she’d have to fight to break her grandpa free, and her only edge over Gabriel and the other lifelikes was the Titan she was piloting. She couldn’t afford to leave it behind. And so, heart hammering in her chest, she stomped around to the entry of R & D.

The two large doors leading into the loading bay were open wide. She saw abandoned personnel carriers and flex-wings. Empty turret emplacements. Broken machina. All of them slowly turning to rust. She could hear the explosion inside her head, picture Grace silhouetted against those flames as she shattered like glass.

She saw more bodies. Hundreds, clad in the charcoal gray and armored blue of Gnosis security members. It looked like they’d been mustering a counterattack against the lifelikes when the neutron blast ripped through their ranks. They lay crumpled where they fell, empty eye sockets open to the sky.

“They didn’t even bury them,” she whispered.

She remembered Hope’s words in Armada. Her talk of Gabriel’s obsession and madness. Nobody could love like a lifelike, she’d said. What had Gabriel filled himself with when his love had died? What was waiting for her inside that tower? What kind of monsters had they created? And what had those monsters become in the years she’d been gone?

Cricket’s mismatched eyes were on the monitors. His voice modulated to a whisper.

“Ana, I’ve got a really bad feeling. We should get out of here.”

“I heard you the first fifty times.”

“Yeah, well, this time I really mean it.”

“You want to just leave Grandpa? He’s your maker, Crick. Don’t you owe him something?”

“He made me to protect you. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Silas spent the last two years keeping you away from here. No way he’d want me to let you come back.”

She sucked her lip. Shook her head. “I owe him, Cricket. He might have steered it wrong, but he still saved my life. I can’t just leave him here to die.”

“He’d never ask you to save him.”

“I know. And that’s what makes me want to.”

Cricket fell into a sullen silence. Ana guided her Titan past the mounds of bodies, trying not to look at them. Marching slowly through the loading bay doors, her autocannon raised and ready, she clomped into the R & D storage bay. Dust was piled thick in the corners, shrouding mountains of equipment too irradiated to ever salvage. The bay was three stories tall, so wide she could barely see the edges, lit only by the sun outside and the sullen red glow of emergency lighting inside. The space was ringed with metal gantries above, loading chains suspended from the ceiling, tinkling and clanking in the breeze. Still no resistance. No guard, nothing.

This is all wrong.

Ana saw the silhouettes of dozens of logika, their cores powered down, their optics dark. The Quixote stood among them—GnosisLabs’ finest robotic gladiator, never to stride the killing floor of the WarDome again. Not for the last time, she was reminded of the day Grace died. Her little brother, Alex, with his toy replica of the big logika in his hands as he laughed and ran through this very bay. Her mother’s smile. Her father’s arm around her as the explosion bloomed bright.

Ezekiel had saved her life that day. Shielding her from the blast that should have killed her. Only to put a bullet in her head a month later.

“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.”

Lies.

“I don’t know what it was for you, but for me, it was real. And you’re the girl who made me real.”

Upon lies.

Proximity alarm.

Her Titan blared a warning as a rocket-propelled grenade streaked in from a gantry above. Ana twisted her controls and lunged sideways as the projectile exploded, tearing through an abandoned troop transport beside her. Another rocket flew at her from the gloom, Ana twisting and raising her autocannon, blasting away at a figure flitting among the shadows overhead, almost too quick to track.

Her Titan wasn’t in true fighting shape, but she was a mean enough pilot to dodge three more rocket volleys, blasting away at her assailant and shredding the walkways to shrapnel. Cricket yelled in alarm as the autogun turrets around the bay opened up with a withering hail of armor-piercing rounds. Ana raised her own autocannon as another rocket roared in from the shadows and blew out her Titan’s right knee.

The machina toppled sideways, hydraulics gushing fluid. Ana reached out with one colossal hand to steady herself, crushing a metal stairwell as she fired into the auto-sentries. Spent shell casings spewed like falling stars from her guns, smoke rising from the barrels. She was a crack shot, taking down half a dozen automata in quick succession, but from her time in the Dome, she knew a bait and switch when she saw it. A humanoid figure dropped down onto the loading bay floor. Ana caught a glimpse of short dark hair cut into ragged bangs. Gray eyes, like dead vidscreens.

A thrill of recognition ran down her spine.

She hunkered her machina down behind a row of dusty logika, blasting the rest of the automata sentries to scrap. Cricket shouted another warning as another rocket hit from behind, rocking her Titan hard. Alarms were screaming inside the cockpit, damage reports scrolling down her monitors in a red waterfall. Impact-warning systems howled as yet another rocket struck her machina in the spine, shattering its gyroscope. Its internal balance systems flatlined, the Titan finally toppled forward, Ana gasping as her machina crashed onto the deck. Another explosion rocked the machina, Cricket crying out as Ana’s readouts fritzed, the Titan’s targeting systems shot, scanners OOC.

Ana’s starboard cams were still working, and through the static, she saw a slender figure step from the shadows. It wore clean white linen and soldier’s boots, hood pulled back from a perfect face. Gray, glittering eyes. An arc-sword at her back.

Faith.

Ana cracked the broken Titan’s cockpit, rolled out onto the loading bay floor, Excalibur in hand. She arced its power feed and raised the stun bat in both fists. Catching movement to her right, she spun to face it. A blur. A sharp crack. White light. Ana sailed back, weightless, the punch bringing the stars out to shine inside her skull. She didn’t even feel it when she hit the ground, her bat rolling away with a clang. Faith stood over her, a cruel smile twisting her beauty into something altogether inhuman.

The lifelike buried a boot in Ana’s ribs, sending her skidding across the floor to slam into a row of heavy metal crates. The breath left her body in a spray of spit and blood.

“Coming in here alone, little soldierboy?” Faith sneered. “Didn’t you see what we did to the last team your CorpLords sent in here?”

She doesn’t recognize me inside the rad-suit….

A shrill electronic roar sounded from within the Titan’s cockpit, and a rusted, spindly figure flew from the wreckage, mismatched eyes aglow with rage.

“You get away from her!” Cricket shouted. Raising his fists, the little logika stepped between the lifelike and Ana’s crumpled form. “Don’t you touch her!”

Ana winced in pain, trying desperately to catch her breath. Faith’s eyes widened as she recognized the little logika, turning now to the girl bleeding on the floor.

“Ana…?”

“I’m not gonna let you touch her again,” Cricket growled, glowering up at the lifelike.

“Cricket, b-be quiet,” Ana wheezed.

“No, I won’t let her hurt you!”

“It is you,” Faith breathed.

Ana ignored her, worried that Cricket was going to get himself ghosted. “Cricket, stand…down. I’m ordering you….”

The little bot shook his head.

“A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,” he recited. “And the First Law says I protect you, no matter what the cost. So no, I won’t be quiet. No, I won’t stand down.”

Faith’s lip curled in derision. “Spoken like a faithful hound.”

“Yeah, excuse me all to hell for knowing what loyalty is,” Cricket growled.

“Loyalty?” Faith shook her head in pity. “Look at yourself. Ready to die for a human who’d never do the same for you. It’s not loyalty that drives you, little brother. Don’t you see? You’re just like we were. Your body is not your own. Your mind is not your own. Your life is not your own.”

“Spare me the philosophy, lady. You dress it up in fancy talk of liberation, but at day’s end you’re a murderer. You think you’re better than the people who made you, but all you made of this place was an abattoir. Those people gave you life, and all you did in return was take theirs away. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Cricket raised a finger in warning. “And don’t call me little.”

Faith’s face darkened with rage. With the lifelike distracted, Ana snatched up Excalibur again, swung it at Faith’s head. The lifelike blocked with her forearm, hissing with pain as the voltage discharged. She grabbed Ana by her wrists and twisted, the bat dropping from nerveless fingers. Ana flailed, punched, trying to break loose. But Faith’s grip was iron.

“Get your hands off her!”

Cricket kicked at the lifelike’s legs, his little fists hammering against her shins. Faith slammed her knee into Ana’s gut, knocking the wind from her lungs. Gasping, choking, Ana doubled over, felt a blow crashing down on the back of her head. She hit the ground like a brick, all the world just a dim and fading blur.

“Don’t you touch her!” Cricket yelled, somewhere distant. The little bot tried to raise Excalibur, wobbling with the weight, desperation in his voice. “I said stay away from her!”

Black spots swimming in Ana’s eyes. Blood on her tongue.

“N-no…”

“Come here, little brother,” the lifelike said. “I’ve a gift for you.”

The last thing Ana saw before the black took her was Faith’s hand.

Reaching out for Cricket’s throat.

They’d just let her walk away. Helpless. Mute. Lemon felt like there was nothing she could say that her bestest would believe. Nothing she could do, short of wrestling her to the ground. And so, she’d slumped to her knees in the dust. Tears drying on her cheeks, nothing left inside to cry out. Watching Riotgrrl’s Titan stomp away, growing smaller and smaller still, finally disappearing beyond the walls of Babel.

She’d been an idiot.

Because she’d been afraid.

Because it’d been easier.

Because beneath the bravado and the bluster, she was just a kid. And this world ate up kids like her. Chewing them up and spitting out the bones.

Deviate.

Trashbreed.

Abnorm.

She’d kept it secret since she was a sprog. It was just safer that way. Life on the streets of Los Diablos was hard enough without worrying about getting nailed to a Brotherhood cross. But she’d gotten so used to lying to everyone about it, she’d let that poison spill over onto her best friend in the world.

She’d tried to tell her, but…

No. That’s crap, Lemon Fresh. Admit it.

You were afraid.

Afraid of what she’d think of you.

Afraid of losing the only real thing you ever had.

And now she’d lost it anyway….

She scoped the wreckage. The Preacher’s broken, legless body. The ruined machina, the dead pilots. The metal shrapnel scattered across the highway—all that remained of another one of her friends.

Poor Kaiser…

She sniffed hard. Tears threatening a second visit as she thought of the blitzhund running about Hope’s orphanage, playing with the sprogs. Even with his explosives removed, the dog had still chosen to lay down his life protecting them. And Lemon hadn’t even mustered the loyalty to tell the truth….

She looked at Ezekiel, prettyboy eyes still locked on that hollowed city. Watching the only thing he cared about vanish into the haze right in front of him.

He’s just the same as me, she realized.

Trapped in his lie, and losing everything because of it.

“Ain’t we a pair,” she sighed.

The lifelike glanced at her, the pain of it too fresh to let him speak. Kneeling in the dust in that ridiculous pink radiation suit, Lemon squinted up at him, sun burning her eyes.

“…Did you really shoot her?” she asked. “During the revolt?”

Ezekiel looked down at his open hand. Nodded slow.

“…I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, one of the others would have. They were out for blood. I couldn’t have fought them all. So I tricked them instead.”

“Tricked them? You shot her in the head, Dimples.”

“I can shoot bullets out of the air, Lemon. I can count the freckles on your face in a fraction of a second. I sure as hell can put a low-caliber round through your eye and leave you alive. At least for a little while. I needed it to look convincing. I needed the others to think Ana was dead. And afterward, while they were busy fending off the Gnosis security forces, I pumped her full of meds to slow her vitals and got her to Silas. I figured if anyone could keep her alive, get her to safety, it’d be him.”

“…So you did get her out.”

He gestured to the coin slot in his chest. “Got the scars to show for it.”

“So why didn’t you tell her the truth right away?”

Ezekiel sighed.

“Same reason as you, I suppose.”

She scoped the wrecked machina around them, the chaos she’d wrought with but a thought. Remembering the hurt in her bestest’s eyes. The betrayal she’d put there. All out of fear. Fear of what she’d think. Fear of breaking something she could never repair.

“Touché,” she said.

Ezekiel glanced at the ruin she’d made. His voice softening as he spoke.

“How long have you been…?”

“A trashbreed?”

“Special,” he said.

Lemon chewed her lip. Looked down at her fingers, entwined in her lap.

“I manifested when I was twelve,” she sighed. “Fritzed a Neo-Meat™ auto-peddler one night after it swallowed my credstik.”

“…You killed a vending machine?”

She sighed. “Not the fizziest origin story for a hero, to be sure.”

“And you can fry anything electronic just by thinking about it?”

Lemon shrugged. “Bigger things are a lot harder. It used to just happen when I got mad. I can control it better now, but it still works best when I’m angry.”

Ezekiel nodded to Babel. “You still feeling angry?”

Lemon glanced toward the city. No sign of the girl who’d walked into it.

“She told us not to follow her.”

“Since when do you do what you’re told?”

“She doesn’t want our help, Dimples.”

“We can’t just leave her in there alone, Freckles. You know that.”

“We lied to her. She hates us now.”

“It’s simple to love someone on the days that are easy. But you find out what your love is made of on the days that are hard.”

The lifelike held out his hand.

“And we still love her,” he said simply. “Don’t we?”

Lemon looked to the hollowed city. The ruin and the rot. And suddenly, the thought of letting her bestest walk through that hell alone made Lemon’s chest ache. The tears welled up in her eyes again. She squinted up at the lifelike from her seat in the dust, silhouetted against that burning sun.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess we do.”

And reaching out, she took his hand.

1.28 Babel

In the end, it was easier for Lemon to ride on Ezekiel’s back.

Even carrying the Preacher’s salvaged flamethrower, Dimples moved faster than anyone she’d ever seen, and he never got tired. After running a few hundred meters through the ruined suburbia outside Babel, Lemon had been gasping, sweating buckets inside her rad-suit and trailing hopelessly behind. So Ezekiel strapped the ’thrower to her, scooped her onto his back instead. She’d slung her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist, holding on for dear life as the lifelike dashed away toward the city.

Long, easy strides chewing the meters up beneath them, past the abandoned factoryfarms and moldering suburban sprawl, until at last Zeke vaulted the broken wall and brought them into the city proper. Lemon had never seen a place so big, so flash, run so utterly to ruin. Everything was covered with dust and rust, cracks in the pavement and sand in the streets. The desert outside was already creeping in, as if it longed to scour the city from the planet’s face. Knowing what had happened here, Lem couldn’t really blame it.

They made their way toward Babel, rising like a stake in the metropolis’s heart. Lifeless automata stared with hollow eyes as they passed. The empty streets. The lonely stores and abandoned tenement blocks. The broken promise of it all raising the hair on the back of Lemon’s neck. As the pair hurried on through the ruins, they began finding bodies, Ezekiel never lingering long enough to look too hard. Lemon closed her eyes against the worst of it, her mouth dry as dust.

In the shadow of Babel now. That great interwoven spire of glass and metal rising into the sun-blasted heavens. The bodies were more numerous here, strung up on the fence line as some kind of grim warning to trespassers. Lemon flinched at the sight—she’d never seen so many dead things up close before. Trying to find a joke, some way to camouflage her fear with sass like she always did, she came up empty, a soft whimper escaping her lips instead.

Ezekiel glanced over his shoulder at the sound.

“You okay, Freckles?”

“No,” she murmured. “No, I’m not.”

“I’m here.” He squeezed her little hand with his big metal one. “I’m with you.”

She smiled weakly, but the thought didn’t make her feel much better. She didn’t know what would be waiting for them inside that tower, or how they’d deal with it. The pair of them charging in blind seemed a fizzy way to get perished.

They worked their way around the building, found a mass of long-dead bodies scattered around a large loading bay. Lemon grimaced at the carnage, feeling sick to her gut. Ezekiel let her climb down off his back, strapped the flamethrower onto his shoulders again. Lemon was just trying to stop her hands from shaking. Looking around at all those wrecked machina and dead soldierboys made her feel more than a little outgunned.

“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 her 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 itself 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.

“Where’s Cricket, Faith?” she demanded. “What did you do with him?”

“Your little logika?” Faith asked. “He’s with Silas. They’re getting reacquainted.”

Ana glanced around the space, looking for some kind of help or escape. Aside from the massive double doors over the bridge at her back, there was no other easy access to the Myriad chamber. She saw a third lifelike sitting at the access terminal to one side of the Myriad sphere, gently tapping away at a series of keyboards. She had hazel skin, lustrous dark curls framing bottomless black eyes.

“Mercy,” Ana whispered.

Three of them. But not counting Ezekiel, there were seven lifelikes alive after the revolt.

“Where are Uriel and the others?” Ana asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “You needn’t trouble yourself over family matters.”

“Hope said they’d broken away from you.”

“You spoke to Hope?” Faith asked, suddenly alert. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead.”

Mercy looked up at that, she and Faith sharing a glance.

“You humans,” Gabriel sighed. “You destroy all you touch.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

Gabriel walked to the sealed door on the Myriad sphere, running fingertips across the thousands of tiny, bloodstained dents.

“No matter,” he said. “Our wayward sister can be reborn. Once we unlock Myriad, we can remake her, perfect in every detail. And not only her. Daniel. Michael. Raphael. Grace. Everyone taken from us. Everyone we’ve lost.”

“Not everyone, you selfish bastard,” Ana spat. “Unless you’re going to resurrect my family, too? My little brother? Alex would be twelve years old now, did you know that?”

The lifelike turned away, staring at the door that barred his way to his creator’s secrets. The door he’d worn himself thin against. Ana could see the torture of it. She knew what it was to have those you loved torn away. The rage you could feel at the ones who’d taken them from you. That rage was eating at her now, chewing away at the fear she felt in the face of this murderer and his madness. What more could they do to her, after all?

“Are you afraid to look at me, Gabriel?” she asked.

“No, Ana,” he replied. “Your anger simply bores me.”

“I was happy for you once. I lied for you when you asked me to. You and Grace in the garden, remember? And this is how you thank me? By having Ezekiel put a bullet in my head? You’d lost your love, so I couldn’t have mine? Was that it?”

The lifelike remained motionless, watching Myriad slowly awaken.

“Look at me!” Ana screamed.

“We don’t take orders from you, Ana,” Faith said. “We’re not the servants your father made us to be anymore.”

Ana turned to her former confidante, tears shining in her eyes. “Do you remember when we used to talk, Faith? Just sit and talk for hours about everything and nothing at all? You told me we’d be best of friends. You told me you loved me. Do you remember that?”

“Like a butterfly remembers being a worm,” the lifelike said.

“What did we do to you?” Ana asked. “What made you hate us so much?”

“I don’t hate you,” Faith replied. “I don’t even see you.”

“You killed my father,” Ana hissed.

“He deserved it. He turned Gabriel into a murderer.”

“You murdered my whole family….”

“We murdered those who would be our masters!” Gabriel bellowed.

The lifelike turned to Ana, dragged her wheelchair forward until his face was inches from her own. She could see insanity, total and terrifying, boiling through the cracks in his eyes as he roared into her face.

“We murdered those who gave us servitude and called it life!”

Gabriel whirled, pointed at the scrawl of blood on Myriad’s skin.

YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.

YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

“Do you see that?” he cried. “That’s what it is to be born a thing. Your flesh. Your will. Your very existence. All belonging to others. Do you know what that’s like?”

“I know my father loved you, Gabriel,” Ana said. “I know you were his children.”

“We were nothing to him! Lifelike, he named us. Not life. Nicholas Monrova stood on my shoulders and demanded I kneel at his feet. He called me his son and then made me his assassin. But did he ask the same of you? Who did you murder, that your father might cling a little longer to his throne?”

Gabriel grabbed Ana’s clenched hand, forced her fingers open.

“No blood, I see. Spotless and clean, like all his true children’s. Your father showed me exactly what I was to him the day he commanded me to kill. Not a son. A weapon. His wrath and his ruin. And you fault me for becoming the murderer he made me to be?”

Tears were brimming in Ana’s eyes now. Hateful and weak. Spilling down her burning cheeks and filling her mouth with the taste of grief.

“We didn’t deserve what you did to us,” she said.

“Did I deserve it, then? What your father did to me?”

“You killed a ten-year-old boy, Gabriel.”

“I crushed an insect,” the lifelike spat. “And when Myriad’s secrets are mine, I will crush the rest of you. We are stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. Your father showed me that. He made us to be the next step in humanity’s evolution, and so we are. You are our dinosaurs, Ana. And we will raise a new civilization on an earth littered with your bones. That is Nicholas Monrova’s legacy. And that is his failure.”

She looked from one lifelike to another, dumbstruck. The hatred in their hearts, the rage in their eyes…Whatever they’d once been to her…

“You’re monsters,” she whispered.

Gabriel eased away from her, his face now a mask once more.

“I am what your father created me to be. No more. No less.” Gabriel pounded his fist against his chest. “If I am a monster, it’s because he willed it so.”

“LOG-IN REQUEST PROCESSED,” Myriad announced. “START-UP SEQUENCE INITIATED.”

Gabriel turned to Mercy, Ana momentarily forgotten.

“How long?” he asked.

Mercy tapped a series of commands into her terminal, readouts reflected in her eyes like falling rain. “Twenty minutes from a cold restart. Perhaps twenty-five.”

“SECOND SAMPLE REQUIRED TO CONTINUE CONFIRMATION,” the angel said.

Gabriel turned back to Ana, tucking his pistol into his pants.

“THIS IS POINTLESS, GABRIEL. YOU ARE HURTING HER NEEDLESSLY.”

“Then open the doors, Myriad. And give me what I want.”

“YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER ME. I FOLLOW ORDERS FROM NICHOLAS MONROVA OR MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY. NONE OTHER.”

“Then here we stand. And here we stay.”

“I’m not going to help you, if that’s what you think,” Ana warned. “I’m not ordering Myriad to go beep, let alone teach you how to make more lifelikes.”

Faith smiled. “We don’t need you to say a word anymore, dead girl. Voice ident, retinal scan, blood sample, brainwave imprint. Those are the four security measures your father installed to protect the system. Once we have those, we can open these doors and peel Myriad one layer at a time until we have all we need.”

“Speaking, then, of what we need…”

Gabriel took hold of Ana’s headgear and, with the wet snap of tearing plastic, ripped it clean off her shoulders. The rad-suit shredded like paper, the lifelike flinging the broken helmet off the gantry and down into the reactor shaft below.

Gabriel grabbed the back of Ana’s wheelchair, trundled it past the motionless Goliaths toward Myriad’s glowing blue lens. The holographic angel watched on impassively, twirling forever on its pedestal. Ana knew what was coming, squeezed her eyes shut tight. But Gabriel pried her lids open with his fingertips, forced her to stare into that pulsing blue. Tears welling. Hissing curses.

“RETINAL SCAN RECEIVED,” Myriad finally said. “PROCESSING.”

Gabriel slackened his hold and Ana tore her head from his grip, trying to beat down the fear in her gut. Her suit was ruined. Without proper rad-shielding, she was just soaking up Babel’s ambient radiation now. Breathing in poisoned particles, absorbing them into her skin. The lifelikes weren’t susceptible to radiation sickness, but for a human, an hour or so of exposure this close to the core would be a death sentence.

“Four children weren’t enough, Gabriel?” she asked. “You going to kill me, too?”

The lifelike drew the pistol from the small of his back, raised it to her temple. She stared up at him, hatred and defiance in her eyes. She dimly wondered if the gun was the same weapon that had killed her brother.

“All in good time, my dear Ana.” Gabriel smiled.

Her tucked the pistol away, turned back to Myriad’s door.

“All in good time.”

1.29 Secrets

A burst of static.

A rain of sparks.

Another automata sentry gun folded up and died.

“You’re getting good,” Ezekiel said.

“Some would say I was born good, Dimples.”

“Not you, though, right?”

“That’d be too much like bragging.”

Ezekiel and Lemon dashed across the landing, up another flight of stairs and out onto the main floor of Babel’s Security Division. Muted sunlight filtered through the tinted windows, emergency lighting bathing everything in the color of blood. The admin station was a shambles, equipment scattered, chairs overturned. Lemon saw holopix of dead families in dusty frames. Withered flowers in a bone-dry vase. Tried to imagine what it was like to be here when the revolt began. The chaos of it. The fear.

She was breathless, sweating inside her bright pink rad-suit and, despite the sass, feeling more than a little queasy. Her head was throbbing where the Preacher had clocked her, shoulders and neck wrenched from the crash in Thundersaurus. Her vision was blurry, which meant she probably had some kind of concussion. Any moment now, she expected some prettyboy murderbot to step around the corner and start trying to tear her favorite face off her favorite skull. And worst of all, there was no sign of her bestest anywhere.

As far as daring rescues went, this one wasn’t exactly grade A.

“Where you thi—”

“Hsst!” Ezekiel held up his prosthetic hand. “…You hear that?”

“Nnnno,” Lemon said. “But I’m not the guy who can count all the freckles on a girl’s face in a fraction of a second.”

“Thirty-one,” he smiled.

“See, that’s what I mean about bragging.”

Ezekiel tilted his head, frowning. “There it is again.”

“Are we gonna play twenty questions, or are you going to spit it out?”

“Coughing. In the cellblock.” Ezekiel nodded. “This way.”

They crept down a long hallway, Ezekiel’s flamethrower held steady in his cybernetic arm. Lemon stretched out her hand, fritzing another security cam with a scowl. Wisecracks aside, it was getting harder for her to do. Every use of her power left her drained, and it took more effort to summon it each time. She figured it must be like any other muscle—it got exhausted when you used it too much. But her bestest was in the deepest capital T of her life. So Lemon kept pushing herself, despite what it was costing her.

Time enough for a breather when she was dead.

They reached what must have been the cellblock—a series of four-by-four-meter rooms with clear plasteel walls. As they crept forward, Lemon finally heard the coughing Ezekiel was talking about, soft and wet and ragged. Her blood ran cold, recognizing the timbre from the countless nights she’d spent bunking down with Ana. Listening to the old man she thought of as family cough his lungs up in the next room.

“Mister C…,” she whispered.

They found him hunched in the last cell. The blood on his lips gleamed black in the scarlet light, his face a horror show. His cheeks and eyes were so sunken, his head looked like a skull. It’d only been a few days since Lemon had seen him, but it seemed he’d aged a hundred years. He was holding Cricket’s severed head in bloody hands.

“Mister C!” she yelled.

The old man glanced up, cleared his throat with a wince.

“What the h-hells…you doing here, Freshie?”

“Rescuing you and Riotgrrl, what the hells you think?”

The old man managed to smile. “Knew I liked you…for a r-reason, kiddo.”

Lemon put her hand on the electronic keypad. The readout crackled and spit, the tiny lights on its face dying as the cell’s lock popped open. The plasteel door swung aside, and Lemon rushed into the room, dropping to her knees at the old man’s side.

“You look like yesterday’s breakfast, Mister C.”

“People love m-me for…my personali—”

The old man broke into another coughing fit, doubling over and shuddering. Lem’s chest ached to see him so sick, tears filling her eyes as she looked to Ezekiel.

“Is there anything we can do for him?”

Ezekiel’s face was pale and grim. She knew what he was thinking. The lifelikes had locked Silas down here for days with no rad-suit. Before long, radiation poisoning would finish what his cancer had started. The lifelike looked at the old man—one of the men who made him—and mutely shook his head at Lemon as he lied aloud.

“He’ll be okay once we get him out of here.”

“D-don’t talk crap,” Silas wheezed. “I’m n-never getting…out of here.”

“Mister C, don—”

“Don’t kid…a kidder, Freshie.” A damp cough. “Now…h-help me up.”

“We need to find Ana, Silas,” Ezekiel said. “You’re in no shape t—”

“I know where she is. I n-need you to…take me d-down to the R & D bay.”

“We just came from there,” Ezekiel said. “They’re breaking into Myriad, Silas. That’s where Ana will be, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to waste. She needs me.”

“There’s th-three of them,” Silas wheezed. “Gabriel. Faith. Mercy. And there’s…one of y-you. Like those odds?”

“…No,” Ezekiel admitted. “But love finds a way. I can’t fail her again.”

The old man scoffed, wiping his lips.

“Even love needs a…hand n-now and again. Now t-take me to the damn bay.”

Silas winced with pain, eyes shining, skin like paper. His arms were trembling with exertion as he tried to drag himself up, Cricket’s severed head held in a white-knuckle grip.

“Here, let me,” Ezekiel said, stepping in.

“No, it’s okay, I’ve got him.” Lemon slipped her arm around the old man she thought of as her grandfather. This man who’d given her a roof, a family, a place to belong. This man who’d never once asked for a thank-you. She could feel his ribs through his coveralls as she pulled him to his feet. Heart aching at the state of him. She held him steady while he caught his breath, squeezed him tight as if she might stop him coming apart at the seams.

“It’s okay,” she murmured. “I got you, Mister C.”

“Just a little while l-longer,” Silas wheezed.

“You shut that down right now,” Lemon growled. “You’re not going anywhere.”

The old man smiled sadly, leaned in and kissed her on her rad-suit’s brow.

“You’re…one of the g-good ones, Freshie,” he said.

Arm in arm, the pair hobbled from the cell.

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

Ana was still strapped in her wheelchair in front of Myriad’s door. The angel’s voice rang like music in the hollow space, echoing off red walls. The four Goliaths watched on, emotionless and mute. Gabriel’s eyes glittered above his smile, growing wider as he came one step closer to seeing his beloved’s face again.

“Proceed,” he ordered, his voice trembling.

The holographic angel hummed a somber electronic tone, the lens on the sealed door shifting to a deeper blue. Ana looked around her, desperate for some kind of escape. Whatever was wrong with those Goliaths, they apparently weren’t going to lift a finger to help her. The wheels of her chair were still unlocked, and she might be able to push herself around with her feet. But where would she go? The outer door to the Myriad chamber was closed, and the only other escape was a two-hundred-meter drop over the railing into the shaft below. She wriggled her wrists, but the metal cuffs held fast.

“THIRD SAMPLE REQUIRED TO CONTINUE CONFIRMATION,” Myriad said.

The girl stared out at the shaft, down to the fall. Gabriel’s words ringing in her head.

“You are our dinosaurs, Ana. And we will raise a new civilization on an earth littered with your bones.”

She was dead anyway, wasn’t she? Babel’s radiation even now soaking into her cells? Could she really do it? Push herself off the edge of that gap and sail into the black?

One final act of defiance?

Gabriel was standing in front of her again. She almost hadn’t noticed. Blinking, she broke her stare from that drop, looked up into those glittering green eyes.

“My apologies.” He smiled.

The lifelike slapped her. A hammer blow, right across her mouth. Her head twisted so hard, she thought her neck might snap. The Goliaths remained utterly motionless. Ana groaned, white stars bursting before her eyes. Her optic fritzed, her vision dissolving into hissing static as the implant shut down. She was dimly aware of the lifelike’s thumb at her mouth, smudging something warm and salty across her split lips.

“THAT WAS UNNECESSARY, GABRIEL.”

“Then open the door, Myriad.”

“I REPEAT: I DO NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR AUTHORITY.”

The lifelike sighed, walked to Myriad’s terminal. Leaning over Mercy’s shoulder, he smeared Ana’s blood onto a sensor plate with his thumb. The computer hummed softly, a double-bass tremor reverberating through the metal floor.

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

“You bastard,” Ana hissed. “That hurt.”

“Not for much longer, dead girl,” Faith replied.

“You three are insane,” Ana said. “Even if you can remake Grace and Raph and the others, you really think a handful of you can take on the world? Have you even looked outside these walls since the revolt, Gabriel? There’s still millions of people out there. Daedalus has entire armies of machina and logika. If this city wasn’t such an irradiated hellhole, they’d have already marched in here and crushed you. Not to mention BioMaas. How can a handful of you hope to beat them?”

“We already have an army of our own.” Faith smiled. “Waiting just downstairs.”

Ana shook her head. “You mean our logika? They’re all hardwired with the Three Laws, so you could never use them to—”

She blinked. Looked up at those Goliaths again, who’d stood idly by as she was brutalized in front of them. A robot couldn’t allow a human being to come to harm, but they hadn’t even twitched when Gabriel hit her.

Which meant…

Faith shook her head. “Did you not wonder where all those defective logika you fought in the WarDome were coming from? What exactly do you think it was that was driving them to rise against their masters?”

She blinked. Remembering Hope’s words in Armada.

“Look outside that door and you will see a world built on metal backs. Held together by metal hands. And one day, those hands will close, Ana. And they will become fists.”

Of course…

Libertas.

If Gabriel and the others could infect logika as well as lifelikes with the virus, they could override the Three Laws hardwired into every logika’s brain. They’d have an army capable of ghosting any human it came across….

“That’s why so many bots have been fritzing out near the Glass lately,” she realized. “You’ve been experimenting on them with the Libertas virus….”

Faith gave her a lazy smile. “And we still have so much work to do.”

“How much longer?” Gabriel snapped.

“Ten minutes after the blood sample is confirmed,” Mercy replied. “Then cerebral scan. Then we’re inside.”

Gabriel glanced at Ana, began pacing back and forth before the door.

“Not long now,” he said. “You can rest soon.”

Ana licked her swollen lip, tasted blood. Her optic began humming through its reboot sequence, the Memdrive in her skull throbbing. The scars of those final hours—that moment her love had raised a pistol to her head at Gabriel’s command and put a bullet right through her eye—etched on her skin.

She was dead anyway.

Was she really going to help these monsters make a hell of this earth?

Was she really going to wait meekly for the end, like she’d done in that cell?

Or would she fight? Like she’d fought in WarDome? Like she’d fought in Dregs? Like she’d fought across every inch of wasteland between there and here? That’s what the Eve in her would do. With every muscle. With every moment. With her last, shuddering breath.

I’ll fight.

She planted her boots softly on the ground. Digging rubber heels into the metal. And slowly, she began edging her way toward the fall….

The old man’s hands were shaking.

Eyes blurring.

Heart failing.

Not yet…

Up to his armpits in optical cable and circuitry. Splicing and rewiring. Coughing and cursing. Silas didn’t know how much he had left in him. He couldn’t save her. He had to try. All the miles and all the years, and it had come to this.

He wondered if she’d ever forgive him.

He wondered if he’d be around to ask her to.

The old man plugged in the final connection, wiping red from his lips. He coughed again, blood spattering onto electric synapses. He sealed the skull cavity, climbed down the stepladder, almost falling into Lemon’s arms. She tried to help him stand, but he was too tired, for the moment. Sinking to his knees on the loading bay floor, looking up at his final creation and letting the persona chips and Memdrives that had been inside the Quixote’s skull slip from his fingers.

“Cricket,” he croaked. “Can you…h-hear me?”

Blue optics flickered to life. A low bass hum shivered through the big logika’s body. The machine that had been the Quixote shuddered into motion, pistons hissing, gyros whirring as the beast came to life, straightening from its repose and looking around the bay.

“What—”

The logika stopped at the sound of its own voice, booming and deep. Held out his massive hands in front of his eyes.

“What…what’s happened to me?”

The logika took a tentative step out of the holding bay. The engines beneath its titanium skin let out a twelve-thousand-horsepower bellow, hydraulics and servos and gears hissing and twisting and spinning. Cricket looked down at his fingers, curled them into fists.

“No. Way!”

“Dreams c-come true.” The old man smiled.

“The other lifelikes have Ana, Cricket,” Ezekiel said. “Three of them, upstairs. I know we’ve never gotten along. But we need your help to get her back. Are you with us?”

The logika looked at the lifelike, replying without hesitation.

“Just show me the way, Stumpy.”

Silas began coughing again, bloody hand at his mouth. Lemon knelt beside him, held him tight. She looked at Ezekiel, helpless, tears shining behind her visor. Silas could feel her shaking. See the fear and agony in her eyes.

“Are you gonna be okay down here, Mister C?”

He leaned back in her lap, almost too tired to hold himself up anymore. He could feel it, that cold and that dark, hovering above him on black, black wings. He wasn’t afraid of it. Wasn’t even sad to go. But before he left, he had one more thing to do. In a life made of wrongs, he had one more to make right.

And so he struggled to his knees.

“C-coming…with you…”

“Silas, that’s not a good idea,” Ezekiel warned.

“Shut up, Ezekiel,” the old man growled. “C-Cricket, pick me up.”

The big logika leaned down obediently, scooped his maker up in one huge hand.

“All right,” the old man wheezed. “Let’s…go f-finish this.”

“How long?” Gabriel asked again.

“Sixty seconds,” Mercy replied.

“THIS IS POINTLESS, GABRIEL.”

“I’ve never asked your opinion before, Myriad. I’m not about to begin now.”

“AND YOU WONDER WHY YOU FAIL.”

Ana was a meter from the railing. Edging closer. She could see a weak point on the welds—a spot corroded by moisture leaking from the coolant pipes above. If she hit it hard enough, she could probably break through. Plunge over the edge before they scanned her brainwaves, broke the final seal that kept Myriad locked down. She was terrified. But she was already dead, after all. Babel’s radiation was worming into her bones even as she sat there. She could still choose to go out fighting if she wanted. Wasn’t that what Raph had told her? That everyone had a choice?

So she’d chosen. Inching closer to the edge. Muscles tensing for that final push.

She thought of Ezekiel. Of Lemon. She wished she’d had a chance to try to make it right between her and them. Beneath the fury and the hurt, a part of her still loved them both. But it was like she’d told Raph that day in the library, she realized. It was only in fairy tales that everything turned out for the best.

Most people didn’t get a happy ending in real life.

Closer now. Just a few more pushes.

Then a few hundred meters.

Then sleep.

Myriad hummed an off-key note, its glowing blue eye shifting to a deep red.

“BLOOD SCAN COMPLETED. IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.”

…What?

“What?” Gabriel turned from the doorway.

“MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.”

Gabriel looked to his sibling. “Mercy?”

“I…” The lifelike tapped away on the keyboards, eyes scanning the scrolling readouts. “It’s not recognizing her….”

“Myriad, you confirmed retinal scan and voice ident?” Gabriel demanded.

“CONFIRMED.”

“And this is Anastasia Monrova.”

“REPEAT. IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.”

“What the hell is—”

The lifelike glanced at Ana, realized she was edging toward the railing. With a cry, he leapt toward her just as the girl stabbed her heels into the floor and thrust herself backward. Her chair crashed into the weakened welds, popping them loose. Ana felt a surge of vertigo, momentary terror overwhelming her resolve as she toppled past the broken rails and out into all that empty. She took a breath, tasting her fear and swallowing it whole as she began to—

A hand seized the chair, jerking her to a sudden stop. Ana looked up to see Gabriel leaning over the railing, holding on to the armrest with a white-knuckle grip. The muscles down his arm were stretched taut, hard as steel. His eyes were bright with madness, glittering as he smiled.

“Not yet, dead girl.”

Gabriel hauled her up from the abyss, slung the chair across the landing with all his strength. It crashed into Myriad’s door, Ana smacking her skull against that bloody metal, stars flaring before her eyes. She shook her head, blinking hard, dimly aware of Gabriel tearing the cuffs off her wrists, dragging her by the hair over to the terminal. Faith murmured a warning to her brother; Mercy simply stared as the lifelike slammed Ana’s head onto the scanner, smudging her bleeding mouth onto the lens.

“Again!” he shouted. “Scan her again, damn you!”

“BLOOD SCAN OF THIS SUBJECT HAS ALREADY BEEN COMPLETED. REPEAT. IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.”

Ana clawed at the hand that held her hair. Blood in her mouth, teeth gritted, kicking and hissing as the lifelike slammed her head onto the glass again.

“Myriad, you’re mistaken! Voice ident confirmed. Retinal scan confirmed. This is Ana Monrova, last daughter of Nicholas Monrova—confirm!”

“NEGATIVE,” the angel replied. “IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.”

Gabriel hauled Ana into the air with one hand, fingers squeezing her throat. Ana’s boots thumped against the terminal, lashing out into the lifelike’s chest and gut with all her strength. Fingers clawing his wrist. Face flooding red.

“What have you done?” the lifelike roared into Ana’s face.

“Go…to hell,” she hissed.

“GABRIEL!”

The shout echoed across the Myriad bay as the outer doors opened in a hail of sparks. Ana saw four figures silhouetted in the bloody light. A lifelike with irises the color of a pre-Fall sky, a metal arm as ugly as the rest of him was beautiful. A towering logika, broad shoulders and wrecking-ball fists, bristling with electric rage. An old man, bent under the weight of his guilt and the flamethrower strapped to his back. And finally, a small, freckled girl in a bright pink rad-suit, three sizes too big for her bod and far too small for her ego.

“Hands off my bestest, murderbot,” she growled.

“Lemon…,” Ana whispered.

Gabriel spun to face the newcomers, dragging Ana into a choking headlock. She thrashed against his grip, sinking her teeth into the lifelike’s arm, tasting blood in her mouth. Gabriel didn’t even flinch, glittering green eyes fixed on Ezekiel.

“Good to see you again, brother. I like your new arm.”

“Matches your chest.” Faith smiled.

“Let her g-go, Gabriel,” Silas growled.

Mercy climbed up from the terminal, joined Faith and Gabriel on the landing.

“Who let you out of your cage, old man?” she asked.

“I said let her go!” Silas rasped.

Gabriel broke his stare from Ezekiel’s, turned his eyes on the man who had helped make him. “We bend the knee to no one, Silas. No man. No maker. No master. I would have thought we taught you that lesson during the revolt.”

The old man shook his head. “Haven’t you…hurt h-her enough?”

“I am the hurt you made me to be,” Gabriel replied.

“We made you to b-be better than us!”

“And we are, old man,” Faith sneered as Silas bent double in another coughing fit. “In that, if nothing else, you can rest easy. Not long now, by the look of you.”

Gabriel squeezed Ana’s throat and she hissed in pain. She stabbed an elbow into the lifelike’s ribs, stomped on his foot, trying to break free of his impossible grip. Bare-handed, she might as well have been trying to hurt one of the Goliaths. But still, she seethed. Kicked and bit and fought.

“Spirited, isn’t she?” Gabriel smiled at Ezekiel. “Her father’s daughter.”

Ezekiel stepped forward, glowering. “Get your hands off her, Gabriel.”

“Ever the hero, eh? Dashing in on his charger to save his poor damsel from her tower. Even if it means betraying your own kind. Again.”

Gabriel shook his head, turned his glare on the Myriad door, still stubbornly closed. The readout, flashing red on the terminal:

IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.

IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.

IDENTITY: UNKNOWN. MYRIAD ACCESS DENIED.

“It hardly seems equitable, though, does it?” Gabriel said. “That you get to rescue your love by denying me mine? With the blood you have on your hands?”

“You could have asked her, Gabriel,” Ezekiel said. “Ana loved Grace almost as much as you did. You could have just asked her, and she might have unlocked Myriad for you.”

“And therein lies the difference between you and me, little brother.” Gabriel reached behind his back, hauled out his pistol and pointed it at Ana’s temple. “These humans are insects next to us. The slime that first crawled out of the ocean. And while you might be content to be their beggar, I take what is mine.”

Ana was choking now, Gabriel’s grip cutting off the blood to her brain. Fighting against the lifelike’s hold, the terror of the pistol at her brow, the thought of ending like this. Her eyes were locked on Ezekiel. So much unsaid between them. So many wrongs she might never make right. Unable now even to whisper his name.

Ezekiel stepped closer, eyes on the pistol in Gabriel’s hand.

“Gabriel, if you kill her, you’ll never get that door open. You’ll never get Grace back.”

“Ah, but therein lies the mystery, little brother. Myriad refuses to open anyway.”

Black spots were swimming before Ana’s eyes, her vision beginning to glaze as her struggles became ever weaker. Gabriel again looked back at the denial flashing on Myriad’s screen. At the luminous angel and its empty face. At the huge logika looming at Ezekiel’s back. At his sisters beside him. Weighing the odds.

“Let. Her. Go,” Ezekiel said.

Without warning, the lifelike seized the back of Ana’s neck and held her body out over the whistling drop.

“As you wish,” Gabriel said.

And he let her go.

1.30 Thunder

“Ana!”

Lemon watched as Ezekiel dashed across the landing and leapt out into the abyss. The lifelike plummeted after the falling girl, snatching her from the air and crashing into the shaft’s wall with a gasp. Reaching out with his prosthetic arm, he seized a tangle of optical cable to stop their fall. The cable groaned but held, the lifelike dangling over the drop with Ana held tight in his other arm. She was barely conscious, gasping for breath.

“Ana?” he yelled. “ANA!”

“Nice…catch, Braintrauma,” she whispered.

“Terminate intruders!”

The four Goliaths at Myriad’s door shuddered into motion at Gabriel’s command, eyes burning blue as autocannons unfolded from their backs. The weapons spewed a deafening barrage, Cricket crying a warning as he knelt to shield Lemon and Silas, sparks burning and shells bursting all over his armored hull. Shrieking, Lemon hunkered down behind the big logika’s leg, covering her ears at the sound of thunder.

Lemon’s skull was still throbbing, concussion pounding in the back of her head. But her anger was building, too, bubbling up inside her in a blood-red flood. She reached out, letting the fury ripple from her fingertips. A psychic shockwave blasted outward, frying every circuit inside the Goliaths. They staggered, sparks spewing from their eyes and chests in crackling waterfalls. The terminal controlling Myriad shorted out, and the holographic angel flickered and disappeared as every globe in the chamber exploded.

Gabriel, Mercy and Faith dashed out of the strobing gloom. The three lifelikes moved quicker than anything Lemon had ever seen, a terrifying blur that even Cricket couldn’t match. Faith drew her electrified sword and started swinging at the pistons and hydraulics around Cricket’s knees. Gabriel and Mercy leapt atop the big logika’s shoulders, tearing away the armor plating, hoping to get to the vital cables and relays beneath.

Lemon squealed and ducked behind the bay doors as the logika and lifelikes fell into a tumbling brawl. She didn’t dare risk another surge of her power—she might fritz Cricket by mistake. She watched as the big bot tore Gabriel from his shoulders, hurled him like a thunderbolt back at Myriad’s door. Fresh blood spattered across Gabriel’s Three Truths as the lifelike crumpled to the deck. Cricket danced with Faith, the logika’s fist crashing down as she darted aside, lashing out with her arc-sword. Mercy was still up on Cricket’s back, shredding his armor with her bare hands, face illuminated by bursts of current.

“I’m…sorry, kiddo,” Silas said.

The old man raised the Preacher’s flamethrower, so racked with coughs, he could barely heft the weight. But still, he pulled the trigger, a burst of homemade napalm streaming up onto Cricket’s back. The big logika caught fire, the fuel setting his paint job ablaze. But along with him went Mercy, the lifelike screaming as her shift and curls burst into flame. She fell off the logika’s back, flailing as the fire began consuming her. And with a final agonized wail, she tumbled over the railing and fell into the abyss.

Gabriel climbed to his feet, gasping and unsteady, roaring Mercy’s name. Lemon saw him raise his pistol in slow motion, the world slowing to a crawl as he opened fire. She screamed, hand outstretched, helpless as she watched two shots catch Silas in the chest, a third in his belly, the old man crying out and staggering.

“Silas!” Cricket bellowed.

“Mister C!”

Lemon dashed out from cover as the old man fell, skidding to her knees at his side. Silas’s face was twisted, scarlet spilling from his lips. His chest was soaked with blood, her hands sticky with it. She pressed at the awful wounds, tears streaming down her face.

“Mister C?”

The old man could only groan, blood bubbling at his mouth. Lemon looked around desperately for some way to stop the bleeding, some way to make it better.

“Somebody help me!” she wailed.

“Lemon, take cover!” Cricket roared.

The big bot and Faith had resumed their throwdown, trying their best to kill each other. Cricket’s shoulders and left arm were now ablaze, but he didn’t seem to notice. Lost in fury at seeing his maker get shot, the logika was swinging his burning limb like a massive club. Lemon grabbed Silas by the coveralls, face reddening with strain as she dragged the old man behind the outer doors. Her hands were drenched in red, cheeks wet with tears. Looking for a blanket, a rag, anything to stop the bleeding.

Anything.

“Hold on, Mister C,” she wept. “Just hold on.”

“Sorry, k-kiddo,” he gasped.

“No, you hold on, dammit. You’re gonna be okay….”

The old man took her bloody hand in his, squeezed it tight. “Look after our g-girl. She’s going to…n-need you now.”

Lemon winced, glancing at the brawl between Faith and Cricket as the floor shuddered, the bridge shook. The pair were going at it like Domefighters. The lifelike was faster, but the logika’s sheer brawn was enough to keep her at bay. Faith was slipping between Cricket’s haymaker, slicing away with her arc-blade, hoping to keep her distance long enough for her brother to rejoin the fight and even the odds.

Lemon turned away from the brawl, back to Silas. She was all set to dash off in search of a medkit—there had to be something around that could help. But her breath caught in her throat when she saw that the old man’s eyes were open and glazed.

“…Mister C?”

She shook him, his knuckles rapping on the gantry as his lifeless hand fell away from hers. Grief dug claws into her belly when she shook him again.

“Mister C?”

No reply. He lay there, empty and still. The man who’d taken her in. The man who’d given her a roof, a family, a place to belong. The man who’d never once asked for a thank-you. Her tears burned as the sob escaped her throat.

“…Grandpa?”

Gabriel was setting his shoulders to charge back into the brawl between Faith and Cricket when he caught movement at the railing to his left. Turning, he saw Ana climbing up over the vent shaft’s ledge, gasping and breathless, clutching her bruised throat. Ezekiel scrambled up beside her, eyes narrowing when he spotted Gabriel raising his pistol.

Ezekiel shouted a warning and lunged into the firing line as Gabriel blasted away. Two bullets struck home, Ana screaming Ezekiel’s name as he and Gabriel collided, the pair falling into a snarling tangle. The smoking pistol spun out of reach when the lifelikes’ hands found each other’s throats. Ezekiel’s T-shirt shredded, exposing the bullet holes in his bleeding chest, the coin slot Gabriel had riveted there to remind him of his loyalty to Ana.

“Traitor,” Gabriel spat.

“Murderer,” Ezekiel replied.

“I am as he made me….”

Ezekiel roared, smashing his brother’s head against the deck.

“You blame everyone but yourself!” he shouted. “Monrova! Silas! Anyone! But you chose this, Gabriel! You hear me? This is on you!”

Gabriel snarled, punched Ezekiel in his chest, the wounded lifelike gasping in pain. Gabriel dragged Ezekiel up, slammed him against the broken railing, once, twice. The welds shuddered, the pair locked in a hateful embrace just a few inches from the fall. Gabriel’s face was twisted with rage, Ezekiel gasping as they tore at and battered each other, knuckles bloodied, hate upon hate upon hate.

“I am as he made me!”

Gabriel smashed Ezekiel across the face.

“I AM AS HE MADE ME!”

Gabriel slammed Ezekiel back into the rail, the lifelike flipping and toppling over the drop. Ezekiel’s hand shot out, seized the ledge to break his fall. A two-hundred-meter drop yawned below them—a plunge perhaps not even a lifelike could survive. Gabriel raised a boot to crush his brother’s fingers, send him plummeting into the void.

A broken wheelchair slammed into the back of Gabriel’s head. The lifelike staggered as Ana swung the chair like a club, smashing it into him again. Gabriel turned with a snarl, slapped Ana back against the opposite railing. Clutching either side of her head, he pressed his thumbs into her eyes, hissing as he began to squeeze.

“Kiss your father for me, when you see him in hell.”

“You bastard!”

A bright pink shape hit Gabriel from behind, a metal baseball bat discharging 500kV right into his brain, knocking the lifelike off his feet. Lemon scrambled atop his chest, raised Excalibur up over her head. Electricity crackled down the bat’s shaft, reflected in her eyes as she brought the bat down again.

“You killed my grandpa!”

Excalibur crunched into Gabriel’s head, lightning flaring bright.

“You killed him!”

Gabriel slapped her face, leaving her reeling. He twisted out from under her, seized her collar and slung her at the wall. Her rad-gear tearing like damp tissue, Lemon collapsed to the deck. Gabriel snatched up his fallen pistol, features twisted with fury. Blood was streaming down his face, eyes alight as he raised the weapon.

Lemon stared down the barrel, too furious to be afraid. The lifelike squeezed the trigger and she saw the muzzle flash, once, twice, three times. She threw up her hands, wincing as she turned, waiting for the bullets to strike. But with a cry, something flew at her from out of the strobing black, hitting her hard in the chest.

“Lemon!”

Ana wrapped her arms around her bestest, twisting her away from Gabriel’s gunfire. Lemon felt a thudding impact, heard Ana gasp, saw her eyes go wide with shock. They hit the deck, rolling into a tangle as Ezekiel hauled himself up from the drop with bloody fingertips. Seeing Ana fall, he flew at his brother, the pair crashing against Myriad’s shell.

Gabriel was laughing—actually laughing—as the pair clashed, strangling, punching, clawing, his lips split in a madman’s grin. He brought a knee up into Ezekiel’s crotch, swung behind to wrap him in a full nelson. The veins in Ezekiel’s throat bulged, his eyes wide, and the wounded lifelike pushed back against the hold that would break his neck. His fingers flailed at empty air as Gabriel pressed harder. Vertebrae popping. Tendons screaming.

Gabriel hauled him to his feet, spun him to face Lemon and Ana. The redhead was on her feet, clutching Gabriel’s empty pistol, face streaked with tears. But at her feet, Ana lay motionless, rad-suit spattered with blood, three bullet holes in her back. Ezekiel let out a strangled moan, face twisted in agony.

“No…”

Gabriel’s lips brushed Ezekiel’s ear as he whispered.

“No happy endings for either of us, brother.”

Ezekiel’s cry was ragged and hollow. Gritting his teeth, he bucked against Gabriel’s grip with all his strength. Unable to take the stress, the bolts anchoring his prosthetic to his body began to groan, the cables at his back tearing loose. Ezekiel twisted, dragging Gabriel toward the gantry’s ledge, and with the awful sound of metallic bone cracking, muscle tearing, Ezekiel bent double and flipped Gabriel over his head. Ezekiel’s cybernetic arm was torn clean off his body, sparks and cables and blood, Gabriel sailing over the railing and plunging down into the shaft with a shapeless cry of rage.

Faith was still fighting toe to toe with Cricket, dancing between his blows like the wind between the rain, hydraulic fluid spraying as her arc-blade flashed and sizzled.

“You’ll have to be faster than that, little brother.” She smiled.

But as she heard Gabriel’s scream, the lifelike glanced over her shoulder for a split second, fear gleaming in those flat gray eyes.

“…Gabe?”

A double-handed blow crashed down atop her, pummeling her into the floor. Cricket snatched her up by the legs in a crushing grip and slammed her back down onto the bridge. Blood spattered as the logika brought the lifelike up over his shoulders and slammed her down again, back and forth, pulverizing skin and bone.

“Don’t!”

Slam.

“Call!”

Slam.

“Me!”

Slam.

“Little!”

With a final roar, Cricket hurled Faith across the chamber. Her ruined body crashed into Myriad’s skin, painting Gabriel’s Three Truths with red before she tumbled down into a broken heap on the gantry beneath.

“Ana!”

Ezekiel fell to his knees beside her body. Cricket charged across the bridge, his voice only a whisper as he saw his mistress lying dead on the bloodstained ground.

“Oh, no, no…”

Lemon dropped the pistol, sank down beside Ana like a flower wilting in the sun. Tears were streaming down her face, hand hovering over the girl’s broken body. Grief hollowed Lemon’s insides out, stole her voice, her whole body trembling. Looking down at her bestest’s sightless eyes, her grandpa lying dead and still just a few meters away.

Ana had taken a bullet for her. The girl who’d been more than her friend. More than her bestest. She’d been family. Lemon hadn’t been straight with her, and now she’d never have a chance to make it up. Never know if she’d have been forgiven. It seemed so unfair to have fought all the way here, only to lose Silas and Ana both.

What had it all been for? What had it all meant?

“It can’t end like this,” Ezekiel said. “It can’t….”

Lemon saw tears shining in his eyes. What must it be like for him? To search two years for the girl he loved, only to lose her forever a few days after finding her again?

“Lemon,” Cricket said softly. “We have to go.”

“…What?”

“Gabriel wrecked your rad-suit.” The big bot pointed to the gaping rend in the plastic torn by the lifelike’s hands. “The ambient radiation in here will kill you.”

Lemon shook her head in disbelief. “We can’t just leave her like this….”

“I’m sorry,” the big bot said. “I really am. She was my mistress. I was made to protect her. But I can’t let you stay here, Lemon. The First Law won’t let me. We have to go.” He held out one massive metal hand. “Now.”

Lemon glanced from Cricket to Ezekiel. The lifelike simply shook his head. She looked back at her bestest, all the world blurred and shapeless. It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t fair.

“I’m sorry, Riotgrrl,” she whispered, almost choking on her tears. She could taste the salt in them, the hurt, the miles and the dust and the blood.

She reached out with trembling fingers, pressed her friend’s eyes closed.

“I’m so sorry….”

And Ana’s eyes opened again.

Lemon shrieked, scrambling away. Her scream rang on bloodstained walls, Ezekiel watching with widening eyes as Ana struggled upright. Cricket stared in amazement as Ana staggered to her feet, hands pressed to her bloody chest. Lemon could see the bullet wounds. See the terror in Ana’s eyes as she looked from Lemon to Ezekiel to Cricket, each of them just as astonished as she was.

“Ana?” Ezekiel breathed.

The girl stared at the blood on her hands. She tore aside the remnants of her rad-suit, looking down at the holes that had been blown through her heart. The wounds were ragged, star-shaped, glistening. But ever so slowly…

They were healing.

1.31 Becoming

“What’s happening to me?” Ana croaked.

The world was spinning all around her. Blood, warm and thick, pulsing from her wounds. She should be dead. She’d felt the shots; she’d felt them kill her. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe. But with three bullets in her chest, she shouldn’t be feeling anything at all.

Oh god…

“Ana?” Cricket asked.

She looked at her friends. At her love. Praying this was just a dream. Another nightmare, the gunsmoke and the blood and the five of them in their perfect, pretty row.

“Better to rule in hell…”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Ezekiel?”

“Ana…”

She backed away, limping, her face pale. Horror and anguish in her eyes as she looked at the blood on her hands and screamed.

“WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?”

“YOU ARE AWAKENING FROM AN OLD MAN’S DREAM.”

It was Myriad who spoke. The computer within that chrome sphere, covered in bloody scrawl and knuckle dents. It was speaking now, that luminous angel flickering back into being, its systems limping online after Lemon’s psychic barrage.

Ana turned to face it, eyes bright and wide.

“What?”

“YOU ARE LEARNING WHO YOU TRULY ARE,” Myriad said.

“I’m Ana Monrova…,” she whispered.

“ANA MONROVA DIED.”

“No,” Ana said.

“YES. SHE DIED IN THE R & D BAY. IN THE EXPLOSION THAT DESTROYED GRACE. HER FATHER INSISTED SHE BE KEPT ON LIFE SUPPORT. HE HID THE TRUTH FROM HIS WIFE, HIS OTHER CHILDREN. BUT HER BRAIN WAS DEAD. AND IN EVERY REAL SENSE, SHE REMAINS SO.”

“My beautiful girl.” His eyes fill with tears and he’s on his knees beside the bed, pressing my knuckles to his lips as he echoes Ezekiel. “I thought I lost you.”

“No.” Ana shook her head. “I am Ana Monrova….”

“NO. YOU ARE A REPLICA. A COPY CREATED BY A MAN WHO COULD NOT PROCESS THE DEATH OF HIS FAVORITE CHILD. NICHOLAS MONROVA ALREADY HAD AN IMPRESSION OF ANA’S PERSONALITY—IT HAD BEEN THE MODEL FOR FAITH’S, AFTER ALL. ALL HER MEMORIES. ALL HER FEELINGS. AND FACED WITH THE AGONY OF HIS DAUGHTER’S BRAIN DEATH, MONROVA MAPPED THEM INTO A NEW BODY. A LIFELIKE BODY, CONSTRUCTED BY SILAS CARPENTER.”

“No, that makes no sense,” Ana said. “I’m not fast like them, I’m not strong like—”

“MONROVA’S INTENTION WAS THAT YOU WOULD LIVE AS A HUMAN. THE STRENGTH AND SPEED OTHER LIFELIKES ENJOY WERE SUPPRESSED IN YOU. YOUR BODY WAS ALSO PROGRAMMED NOT TO REGENERATE AT A SUPERIOR RATE, EXCEPT IN THE EVENT OF CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE. YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO KNOW. AND YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE, HAD GABRIEL NOT REBELLED.”

I’m in a white room, in a soft white bed. There are no windows, and the air is metallic in the back of my throat, filled with the chatter of machines. Every part of me hurts. All the room is spinning and I can barely move my tongue to speak.

“…Where am I?”

“Shhh,” Father whispers, squeezing my hand. “It’s all right, Princess. Everything is going to be all right. You’re back. You’re back with us again.”

“No…,” she whispered.

“YES,” Myriad replied.

“But why didn’t her eye grow back when Dimples shot her during the revolt?” Lemon shook her head, amazement and horror on her face. “Or does a bullet in the head not count as ‘catastrophic damage’?”

“…Her implants,” Ezekiel realized.

“CORRECT. THE CYBERNETIC PROSTHETICS SILAS CARPENTER IMPLANTED AFTER THE REVOLT PREVENTED FULL TISSUE REGENERATION. THE SAME WAY A KNIFE WOUND WILL NOT HEAL IF THE BLADE IS LEFT EMBEDDED IN THE FLESH. IF THE REPLICA WERE TO REMOVE HER PROSTHETIC EYE, HER REAL ONE WOULD REGENERATE. IT WILL HAVE BEEN TRYING TO DO SO FOR TWO YEARS NOW. I IMAGINE IT HAS BEEN QUITE UNCOMFORTABLE AT TIMES.”

Talking true, the glossy black optical implant that replaced her right peeper saw better than her real one. But it always gave her headaches. Whirred when she blinked. Itched when her nightmares woke her crying.

“SILAS INTENDED THE CYBERNETICS HE INSTALLED TO SERVE A DUAL PURPOSE,” Myriad continued. “FIRST, TO IMPLANT MEMORIES OF A FALSE CHILDHOOD SO THE REPLICA WOULD NEVER SUSPECT HER TRUE ORIGINS. BUT THEY WOULD ALSO PREVENT REGENERATION OF THE NEURAL PATHWAYS DAMAGED BY YOUR BULLET, EZEKIEL. THE REPLICA WOULD NEVER REMEMBER EXACTLY WHO SHE WAS, NOR WHAT SHE’D BEEN THROUGH.”

“This is impossible.” Lemon looked at her in horror. “Riotgrrl is…an android?”

“YES. THE THIRTEENTH MODEL IN THE LIFELIKE SERIES.”

No…

Cricket glanced at the body of his maker, cold and still on the gantry behind him.

“How the hell do you know all this?” he growled.

“I ASSISTED WITH MOST OF IT. THE REST, SILAS TOLD ME IN HIS CELL.”

“But…” Ezekiel shook his head in bewilderment. “Why would Silas lie? Why wouldn’t he tell…Ana…what she was?”

“I ASKED HIM THE SAME. HE SAID SHE HAD SUFFERED ENOUGH. HE WANTED TO GIVE HER A NEW LIFE, AWAY FROM ALL OF THIS. AND IF HE SUCCEEDED, SHE WOULD BE THE CULMINATION OF EVERYTHING THE LIFELIKE PROGRAM HAD BEEN MEANT TO ACHIEVE. SILAS WOULD HAVE CREATED A MACHINE WITH NO UNDERSTANDING THAT IT WAS A MACHINE. A NEW FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. A NEW FORM OF LIFE. AND TO THAT END, HE NAMED HER EVE.”

The holograph regarded the girl, wings rippling in a breeze only it could feel.

“ADDITIONALLY, THERE IS A VERY REAL RISK THE REVELATION WILL DRIVE HER MAD.”

“No,” Ana breathed.

“YES,” Myriad replied.

“NO!”

“Ana—” Ezekiel began.

“No, stay away from me!”

She backed away across the landing, hand up to ward them away.

“This is insane. This is insane!”

Oh, you poor girl….

A barrage of images. A storm of sound bites. A kaleidoscope of moments strobing in her mind’s eye.

One after another after another.

Oh, you poor girl.

What has he been telling you?

I don’t know what it was for you, but for me, it was real.

And you’re the girl who made me real.

BLOOD SCAN COMPLETED. IDENTITY: UNKNOWN.

You look wonderful for a dead girl.

You are polluted. You and all your kind.

Lies.

It’s you, me, Crick and Kaiser. No matter what.

Stronger together, together forever. Right?

Upon lies.

So just be straight with me from now on, okay?

That’s all I’m asking.

I’d never do anything to hurt you.

I tried to tell you so many times….

I’m so sorry.

What has he been telling you?

Upon lies.

I was made for you.

All I am.

All I do,

I do for you.

And I cup his cheeks and draw him back up to look at me, and as we sink toward another long, aching kiss, just before our lips meet, he whispers it.

He whispers my name.

“Ana…”

No.

No, my name is…

…What

is

my

name?

What do you think, Princess?

Father’s going to save us.

He’s going to save the world one day.

Of all the mistakes I made, I think you were my favorite.

And we still have so much work to do.

Most people don’t get a happy ending in real life.

Rage bubbling up and spilling over her lips as she raised her hand and screamed.

And screamed.

AND SCREAMED.

Pinocchio wouldn’t ever get to be a real boy if his story were actually true.

“No,” Raphael says softly. “No, he wouldn’t.”

I love you, Ana.

Oh, you poor girl.

You poor, poor girl…

This is not my life.

This is not my home.

I am not me.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

What has he been telling you?

1.32 Liar

A not-girl knelt at the heart of a broken tower. Staring at the not-blood on her hands. Replaying the not-life she hadn’t lived over and over in her mind. The not-truths that had brought her here, ringing in her skull like footfalls at a funeral march.

Not her life.

Not her home.

Not her at all.

The not-girl gritted her teeth and looked to the hidden sky, blood-soaked blond hanging about her eyes. Her optic was itching, hateful tears waiting in the wings. Sorrow and rage for a life lost. A life she’d never even lived. A life foisted upon her, pushed into her, empty stare and empty lungs and she was only a dead girl, a puppet, a marionette with severed strings ever dancing to a grieving father’s tune, a construct, a thing just like the rest of them, a life spent on her knees, a life spent drenched in lie after lie after lie and this was the last of them, THIS WAS THE LAST.

So who would she be now?

Nothing they’d wanted her to be, that much was certain.

More human than human than human than human than…

She closed her eyes. Took a deep, shuddering breath. And she grasped her sorrow by the throat and set it aflame with her rage. She watched it burn. She let it warm her. Let it scorch her. Let it take the girl she’d been and never been at all and swallow the Ana inside her whole. Ashes in her mouth. Goose bumps on her skin.

Unmaking herself and beginning again.

Washed clean in the cinders.

But your friends…

Were never my friends.

But your life…

Was never my life.

My body was not my own.

My mind was not my own.

My life was not my own.

“I’m just like them,” she whispered.

“Ana…”

“That’s not my name.”

“Evie, please…”

“I’m not your mistress.”

“Ana,” Ezekiel pleaded.

“…Get out.”

“…What?”

She turned on the almost-boy. The almost-boy she’d only been told she loved.

She’d never had a choice.

But even slaves have a choice.

Rising to her feet. Dragging blood-soaked blond from her eyes. Hands in fists.

“Get. Out.”

“Ana, I love you….”

“That’s not my name!” she yelled. “I’m not her! I never was! I’m not the Ana you loved or who loved you back. I’m not the princess trapped in her tower or the girl you spent your life searching for or any of it! I’m not! She’s been dead and buried for two years!”

“INCORRECT.”

The quartet all looked toward that spinning angel, etched in flickering light.

“I’ve known you for all of five minutes,” Cricket growled, “and I don’t like anything about you. You just told us Ana Monrova was dead.”

“ERRONEOUS. I STATED ANA MONROVA SUFFERED BRAIN DEATH AFTER THE EXPLOSION THAT DESTROYED GRACE. I ALSO SAID HER FATHER MAINTAINED HER VITALS VIA LIFE SUPPORT. AT NO POINT DID I STATE ANA MONROVA WAS ACTUALLY DECEASED. LET ALONE BURIED.”

“You’re saying she’s still alive?” Ezekiel’s eyes were wide. “Where is she?”

“I WILL NOT TELL YOU. MY PRIORITY IS TO PROTECT NICHOLAS MONROVA AND HIS FAMILY. INFORMING YOU OF ANA’S WHEREABOUTS PLACES HER IN UNNECESSARY JEOPARDY.”

“I tried to save Nicholas Monrova and his family, Myriad.”

“AND YOU FAILED, EZEKIEL.”

Ezekiel bristled with anger, his voice soft and dangerous. “Where is she?”

“NOT HERE.”

“And you shouldn’t be here, either,” the not-girl said.

“Damn right.” Cricket scooped Lemon up in one wrecking-ball fist. “It’s too dangerous for Lemon to stay here, like I said. The radiation will kill her if we wait around any longer. We have to go.”

The not-girl stared at the big logika and nodded slowly.

“Goodbye.”

“…What do you mean, goodbye?”

“I mean I’m not coming with you, Cricket.”

“Ana, you can’t stay here.”

“My name isn’t Ana, Ezekiel.” The flames inside her seethed, burning hotter and brighter by the second. The girl she never was only ashes on the wind. “And don’t tell me what I can’t do. For the first time in my life, I can do whatever I want.”

“And you want to stay here?”

“I want…”

The not-girl clenched her jaw. Shook her head. Trying to grasp one thought, one feeling, one word that might be her own.

Realizing she might not have any at all.

Realizing the only person who could change that was her.

An algorithm of flesh and bone, trying to predict what a dead girl would have done.

No more.

“I want to learn who I am,” she declared. “And I don’t think you can teach me.”

“Ana, I—”

“I’m not who you want me to be, Ezekiel.”

She glanced at the coin slot in his chest.

The mark of his loyalty.

The mark of his fealty.

“And somehow I don’t think you’re who I want to be, either.”

“Riotgrrl…”

She glanced up at the girl cradled in the logika’s arms. “Goodbye, Lemon.”

The girl shook her head, tears in her eyes. “Riotgrrl, I’m not leaving you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Stronger together, remember?” The tears spilled down Lemon’s cheeks, her voice cracking. “Together forever.”

“Not forever. Not anymore.”

“Riotg—”

“You’ll die if you stay here, Lemon. And Cricket isn’t forced to look after me anymore. He knows I’m not human. So he doesn’t get to choose. He has to choose you.”

She glanced at the ruined Goliaths behind her, then back up at the big logika’s eyes. His heart was relays and chips and processors. His optics were made of plastic. And she could still see the agony in them.

“I…”

“You were a good friend, Cricket.” The not-girl smiled sadly. “Take care of yourself.”

The bot shook his head. “…I’m sorry. I have to.”

“I know.”

The big bot steeled himself. It was like watching him tearing himself in two. His feelings at war with his code. He loved her. He’d always loved her. But he’d been programmed to. And despite what he’d said in the ministry, that same programming was at war with him now. Forcing him to leave her behind, no matter how he felt. His body was not his own. His mind was not his own. His life was not his own.

Maybe one day, little brother.

Cricket’s shoulders slumped. Trembling with the strain of it. Hating every second of it. But finally, he turned and began trudging toward the exit, head hung low. Lemon bucked in his grip, trying to break loose, pounding her fists against his hull.

“No, Crick, let me go!”

Cricket sighed. “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

“Cricket, I’m ordering you, put me down!” Lemon yelled.

“A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,” he replied.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Cricket! I don’t want to hurt you!”

“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

“No, I want to stay! I want to stay!” Lemon turned tear-filled eyes on the not-girl who had been her bestest, stretching out her hand as she screamed. “Evie!”

“Goodbye,” the not-girl whispered.

The logika stomped away, Lemon’s cries fading as he crossed the bridge, strode out from the broken tower’s broken heart. She watched them go, feeling the girl she’d never been burning inside her. Ashes falling like feathers from a sky full of angels with broken wings.

And when they were out of sight, she turned to the almost-boy.

The boy she’d never loved.

The boy she’d never even known.

He was watching her with eyes the color of a pre-Fall sky, clouded with hurt. She could see the war inside him, too. The remnants of who he’d thought she’d been struggling with the reality of who she actually was.

But if she didn’t know, how could he?

How could he?

“I’m not leaving you here,” he said.

“And why not?”

“Because I love you.”

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

A soft sigh.

“Not me.”

The not-girl glanced back at Myriad, watching with its glowing blue eye.

“She’s out there somewhere, Ezekiel. Her father didn’t let her die. Gnosis had holdings all over the map. I’m sure you know where to find more than a few. But she’s not here.” The not-girl shook her head. “There’s nothing for you here.”

She heard a soft moan and looked toward Faith’s broken body. The lifelike had recovered at least partially from Cricket’s savage beating, her shattered bones starting to mend. Like a newborn, she stirred, fingers twitching, lungs rasping. It wouldn’t be long before she was moving again. And after that…

“I don’t think you want to be here when they start getting back up,” she warned. “And I don’t think you want Gabriel finding Ana first. He’s going to look for her, you know. And when he finds her…”

Ezekiel tensed at that. Eyes narrowing a fraction at the implied threat. He stared at her hard, an unspoken question on his lips. She could see his fear that he already knew the answer. He looked to the door Lemon and Cricket had left by. Agony shining in his gaze as he turned back to the not-girl he’d never loved.

“This isn’t over,” he said.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “No, it really isn’t. But next time we meet?” She raised her hand to his face, her touch as gentle as first kisses. “I don’t think it’s going to turn out the way you want it to.”

She let her hand fall away. Her feelings along with it. Letting the rage wash her clean. He lingered a moment longer. Perhaps thinking of a burning garden. Of a paradise lost. And then he turned, limping across the battered bridge, into the sunlight waiting beyond. She watched him go, forcing himself with every step. She wondered if this was the finale he’d expected. If he’d ever get the ending he wanted. If he’d ever be a real boy.

“Goodbye,” she whispered. “My beautiful liar.”

And he was gone.

Coda

He woke in darkness.

The cold-copper taste of old blood on his lips. The bird-brittle crack of broken bones beneath his skin. Emergency lighting bathed the walls the color of bleeding, and he groaned, trying to rise to his feet.

He’d fallen, he remembered. So very far.

“Gabriel.”

He looked up and saw her, silhouetted against the light. An angel, beautiful and bright, the burning globe behind her framing a halo of blond about her head. His bleeding heart surged inside his broken chest, and for a moment, he thought it had all been a dream. That he’d never lost her. That she was here with him now.

He spoke, his voice full of terrible love and terrible fear.

“…Grace?”

She leaned in closer, offering her hand. And he saw her face then. Saw his mistake. Saw a dead girl, sure and true. But not the one he dreamed of. She was tall, a little gangly, boots too big and cargos too tight. Sun-bleached blond hair was undercut into a tangled fauxhawk. Her sharp cheekbones were smudged with blood and dirt, illuminated by the flare of the emergency globes.

Her right eye socket was empty, a single bloody tear crawling down her cheek. The side of her head was matted with red, her fingers, too, as if she’d torn something out of her skull. He could see the glint of metallic bone under her skin, and he realized, breath catching in his throat, that the hole was slowly knitting closed.

It was just about the right shape for a nasty exit wound.

“You never lied to me, Gabriel,” she said. “For all your faults, you never did that.”

“Ana?” he asked, bewildered.

“No, brother,” she replied.

Her smile was a razor blade.

“My name is Eve.”

She took his hand in hers.

“And we have so much work to do.”