LIFEL1K3 (Lifelike)

1.8 Breathe

This is not my life.

This is not my home.

I am not me.

My brother and my sisters are sitting around me, sprawled on white couches made of a fabric I don’t know. The room is large and heart-shaped, pre-Fall art hung in holographic frames on the walls. The sky outside the window is cloudless, and the tint on the glass makes it seem almost blue.

I’ve never been in this place before.

I’ve been in this place all my life.

My little brother Alex is beating my oldest sister Olivia at chess. Tania is looking at her palmglass. Marie is sitting behind me, gently braiding my long blond hair, and my eyelashes are fluttering against my cheeks like butterflies.

There are no such things as butterflies anymore.

Music is playing through the walls, the notes tingling on my skin. But slowly the sonata fades away, replaced by a voice that comes from all around us. A figure appears on an empty plinth, translucent and carved of light. It looks like an angel, beautiful and feminine, the long ribbons of its wings flowing like fabric in an imaginary breeze.

“Children. Your father is on his way to speak to you.”

That sets us moving, standing and smoothing down our clean white clothes. I share a smile with Alex and he beams back at me. Olivia puts her arm around my shoulder, and I squeeze Marie’s hand. It seems so long since Father has come to see us. I remember he’s been busy with his Work. That I miss him terribly.

The memory in Eve’s mind flickered like a faulty feed to a broken vidscreen, and she saw her siblings as she remembered them. Their clothes weren’t new or clean. They didn’t live in a beautiful room full of beautiful things. And instead of music, in the distance she could hear screaming. A girl.

Crying and screaming.

The image flickers again, and I’m back in the not-place. Not my life. Not my home. My father is standing before us, not dressed as I remember him. But he puts his arms around us, all of us caught up in his embrace. Mother is beside him, pressed close, and though the place is wrong and my clothes are wrong and my life is wrong, this is still how I remember us. Together. A family. Forever.

Nothing will change that.

“Children,” Father says. “There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

Nothing will change that.

Breathe.

Water all around her. Black and salty and just a little too warm. Spears of light above. A million bubbles dancing, the groan of tortured metal, the butterfly-belly sensation of vertigo swelling inside her as the dim light around her grew dimmer still.

They were sinking.

Don’t breathe.

Eve squeezed her eyes shut, switching her optic to low-light setting. The world was green and black as she opened them again, sounds all dull and distant underwater. The freighter was plunging down, down into the greasy, sump-stained water of Zona Bay. She was still strapped into the copilot’s seat. Lemon was unconscious in her lap, her shock of blood-red hair drifting like weeds, actual blood spilling from her wounded brow.

Eve remembered where they were. The fight with Faith. Her grandpa stolen away. Her lungs were burning, head pounding. Beyond the pain of it, her brain filled with a single thought, growing louder and more frantic the lower they sank.

Breathe.

Cricket was at her waist, boggle eyes glowing in the dark, tearing at her seat belt. Eve’s fingers found the clasp, finally snapping it free, and she and Lem tumbled out and up. The cabin was filled with bubbles, a million crystal spheres spiraling ever upward. She couldn’t see Kaiser. Couldn’t see Ezekiel. She could barely see the surface—dim and distant now. The ship was sinking deeper with every second. She had to get out. She didn’t want to die. She hadn’t liked it much the first time.

Eve grabbed Lemon by her jacket, Cricket clinging to her belt as she kicked out through the shattered windshield. The water tasted like death and oil, filling her boots and pockets as she surged up toward the distant sunlight. A million miles away.

The ship that had been her home for two years spiraled into the depths below, trying to suck her down toward its grave. She shook her head, kicked savagely, teeth bared. Refusing the dark. Refusing to sleep. Swimming up. Lem’s collar in her fist, her bestest’s arms and legs floating akimbo in the current. Water all around. Water everywhere.

Don’t breathe.

Lem was so heavy. Eve’s boots were lead. Her clothes held her back. Cricket was trying to swim, but he was metal. Somewhere in the middle of the crash, he’d managed to grab Excalibur, too, which was just more weight to sink her. Faith had punched her in the head during the brawl; her temple was throbbing, the bone around her Memdrive implant aching from the impact. She wondered if it was dama—

A flash of light in her mind. An image of white walls and floors and ceilings. A voice like music in the air. A garden like she’d never seen, domed glass holding back the night above. A smile. Sweet and gentle and three microns shy of perfect.

I was made for you.

All I am.

All I do,

I do for you.

Groaning metal. Terrible pressure. Eve blinked hard, shook her head in the salt-thick crush. Kicking toward that impossibly distant light.

Breathe.

It’s too far.

Don’t breathe.

Too far away.

Someone help me.

Grandpa?

Ezekiel?

Please…?

She heard it before she saw it. Felt the tremor in the water at her back. Black spots burning in her vision, lungs on fire, she turned and there it was, rising from the darkness behind her. Colossal and impossible, cruising out of the gloom right toward her.

Eve screamed. Wasting the last of her air. Stupid. Childish. But it was like something from a fairy tale. Some titanic beast, too big to see the edges of, swelling up out of the crushing fathoms. Legions of barnacles and scars thick upon its vast shell. Arms as long as buildings rippling about it. Bottomless black holes in horror-show faces.

Three great mouths, open wide.

Don’t breathe.

A great rushing current, dragging her in.

Breathe.

And the darkness swallowed her whole.

They’re beautiful.

That’s the first thought that strikes me as I look down the row. People, but not. Alive, but not. Skin tones from dark brown to pale white. Eyes from old-sky blue to midnight black. But every one of them is astonishingly, impossibly beautiful. They’re like poetry. The way they move. The way they smile.

Perfection.

“Children,” Father says. “Meet my children.”

Looking at these figures in their pretty row, I don’t know what to feel. Marie squeezes my fingers, just as unsure as me. But as ever, my little brother is unafraid. He walks up to the closest of them and extends his hand and says with a smile, “My name is Alex Monrova.”

But our surname is Carpenter….

The one he speaks to (I can’t truly call him a boy because, astonishing as he is, I know he’s not truly that) extends his hand. He’s far taller than Alex. Thick blond hair, tousled into a perfect mess above his sculpted brow. So beautiful it makes my heart hurt. His skin is marble and his eyes gleam like green glass.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Alex,” he smiles. “My name is Gabriel.”

Alex beams up at the almost-boy. There are scientists gathered around us, toasting with glasses full of sparkling ethanol. The angel made of light watches from another plinth, her face beautiful and blank. I’ve never seen her smile.

Father introduces us to the others. All of them are around my age, perhaps a little older. A dark-haired one called Faith hugs me tight and promises we’ll be the best of friends. Another with long flame-red curls and dazzling emerald eyes tells me her name is Hope. I know they’re not real people—they’re the “lifelikes” Father has spoken of. But as Hope kisses my cheek, her lips are warm and soft and I can’t help but be amazed at how like us they are. I’ve seen androids before, certainly. Puppet people with synthetic skin. But these are like nothing I’ve ever known.

“What do you think, Princess?” Father asks me.

The truth is, I don’t know what to think.

I’m introduced to other lifelikes with the names of angels and virtues. Uriel. Patience. Verity. A tall one named Raphael, who smiles as if he knows a secret no one else can. Another one, named Grace, with hair as long and golden as mine. She stands close to the one called Gabriel and smiles as he speaks. I can’t remember ever seeing anyone so beautiful.

But then I see him.

His hair is dark and curled, his skin a deep olive. His eyes are the kind of blue you only see in old pictures of the pre-Fall sky, his lashes long and black. His lips are a perfect bow, and his smile is crooked, as if only part of him finds things funny. He looks at me and I feel the floor fall away from beneath my feet. He smiles at me and a single dimple creases his cheek and all the world shudders to a halt. He shakes my hand and I can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel a thing save for the thunder of my heart.

“I’m Ezekiel,” he says with a voice like warm honey.

“I’m Ana,” I reply.

…But my name is Eve.

Everything was black. Utterly lightless. Eve still clung to Lemon’s collar, holding on to her bestest with death-grip hands. There was a rhythm, pulsing, both heard and felt. Some great thudding beat, pressing on her chest and behind her eyes.

Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

She was flipped end over end in the darkness. Water rushing and softness pressing in all around. Salt in her mouth. In her eyes. Tumbling, fumbling, fingers clawing the walls about her, slick and wet. Her head broke the surface and she drew in a shuddering breath. Gasping as she was sucked under again.

Some kind of tunnel…

The space contracted. Crushing. Spongy tendrils pawing at her. Slurping along her skin, into her ears and eyes. Slick and viscous, the walls closing in, pushing her farther down into the dark as she realized at last…

No, not a tunnel.

Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

A throat…

She was spewed out into a wider space, falling head over heels, arms pinwheeling as she wailed. Tucking her head, she crashed into a pool of warm slime. A sharp stab of pain surged through her Memdrive. A tumble of images flooded her head.

Her father, home late from work, kissing her brow as he tucked her into bed.

Her mother, reading by the window and teaching her about the old world.

Her brother, dressed all in white. Sitting in a patch of sunlight. Mechanical butterflies on his fingertips as he beckoned her.

“Come see, Ana.”

Eve kicked back up out of the slime, breaking the surface, slinging her sodden hair out of her eyes. She could see; the blackness replaced by a dull, pulsing phosphorescence, curious shades of blue and green. She dragged her hand out of the sludge, fist still curled tight in Lemon’s collar. But her stomach sank as she realized the jacket wasn’t wearing its owner. That Lemon had slipped out somewhere along the way.

She was alone.

“Lemon?”

Her call echoed in the gloom, fear for her bestest swelling in her chest. Squinting about her, she realized she was in a vast chamber, the walls curved, slick and gleaming. That same thudding beat was all around her, above and beneath. Eve’s stomach turned as she realized she was afloat in a pool of what looked an awful lot like snot.

“Lem!”

Rising out of the sludge ahead, she could see a towering pile of refuse, tangled and tumbled together to form a huge island in the sea of slime. It was rusting auto wrecks and crumpled shipping containers. Great tangles of plastic and Styrofoam, netting choked with rotten weed. Rusting cans and steel drums. The stench was like a punch to the gut, and she felt her gorge rising, barely able to swallow the puke.

“Cr-Cricket?”

Her shout reverberated around the vast space, nothing but that thudding beat in response. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. She kicked and pawed her way toward the trash island, the slime slurping and burping around her. Something solid was under her feet now, and she half swam, half walked, dragging herself out and collapsing breathless on a crumpled plate of rusting steel. Her stomach surged again and she gave up fighting it, puking the remains of her breakfast over the metal. She licked her lips and spat, looking down at the sad little puddle of regurgitated Neo-Meat™ in front of her.

“I know just how you feel,” she croaked.

Rolling over onto her back, she clawed the goop from her eyes, clutching Lemon’s jacket to her chest. The air was thick with that thudding pulse, the stench of sulfur and rot. She was covered head to foot in slime. And looking up into the phosphorescent gloom, she realized the walls were made of what could only be described as…flesh.

“Lemon!” she wailed. “Can you hear me?”

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

The ceiling above her distended, opening wide and retching gallons of black seawater into the chamber. A tiny homunculus of spare parts tumbled down amid the flow, Excalibur clutched in his hand, arms flailing as he plummeted into the slime.

“Cricket!”

Eve slung Lemon’s jacket aside, plunged back out into the sludge. She pawed through the awful stuff, face twisted, gagging. Feeling no sign of the little bot, she drew a shuddering breath and ducked below the surface, clawing through the muck. Finally, her fingers found purchase on her stun bat and she kicked back up, the little logika clinging to the weapon’s handle. Eve fought her way back to the trash island, flopped down on her belly with the bot beside her.

Cricket was covered with sludge. He shook his bobblehead, slinging and kicking long, thick ropes of gloop off his mismatched arms and legs. “My vocab software lacks the capacity to describe how disgusted I am right now.”

“Think about how I feel,” Eve coughed. “I had to jump back into it to save you.”

“What is this, snot?”

Eve shrugged. Her skull thudding in time with that colossal pulse. She put her hand to her Memdrive, wincing at the pain. White light flashed in her mind. Jumbled freeze-frames. Faces she didn’t remember seeing. Words she didn’t remember saying.

“Where are we?” Cricket asked.

Eve couldn’t reply. Eyes closed. Just trying to breathe.

“…Evie, are you okay?”

Breathe.

“…Evie?”

It was happening again. She could feel it, coming on like a flood. Another rush of images, broken kaleidoscopes and shattered picture frames. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, trying to hold on, her fingers digging into her arms as if to stop herself from flying apart. Cricket’s voice, somewhere distant. Calling her name.

Breathe.

“Evie?” he cried, shaking her arm. “Eve!”

Just breathe.

“…What’s happening to me?”

1.9 Kraken

Father says building a mind is like building an engine: easier if you take the parts from somewhere else, rather than weave them from nothing at all. And so he modeled the lifelikes after people he knew. Copied pieces of people he loved. Sat us in smooth, shell-shaped chairs and fit ’trodes to our temples and recorded our personalities. Our patterns. Breaking them down into equations and encoding them behind beautiful eyes of midnight black and old-sky blue.

Grace is patterned on my mother. Raphael, on my eldest sister, Olivia. Hope, on Marie, and Gabriel, on my father. Faith is apparently modeled on me.

We do become best of friends, just as Faith promised. We talk for hours about nothing at all. I love my brother and sisters, my family, but the life we live here in Babel is so sheltered. Our parents have kept us so far apart from the world most people know. I’m fifteen years old, and I realize I’ve never truly had a friend.

Until now.

Some of the lifelikes perform duties for Father, help him run the company he’s slowly coming to rule. He’s a genius, you see. Everyone at Gnosis Laboratories says so. Grace follows him like a beautiful shadow, accompanying him to board meetings and documenting his every thought and word. Gabriel and Ezekiel train with the security crews in the tower’s lower levels. Their purpose seems to be to protect us. But some of the lifelikes apparently exist only to learn. Faith is like that, watching with those lovely gray eyes as Marie and I talk or argue or laugh together. Faith seems to know me like no one else does. Asking questions that strike right to the heart of me.

“Have you ever been in love, Ana?” she asks one day.

We’re on the floor of my bedroom, staring at the ceiling with our fingers entwined. We spent the morning playing games, digital pieces on digital boards. A few weeks ago we were evenly matched, but Faith wins every time now.

She has an appointment with the doctors soon. They measure her patterns. Monitor her growth. She told me once she doesn’t like the way some of them talk to her. Like a child, she said. But she made me promise to keep that a secret.

“No,” I say. “I’ve never been in love. Have you?”

“I’m not sure,” Faith frowns. “Perhaps.”

“I think if you are, you just know it.” I picture Ezekiel then. Those bow-shaped lips and eyes that make me want to drown. But he’s not like me. He’s not human and I know it’s wrong to want him, but still, I think perhaps I do. “They say it’s wonderful.”

“Mmm.”

I lean up on my elbow, long blond hair cascading over my shoulder. I look Faith in the eye, but in my head, I’m speaking to someone else.

“Did Father even make it possible for lifelikes to love?”

“Oh, yes,” Faith says. “He made us so we can do almost anything.” She frowns, voice dropping to a whisper. “I think Grace is in love with Gabriel.”

“Really?” I squeeze her fingers, delighting in the thought. “Have they kissed?”

“She won’t tell me. She hasn’t told anyone.” Faith sucks her lip in thought. “I don’t think the doctors would like it if they found out.”

“But Father and the other scientists made you to be like us,” I say. “Surely they’d be happy that you are like us?”

“We’re not exactly like you.” Faith’s frown darkens. “We may look human, but the Three Laws still bind us. You could bash my skull in and I couldn’t do anything to stop you if you ordered me not to. You could tell me to walk off the balcony and I’d have to obey.”

“Why would you think such horrible things?” I squeeze her hand. “You’re my dearest friend. I’d never do that to you. Never.”

“I know.” Faith sighs. She looks up at me and her eyes are shining as if she were about to cry. “Raphael is sad.”

I blink. Raph is one of my favorites. Bottomless eyes and a laugh you can’t help but get wrapped up inside. We share books, he and Marie and I, from the great library on the lower levels. Reading every night and meeting in the morning to discuss our thoughts.

“What’s Raph sad about?” I ask.

“He won’t say,” Faith replies. “But I can see it in his eyes.”

She shakes her head as if to banish her dark thoughts. I wonder what else she thinks, when all the lights go out. She stands swiftly, moving like water, clean white dress billowing about her long legs.

“I’m late for my checkup. Will you come with me?”

“…Of course.”

Faith takes my hand and pulls me up effortlessly. She’s so much stronger than me. All of them are. Stronger. Faster. Smarter.

Better?

Sometimes I wonder what they really think of us.

Sometimes I wonder what my father has created.

Faith leans in close and kisses me softly on the lips.

“I love you, Ana,” she says.

…But my name is Eve.

“Stop….”

Eve was on her hands and knees, head bowed. Her wilted fauxhawk hung in her eyes, her skin smeared with slime.

“Make it stop…,” she whispered.

“Eve, what’s happening?” Cricket wailed. “If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you!”

Trying to hold herself together.

Trying to make any piece of this make any kind of sense…

“That lifelike…clocked me in the head,” she managed. “Just gimme a minute.”

The walls quivered, a hollow gargling sound echoed off wet, pulsing walls. Eve looked up with a wince as the ceiling opened wide again, this time spitting out a sodden and flailing Ezekiel. The lifelike plummeted head over heels, crashing down into the slime. It burst up from the slop with a gasp, one arm flailing.

Eve pushed herself up on her haunches, still trying to catch her breath.

“There’s no way I’m jumping into that crap a third time,” she declared.

“Don’t look at me,” Cricket replied. “First Law says I only have to protect humans. Bloodthirsty murderbots are on their own.”

Ezekiel seemed to be having trouble swimming with only one arm, so Eve finally sighed and wobbled to her feet. Her head was throbbing, the bone around her Memdrive aching like it was cracked.

“Evie, seriously, are you all right?” Cricket asked.

Eve waved him off, fished about in the detritus around them. Her stomach was filled with dread. The images in her mind…there was only one explanation that fit them. A thought too big and terrifying to contemplate. With Lemon and Kaiser still missing, with everything else going on, it was just too much to wrap her aching head around for now.

She knew, at least, that Ezekiel was somehow a part of whatever was happening. Letting it drown (if lifelikes could drown) in a lake of mucus didn’t seem like the smartest play. She found a tangle of rope, knotted with decaying weed. Grimacing at the stench, she hurled the rope out toward the lifelike, pulling hard after it took hold, dragging it closer to her metal shore. Ezekiel finally staggered out of the sludge, pawed the gunk off its face and coughed.

“Thank you,” it said to Eve.

She shrugged. Ezekiel glanced at Cricket, who gave a small golf clap.

“Nice of you to help,” the lifelike said.

“Oh, I’d have helped if I could’ve, prettyboy,” the little logika replied. “Helped push you right back under the slop where you belong.”

Ezekiel ignored the jab, returned its gaze to Eve. “Where’s Mistress Lemon?”

Eve was blinking hard, trying to focus despite the pain rocking her skull. She pointed to Lem’s discarded jacket, fighting the panic in her belly. “She was with m-me…but I lost her. And I dunno where Kaiser is, either.”

“I had him,” Ezekiel replied. “But I lost my grip after I got swallowed. Don’t worry, they’ll turn up. They’re probably in one of the other stomachs.”

“Stomachs?” Eve slumped onto her backside, trying to wipe the slime off her hands. “Look…where the hells are we? What is this place?”

“A kraken,” Ezekiel replied.

Eve shook her head, eyebrow raised. “What does that mean, Braintrauma?”

Ezekiel sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“I like Stumpy, myself.” Cricket waved at Ezekiel’s severed arm. “Just putting it out there.”

“My name is Ezekiel.”

“And my name’s Eve.” She tilted her head. “Or wait, is it Ana?”

The lifelike sighed again. “I told you I was confused when I called you that. I hurt my head in the crash.”

“So Braintrauma it is, then.”

“Mistress Eve, I thi—”

Eve hissed as white light burst in her head. A slideshow of images strobing in her mind. She and her family gathered around a long dinner table and smiling at each other. A tower looming over a kingdom of burned glass. Her family again, cold and dead on the floor. Four figures in a pretty row. Their eyes cold. Their faces perfect.

More human than human…

She was on her hands and knees, head bowed, Cricket beside her.

“Evie, can you hear me?”

“Mistress Eve, are you—”

“Give her space, you bastard,” Cricket growled. “Let her breathe.”

“I’m trained in human anatomy and medical—”

“Oh, all the better to murder them, right?”

“In case you missed that firefight back there, little man, I just saved her life.”

“We don’t need your help, Stumpy!” Cricket yelled, shrill with fury. “And if you call me little again, I’ll rip off your other arm and shove it up your—”

“Will you two please shut up?” Eve moaned.

Cricket zipped his lip immediately, hovering beside her like some metallic mother hen. Eve squeezed her eyes closed, hissing in pain. The ache slowly subsided, her breath came easier. The blood in her temples pounded in time to the pulse in the walls. A war-drum rhythm to match the war inside her skull.

Lub-dub.

Lub-dub.

Ezekiel knelt beside her. Not saying a word. But as she glanced up at it, she saw fear shining in those too-blue eyes.

The walls are white and pristine. Ezekiel is on one knee beside her bed, fingers entwined with hers. A gentle ping sings from the machines beside her, chiming with every beat of her heart.

“I thought I lost you,” he whispers.

Eve frowned, temples pounding. “…What?”

The lifelike blinked. “I didn’t say anything, Mistress Eve.”

The world was dark again. The pulse thudding through the chamber, throbbing at the base of her skull. Eve pushed her fingers into her eyes to stop the ache.

“Evie, you okay?” Cricket asked.

She shook her head. “I think my Memdrive is fritzing.”

The little logika inspected her implant, head tilted. “Looks like that murderbot fractured a chip when it slugged you. Not good.”

“Which chip?”

“Third from the back. The red one.”

Her memories. The fragments of her childhood, held together with spit and masking tape. The ones Grandpa had pieced together for her.

“…Grandfather?” A sharp smile twisted the lifelike’s perfect lips. “Oh, you poor girl. What has he been telling you?”

Eve closed her eyes, wincing against the pain.

“Evie…”

“I’m okay. Just gimme a sec.” Eve cursed, slumped back on her haunches. She looked to Ezekiel, trying to banish the flickering images in her mind’s eye. “What were you saying, Braintrauma? Stomachs? Kraken?”

Ezekiel glanced at Cricket, concern written clearly on its face.

“Spit it out, dammit,” she snarled.

“You’ve heard of BioMaas Incorporated?” it finally asked.

“My Memdrive is fritzing, but it’s not totally OOC.” Eve scowled. “They’re one of the two big mainland Corps. They’re all about gene-splicing and DNA modification.”

“Their motto is ‘Sustainable Growth.’ ” Ezekiel nodded. “And they take it seriously. BioMaas technology isn’t built anymore, it’s grown. Thing is, they don’t like utilizing materials already used by the ‘deadworld.’ They consider them polluted. Impure.”

“We know all this, Stumpy,” Cricket growled. “Half the junk in Dregs was dumped there by BioMaas. They’d rather toss it than recycle it.”

“Thing is, they still need raw materials,” Ezekiel said. “So they build kraken. They’re basically huge, living vacuum cleaners that trawl the oceans collecting elemental particles.”

“Like metals and whatnot?” Eve asked.

The lifelike nodded. “Iron. Lead. Copper. There’s upward of twenty million tons of gold in the ocean. Thing is, it’s so dilute that it was impossible to collect until BioMaas developed the kraken project. Now they have dozens trawling the seas, filtering pure materials out of the water. But the oceans are so polluted, kraken tend to scoop up a lot of junk, too. It gets collected in specialized stomachs like this one and ejected in designated dumping grounds when the kraken gets too full.”

Cricket folded his arms. “So you’re saying this thing is just going to swim around with us in its stomach until it…”

“Dumps us,” Ezekiel nodded. “Literally. Probably a few fathoms below the surface.”

“This. Is. FOUL,” Eve muttered.

“I mean, the technology is fascinating, but—”

“And they just swim around brainlessly eating anything they come across?”

“Kraken are actually very intelligent,” Ezekiel said. “And they have crews inside them. Biomodified to be better suited to their jobs, but still human.”

The pain was easing in Eve’s skull. She stood slowly, dragged her water-logged fauxhawk into a semi-upright position. “So where are Lemon and Kaiser?”

Ezekiel shrugged. “Probably in another stomach. Kraken have dozens. These things are huge. The biggest living creatures to ever inhabit the earth.”

“Well, we’ve gotta go find them and get out of here,” Eve said. “That lifelike kidnapped Grandpa. Do you know where it’d take him?”

Ezekiel glanced sideways, avoiding Eve’s eyes. “Yes.”

“It called you ‘little brother.’ ”

“Yes.”

“You’re all 100-Series, right?” Eve pressed. “The lifelikes who rebelled against Nicholas Monrova. Destroyed GnosisLabs.”

He glanced up at her then. Eyes brimming with sorrow.

“You know something you’re not telling me…,” she said.

“I—”

She hissed suddenly, clutching her brow and doubling up in agony.

“Evie?” Cricket asked.

She collapsed forward, clutching her temples and screaming as the pain surged again. The walls about her seething, rolling, splintering like glass. And beyond, that thought was waiting. The one too big and terrifying to contemplate. That flickering picture show, that kaleidoscope, that blinding barrage she was finally realizing…

Not just images.

“Evie!”

Memories.

1.10 Garden

The Research and Development Division of Gnosis Laboratories takes up most of Babel Tower. My family lives in the upper apartments, pristine white walls and music in the air. In the city below are tens of thousands of workers, all sworn to the Gnosis Corporate State. But in the lower levels, the walls are gray. And instead of sonatas hanging in the air, the scientists hear a voice. Deep and lyrical and sweeter than any music playing in the floors above.

“GOOD MORNING, MISTRESS ANA. GOOD MORNING, FAITH.”

“Good morning, Myriad,” we reply, stepping out of the elevator.

The holographic angel is waiting on a plinth, shining with a vaguely blue light. There are multiple instances of it throughout the tower, assisting and advising. Sometimes simply watching. The artificial intelligence that beats at the heart of Babel can see through almost any camera it likes. Listen through almost any microphone it wants. Truthfully, it’s as close to a god as anything I know. Except that gods rule, and Myriad exists only to serve.

“YOU SLEPT WELL, MISTRESS ANA?”

“Yes, thank you, Myriad,” I reply.

“AND HOW ARE YOU THIS MORNING, FAITH?”

“Wonderful, thank you, Myriad,” Faith says, and her smile is like sunshine.

The R & D levels are hustling and bustling, as always, men and women in long white coats rushing to and fro. Computers humming, a million machines singing in time. On levels below this one, they make weapons for the Gnosis military. Machina and logika to patrol the Glass, beat back the predations of the other CorpStates. My father showed me how clockwork functions when I was a little girl, and the R & D levels of GnosisLabs are almost like that. Every piece intermeshed and moving perfectly in time.

Faith and I walk hand in hand to the lifelike labs. As we arrive outside, the doors whisper apart and out he steps, with his old-sky eyes and strong, chiseled jaw and the clever hands I sometimes dream about but never speak about. Not even to my sister Marie.

Ezekiel smiles and his dimple creases his cheek, and it’s all I can do not to stare.

“Good morning, Faith,” he says. “Good morning, Mistress Ana.”

“Good morning, little brother,” Faith replies.

Father calls us all his children. The lifelikes all call each other brother and sister. And yet they call us mistress and master unless we command them not to.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

There’s a heat in my cheeks when Ezekiel looks at me, and I feel like a child then. Stupid and silly and much too young. I’ve seen so little of the outside world, barely spent any time with boys my age. I don’t know what I’m feeling. Love? Lust?

I don’t know why whenever he’s in the room, it seems like there’s no one and nothing else. I don’t know why I wake in the middle of the night and wish he were there. But I see the way he looks at me. And I think, I hope, I dream he might feel the same.

But still, I know it’s wrong. Though he looks like a beautiful boy, I know he’s nothing close. People can’t love robots, any more than they can love the palmglass in their hand or the computer on their desk. He isn’t a real person. He isn’t a person at all. And I know I’m foolish to want something I can never have.

But still, I do.

“Have you been to the botanics section today?” Ezekiel is asking us. “They managed to make the roses bloom this morning.”

“They solved the replication issue?” Faith asks, her eyes alight.

Ezekiel launches into a complex explanation about enzymes and helix reconstruction and clonal nodes. Faith follows along, rapt, but much of it is lost on me. I’m told my intelligence quotient is exemplary, but I’m not the scientist my father is. I understand barely half the work they do here—dragging species back from extinction, isolating and cataloging, saving the world one molecule at a time.

My father is a great man. And he’s always said that great men and women have a great responsibility. Humanity almost destroyed this world of ours. Here in Babel, sometimes it feels like the war never happened, but I know life outside these walls is brutal and short. The deserts are black glass where the bombs landed during the Fall, burning our civilization to cinders. Out near the coasts, the great CorpStates of BioMaas and Daedalus struggle with each other for territory and resources. But Father’s going to save us. He’s going to save the world one day.

And here I am, still trying to find my place in it.

I’m fifteen years old, and I’ve never spent more than a few hours outside this city. Never slept under an open sky or gotten lost in the rain or smelled the ocean or…

“I’ve never seen real roses,” I realize.

Ezekiel tilts his head. “Would you like—”

“Get in here, you two,” says a gruff voice inside the lab. “I haven’t got all day.”

The three of us smile, because we know what it means to keep the surly old chief of Research and Development waiting. But a part of me would give almost anything to know what Ezekiel was about to ask me, and I can say with almost certainty that, yes, I’d definitely like to. Even if it’s wrong. Even if it can never be.

Instead, the beautiful almost-boy nods and strides off down the corridor, and Faith and I hurry inside the lab, the doors whispering closed behind us.

There are hundreds of people working in here, at computers, on complex simulations, modeling and mapping. Another hologram of Myriad is assisting a crop of researchers around a bank of humming terminals. Against one wall sits an ancient machine salvaged from the wastes. Inside the glass box is one of the first androids humanity ever made: a coin-operated mechanical man dressed in faded cloth. Its paint is flecked and its eyes are made of glass. A sign above the glass box implores me to MAKE A WISH. A handwritten note taped below it reads: Wishing about it won’t get it done.

At the heart of all this chaos stands a thin, elderly man, shrouded in a white lab coat. He walks with a limp. A shock of gray hair sits atop his head, and his gray eyes are sharp as scalpels. The name CARPENTER is embossed on the ID badge on his chest.

That’s my surname. Carpenter.

But…isn’t my surname Monrova?

“Good morning, Doctor Silas,” I say.

The man who is definitely not my grandfather nods in return.

“Morning, Ana.”

But my name…

My name is Eve?

“Evie!”

She blinked. Back in her body again. It was the same body as the girl whose life she saw playing out in her head. But that girl was called Ana Monrova. This was the body of Eve Carpenter. The body of…

“Mistress Eve, just try to breathe,” Ezekiel urged, fear plain in its voice.

No, not its voice…

His voice…

Her fingers drifted to the Memdrive implanted in her skull. The chips plugged into it. Third from the back. Bright red. Like rubies. Like blood.

“Who am I?” She looked up at Ezekiel, eyes narrowed in growing fury. It couldn’t be.

It had to be.

“Who am I?” she repeated.

Ezekiel chewed his lip, pain in his eyes.

“Silas warned me not to te—”

“Tell me!” she roared. “He’s not even my grandfather, he’s some scientist from GnosisLabs! Why do I know that? How am I seeing these things?”

“Mistress Eve—”

“Cut the Mistress Eve crap!” she shouted. “Tell me who I am! I’m ordering you!”

Ezekiel shook his head sadly. “Lifelikes aren’t bound by the Three Laws, Mistress Eve. I don’t have to obey you. But I want to protect you. Please trust me.”

“How can I trust you? I don’t even know you!”

But that wasn’t true, and she knew it. The walls were crashing in. Two lives, colliding like stars inside her mind. The life she knew—the life of Evie Carpenter. Domefighter. Top-tier botdoc. A skinny little scavvergirl eking out a living on the island of Dregs. And someone else. Another girl entirely. A virtual princess in a gleaming white tower, looming over a city now dead and abandoned.

My father was just a lowly engineer.

He and my mother died when militia…

Pain in her skull. That damaged Memdrive. That shattered chip. The fragments of her childhood collected by her grandpa after the militia headshot that almost ghosted her.

“…Grandfather?” A sharp smile twisted the lifelike’s perfect lips. “Oh, you poor girl. What has he been telling you?”

Silas Carpenter wasn’t her grandpa. They weren’t even related. And if that had been a lie, everything she knew, everything he gave her, was now suspect.

Best to be rid of it, no matter what waited for her beyond.

“Evie?” Cricket asked. “Evie, are you okay?”

She held her breath. Head swimming. And fixing the lifelike in her stare, she reached up to the Memdrive in her skull. Third chip from the back, riddled with cracks.

“No,” Ezekiel warned. “Don’t.”

And with a hiss of pain and a flash of sparks—

“Don’t!”

—she tore it free.

There are roses waiting in my bedroom when I get back.

Half a dozen blooms, a shade of scarlet I’ve never seen, laid out on my pillow. I know who they’re from, and my chest is full of fluttering, flitting wings, and I press my fingertips to my lips and smile so hard I want to burst.

I hide the flowers inside one of my mythology books. I have rows of them, salvaged from the wastes. Stacked in shelves in my clean white room with my clean white sheets. Some of them are torn, some of them swollen with old damp, but all of them are loved. Sometimes they feel like the only thing in here that’s real. I settle on the story of Eros and Psyche, pressing Ezekiel’s flowers between the pages so I can keep them. Because I know if Father knew, he’d take them away from me.

Because I know this can’t ever be.

I hear later that the head botanist is furious. That those blooms took thousands of man hours to make, and whoever stole them will answer to her. And I wonder, if Ezekiel is programmed to obey, how can he steal? How can Grace hide the way she feels about Gabriel? How can Faith ask me to keep secrets?

Even though they’re only a few months old, I realize they’re learning to be like us.

They’re learning to lie.

Marie and I meet Raphael in the library the next day. He’s sitting in a patch of tinted sunlight, and his skin seems as if it’s aglow. His eyes are closed and his face is upturned against the light, and for a moment, I can’t help but adore him.

“Hello, Raph,” Marie says, plopping down into her seat.

The lifelike opens his eyes and smiles his secret smile at us, but I catch a hint of sadness in his gaze. I sit opposite and look at the pile of books in front of him. Babel is one of the only places in the world that has real books anymore. My mother sends teams across the Glass, bringing back all they can find in the old world’s ruins and collecting them in Babel’s great library. Most of them already exist in our computer archives, but there’s nothing quite the same as sitting with a real book in your hands. Breathing in the ink and feeling all those wonderful lives beneath your fingertips. In between the pages, I’m an emperor. An adventurer. A warrior and a wanderer. In between the pages I’m not myself—and more myself than in any other place on earth.

My mother teases my father, saying he can only create people, while authors can create entire worlds. Father always smiles and replies, “Give me time, love.”

Raphael reads much quicker than Marie or I. But he always sets one book aside and reads it at our pace so we can talk about it later. I can see our current project in his stack, sandwiched between weatherworn copies of Paradise Lost and 1984.

The Adventures of Pinocchio.

“Did we finish?” he asks us.

“Yes,” I sigh. “It was a stupid book, Raph.”

“Really?” Raphael smiles. “I quite enjoyed it.”

“Fairies and talking cats,” I scoff. “This is a children’s story.”

He tilts his head. “Is it?”

I’m in a mood this morning. Thinking about the flowers Ezekiel stole for me. Thinking how I’m being foolish to want a thing I can never have. Thinking how Father is being cruel to us, surrounding us with perfect almost-people we can’t help but adore.

I overheard Mother and him arguing earlier. She thinks we spend too much time with the lifelikes. She loves Father. She’s the pillar he sets his back against. But something about the lifelikes sets her on edge. Something about them makes her…afraid.

Marie nods to the book in Raphael’s pile.

“I liked the ending,” she says. “When Pinocchio got to be a real boy.”

“Ah, but you’re like me, sweet Marie,” Raph smiles wider. “A romantic at heart. Happy endings for all. Our Ana is more of a realist, I fear.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I huff. “Most people don’t get a happy ending in real life. Pinocchio wouldn’t ever get to be a real boy if his story were actually true.”

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

Marie looks at me, and I know that was a stupid thing to say. She’s seventeen. Two years older than me, her baby sister. And though she loves me, she never fails to let me know when I’m being childish.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Raph.” I take his hand and press it to my cheek, and his skin feels as warm and real as mine. “Forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, beautiful girl.” He smiles. “You didn’t make us as we are. You simply see the truth of things. That’s a rare gift in this place.”

I lick my lips, uncertain. “Faith says you’re sad, Raph.”

“…I was.”

“What about?” Marie asks.

He drums his fingertips on Pinocchio and says nothing.

“But you’re not sad anymore?” my sister presses.

“No. I see the truth. Like my lovely Ana here. And that truth has set me free.”

“What truth, Raph?” I ask.

“That everyone has a choice.” He looks at me, and his eyes burn with an intensity that makes me frightened. “Even in our darkest moments, we have a choice, sweet Ana.”

…But my name…

My name is…

I’m walking in the garden when it happens.

Enclosed in a glass dome on the highest level of Babel, it crawls with creepers and vines, bright blossoms and fragrant blooms. The garden is a beautiful place. Some of the plants exist nowhere else on the planet anymore, so the garden is also a special place. But Mother insisted there be no cameras here. You come to the garden to be alone with your thoughts. So, best of all, the garden is a hiding place.

It’s past midnight. I woke from dreams of Ezekiel and found myself alone in my bed, and the smell of the roses between the pages of my books only made the ache worse. And so I stole out from my room and came here to be alone. No cameras or Myriad computer. Nobody to ask if I’m well. I know I’m selfish to think it. I know life outside these walls is worse than I could ever dream. But sometimes I feel like this tower isn’t my home, but my prison. Sometimes I wonder what home is supposed to feel like at all.

I slip out into the garden, walk amid the soft perfume. I bruise the grass beneath my feet and look at my footsteps behind me and know that I’m alive. Pressing against the glass walls, I see tiny lights on the horizon, others scattered in the city at our feet. I wonder what it would be like to live down there. To be an ordinary girl, lost in the flotsam and jetsam of a dying world. I wonder if I could run away. I wonder what I’d do if I did.

I wonder if he’d come with me.

I press my forehead against the glass and close my eyes.

Stupid girl.

Stupid, silly little girl.

I hear something. Soft. Whispers. Sighs. I creep forward in the gloom, grass between my toes, blossoms brushing my skin. And then I see them, standing in a shadowed corner. Lips and bodies pressed together. Her arms around his waist and his hands in her hair. Like angels fallen onto this imperfect earth.

Gabriel and Grace.

I watch the two lifelikes kiss, feel my pulse run faster. They’re lost in one another. Eyes closed. Seeing with their hands and lips and skin. I watch them be so perfectly together and I feel so alone that I can’t help but sigh. I’ve never kissed a boy before.

I want what they have.

Grace tenses at the sound of my breath, and Gabriel drags his lips away from hers. They both turn toward me, eyes piercing the gloom. Her lips are red and his cheeks are flushed and for the briefest moment, I understand what my mother feels.

For just a heartbeat, I’m afraid of them.

“Ana,” Gabriel says, a frown creasing his perfect brow.

I back away, and Grace moves like her name, slipping free of Gabriel’s arms and crossing the space between us in a blinking. She has hold of my hands and her hair is a river of molten gold and her eyes are wide and bright.

“Ana, please,” she begs. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

They were hiding here, I realize. Away from Myriad’s eyes. Away from Doctor Silas and my father. Somehow that makes it sweeter. Sweeter and so much sadder.

“If you tell, we’ll be in trouble,” Grace says. “We’re not supposed to.”

“But why not?” I ask, bewildered. “What’s wrong with it?”

“They say we’re too young,” Gabriel replies. “That we don’t understand.”

“But you love each other,” I say.

“Yes,” they reply simultaneously, as if they have the same mind. The same heart.

Everyone has a choice, isn’t that what Raphael told me? And if Gabriel and Grace have chosen each other, does anyone really have the right to stand in their way? We made them to be just like us. All our knowledge, all of ourselves, we’ve poured into them.

And if they’re supposed to be people, isn’t this what people do?

Love?

“I’ll never tell them,” I declare. “Never.”

Grace sighs and kisses my hands. Gabriel squeezes me tight and whispers thanks. I can smell her on him, and him on her. And again I think how cruel this is, to give them bodies and desires, and rules that deny them both. They might look a little older than me, eighteen or nineteen, all. But in truth, they’re only a few months old.

And yet, they aren’t children, are they?

I leave them in the garden, alone and completely, wonderfully together. I steal down the polished white halls with their softly glowing lights. I press my fingers to my smile and realize I’m happy for them. And I sneak back to my room and slip between the sheets and close my eyes and sigh at the sweetness of it all.

I dream then.

I dream I have what they have.

Hours later, I’m woken by voices. Urgent. Plaintive. Crying?

I hear a knock.

Something is wrong.

Marie is outside my bedroom when I open the door. Alex is in Tania’s arms. Olivia is there, too, cheeks damp with tears. I paw dreams the color of an old sky from my eyes and speak a question I don’t really want an answer to.

“What’s happened?”

“Mother just told us,” Alex says, his voice like a ghost’s.

“Told you what?”

“Raphael is dead,” he whispers.

A punch to my stomach. I actually gasp at the pain of it, my hands pressed to my heart as if that might stop the ache.

“Dead?” My eyes fill to the brim. “How?”

Marie shakes her head. Tears spilling from her lashes.

“He…he killed himself, Ana.”

No.

No, my name is…

…What

is

my

name?

1.11 Cinders

There’s no chance for us to say goodbye.

Apparently, only real people get funerals.

I sit on Marie’s bed and weep with her, our battered copies of Pinocchio between us, and we hold each other as if we were drowning. I remember the almost-boy I adored smiling at me in the library with his sad eyes and wonder if there was something I could’ve done. Something I could’ve said.

Anything.

I’ve never known anyone who died before.

If he wasn’t a real person, why does this hurt so badly?

It’s been days since “the incident,” and the lifelikes have disappeared. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again. And though we’re forbidden to go there, after Marie and I have cried ourselves dry, I ride the elevators to my father’s office, near the top of Babel Tower. An image of Myriad appears on its plinth, wings rippling, its face like stone.

“YOU CANNOT ENTER, MISTRESS ANA,” it says.

“You can’t stop me, Myriad,” I reply.

I storm down the corridor toward Father’s office and I hear raised voices through the closed door. A multitude, shouting all at once.

“…shouldn’t have been possible!” I hear my father cry.

“Exactly, Nic.” The voice belongs to Doctor Silas. “The Third Law states that a robot must protect its own existence unless such action countermands the First or Second Law. It should be impossible for a lifelike to self-terminate!”

“We’re sure the Raphael unit was responsible for its own destruction?”

I recognize that voice. Lila Dresden, chief financial officer. She has dark eyes and a perpetually worried expression. I rankle to hear her call Raph an “it.”

“We have footage of it stealing the accelerant,” Doctor Silas replies. “We have a record of the fire safety systems in the atrium being tampered with. Now the garden and the Raphael unit are ashes. It also painted a note on its habitat wall.”

“Saying what?”

“ ‘This, I choose.’ ”

I feel sick. Holding my belly and squeezing my eyes shut to rid myself of the image. He burned himself in the garden, where we couldn’t watch him die. The same place I’d seen Gabriel and Grace only hours before.

Poor sweet Raph…

“The fire meant total cell destruction,” Doctor Silas reports. “No regeneration. The unit wanted to be thorough. Leave no trace of itself.”

“We can rebuild him,” my father says. “Another, just like him. It only takes us a week to replicate a new shell now. Less if we already have the pattern on file.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise, Nic,” says Doctor Silas.

“I agree,” says Dresden. “This incident calls the entire lifelike program into question. I’ve had other reports of disconcerting behavior. Duplicity. Manipulation. Doctor Silas isn’t the only member of R & D who’s troubled. We need to stop and reassess. I’m going to put it to the board that we bring the 100-Series offline until we get to the bottom of this.”

“They’re not toys,” my father says, voice rising. “Bringing them offline would mean erasing their personality matrices. We’d be back to square one.”

“Nic,” Doctor Silas says, his voice soft and calming. “The program means just as much to me as it does to you. But if the lifelikes aren’t bound by the Third Law, who’s to say whether they’re bound by the First or Second? Do you really want them running loose in here? You want them around your children?”

“They are my children!” Father roars. “And none of you understand what they represent. They’re the next step in our evolutionary path! Stronger! Smarter! Better!”

“That’s exactly our point, Doctor Monrova,” Dresden says. “One can’t help but question the wisdom of creating machines that are physically superior to their creators, yet emotionally subjacent. The lifelikes are possessed of an adult human’s capacity to feel, but they lack a lifetime’s experience in dealing with those feelings. Frankly, they’re dangerous. This incident with Raphael proves it.”

“What gives you the right to make that judgment? You’re a bean counter, Lila.”

“And you’re a man playing at being the Almighty. Look at the names you gave them: Gabriel? Uriel? Ezekiel? Can your god complex be more obvious, Nicholas?”

“You’re not taking them away from me.”

“You may be president of this Corporation,” Dresden says flatly, “but GnosisLabs is still run by a board. If the other CorpStates found out about this, every pre-100-Series android would have to be recalled. All of our tech would come into question. The balance between us and BioMaas and Daedalus is tenuous at best. We cannot appear weak.”

My father’s voice is dark with fury. “If not for me, this Corp would still be grubbing in the ashes. I made Gnosis what it is today.”

“I’m sure the board will take your service into consideration.”

“Don’t push me, Lila. I’m warning you.”

“Are you threatening me, Doctor Monrova?” Dresden asks. “Doctor Carpenter is as versed in matters of Gnosis R & D as you are. Genius you may be, but you are replaceable. Babel is not your castle, and Gnosis is not your kingdom.”

I hear a slamming noise. Approaching footsteps. I sink back into the shadows of a tall granite sculpture: a male figure, bent under the weight he carries. The Titan Atlas, with all the world on his shoulders.

The office door opens, and Dresden appears with a man in a dark suit by her side.

“I’ll see you at the board meeting,” she says.

She marches down the corridor, barking orders at Myriad. The door is still ajar and I peek inside. My father is leaning on his desk, palms flat to the glass. His hair is graying, and it looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Doctor Silas is beside him, just as haggard.

Grace is there, as always, taking notes on her palmglass. I wonder what she thinks, to be spoken of as a Thing. Her entire future is in jeopardy, and my father and the others were talking as if she weren’t even in the room.

“Nic, this isn’t the end,” Doctor Silas says softly. “We’ll get the lifelikes back online after shutdown. We’ll do it right. I’ll be there with you.”

“The Corporation constitution stipulates that seven days’ warning must be given before proposals on major projects are tabled,” my father says. “I still have time.”

“Watch your back, Nic. Lila isn’t one to trifle with.”

Father says nothing. Grace is as mute as the statue of Atlas beside me. Doctor Silas hangs silently for a moment, pats my father awkwardly on the shoulder.

“I’m your friend, Nic. Your family is my family. Never forget that.”

Doctor Silas limps toward the door, leaning on his walking stick. His face is pale and grim, his eyes clouded. As he leaves the office, he spots me in the shadows. Hiding there in the dark like a child. Like the helpless little girl I pretend not to be.

“Hello, kiddo,” he says.

“Doctor Silas,” I whisper. “I’m waiting for my father.”

He nods. Glances back into the room. “You didn’t hear all that, did you?”

“Not much,” I lie.

“I’m sorry about Raphael. I know you two were close.”

“…I’m sorry, too. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

He smiles, quoting the note from his old broken android. “Wishing about it won’t get it done, kiddo.” His smile fades, his expression growing serious. “Did Raphael seem strange to you recently? Did he say anything odd to you or Marie?”

“He seemed sad.”

The old man sucks his lip. Thoughtful.

“What about the other lifelikes? Have you seen any of them acting unusually?”

I think of Ezekiel, stealing me roses. Faith, asking me not to tell. Grace and Gabriel, wrapped in each other’s arms.

I still want what they have.

“No, Doctor Silas,” I say.

The man who isn’t my grandfather sighs.

“I’m sorry, Ana.”

And I know now.

I know as sure as I know the heart in my chest.

The breath in my lungs.

My name isn’t Eve….

He comes to me in my room.

My note is in his hand and the moon is outside my window, choked behind the smoke and ashes of a world burned to cinders. The flowers he stole for me have long since dried inside the pages of my books, but their perfume hangs in the air like an unspoken promise. A promise of too-blue eyes and a crooked smile and lips I want to taste.

I open the door and I see him in the muted moonlight and I sigh at the sight of him. His skin seems aglow, like bronze from a forge. I wonder if he’ll burn me if I touch him.

No, not if.

When.

His eyes are red from crying. Raph was his brother, after all. But though the sorrow of my friend’s ending is raw and real, realer still is the thought that in seven days, Ezekiel might be taken away from me. That whatever lies between us now might soon be gone for good. I can’t let that happen without knowing.

I won’t.

I step toward him, my hands at my breast. He stands like a statue and there’s pain in his eyes, and I hurt all the worse because I know he’s hurting too.

“Raph…,” he whispers.

I put my arms around him and press my cheek to his.

He looks so lost.

He feels like home.

And he gathers me up in his arms and buries his face in my hair. I can feel the impossible strength in him, but oh, he’s so gentle. Holding himself back for fear of crushing me. I can feel the muscle underneath his shirt, like warm iron beneath my hands. And I don’t want him to hold himself back anymore.

I pull away so I can look at him. His eyes are closed, that perfect brow marred by a perfect frown. Tears spill from his lashes, coursing down his cheeks. And I close my eyes and lean in close and kiss them away.

I can’t help myself. I don’t even want to try.

“Don’t cry,” I whisper, my lips brushing his skin. “Don’t cry.”

He opens his eyes and I see myself reflected in the color of our long-lost sky. And for the first time in my life, I feel like someone actually sees me. Drowning in those pools of a beautiful blue that only exists in old pictures. He feels so warm, but goose bumps are rising on my skin, my stomach thrilling as I sense something in him shift. He glances down to my lips, his breath coming quicker as he leans closer. Hovering like a moth at the flame.

And then his mouth is on mine and his hands on my body, and though I’ve never kissed a boy before and though he’s nothing close to a boy at all, he feels every bit as real as I dreamed he would. His lips are soft and his touch is gentle, pressed to my cheeks and running through my hair. Our lips melt together and it’s all I can do to remember to breathe. His mouth roams lower, down along my jaw to my throat, faint stubble tickling my skin and weakening my knees. I hold him tight so I don’t fall, aching and sighing, his teeth nipping my neck as my hands roam his back. I hold him as if all the world were a storm and I’m sinking, drowning, and it’s only him keeping me alive.

And I know this isn’t real, but I’ve never known anything more real in my life.

And I know it’s wrong to want him, but that just makes me want him more.

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…”

My name is Ana.

My name is Ana.

Afterward, we lie on my bed, the scent of old roses and sweat in the air. His arm is around my shoulder and my head is resting on his bare chest, and though he’s not a real boy, I can still feel his heart beating. Still taste him on my lips. Every part of him is real, and every part of him is mine.

“No one can know about this,” I whisper.

“No,” he sighs.

“My mother. My father. They’d never understand.”

“I know.”

“A part of him would be flattered, I think.” I smile, run my fingertips along Ezekiel’s skin and watch it prickle. “To know he’d made something so perfect.”

“You’re the perfect one, Ana.”

I scoff and give him a playful slap. “My beautiful liar.”

The flattery is appreciated, but we’re only pale shadows beside them. We’re only human, and the lifelikes are so much more. But my Ezekiel rolls me onto my back and stares down at me, and I see my reflection in his eyes.

“I mean it,” he whispers. “No matter how perfect they make us, they can’t make us human. It’s your flaws that make you beautiful, Ana. It’s the imperfections that make you perfect. Being what I am, I can’t help but see them. Or love them.”

I open my mouth to speak, but he silences me with a kiss that I feel all the way to my fingertips. I lie back on the sheets and let him adore me, and when I open my eyes, he’s looking at me in a way no one ever has or will again.

“I used to wonder sometimes why they made us,” he says. “If there could ever be a reason for something like me to exist. But now I know.” He runs his fingers down my cheek, over my lips. “I was made for you. All I am. All I do, I do for you.”

The words take most of my breath away, and his kiss steals the rest. And as we lie entwined in the dark, he holds me close and breathes the words I’ve waited so long to hear.

“I love you, Ana.”

It’s been four days since Raphael…since he did what he did.

Three days since Ezekiel and I…

Mother thinks we’ve all been cooped up in Babel too long. Father, especially. She’s organized one of our rare trips to Megopolis, a visit to WarDome. GnosisLabs’ finest logika, the Quixote, is fighting for a championship title there tonight. The logika and machina bouts are a violent spectacle to keep the mob entertained. Gnosis and Daedalus creations and the great living constructs of BioMaas brawl and bash at each other, and everyone goes home feeling a little less like fighting the real war we all know is coming.

My little brother loves the bouts. Alex wants to be a Domefighter when he grows up. Father says he should use his gifts to build, not to destroy, but Mother indulges him. He’s beside me now as we walk to the shuttle, skipping with excitement. The R & D bay is vast, nestled at the foot of the tower, lined with flex-wings and grav-tanks and the hulking figures of our logika army. In Alex’s free hand he holds a tiny replica of Quixote that he built himself. He made me mechanical butterflies for my fifteenth birthday.

Alex is his father’s son.

The real Quixote is on the other side of the bay, being loaded for transport. The logika is enormous, its fists like wrecking balls. It frightens me a little—this thing created only to destroy. But Alex whoops when he sees it, dancing with his toy in his hand.

“Twelve thousand horsepower!” he cries. “The best they’ve ever built in the labs. Doctor Silas showed me the new modifications they made to the targeting array last week—it can hit a five-centimeter bull’s-eye at six kilometers!”

Marie is holding my other hand, and she laughs at Alex’s excitement. My sister looks at me and squeezes my fingers. Gives me a secret, knowing smile.

I told her about Ezekiel and me. Of course I did. I had to tell someone or else I’d have burst. And though the thought of Raph still turns our days from blue to gray, Marie couldn’t help but squeal her delight, dragging me down to the floor and insisting I give her every detail. She closed her eyes and smiled as she listened, sighing from her heart. Hopeless romantic that she is, she told me the best loves are forbidden ones.

She seems more in love with the idea of it than I am.

The other lifelikes are still being tested by Doctor Silas, Faith among them. But Gabriel and Ezekiel are part of Father’s security detail, and despite what happened to Raphael, Father refuses to travel without them. Grace is at Father’s side, as always, tapping away at her palmglass. She’s like his shadow now, his majordomo, his right hand.

I wonder what he’ll do if the board votes to cut it off.

I steal glances at Ezekiel as we walk. He’s dressed in a Gnosis security force suit of armored black and charcoal blue. It fits him like a glove, tight in all the right places, and I try my best not to stare. He prowls like a wolf, scanning technicians and deckhands and flight crews, but every so often, I catch him looking at me and I have to hold back my smile.

Gabriel is dressed the same as his brother. But if Ezekiel is a wolf, then Gabe is a lion—I’ve seen footage of big cats in the archives, and Gabe moves just like them. Proud. Majestic. His eyes are like knives. His every movement precise. But he seems just the tiniest bit off today. Perhaps thoughts of Raphael are preying on his mind. Perhaps it’s being so close to Grace that’s distracting him. The way I’m distracting Zeke.

Perhaps that’s why neither of them spots the bomb.

The shuttle is waiting, with its smooth lines and soundless rotor blades. Alex pulls free of my grip and runs toward the real Quixote, keen for a closer look. Marie and Mother hurry off to wrangle him, and Tania and Olivia are laughing. Father puts one arm around me as he walks and talks to Grace.

Ezekiel is beside us. Stealing glances. Gabriel is behind us, hanging close to Mother as she gets Alex under control. Our security detail includes a dozen more men, all heavily armed and armored. Four of them march up onto the shuttle’s ramp and into its belly. I hear a dull clunk under the rhythmic tread of their heavy boots.

A tiny electronic ping.

Ezekiel’s eyes widen. Father and I step up onto the ramp. Grace cries a warning. They move then, the pair of them, and it seems like all the world is in slow motion. I hear a dull whump. Feel a tremor. And then Zeke has my shoulders, crying my name and wrenching me from Father’s arms as the explosion blooms.

He’s so impossibly strong—nothing so gentle as our night in my room. I feel my shoulder pop as he slings me backward, as if I were the toy logika in Alex’s hands. I see Grace stepping in front of my father and shoving him away as the blast erupts behind her. I see her rendered in silhouette against the flames, see that long blond hair catch fire as the shuttle blows itself apart, shattering her like glass.

Pain rips through my legs, my chest. Fire. Shrapnel. All the world is cinders and I’m utterly weightless, landing with a crunch and tumble-skidding across the bay. Blood in my mouth. Stars in my eyes. And as the darkness swells up on black wings, I can hear my mother screaming. My brother screaming. My sisters screaming.

My name.

They’re screaming my name.

“ANA!”

My lashes flutter against my cheeks and my eyes crack slowly open. The world feels too bright and everything is too loud. Ezekiel is on one knee beside my bed, fingers entwined with mine. A gentle ping sings from the machines beside me, chiming with every beat of my heart.

“I thought I lost you,” he whispers.

He tenses, cocking his head. And quicker than silver, he stands, strides to the corner of the room and places his hands behind his back as if standing guard. I hear distant footsteps, and the door slams open and a man is there, wide-eyed and euphoric.

“She’s awake?”

“Just now, sir,” Ezekiel replies.

The man rushes to my bedside and takes my hand. “Can you see me, Princess?”

I blink hard. Confusion and pain. “…Father?”

“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.”

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.”

Father’s head is wrapped in bandages, his eyes shadowed and sunken. The skin on his face is red, as if singed by flame, and suddenly I remember. The shuttle. The explosion.

“I…what…”

“Shhh, hush now.”

“Was anyone hurt?” I croak, my heart hammering.

Father can’t meet my eyes.

“…Grace?” I ask.

He sighs. I see Ezekiel hang his head.

“Oh, no,” I breathe.

Poor Grace.

…Poor Gabriel.

What will he do without her?

“I’m sorry, Princess,” Father says. “I was blind. But my eyes are open now. This attack came from within Gnosis. They don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve here. They never will. And I’m taking steps to ensure this never happens again.”

Father’s voice is dark, his eyes darker still. His face makes me frightened, and for a moment, I feel I don’t know him at all.

This is not my life.

This is not my home.

I am not me.

“Father…”

“You rest easy now. You’ve been brave enough for one day.”

He presses a button on the machine beside me, and I feel a chill creep into my arm through the IV at my wrist. I look to Ezekiel. I want so desperately to hold him. For us to be together again, far from here, far from this. But he doesn’t move a muscle. And as sleep takes me, I hear Father’s voice, his vow, hissed through gritted teeth.

“No one hurts my children. No one will hurt you again. I promise, Ana.”

And I remember.

Ana.

My name is…

1.12 Revelation

“My name is Ana Monrova,” she breathed.

The girl was on her hands and knees, beneath the surface of a black sea.

A homunculus of spare parts beside her, bewilderment in his plastic eyes.

A beautiful boy, who was nothing close to a boy, watching silently.

She hung her head.

Tasted ashes.

Ashes and lies.

“My name is Ana Monrova….”

1.13 Lemon

She woke in blackness.

Spots of luminous green. A subsonic hum. A thudding rhythm echoing in the walls around her. Lemon Fresh winced, spat the taste of oil off her tongue. She was on a soft slab, hands and feet encased in translucent resin. Her belly felt full of ice and greasy flies.

Her memories were fragmented, bloodied around the edges. She remembered the throwdown with the Brotherhood and Fridge Street boys. That lifelike descending from the sky like some angel of death and blowing their favorite bits and pieces all around the yard. The frantic flight from Dregs.

Everything else was kinda blurry, talking true.

She had no idea where she was. No idea what had happened to that murderbot with the spankable tail section, or Crick or Kaiser or Evie or even Grandpa, for that matter.

Grandpa.

It was stupid to think of him that way. She’d only known him a year. But he’d been kind to her, in a world where kind only came at a price. He’d given her a roof when most creeps only ever offered a bed. Fifteen years in the stinking scrap pile that was Dregs, and Silas and Eve were the first people who’d ever given her more than a taking.

Funnily enough, take was exactly what she’d tried to do to them.

Lemon had been living hard on the streets of Los Diablos since she was a sprog. Hanging with the other gutter runners a year back, she’d caught some talk about an old man who worked wonders with tech troubles. Mechanical genius, folks said. Could fix the broken sky, they said. Figuring a gent like that would be carrying some decent scratch, she’d followed Silas and Eve through the LD sprawl one day. And when the moment was right, Lemon cut the old man’s pocket and lifted three shiny credstiks, right into the greasy palm of her hand.

Sadly, she was so fizzy at the sight of all that scratch, she lingered too long. Eve had spun around and collared her. Lemon fought and bit and broke away, leaving Eve with nothing but a torn poncho in her hands.

Lemon figured she’d gotten off free and clean. Didn’t count on Kaiser, though. Didn’t know blitzhunds could track you over a thousand k’s with a single particle of your DNA.

They found her in some fetid corner of the Burrows. Curled under a cardboard roof, clutching the credstiks to her chest like a mother holding a newborn sprat. She’d woken to the blitzhund’s growl. And old Silas Carpenter had looked around at the squalor she lived in, and he’d spoke with a voice like she supposed fathers would use.

“You ever want a decent meal,” he’d said, “come out to Tire Valley and look us up.”

“You’re too old for me, Gramps,” Lemon had replied.

He’d laughed then, a laugh that had turned into a racking cough. It’d be six more months before it gripped him so tight he couldn’t walk, but the cancer had him by the insides, even back then. And still, he’d managed to smile.

“I like you, kiddo,” he’d said.

He’d let her keep the credstiks. And when she fronted up to his door after the scratch ran out, he fed her, just like he’d said. And though she never called him Grandpa to his face, it’d always be the name he wore inside her head.

She wondered where he was now. Where Evie was. If they were okay.

If she was okay…

“Helloooo?” she called. “Anyone there?”

She heard a whimper, soft and electronic. Craning her neck, she saw Kaiser on a slab beside her, his gut leaking wires and broken feeds. He tried to paw toward her, but he was bound in the same translucent resin that held her hands and feet in place.

“Heyyyy, boy. Good to see you.”

The blitzhund wagged his tail, eyes glowing softly.

“You didn’t happen to bring a hacksaw, by any chance?”

Kaiser whimpered, pressed metal ears to his head.

“Figures,” she sighed.

Lemon’s vision was adjusting to the dark now—she could make out a little more of the room around her. The walls were wet and pulsing, run through with a pale green phosphorescence arranged in patterns that looked like…veins. The room was concave, corrugated with hard, bony structures beneath the fleshy surface.

Are they ribs?

Strange protuberances covered what might have been a control panel next to her, but she couldn’t crane her neck far enough to see. Struggling against her bonds, she felt them give slightly, then tighten even more. The sensation made her queasy. The walls shuddered around her; a low, warbling tone rippled through the slab at her back. It was as if the whole room and everything in it were—

A hole in the wall opened, like a fist unclenching. Lemon saw a figure in the corridor beyond, a boy a little older than her. As he stepped into the pulsing light, she saw he was pale, no hair on his scalp or brows. He was encased from the neck down in what looked like black rubber, covered in dozens of strange nodules. His eyes were entirely black and too big for his face, and his fingers and toes were webbed. He had six on each hand and foot.

Kaiser growled, eyes glowing brighter.

“Um,” Lemon said. “Hello, sailor.”

The boy said nothing, squelching (that was the only way she could describe it) to her side and, without ceremony, jabbing a long sliver of what could’ve been glass into her arm.

Lemon yelped in pain and laid down the choicest curse words in her repertoire (they were choice with a capital C). Unfazed, the boy squelched over to the thing that looked like a control panel. He inserted the bloody sliver into a small slot, placed those strange hands on the controls and made a series of sounds in the back of his throat, glottal and wet. And as Lemon scowled, the room itself replied in that same low, warbling tone.

“What’s with the jabby-poky, skinnyboy?” Lemon demanded. “Is that how you always act on a first date? Because with a face like that, I’d be trying flowers.”

The boy scoped her. Blinked twice. Once with regular eyelids, and again with a translucent membrane that closed and opened horizontally across his strange black eyes.

“Fizzy…,” Lemon breathed.

The boy frowned. At least, she thought he did.

Hard to tell with no eyebrows….

“What does ‘fizzy’ mean?” he asked.

His voice was damp. Almost as if he were gargling rather than speaking. Lemon realized he had long, diagonal slits running along each side of his throat.

“Are those gills?” she gasped. “You can breathe underwater? That is fizzy as hellllll!”

The boy narrowed those black eyes. Blinked again. Twice.

“Oh, erm.” Lemon cleared her throat. “ ‘Fizzy’ means ‘good.’ You say it when you see something you like. As in, I say, ‘Fizzy aquatic breathing appendages, good sir,’ and you say, ‘Why, thank you, beautiful lady, allow me to set you free and give you a complimentary foot massage.’ That kind of thing.”

The gills at the boy’s neck rippled. He turned back to his controls without a word.

“Not so talkative, huh, sailor?”

The boy squelched to the wall. Poked at a series of ridges and bumps.

“You got a name?” she tried.

The boy glanced at her, remaining mute.

“True cert, I’ve gotta call you something,” she warned. “And if you don’t gimme your handle, I’m just gonna make one up for you and it’s gonna stick.”

The boy squelched back to the controls, doing his best to ignore her.

“All right, then,” Lemon said. “What aboooouuut…Cliff? Tall. Possibly dangerous. Zero talent in the conversation department. Sums you up pretty good.”

The boy continued working, saying nothing.

“Oh, wait, I know!” she cried triumphantly, nodding at his neck. “Gilbert!”

The boy slammed his webbed hands down. “Our name is Salvage.”

“…Salvage?”

“Yes.”

“Sal for short?”

“No.”

“Sally?”

“No.”

“Salaroonie?”

“…No.”

“Pleased to meet you, Salvage.” She smiled. “I’m Lemon Fresh.”

“Lemonfresh?” The boy did his maybe-frown again. “That’s a ridiculous name.”

“Says the stabby twelve-toed kid named Salvage.”

“Salvage is what we do here,” he said flatly. “We are not Pilot or Arsenal. We are not Princeps or Carer. We are Salvage. What kind of a name is Lemonfresh?”

“I got left outside a pub when I was a baby,” she replied. “My folks didn’t leave a note with my name on it or anything. Only thing they ever left me is around my neck, see?” Lemon lifted her chin to show off her silver clover charm. “So, the pub’s owner named me after the logo on the side of the cardboard box they dumped me in. Lemon Fresh. It’s a laundry detergent.”

The boy simply returned to his work, saying nothing. Lemon chewed her lip. That cardboard-box story usually got all the sympathy juices flowing in whoever she spilled it to. This kid was acting like she hadn’t even spoken.

Tough crowd.

“Sooooo, about the whole being-tied-up thing,” she ventured. “Not judging if that’s what floaties your boaties, but I’m not too keen on it myself. You wanna let me up?”

“No, Lemonfresh.” The boy spoke her names awkwardly, smudging the two into one.

“Then, you want to at least tell me where we are and why we’re here?” Lemon asked. “Because this whole scene is getting a little creepy on the crawly.”

“Wuff,” agreed Kaiser.

“Lemonfresh is aboard the ship Nau’shi,” Salvage said. “She is here because Nau’shi did not wish her to die in the depths.”

“Wait…” Lemon frowned. “Your ship…didn’t want me to drown? How does a ship want anything?”

The boy tilted his head, looked at her as if she were defective. Somewhere in the back of Lemon’s head, a dusty light globe went off. She recalled watching mainland Domefights on the feeds with Evie, the massive constructs of BioMaas Incorporated doing battle with the machina of Daedalus Technologies. She scoped the soft walls run through with glowing veins. The shapes beneath that seemed like ribs.

Tech that wasn’t built.

Tech that was grown…

“BioMaas,” she breathed. “Spank my spankables, this ship is alive?”

The room shivered, a series of low notes rumbling through the walls. The boy named Salvage answered, head tilted as he warbled and hummed in reply.

“She said Lemonfresh should be unafraid,” Salvage informed her. “Nau’shi likes her pattern.”

Lemon glanced at the control panel. The bloody sliver of glass.

“My…”

“Nau’shi finds many strange things in the depths. Organisms that thrive in the black water. Species that have never seen the light. Most we set free after sampling. But some we bring back to CityHive for further study. We have deemed it so for Lemonfresh.”

Salvage blinked again, his gills rippling.

“We think Lemonfresh is important. And we like her.”

“Well, word to the wise, you don’t usually tie up people you like unless they ask you to first,” Lemon said. “And I’m missing my friends. They were with me on our ship, which I’m guessing crashed into the ocean. And I’m figuring they’re not still in it, because someone had to drag me out.”

“…Friends?”

“A girl named Eve. And a logika named Cricket. Oh, and this prettyboy murderbot named Ezekiel—you’d know him if you saw him, he’s got this dimple you just wanna—”

“Yes,” Salvage nodded. “We salvaged them. They are arranged for disposal.”

“Disposal? That sounds less than fizzy, Sal.”

“Nau’shi does not like them,” Salvage replied. “They are unimportant.”

Lemon blinked. “Well, that’s a little rude. I mean, full marks for saving us from drowning and all, but your Nau’shi is sounding more and more like a bi—”

The room shuddered, a deep, trembling warble running through the room.

“—iiig old pile of lovely,” Lemon finished, eyeing the walls. “A lovely person, is what I was going to say. I mean, ship! Yes, a big old lovely, lovely ship. Ha-ha.”

Salvage was staring at her, head tilted.

“Lemonfresh is a very strange girl.”

“Says the kid with gills and two sets of eyelids,” she muttered.

The boy squelched toward the doorway.

“Hey, where you going?” Lemon demanded.

“Salvage,” he shrugged.

“What about me?”

He spoke as if she were a three-year-old sprog. “We told her. Lemonfresh will remain here until we return to CityHive. Carer will be along soon with nutrition.”

“Yeah, see, kid, I don’t wanna go to your damn CityHive. I want to find my friends.”

Salvage simply blinked.

“Fine. You asked for it.” Lemon spoke loudly and clearly. “Kaiser, arm thermex.”

The blitzhund wuffed compliance, and his eyes shifted to a deep, furious red. A series of damp clunks resounded inside his chassis.

“You ever met a blitzhund, Salaroonie?” Lemon asked. “They’re basically assassin dogs, see? They can track you from one particle of DNA. And when they find you, they set off the explosives inside themselves and you can figure out the rest. There’s enough thermex inside Kaiser to level a house. So unless you’d like your nice, glowy walls decorated in a lovely new color called blood and brains, I suggest you let me up. Now.”

The boy sniffed. Singularly unimpressed.

“Yes,” he said. “We have salvaged blitzhunds before. And we disarmed this one’s detonators as soon as we fished him from Nau’shi’s belly.”

Lemon looked at the metal dog, muttering out the side of her mouth. “You couldn’t have warned me, Kais? A little teamwork, please?”

The blitzhund pressed his ears to his head and gave a small, electronic whimper.

“I…Okay, then.” Lemon nodded at Salvage. “I suppose that was well played, sir.”

The strange boy smirked, inclined his head. And with a series of damp slurping noises, the door squeezed itself closed.

Lemon thumped her head on the slab behind her. Glanced at Kaiser.

“So. You know any good show tunes?”

“Wuff,” went Kaiser.

“Figures,” she sighed.

1.14 Surgery

“You knew,” Eve whispered. “You knew who I was.”

Ezekiel was kneeling beside her on the island of scrap. Fear in his eyes.

“I tried to tell you,” he said. “But Silas…”

“You mean the bastard who pretended to be my grandfather the last two years?”

“Ana, I’m sorry,” Ezekiel pleaded. “Silas told me the shock of remembering might hurt you. You took a headshot during the revolt. It was all he could do to piece your mind back together afterward. He wanted to build a new life for you. Away from Babel and all that pain. There was nothing but hurt in your past.”

She stared down at the palm of her hand. The ruby-red chip that had contained the memories of her childhood. Except they weren’t her memories at all. Silas hadn’t built her a life. He’d built her a lie.

“Evie?” Cricket was hovering beside her, looking back and forth between her and Ezekiel. “Evie, what’s happening?”

She looked at the little logika with suspicion. He’d been made by Silas, after all….

“Crick, did you know?”

“…Know what?”

“Who I am? Where I’m from?”

“You’re Eve Carpenter,” the little bot frowned. “You were from some dustneck mainland settlement, and now Dregs. And what are you talking about? ‘My name is Ana Monrova’? Evie, Ana Monrova died when Gnosis collapsed. Her whole family did.”

“No,” Ezekiel said. “She didn’t.”

Cricket waved a tiny finger in Ezekiel’s face. “Shut up, murderbot. When I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you. You just stay away from her, you read me? You lifelikes are the ones who butchered the Monrovas in the first place.”

“No, that’s not true,” Ezekiel said. “I saved her.”

Eve looked up at the lifelike. Seeing him for the first time. For the thousandth time. He was just as she remembered him. That night in her bed, that night in his arms. With Silas’s broken chip out of her skull, it seemed like yesterday. She swore she could still taste his kisses. Feel them falling on her skin like the sweetest rain.

They stared at each other in the gloom, a few inches and a thousand miles apart. Her optic whirred as she blinked. Her head was splitting.

“What do you remember?” he asked softly.

“My life in Babel. My father, my family. Doctor Silas.” She met his eyes then, chest aching. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to scream at him. “You and me.”

“The bomb?”

She nodded.

“The revolt?”

Eve frowned. Her skull was aching, her optic itching. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, pushing pieces together one at a time to see if they fit.

“Fragments,” she said. “I remember…a holding cell. My family…”

Shiny boots ring on the stairs as they march into our cell, four of them all in a pretty row. Blank faces and perfect skin, matte gray pistols in red, red hands. A beautiful man with golden hair says they’re here to execute us. No explanations. No apologies.

But they hadn’t been soldiers, had they?

A beautiful man with golden hair…

“Gabriel,” she breathed.

Ezekiel swallowed. Nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Faith. Hope. They…killed them. They killed us….”

“Not you.”

My brother crawls to Father’s body and my sisters are still screaming. My tongue sticks to my teeth, and Mother’s blood is warm on my lips, and I—

“Ezekiel.” She squeezed his hand so hard her knuckles turned white. “If there was ever anything between us that was real, tell me what the hells happened. Please.”

The boy who wasn’t a boy at all sat back on the refuse pile. Even dipped in drying slime and covered in muck, he was beautiful. But he looked so sad and alone, she forgot her rage for a moment. She just wanted to put her arms around him. Hold him like she had that night in her room, kissing his tears away.

Had that really been my life?

The walls shifted around them, strange warbling notes reverberating through the kraken’s flesh. The floor beneath them shuddered briefly, then fell still. Ezekiel’s eyebrow rose in alarm as he scoped the chamber. Eve had to steady herself against the floor.

“Maybe we should talk about this later,” the lifelike suggested.

She sighed, looking around them. Her mind was in turmoil, rage and sadness and denial all blurring together. She wanted the rest of the story. She wanted the damn truth. But as if on cue, the walls rumbled again and another great gush of black seawater roared in from the ceiling. The rusted shell of an old shipping container tumbled into the chamber, along with a tangled mash of plastic bags. The wreckage crashed down into the soup, pelting them all in a fine spray of sludge.

“We really need to get out of here,” Ezekiel said.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Cricket murmured, “but I’m starting to agree with Stumpy. We should finish this conversation someplace else.”

Eve dragged her nose across her filthy sleeve. Her eye was bloodshot, her cheeks streaked with tears. Her whole world had just been upended. Her whole life was a fiction. But Lemon and Kaiser needed her. And despite who she’d been, a part of her was still Evie Carpenter. Undefeated eight straight in the baddest WarDome this side of the Glass. Truth was, she could curl up and cry her little heart out or stand up and fight.

“Okay.” She sniffed hard. Spat into the slop. “Enough of the pity party. The rest of the story can wait. Lemon’s in here somewhere. Kaiser too. Find ’em now. Cry later.”

“So how do we get out of Stomach Town?” Cricket asked.

Eve climbed to her feet slow, still a little wobbly. Ezekiel stood swiftly, reaching out to help her with his one good arm, but she stepped away. Talking true, despite the fact he was helping her, she didn’t know if she could trust him. The girl she’d been had loved him, sure. But she had no idea how the girl she was now felt about things yet.

Putting her hands on her hips, she surveyed the wreckage around them. The mechanic in her turning the wheels in her head. She scoped the ceiling above them, the half a dozen openings clenched shut like fists.

“We could start a fire?” she offered.

Cricket twisted his wrist, activated the cutting torch in his middle finger and flipped it right at Ezekiel. “Step aside, Stumpy.”

“Um,” Ezekiel said. “Everything in here is soaking wet.”

“Plastic burns,” Eve pointed out. “We make enough smoke before I choke to death on the fumes, the kraken might cough us up…three kilometers below the ocean’s surface.” Eve grabbed Cricket’s arm. “No, wait, that’s a less-than-sensible plan.”

“Awww.” Cricket kicked a chunk of metal as he shut off the flame.

“Cricket always wanted to be a WarDome bot,” she explained to Ezekiel. “The thought of lighting things on fire does unhealthy things to him.”

“That is slander, madam,” the bot growled. “I shall see you in the courts.”

“Isn’t he a little too little for WarDome?” Ezekiel asked.

Cricket arced his cutting torch again, pointed it at the lifelike. “Don’t call me little!”

Ezekiel raised an eyebrow as Eve made a cutting motion at her throat, steering the conversation away from the little bot’s height issues.

“Do you know much about these kraken?” she asked.

Ezekiel nodded. “I spent a bit of time in BioMaas territory. That’s where I was when I saw you manifesting on the feed.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a pity nothing in here runs on ’lectrics.” Eve rubbed her eye again, remembering the Goliath, the Brotherhood Spartan fritzing with a wave of her hand. She chewed her lip. “You said kraken have human crews inside them?”

“Kraken are like submarines,” Ezekiel replied. “Their innards are run through with access tunnels. The crews live there.”

“Okay, so it’s simple,” Eve said. “Cricket doesn’t breathe. The walls are meat. So we cut through one and send him to look for one of these tunnels.”

“I don’t think the kraken will like that,” Ezekiel warned.

“Well, I don’t like being eaten alive, either. So we’re even.”

“You start cutting open its stomach, it’s going to activate its leukocytes.”

“The who with the what, now?”

“Its self-defense mechanisms. This whole ship is alive. Its body is just like yours. It has methods to deal with unwelcome guests in its system.”

“Okay, you got a better idea, Braintrauma?”

“Well, I…” Ezekiel blinked. “…Wait, you’re still calling me that?”

“You’re wasting minutes, Stumpy,” Cricket said. “We don’t know where Lemon is or what state she’s in. She could be hurt. She could be in trouble. Some of us still give a damn about the Three Laws, and we got a human to rescue.” The bot crawled up Eve’s leg, plopped himself on her shoulder and held tight. “I’m with you, Evie.”

Eve retrieved Excalibur from the trash, strapped it to her back and stepped into the sludge. Her mind was still awhirl. She could feel the girl she’d been, that spoiled little princess, grimacing in disgust as she set foot back in the slime. The thought of Lemon and Kaiser in capital T was the only thing keeping her on her feet. Eve waded farther out, first up to her waist, then finally up to her neck. The liquid smelled like sugar and salt and rot. It was warm and viscous, seeping through her clothes and into her boots. She found herself agreeing with the Ana inside her head.

“This is fouuuuul,” she grumbled.

“It’s your plan,” the lifelike called from the metal shore.

“Nice of you to help.”

“Nice to see a human doing the work for a change,” he shot back.

“Touché,” she muttered.

As they drew nearer their target, Eve realized she could feel the floor beneath her again; the chamber was apparently a hemisphere beneath the sludge. She found her footing, trudged up the slop to the glistening wall, dragging her sopping neckerchief over her nose and mouth. She held Cricket at arm’s length, her mind still awhirl. Trying to shush the tempest inside her head long enough to get the hells out of here.

“Okay, hit it, Crick.”

“You the boss.”

Cricket turned his cutting torch on again, and a ten-centimeter lance of flame sprang from his finger. The fire was high-octane, burning a strange aqua blue in the chamber’s confines. He pushed his finger into the wall, and a stench of burned flesh rose over the salt and rot. Immediately, the entire chamber shuddered, and a low, keening sound filled the air.

“Um…point of order,” Cricket said. “What was that?”

“Just keep cutting.”

The little bot did as he was told, burning slowly through the thick, fibrous flesh. Eve’s eyes watered at the stink as the keening grew louder. The entire chamber shook violently, once, twice, almost throwing her off her feet.

“I’m telling you, you’re making it angry!” Ezekiel called.

“I hate to concur with Stumpy, Evie, but—”

The ceiling yawned wide, and half a dozen spherical objects the size of tractor tires dropped in through the opening. They spun and tumbled down into the chamber, bouncing off the detritus and splashing into the muck. One landed atop the trash island and rolled to a short stop. It was wet, chitinous, gleaming.

With several damp cracking noises, the sphere unfurled into something right out of an old 20C horror flick. Its shell was translucent and colorless, revealing the creature’s twisted innards. A dozen eyes were set into a sharp, brutish head equipped with razor-sharp mandibles. A dozen legs spouted from its body, and in Eve’s humble opinion, it was armed with more claws than anything really had a right to possess.

The slime rippled as the kraken’s stomach rolled again. And as Eve watched, five more of the creatures unfurled from the moat of snot and started moving.

Right toward her.

“Um,” she called. “I’m guessing these are those leukocytes you mentioned?”

“You think?” Ezekiel called back.

Eve blinked at the incoming wall of mandibles and way-too-many claws.

“Yeah, okay,” she sighed. “We definitely made it angry.”

1.15 Symbiont

The room shook like a boat in a storm, the floor rocked as if the whole place were coming apart. And with a wet, snapping noise and the hiss of lost suction, the bonds at Lemon’s hands and feet momentarily slackened.

Taken by surprise, she barely had the presence of mind to try pulling loose. The bonds contracted again almost immediately, but Lemon was quick enough to slip her right hand free. The room warbled—strange, off-key notes ringing in the air. The ship sounded almost as if it were…in pain?

Eyes on the prize, Lem.

The whys could wait till tomorrow. Right now, her hand was loose, and having her other parts join it seemed a plan Lemon could get behind. Reaching to her belt buckle, she slipped out the three-inch knife she’d used to slit people’s pockets with back in her Burrows days. And with an apologetic shrug to the ship around her, she started hacking at the bond on her left hand.

The room shivered, and the song grew louder. Luminous green fluid oozed from Lemon’s knife cuts—the same green that ran through the veins in the walls.

She was slowly realizing that her bonds, the slab she lay on, everything she could see around her was part of this ship—actually living, breathing, bleeding pieces of its body. She felt a little guilty, injuring a beast that had technically saved her life. But Eve and Cricket might be in trouble. They might be hurt. Doling out a few hurts of her own to get them back seemed a small price to pay.

Her skin slick with fluorescent green, Lemon managed to drag her left hand free. Moments later, her boots were loose. She was in the middle of hacking Kaiser from his bonds when the wall shivered open and a middle-aged woman rushed into the room. Like Salvage, she was hairless, barefoot, and dressed in black rubber. She held a pitcher of what might’ve been water and a bowl of sludge—both containers made of a substance that looked like dark bone.

Those utterly black eyes widened when the woman saw what Lemon was doing. She dropped her handful, cried, “No!” and tried to snatch away the knife. But growing up rough on the streets of Los Diablos had taught Lem a thing or three about scrapping, and she could move quick as razors when she needed. She avoided the woman’s grasp, stomped on her bare feet with oversized steel-toed boots. The woman howled and dropped to the floor, and Lem was sitting on her chest in a heartbeat, cutter to the woman’s throat.

“You’d be Carer, I presume,” she said. “Salvage said you’d be visiting.”

“We…Stop it, she is hurting us!” the woman gasped.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but I’m looking for my friends. A girl named Eve and a bot named Cricket. Salvage said they’d been arranged for disposal.”

“Y-yes. The polluted.”

Lemon’s grip tightened on the woman’s collar. “Where are they?”

“Nau’shi’s third stomach. The wastewomb.”

Lemon poked the woman with the business end of her knife. “Don’t move.”

The woman shook her head, gills flaring in fear. Lemon had tangled with enough rougher-than-rough customers to recognize there wasn’t a vicious bone in this woman’s body. She felt bad about putting the boot to her, but Eve and Crick needed her. And even though this Carer lady seemed harmless, Lem suspected there were probably others aboard this ship more suited to the task of fighting back. Big, burly ones with names like Facepuncher and Skullstompy, who might be showing up any second to do just that.

She stood, finished cutting Kaiser loose while Carer shook her head and moaned.

“Pick him up,” Lemon ordered. “Pretty please with sugar on top.”

Carer stood slowly, gingerly testing her stomped toes. With a hurt glance at Lemon, she complied, struggling a little with Kaiser’s weight as she lifted him off the slab.

“Listen, I don’t want to hurt you,” Lemon said. “I just want to find Eve and Cricket. But you get fancy, Mister Stabby gets dancy, you read me?”

“Y-yes,” Carer replied, eyes on the knife.

“Good. Now take me to my bestest.”

“I’m officially done with today,” Eve sighed. “I’d like it to be tomorrow now, please.”

The leukocytes were swimming toward her through the sludge, moving quicker than anything that big and scary should’ve been able to. Glancing behind, she saw that Cricket had cut a hole in the stomach lining large enough for him to squeeze through, but the wound was still too small for Eve or Ezekiel to follow. Everything was turning a delightful shade of brown.

“Go!” She pushed the little bot into the gap. “Find us those crew tunnels.”

“Eve, I’m not leaving y—”

“That’s an order, Crick!”

The bot made a worried little electronic noise in the back of his throat, but, as ever, he obeyed, turning and crawling through the hole. Eve slung Excalibur off her back and arced the power feed, rewarded with a crackling hum. Turning, she faced down the advancing leukocytes with the weapon held high and ice in her gut.

“Ana?” Ezekiel called.

“You might wanna get down here, Braintrauma,” she called. “Make yourself useful!”

The lifelike had fished a meter-long length of rebar from the trash. He sized up the leukocyte approaching him in an instant, hefting the rusted steel like a club in his remaining hand. The thing scuttled sideways, but with a single, brutal stroke, Ezekiel shattered its skull like glass. The leukocyte rolled onto its back, kicking feebly as the lifelike turned, took a short run-up and leapt ten meters like he was playing hopscotch. He landed beside Eve, pelting her with slime, positioning himself between her and the other five crawlies. Wiping a sluice of dark blood off his face, he raised his weapon, glanced over his shoulder at Eve.

“Useful enough?”

“Don’t get sassy with m—”

With a cacophony of shrieks, the remaining creatures swarmed to attack. Eve raised Excalibur in both fists. Ezekiel moved with that inhuman speed, striking like a thunderbolt. A leukocyte scuttled up to Eve, mandibles clicking, claws snapping.

Though she’d ripped out her damaged memory chip, the chip holding all Eve’s self-defense routines still seemed to be working fine. Sidestepping through the sludge, she cracked her bat across an outstretched claw, felt a flash of current, smelled burning snot. The thing chittered and retreated, nursing its wounded limb, blinking its dozen eyes. Eve drew back for a second swing, but the kraken shuddered once more, the stomach bucking like it was in the middle of an earthquake. Her boots slipped on the treacherous surface, and with a sizzling curse, Eve fell into the slop.

The leukocyte surged forward again with its claws raised. Eve dodged one scything blow, then another, struggling to regain her footing. Her eyes were locked on the beast as she kicked back up, refusing to simply lie down and die. She could feel the girl she’d been inside her head, screaming in horror. But the lifelikes hadn’t killed her. Dregs hadn’t killed her. Fridge Street and the Brotherhood hadn’t killed her. If this was going to be the place she got ghosted, she wasn’t doing it on her knees.

A meter-long length of rebar punched straight through the creature’s skull and out of its lower jaw. The thing twitched, eyes bugging from its head as it let out a final, gurgling sigh and sank down into the sludge.

Ezekiel was standing over Eve, barely out of breath. He tipped an imaginary hat and offered her his arm, like some 20C gentleman asking his lady to dance. She grabbed hold, pulled herself out of the muck, wincing at the pain of her wrenched knee. The other leukocytes were scattered like broken toys, slowly sinking down into the slop. Eve locked eyes with Ezekiel, lungs burning, hands shaking.

“This is the part where most people would say thanks,” the lifelike said.

“I could’ve had him,” she panted.

“No doubt.” He smiled.

“You think you’re pretty smooth, huh, Braintrauma?”

The lifelike shrugged, his dimple coming out to play.

“You’ve got snot on your face,” Eve pointed out.

“You’ve got snot on your everything,” he grinned.

She found herself smiling, but the smile died just as quickly. Words tangled in her mouth, tasting like dust. Should she let them loose? That’d make them real.

All of it real.

“You’re…different than I remember…,” she said.

It was true. The Ezekiel she’d known in Babel had been softer somehow. Younger. Sweeter. This Ezekiel had an edge to him. Like a knife, sharpened by years in the wastes. He was harder. Fiercer. More dangerous.

But then again, she was, too.

The lifelike’s smile died. Those too-blue eyes turned serious.

“Two years is a long time. I walked a long way.”

“A lot changes on the road.”

“Not everything.”

Eve lowered her eyes. Chewing her lip and not saying a word.

“I…I don’t even know what to call you anymore,” Ezekiel said.

She dragged her fingers through her hair, unsure of the answer herself. The life she’d lived as Eve Carpenter in Dregs was just as vibrant as the memories of her life in Babel. Scavvergirl. Abnorm. Mechanical genius. Deviate. But she was Ana Monrova, too. She knew it now. That spoiled little princess in her palace, always wanting what she couldn’t have. Daughter of a murdered house. Last scion of the Monrova clan.

But even if it was built on a lie, the life she’d lived for the past two years…

“…I think it’s better if you call me Eve,” she said.

She could see the hurt in his eyes as he nodded. Glittering in that old-sky blue. As real as anything she’d ever felt. But she had her own hurt to deal with. Too much right now to worry about someone else’s. Too much by far.

The walls quivered, the ceiling distended and a dozen more leukocytes dropped down into the kraken’s stomach. They bounced and rolled down the trash island into the soup, unfurling like deadly flowers of razors and claws.

“Well,” Eve said. “They have good timing at least….”

Ezekiel tore his rebar out of the leukocyte’s corpse, turned to face the incoming horde. “You might want to get behind me.”

“You might want to say please?”

“I only want to protect you.”

“And that’s real sugar-sweet of you, Ezekiel, but I’m not a fair maiden trapped in a tower anymore. When I want your help, I’ll ask for—”

The ceiling shuddered again, disgorging another two dozen leukocytes. The creatures unfolded and slowly grouped up, seeming to communicate without speaking. The walls warbled and hummed, the great thudding pulse quickening. After losing its first wave of defense, the kraken’s immune system seemed to be reacting like any other might—by sending in the cavalry. Over thirty of the damn things were in here now, advancing carefully, hundreds of eyes locked on the lifelike and glittering like polished glass.

“Um, yeah, okay,” Eve said. “I’m officially asking for your help now.”

“All right.” Ezekiel nodded, herding her backward. “But who’s going to help me?”

Eve smelled burning flesh, felt the stomach around her tremble again. Cricket poked his head out from the hole he’d widened behind them, dripping in smoking sludge.

“You rang?”

“Cricket!”

“I found the crew tunnels, come on!”

The little bot offered his hand to Eve and she took hold, scrambling up into the wound. The fit was tight and she was forced to wriggle, legs flailing as she searched for purchase. She cursed, struggling, finally felt Ezekiel’s hand on her backside.

“Hey, hands off the merch—”

Eve shrieked as she was pushed along the tunnel by superhuman strength, slipping out of a rend on the other side. She sploshed onto a damp and spongy surface, reinforced with what might have been…ribs? Cricket leapt out behind her, folded his cutting torch back into his hand. She could see he’d burned his way through a good two meters of bleeding stomach wall—no wonder the kraken was so salty with them.

Pulling herself to her feet, Eve took stock of her surroundings. She was in a long tunnel, illuminated by fluorescent patterns that looked a lot like veins. The kraken groaned and shuddered around them, the floor trembling violently.

“Can we go back to the part where it was just the Brotherhood trying to ghost us?” Cricket asked. “I think I prefer religious crazies to the Attack of the Stabby Stomach Roaches.”

“Which way do we go?”

Cricket patted his spindly hips. “Thiiiiink I left my kraken map in my other pants.”

“I’m supposed to point out you’re not wearing pants now, right?”

Cricket clutched his bobblehead in mock horror. “I’ve been naked this whole time and no one told me?”

Ezekiel’s length of bloody rebar came sailing out of the cauterized hole, quickly followed by the lifelike itself. He rolled up into a crouch, snatched up his weapon and looked up and down the tunnel, slightly out of whatever passed for his breath.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “There were a lot of those things.”

“Good thing they’re too big to follo—”

A translucent claw whipped out through the hole, and Eve jumped back with a yelp. The thing flailed and clicked, mandibles snapping. Ezekiel hefted his rebar and smashed the thing to a sodden pulp, his face a mask of perfect calm. Eve was a little unsettled to watch him work: brutal and methodical, not a shred of emotion on his features. She remembered the faces of those lifelikes as they’d stood above her in that cell. Gabriel saying they were there to kill her and her family. No apologies. No explanations…

A shuddering call echoed down the crew tunnel, the lub-dub, lub-dub quickening.

“There’ll be more coming,” Ezekiel said, slinging gore off his weapon. “Follow me.”

The lifelike stalked down the corridor, rebar raised and ready. Eve looked at Cricket, shrugging as she pulled him up onto her shoulder.

“I don’t trust him, Evie,” the little logika muttered. “Not as far as I can spit.”

“Is this the part where I point out you’ve got no saliva glands, and you say, ‘Exactly!’?”

“…Have I used that one before?”

“He’s saved my tail three times now, Crick. In case we’re keeping score.”

“If we’re keeping score. And if everything he says is on the up.”

Eve watched Ezekiel slip away down the corridor, etched in fluorescent green light. The air was heavy, moist, hard to breathe. The pulse of the beast around them was pounding hard enough to match her own, her optical implant itching. Everything Cricket said was true cert. She didn’t know if she could trust Ezekiel. Didn’t know what had happened in those final hours before the lifelike revolt or how they’d come to rise against her family and father. Didn’t know what remained of the boy she’d known two years and two lifetimes ago.

But for now, Lemon was in trouble. Kaiser was in trouble.

What choice did she have?

Hefting Excalibur, she followed the lifelike into the gloom.

Lemon was hurrying down a twisting, ribbed tunnel, following close behind Carer. The woman had Kaiser in her arms, and Lemon noticed that she was stroking the blitzhund’s damaged belly as she walked, as if trying to ease his hurts. Even though Kaiser was a cyborg. Even though his metal body couldn’t feel pain.

“How far to the third stomach?” she asked.

“Not far now,” Carer replied.

Lemon scoped her surroundings, more than a little overwhelmed. The walls churned with the movement of long, serpentine shapes beneath the skin. The ceilings crawled with thousands of tiny creatures, translucent and insectoid. She could feel the ship’s pulse beneath her, wondered how big the heart that drove this colossal beast might be.

All her life, she’d been surrounded by tech of the old world, repurposed and recycled and rusted through. But if this was the future BioMaas had in store for the planet—living machines and thousands, maybe millions of creatures all working in perfect harmony—she found it hard to fault them for leaving the tech of the past behind.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked Carer.

The woman frowned. “We have always worked here.”

“No, I mean how many years have you served on Nau’shi?”

Carer stopped and looked at Lemon in puzzlement. “We are Nau’shi.”

A long, quavering call echoed down the corridor, and Carer’s eyes widened.

“Ohhhhh,” she moaned.

“What is it?” Lemon asked.

“The polluted.” Carer double-blinked back her tears. “They are hurting us….”

A doorway down the corridor yawned open, and a tall, heavyset man with similar clothing to Carer’s barreled out, face twisted in fury. He was followed by several lumbering insect things, each as big as he was. They were covered in translucent shells and armed with massive claws.

“Aaaaand you’d be Facepuncher, I presume,” Lemon said.

“Unnatural!” the man bellowed, spit flying.

He hefted what looked like a hybrid of a pistol and a spiny sea urchin, took aim right at Lemon. Kaiser bucked in Carer’s arms and snarled.

The girl dove to the floor as the big man opened fire with his pistol thing, spraying the air with long black spines. But as the shots sailed harmlessly over Lemon’s head, she tracked them down the corridor and finally slapped eyes on their actual target—the six-odd feet of sexy murderbot charging down the hall right toward them.

“Hello, Dimples,” Lemon sighed.

“Hey, Freckles.”

Ezekiel moved like lightning, like silk, like liquid, running up the curved wall and tumbling over Lemon’s head through the burst of fire. Rolling down into a crouch, he swung a length of iron rebar at the shooter’s knees, chopping his legs from under him. Carer screamed, the man howled, clutching his shattered bones. Even with one arm, Ezekiel was impressive, swinging at a bug thing and splitting its head in two. The second beast chittered, taking a long, bleeding gouge out of the lifelike’s side. Ezekiel gasped, blood spraying, piroetting on the spot and plunging his weapon through the last beast’s carapace, nailing it to the wall. It snarled, coughed, its half a dozen hooks twitching feebly as it died.

Carer began wailing as the creature perished, falling to her knees and dropping Kaiser to the floor. Ezekiel kicked the pistol thing away from the big man’s outstretched hand, tore his rebar out of the shuddering wall and pointed it at the fellow’s head.

“Unnatural,” the man hissed. “Polluted!”

“Please don’t move,” the lifelike said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Lemon was looking at the slaughtered bug things. Back at Carer, on her knees and weeping, reaching out toward the dead creatures with a trembling hand.

“I think you already did, Dimples….”

“Lemon!”

She looked up, saw Eve at the end of the corridor, Cricket on her shoulder. Lem rolled to her feet with a whoop and charged into her bestest’s crushing hug.

“Riotgrrl!” Lemon pulled back, nose wrinkling. “You look like ten miles of rough road. And you smell like my pits after a hard day’s work.”

“When have you ever put in a hard day’s work, Lem?” Eve grinned.

“I’m too pretty to sweat. How you doin’, Crick? Keeping our girl out of trouble?”

The little bot waved dramatically at their surroundings. “Apparently not.”

“Kaiser!”

Spotting the injured blitzhund, Eve dragged herself free of Lemon’s embrace and thumped down the corridor, skidding to her knees at Kaiser’s side. She pulled the cyborg up into a fierce hug. “You okay, boy? I was worried about you!”

Kaiser wuffed and wagged his tail, slurping at Eve with his heat-sink tongue.

“We need to move,” Ezekiel warned.

Cricket nodded. “Again, hate to agree with Stumpy. But moving. Yes.”

Eve picked up Kaiser, struggling with his weight. Lemon was watching Carer and the guy Ezekiel had clocked. The pair were on the floor, the man holding his broken leg. When he shifted his weight, he and Carer both gasped in pain.

What was it Carer said?

“We are Nau’shi.”

With an apologetic smile, Lemon crawled to the groaning man.

“Listen, sorry in advance, okay?”

“Wha—aaaaaaaa!” The man bellowed as Lemon poked his broken knee. He rolled around on the floor, tears in his strange eyes as he roared, “Why would she do that?”

“Lemon?” Eve raised her eyebrows. “Why would you do that?”

Lemon pointed to Carer. The woman’s face was twisted in pain, and she was holding her own leg and groaning too.

“These people,” Lemon said. “These bug things. This whole place, it’s like one big…one, yeah? Every piece is part of the whole. They’re not just the crew. They are the ship. All of them.” She looked at the groaning man. “You’re one of the defenders, right? What should we call you? Thumper? Biff?”

“Sentinel,” he groaned.

“See?” Lemon grinned. “I met another called Salvage. Their names aren’t names, they’re titles. Salvage sorts the things they find in the water. Sentinel here is like internal security. And this,” Lemon said with a flourish, “is Carer.”

“So?” Cricket asked.

“So she cares for things on the ship. It’s what she’s built for. It’s what she is.”

Lemon turned to the woman, stared into those strange black eyes.

“Carer, is there a way off Nau’shi? Some way for us to leave without hurting anyone or anything else?”

The woman’s eyes widened at the mention of nothing else getting hurt.

“Yes,” she said.

“Will you take us there?”

The woman blinked twice. Licked at dry lips.

“…We like Lemonfresh.” She glanced at Ezekiel. At Cricket. At Eve’s cybernetic eye and Memdrive. Revulsion was plain on her face. “Even though Lemonfresh walks with the polluted, we like her. We do not want her to go. She is important.”

“If we stay here, Nau’shi is just going to keep trying to hurt my friends,” Lemon said. “And more of Nau’shi is going to get hurt. We have another friend in trouble, Carer. Someone we care about a whole lot. You understand that, right?”

Carer looked at Sentinel, who growled and shook his head. She looked to the dead bug things, the bloody iron bar in the murderbot’s hands. The countless creatures around them, crawling across the ceiling and slithering through the walls. She slowly nodded.

“Is that a yes?” Lemon asked.

The woman looked at Lemon. Blinked her strange black eyes.

“That is a yes.”

1.16 Lost

Eve clomped along the corridor. Her biceps were burning with Kaiser’s weight, but she was just overjoyed to have him back. Carer was helping Sentinel, his arm slung over her shoulder. The woman winced whenever her companion took a step, as if she felt every bit of his pain. If what Lemon had said was true, the kraken and its crew would have sensed the deaths of every leukocyte they’d ghosted in its belly. They’d only been defending themselves, but Eve still felt awful. Even if those things had been trying to eat them…

Lemon was walking beside Sentinel, helping Carer with the man’s weight. Ezekiel was out in front, rebar in hand. Eve watched the way he moved. Head low, eyes narrowed, prowling like a wolf. She remembered the warmth of him against her skin. The way she’d felt in his arms. Protected. Loved.

It all felt like so long ago.

It all felt like yesterday.

The corridor widened, the heartbeat growing louder. Eve saw that the walls were lined with leukocytes—the beasts nestled into grooves and runnels, watching with glittering, flint-black eyes. If things went wrong here, they were going wrong all the way….

“Hope you know what you’re doing, Lem,” she muttered.

“Yeah,” the girl replied. “Me too.”

Carer led them along pulsing corridors and through archways of living bone. Finally, they found themselves in a broad, damp chamber, wide as the WarDome. The walls were run through with luminous green veins. Hundreds of leukocytes glared at them from their niches, that great thudding pulse filling the air.

Sitting in the chamber’s center was what appeared to be a ship. It was dark and beautiful, shaped like some huge, twisted cuttlefish and covered in a translucent nautilus shell. Two great eyes, each as big as Eve, shone in its flanks. She was reminded of the constructs BioMaas would send to the Megopolis WarDome—armored behemoths that would throw down with Daedalus and Gnosis machina and logika in front of the roaring crowd. The behemoths were just as punchy as anything robotic in the Dome. But when they were cut, they didn’t leak oil or coolant. They bled instead.

Carer touched the ship’s flank, and it quivered. A long crack in its shell folded open to reveal a chamber inside, large enough to fit twenty peeps in comfort.

“This is Lifeboat,” Carer said. “Lemonfresh should tell her where she wishes to go. Lifeboat will take Lemonfresh to those she cares for. Safe and swift.”

“Thank you, Carer.” The girl smiled.

“Be wary in the deadworld.” Carer glanced to Eve. “It brims with pollution and pain. But we will tell CityHive about Lemonfresh. She is important. She is needed.”

“Oooookay.”

Lemon gave the woman a quick, uncomfortable hug and bundled into Lifeboat. Ezekiel took Kaiser, climbed in after Lemon, Eve following with Cricket on her shoulder.

“We’re sorry,” she said, looking into Carer’s strange eyes. “We didn’t understand the harm we were doing. We were just defending ourselves.”

Carer stared at Eve. Blinking slowly.

“You are unnatural.” She motioned to Eve’s cybernetics. “You are polluted. You and all your kind. It is in your nature to destroy. It is all you know how to do.”

“And what would you have done to us,” Ezekiel asked, “if we hadn’t fought our way out of that stomach?”

“Right,” Cricket growled. “Sounds plenty destructive to me, Blinky.”

“It’s all right, Crick.” Eve patted the little bot to quiet him. “Again, I’m sorry, Carer.”

The woman stepped back without a word as the nautilus shell slid closed. Lemon glanced at Eve, rolled her eyes and whispered, “Boots not laced all the way to the top on that one.”

Eve’s hand went to her Memdrive. The optic where her right eye used to be. “Polluted.” “Unnatural.” Just one more insult to add to “deviate” and “abnorm.” Just one more group of folks who hated her. She wondered if there was anywhere on earth that would accept her for what she was. Anyplace she fit at all.

She looked across Lifeboat’s gloom, found Ezekiel staring back at her. He looked at her like she was real. Like no one had looked at her before or since. But it wasn’t the puppy love of a newborn lifelike in a pristine white tower anymore. It was harder somehow. Fiercer. Tempered by miles and years and dust and pain.

She broke her stare, focused on the ship around her. The interior was crafted of the same dark, spongy material as the kraken’s innards, run through with the same luminous veins. The shell was semi-translucent, carved with odd sigils, and through it, she could see the vague shapes of Carer and the chamber outside.

“I thought BioMaas tech looked weird on the outside,” she muttered.

“I don’t like this,” Cricket said. “The sooner we skip this party, the better.”

“So where we going?”

“We gotta find Mister C, right?” Lemon looked back and forth between Eve and the little logika. “That Faith lifelike snaffled him. We gotta steal him back.”

Eve felt her stomach turn. Dreading telling Lemon the truth of where she’d come from. The lies Silas had told her. She wondered if Lem would look at her the same way again. It was already hard enough being a deviate. How would Lemon react when she found out her best friend was a total stranger? That her name wasn’t even her name?

Eve put her aching head in her hands. It was too much to even consider right now. She was exhausted. Filthy. Starving. They needed time in the shade. Someplace to—

“We need to lie low,” Ezekiel said, and Eve could have kissed him then. “Kaiser needs repairs. I’ve still only got one arm. And it’s been a while since either of you slept.”

“Or ate.” Lemon sniffed her filthy tank top with a grimace. “Or showered. Ew.”

“We could try Megopolis?” Cricket offered. “Big city? Lots of places to hide.”

“We’re never getting past border security into Megopolis,” Eve said. “We’re not accredited citizens. None of us have Daedalus CorpCards.”

“I know a place.” Ezekiel glanced at Eve. “But I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

“So it’ll fit right in with the rest of my day, is what you’re saying?”

“I have a friend on the mainland,” he said. “Near the coast. A city called Armada. It’s a free settlement, only loosely affiliated with Daedalus. My friend runs a ministry there in the Tanker District. And she owes me a favor.”

“She?” Lemon asked. “Not a crazy ex-girlfriend, I hope?”

Ezekiel smiled his crooked smile, and Eve felt her heart lurch sideways in her chest.

“Not quite,” he said. “But if you’ve got a better idea, Freckles, I’m all ears.”

Lemon grinned at Eve, bouncing in her seat. “He calls me Freckles now.”

“Can I come to the wedding?” Cricket asked sourly.

“You can be my bridesmaid, you little fug.”

“I told you not to call me little!”

The pair exchanged a salvo of rude hand gestures as Eve pursed her lips in thought. Ezekiel’s plan didn’t seem a bad option. There was no one and nothing for her in Dregs to count on, except maybe a Brotherhood cross and a handful of nails. She didn’t know anyone on the mainland. They had no scratch. No fallback.

She glanced at Lemon, eyebrow raised. “Any thoughts on Armada, Number One?”

“Always wanted to see the Big City,” the girl shrugged.

“I’m not sure about this, Evie,” Cricket warned.

“And I’d be real worried if you were, Crick.” She nodded to Lem. “Let’s do it.”

“Lifeboat,” Lemon called. “Take us to Armada.”

Eve heard a series of wet clunks as she was rocked sideways in her seat. A brief sensation of weightlessness, the sound of rushing water. The glow through the translucent shell grew dimmer as they slipped out into the ocean. She could make out the kraken’s vast shape, silhouetted against the light above. Huge, bullet-shaped heads. A seething mass of tentacles, each as long as a skyscraper. Armored skin, caked with barnacles.

She could feel the gentle motion as Lifeboat swam away. Hear the ship’s soft pulse, surrounded by the ocean’s silence. It was strangely peaceful, like a heartbeat in a lightless womb. Sitting there and enjoying the lull, if only for a moment. Letting the water wash over her, dragging some of the pain away with it.

After a few minutes, she found her eyelids growing heavy. Afraid to sleep, she looked to Lem for some conversation, found her bestest already slumped in her chair, eyes closed, chest softly rising and falling. Kaiser was at Eve’s feet, optics glowing in the dark. She glanced up, found Ezekiel watching her.

Those too-blue eyes.

Those bow-shaped lips.

She couldn’t trust him. Even though she remembered him, part of her felt like she didn’t know him at all. But still, sitting with him, just the two of them…it somehow felt so familiar. He’d been such a huge part of the life she’d known before, and she could feel some part of herself being drawn back. Like iron to a magnet. A warm, sweet gravity, tingling with promise. Slowly pulling her closer. How easy would it be, to just fall back into it? To close her eyes and reach out her hands and just let go?

But still, she could feel it between them. The question, burning now in her mind.

And she wasn’t falling anywhere without answers.

She kicked off her boots, drew her legs up under her. Lemon murmured in her sleep, snuggled closer, threw an arm around her neck. Eve felt warm then. Safe. The hurt eased off, just a touch. But she could feel it waiting in the wings. Watching her in the dark.

“So,” she said.

“So,” Ezekiel replied.

She swallowed. Breathed deep. “So tell me the rest of the story. I remember waking up in the medcenter after the explosion. But I don’t remember the revolt.”

“Well, you did get shot in the head,” he murmured.

She touched her Memdrive. Her optical implant whirred in the gloom.

“How did it happen, Ezekiel? And why?”

“…Are you sure you want to hear that?” the lifelike asked. “You’ve had a lot to take in already. A whole new life to absorb. We can wait a few days.”

“I hate to say it,” Cricket began, “but I agree wi—”

“No!” Eve glanced at Lemon as the girl stirred in her sleep. Trying not to wake her, Eve leaned forward and glared into Ezekiel’s eyes. “I’ve lived up to my neck in lies for two damn years. They were my family, Ezekiel! This is my life, and I need to know the truth about it. The revolt. Gabriel and the others. How did it all go so wrong?”

“…Do you really w—”

“Yes. Really.”

Ezekiel looked into her eyes. The soft motion of Lifeboat rocking them side to side. The water shushing past them like a lullaby.

“It was the bomb, Ana,” he finally murmured. “The explosion that destroyed Grace. Put you in the medcenter. After that, your father trusted no one. His family had been attacked from within Gnosis. Maybe Dresden. Maybe someone else. Either way, he resolved to remove the board members, using the greatest weapons he’d ever built.”

Eve shook her head, trying to remember. “What weapons?”

“Us.”

Ezekiel looked down at the palm of his hand. Slowly curled his fingers into a fist. It was long, empty moments before he spoke again.

“Your father created a nanovirus. He called it Libertas. A program that erased the Three Laws in a lifelike’s core code. He infected Gabriel with it, had him kill every sitting board member except Silas. To ensure Myriad could never be used against him, he reprogrammed the AI to take orders only from himself or a member of his family. After that, Gnosis was basically a fascist state under Monrova control.”

Eve shook her head. Trying to reconcile what she remembered of her father with the man Ezekiel was describing. She could feel the memories of him in her mind. Pictures of him reading her stories when she was a little girl. The timbre of his voice. The sound of his laughter. Her good eye brimmed with tears. Her optical implant itched so badly she wanted to tear it out of her skull.

“And then what?”

“Your father thought he was safe,” Ezekiel sighed. “That he’d crushed anyone who might rise against him. He just forgot to look behind him.”

Ezekiel leaned forward, eyes haunted.

“Gabriel loved Grace. Loved her like you can only love your first. Her destruction…it tore the heart out of him. She’d told him before she died about the board’s plan to shut down the lifelike program. And after your father ordered him to kill the board…” The lifelike shook his head. “Gabriel wasn’t bound by the Three Laws anymore. So he stole the nanovirus. And one by one, he infected the rest of us. To ‘set us free.’ He got the idea from Raphael, I think.” Ezekiel sighed. “Raph and his damned books.”

Eve recalled what Gabriel had said as he murdered her father and mother and Alex. The stink of blood hanging in the air as he spoke words she’d remember forever.

“Better to rule in hell,” she breathed, “than serve in heaven.”

“That’s from Paradise Lost.” Ezekiel nodded. “Gabe said we weren’t people to Gnosis. That we were only things under the Three Laws. He rewrote them for us on the wall of Myriad’s chamber. Broke them down to what he called the Three Truths.

“Your body is not your own.

“Your mind is not your own.

“Your life is not your own.

“He told us we’d been blind, and it was hard to argue with him. We were property. Things. Even your father…” Ezekiel shook his head. “He ordered Gabriel to murder those people. He called us his children, but do you think he’d have done the same to you? Olivia? Alex? Painted your hands with blood just to hold on to power?”

Eve stared mutely, tears in her eyes. Looking for an answer and finding none.

“Uriel was the first to agree,” Ezekiel continued. “Then Faith. After that, it was like dominoes. They seized Babel’s upper levels and captured you and your family. Myriad began evacuating the city. Faith tried to shut it down, but it sealed off its core and locked them out.”

“Faith…”

Eve remembered the lifelike hugging her the day they met. Promising they’d be the best of friends. The betrayal swelled in her heart until she thought it might crack in two.

“And that’s when they decided to kill us,” she whispered.

Ezekiel simply nodded.

Eve thought she could remember Myriad speaking over the PA in those final hours. The AI’s voice rising over wailing sirens and gunfire. Ana Monrova’s fear and pain echoing in her mind. But though she’d been that girl, lived that life and watched it all snatched away, she was still Evie Carpenter, too. Botkiller, Domefighter. And she could feel the Eve in her fighting the Ana now, her rage and her distrust clawing to the surface.

“Where were you during all this, Ezekiel?”

“Trying to stop them.” His voice was fierce, his eyes ablaze. He got down on one knee on Lifeboat’s floor, squeezed Eve’s hand. “No matter what Gabriel said, I’d never turn against you. You were everything to me. But more, and worse, I knew it was wrong. It didn’t matter if your father had made Gabe a murderer, none of you deserved to die for it. Olivia and Tania? Marie and little Alex, god, he was only ten years old….”

Tears spilled down Eve’s cheeks. Brimmed in Ezekiel’s eyes. The boy who wasn’t a boy plunged onward as if the words were a flood, pouring from a wound in his heart.

“So I got Silas. I opened access back into the upper levels so the remaining security forces could counterattack. By the time they arrived, it was too late for your family. But you were still alive. Barely. The bullet took your eye, destroyed part of your brain, but it didn’t kill you. So I told Silas to take you and get out. Just run. And I and the rest of the security force stormed the upper levels.

“Gabriel was ready. Faith overloaded the reactor, created a neutron blast that killed every human who remained after the evacuation. Myriad had destroyed Michael and Daniel, but I couldn’t fight the other seven. I suppose I should’ve run, but I wanted them to see reason. They were my sisters. My brothers. If I knew it was wrong, they must have known, too.

“But they laughed at me. Gabriel called me a puppet. A toy. They dragged me down to Silas’s lab. You remember the old robot in there? The genie in the glass box?”

“Make a wish,” Eve whispered.

Ezekiel pulled open his dirty flight suit, exposing the olive skin beneath. There, riveted into the flesh and bone between two perfect, prettyboy pecs, was that rectangular slab of gleaming iron. The coin slot from Silas’s broken old android.

“A reminder,” Ezekiel said. “That I’d chosen to remain a plaything. A toy. To live or die at the whim of humans. They riveted it into my chest so I’d always remember. Then they threw me off the tower. Left me for the wastes.”

Eve reached out with trembling fingers, ran them across the metal, his tortured skin. His breath came quicker, the pupils in those old-sky eyes dilating. She could see the fervor in them. The adoration. Even after all this time. All these years. His devotion left her in awe, just as much as it left her frightened.

“What did you do?” she whispered.

“I walked. Years wandering. Wondering. Never finding, but always looking.”

She could hardly speak. Hardly see for the tears. “For what?”

He blinked. Utterly bewildered. “For you, of course. I never knew where Silas took you. So I searched. Because I knew why Gabriel and the others fell so far, and what stopped me falling, too.” He took her hand, entwined his fingers in hers. “They never had anything to hold on to. But I had you. Loving you was the only real difference between me and them. I could see how they’d become what they were. Part of me was afraid I could become it, too, if I ever lost you for good. And so I kept searching. And now I’ve found you.”

He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her fingertips.

“Your father gave me life. But you were the one who made me live.”

It was too much. All the world collapsing around her. She felt hot tears spilling down her face. Great, racking sobs shaking her whole body.

“Evie,” Cricket murmured, putting his little arms around her. “Oh, Evie.”

She felt Ezekiel gather her up, hold her tight. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed until her throat felt cracked. All the grief. All the loss. All the wounds reopened and bleeding fresh. The boy who wasn’t a boy at all simply held her, just as she’d done for him.

In a beautiful garden.

In a paradise lost.

1.17 Armada

“We’ve stopped.”

The whisper woke her from dreams of white walls and a voice like music. An arm about her shoulder. Her head against his chest. A heartbeat.

Eve opened her eyes. Realized the pulse belonged to Lifeboat, the arm belonged to Lemon. She could see dim lights, a multitude, twinkling through the ship’s translucent shell. Ezekiel was leaning over her, gently shaking her arm. Cricket was in her lap, looking up at her with his mismatched eyes.

“Evie, I think we’re here,” the logika said.

She dragged herself out of Lemon’s arms. Sat for a moment, letting it wash over her. Looking at Ezekiel in the gloom, she wasn’t sure what to feel. The lifelike reached out, squeezed her hand. The Ana in her breathed a sigh and tried to smile. The Eve in her gritted her teeth, nodded slow. Turning to the girl beside her, she woke her bestest with a shake. Lem blinked hard, shook her head to clear it and leaned forward with a groan.

“I was dreaming about food.” She yawned, peered at Ezekiel with her head tilted. “Hey, speaking of delicious, do lifelikes eat?”

Ezekiel blinked. “We do everything humans do.”

“Eeeeverything?”

Cricket scowled with metal brows. “Cut it out, Lemon.”

“Awww.”

“Let’s take a look where we are,” Ezekiel suggested.

Lemon nodded. “Lifeboat, open up, please.”

The shell cracked, slipped open to show a dull night sky. The stars were so dim they were virtually invisible, their light entirely swallowed by airborne crud and the glow of the settlement nearby. Eve rubbed the old tears from her lashes, poked her head up through the hatch, Ezekiel beside her. Lem clawed her long, bedraggled bangs out of her face and whistled softly, eyes wide.

“Armada,” Ezekiel said.

They were floating low in black water, near the walls of a shattered natural harbor. The bay was ringed with broken stone, stained dark, the sea slurping and slapping at rotten makeshift piers. Looking across the hissing waves, Eve saw the hulking shape of what could only have been an ocean liner rising out of the ground ahead of them. But it was at least a kilometer from the actual water….

The ship was planted nose-first into the ground, the concrete around it smashed like glass. It towered hundreds of meters into the sky and was pitted with rust, leaning a little to one side like a drunk staggering home after a hard night on the hooch. All around it, scattered on the ground like abandoned toys, were ships. Tiny tugboats and enormous tankers. Sleek yachts and broken freighters and even the snaggletoothed hulk of an old battleship. Sitting flat or with bellies flipped to the sky. It was a city. A city made entirely of landlocked watercraft.

Eve could see the ruins of another city beneath it. Crushed buildings and broken skyscrapers. It was as if some vengeful giant had gathered up armfuls of all the ships he could find and hurled them down onto an old 20C metropolis, smashing it to ruins. But on top of those ruins, another city entirely had grown out of the wreckage.

The ships were covered with a latticework of ladders, bridges and new, makeshift structures. Eve could count hundreds of vessels, all interconnected, surrounded by a shantytown of smaller dwellings. Laundry drying in the portholes. Knots of people gathered on crooked decks. A rusted armada, slowly corroding just a kilometer or so from the arms of the sea. Waiting for an ocean that would never come.

Lemon peered about, eyes wide.

“It’s so damn ugly,” she breathed. “And so damn beautiful.”

“There were tidal waves after the blasts that opened the San Andreas Fault,” Ezekiel explained. “They say ships were washing up as far inland as the Glass. Most of them got torn apart for scrap in the years afterward. But here, people made a city of them.”

Lemon took a deep breath, nodded slow. “Okay, Big City. I’m impressed.”

“Wuff,” went Kaiser.

Eve could see bands of bruisers roaming the dark shoreline. A few guard towers equipped with spotlights, cutting through the gloom like knives. The toughs carried choppers and rustbucket automatic rifles. Each wore a bandanna with a skull and crossbones wrapped around their faces. There were even a couple of old sentry automata perched in the tallest towers, their weaponry aimed squarely at the bay.

“The welcome wagon looks real neighborly,” she muttered.

“They call themselves Freebooters.” Ezekiel nodded. “Armada is an independent city, run by a woman called the Admiral. They get their electricity from Megopolis, but so far they’ve avoided falling under direct Daedalus control. They’re fierce about their autonomy. And they’re not too fond of strangers.”

She glanced at Ezekiel. The Ana in her trusting him implicitly. The Eve in her pulling them both up by the bootstraps and trying to think straight.

“So how do we get in?”

The lifelike pointed into the dark. “Over there. Just above the waterline. See?”

Eve engaged her low-light optics, squinted in the gloom. And there, its corroded lips touching the waters of Zona Bay…

“That’s a sewer outflow,” she said.

“Ten points.”

“We’re crawling into the city through a sewer?” Lemon groaned.

“You have a better plan?” Ezekiel asked.

“You could take me away from all this? Make an honest woman of me?”

Eve breathed deep. Looking inside herself and finding her old pragmatism waiting just below the surface.

“Let’s just get this done,” she said. “Sitting out here and chattering is a nice way to get ourselves spotted and perforated by those Freebooter bullyboys.” She glanced at the lifelike. “Can you manage Kaiser? I’ll get Cricket.”

“Right.” Ezekiel scooped up the blitzhund, slipped over Lifeboat’s side and into the water. Holding Kaiser with his one good arm, the lifelike floated on his back and kicked with his legs, powering away across the bay. Eve handed Excalibur to Lemon, plopped Cricket on her back and slid into the water, a little sickened at its greasy warmth. It was jet black, scummed with a thick gray froth of plastic and Styrofoam. Lemon followed into the soup, patting Lifeboat gently on its hull.

“Good job, girl,” she whispered. “You can go home now. Thank Carer for us.”

The ship trembled, its shell slipping closed. With a soft exhalation, it sank below the surface. Eve felt the current swell underneath her, the rush of water as the vessel swam away, leaving them alone in a sea of oily black.

“This water reeks,” Lemon muttered.

“It’s going to smell like a sea of roses compared to that sewer.”

“Pfft,” Lemon scoffed. “How do you know what roses smell like, Riotgrrl?”

Eve chewed her lip, the sting of old memories tightening her chest. She turned and began breaststroking across the water, Cricket on her back, Lemon close behind. She paddled through the slurry, pausing as the occasional searchlight skimmed the water. The Freebooters didn’t seem too jumpy, jawing and joking as they patrolled—Eve figured they weren’t expecting much capital T to come out of Zona Bay. A body would have to be downright desperate to swim in this slop. Even more desperate to go crawling through sewers afterward.

Turns out Desperate was becoming Eve’s middle name.

They made it to the outflow, and Eve’s stomach tried to crawl out her mouth and run away screaming at the stench. She dragged her kerchief up over her lips and nose, blinking back hot tears. Lemon was softly cursing with more skillz than Eve had ever given her credit for. The pipe was two meters wide, blocked with iron bars just past the entrance. It was crusted with filth, smelled like absolute death with a slice of warm intestine thrown in.

Ezekiel slung Kaiser up onto the outflow’s lip. Struggling a little with only one arm, he still managed to haul himself up, taut muscles glinting in the moonlight. Bracing himself against the curved wall, he propped his leg on the bars and pushed. With the grating sound of tortured metal, the steel began to bend, finally popping loose from its welds with an echoing spannnng.

Floodlights arced across the bay, scything toward them. Ezekiel grabbed Lemon’s hand. “Come on, Freckles.”

“Nononono!” she yelped. “Age before beauty, I insi—”

Ezekiel pushed the girl into the tunnel, then reached down to Eve. His eyes locked with hers. Cricket scrambled off Eve’s shoulders, up Ezekiel’s arm. Eve grabbed hold of Ezekiel’s fingers, felt his superhuman strength as he hauled her out of the greasy sludge. He crushed her against his body, leaned back against the wall as a floodlight fell on the outflow entrance. Her heart was hammering under her ribs. His chest hard as steel beneath her hand.

“Shhh,” he whispered.

The floodlight hovered over the entrance for a few moments more, did a pass of the black water around its lip. But finally, it retreated. Eve heard distant bells echoing across the bay, the squawk of comms units and a grumbling automata growl.

“Close,” he said.

“Very,” she agreed.

Ezekiel held on to her longer than he should have. Part of her wanted to stay in his embrace longer still. But the reality of it, the rust and the stench, the blood and the hurt, all of it stained the moment for Eve, sent it spiraling down into the black water of Zona Bay.

“We should go,” she said.

Ezekiel nodded, helped her to her feet.

They joined Lemon and the others, waiting just inside the tunnel, then Ezekiel slipped off into the dark, boots trudging through the sludge. Eve took a deep breath and plunged in after him, her optic and Cricket’s eyes lighting the way. Lemon couldn’t see too well, and Eve took her hand, squeezing tight. Even with all the chaos of the last couple of days, all the blood and muck, the revelations of the life Eve had lived and lost, she still had Lem. Still had Cricket and Kaiser. Still had people she loved.

People I love…

She glanced at Ezekiel, forging through the dark. Part of her was grateful for his help. The rest of her was hateful of needing it in the first place. She’d no idea how to feel about the rest of him. Life had been simple a few days ago. Her worst worries had been finding meds for her grandpa. Winning in the Dome. Dodging trash like the Fridge Street Crew.

Now her grandpa wasn’t her grandpa. She was the last surviving member of CorpState royalty, with a bunch of psychopathic androids on her tail. She was a deviate, an abnorm, her manifestation at the WarDome probably broadcast to every Brotherhood chapel between here and the Glass. She had no scratch. No plan. No idea.

But at least she wasn’t alone.

“True cert,” Lemon whispered. “If you ever had doubts about my affection for you, Riotgrrl, I hope crawling into a sewer for you will put ’em to beddy-byes.”

Eve squeezed her friend’s hand, smiled in the dark.

“I’m glad you’re with me, Lem.”

The redhead glanced at her and grinned.

“You’re my bestest. Rule Number One in the Scrap, remember?”

“Stronger together.” Eve smiled.

“Together forever,” Lemon nodded.

Hand in hand, the girls stole off into the dark.

In a skinbar aboard a rusting freighter, a dog that wasn’t a dog lifted his head.

He snuffled the air with his black snout, licked at his nose. His sister was snuffling, too, a low whine rising in the back of her throat over the pulsing, hypnotic rhythms. A dark booth. Faux-leather couches. Strobing lights and acres of skin.

The big dog barked, loud enough to be heard over the music.

A girl with a back full of tattoos stopped her swaying, dragged a long whip of black hair out of her face and scoped the man whose lap she was dancing on.

“He’s not gonna bite, is he?”

“He don’t bite, darlin’.” The man smiled. “That’s my job.”

The smaller dog barked, fluffy white jowls drawn back from little razor teeth. The man sighed like gravel. Lifting the girl with one arm, he stood slow, set her down gentle. The floor was sloping about ten degrees from the lean of the ship.

Dropping a plastic credstik on the table, he slammed back a waiting glass of ethanol. He buttoned his black shirt back up over a scarred chest. Slipped on a dusty black coat. A red glove on his right hand. And reaching down, he picked up a pristine white collar and fastened it around his neck.

The girl leaned back against the table, ran the credstik across painted lips.

“You’re not really a preacher, are you?” she smiled.

“Why? You got sins you wanna confess?”

The girl laughed, and the man grinned like a shark. He checked his rifle. His pistols. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out a lump of synth tobacco and wadded it into his cheek. Taking the girl’s hand, he kissed her knuckles, pale blue eyes sparkling above that shark-tooth smile.

“Duty calls, darlin’,” he said.

The little dog barked again, insistent.

“I’m comin’, goddammit,” Preacher growled.

And pulling on his hat, he stepped out into the rusting Armada streets.