TRUEL1F3 (TRUELIFE)

The beast drew a shuddering breath, chest expanding as its lungs filled.

“Paladin, look out!” Abraham yelled.

A gout of luminous green burst from the construct’s mouth, sizzling the air. Servos whining, engines screaming, Cricket leapt aside. The acid struck him as he dove, coating one of his missile pods in a soup of hissing green. The WarBot unloaded with another burst from his chaingun as Ezekiel gave up on his pistol, stowing the weapon and picking Faith up again. He dashed toward Diesel and Grimm and placed his sister on the ground beside them.

Zeke felt his skin prickling as Grimm curled his fingers, the temperature dropping through the floor. The warbeast bellowed as its armor blackened, as the muscle beneath warped and smoked. Grimm’s face was fixed in a snarl, his eyes aglow like burning embers, like that flare of light over the New Bethlehem desert. The air around them was now positively arctic—Zeke’s joints aching, frost spilling from his lips. And with another shriek, the behemoth burst into flames.

It roared as the fire spread, as another blast of armorpiercing rounds carved its chest. The construct lashed out with its tail, knocking Cricket backward. The spray from the WarBot’s chaingun lit the skies as he fell, the beast leaping toward him, skin aflame, those bone scythes reared back to carve his head off his body.

A gray tear opened in the ground beneath it, and with a furious screech, the creature toppled down into it. Clawed hands scrabbled at the shimmering edges of the rift as it slipped down into the void. Diesel was standing tall beside Ezekiel, one hand stretched out, the other pointed upward.

The lifelike heard faint roaring far above. Growing louder by the moment.

Squinting up into the dark, Zeke saw the second of Diesel’s rifts, hundreds of meters in the air overhead. The behemoth tumbled out of it, plummeting back toward the earth, screeching and flailing. Her dark hair crusted with pale frost, lips twisted in a smug smile, Diesel shouted over the rising noise.

“You all might wanna cover your ears!”

Ezekiel watched with grim fascination as the behemoth plunged out of the sky. It disappeared past the gentle curve of the nearby dunes, and Zeke heard a thud, a disgusting wet crunch. He felt the impact through his boots, the beast’s shrieks silenced. The temperature began rising, the frost fading from the air.

Grimm held out his fist. “Smashing work, freak.”

Diesel bumped his knuckles. “Tell me something I don’t know, freak.”

Abraham was stumbling over the shattered ground toward them, eyes wild, mouth agape. “My god, did you see that thing?”

“Is everyone okay?” Ezekiel asked.

He looked around the group, who all murmured affirmative—all save Faith, who simply quirked an eyebrow at her legs and said nothing at all. Cricket was picking himself up off the ground, his optics burning bright blue. His left missile pod was partially melted, the casing split and spitting smoke. The logika scanned the sands about him, his gaze finally falling on Diesel and Grimm.

“DID YOU TWO DO THAT?” he asked.

The boy winked. The girl just shrugged.

The big bot rolled his massive shoulders. “I COULDA TAKEN HIM. BUT … THANKS AND STUFF.”

Diesel’s black lips curled in a smile. “You’re welcome and stuff.”

“Speakin’ of thanks,” Grimm said, clapping Abraham’s shoulder, “that’s twice I’d be brown bread if not for you.”

Abe frowned. “What does bread have to do with anything?”

“Brown bread,” Grimm explained. “Dead.”

Diesel rolled her eyes. “Keep up, will you, Brotherboy?”

Ezekiel’s head was reeling. The abilities he’d just seen wielded by these kids … telekinesis, energy manipulation, bending the elements as casually as walking and talking—it was almost impossible to believe. But peering into the jagged pit the behemoth had lain in wait beneath, he realized there were bigger issues at hand. The lifelike felt his heart drop and thump in his chest.

“What was that thing?” Abraham demanded, also peering into the hole.

“A behemoth,” Ezekiel replied softly. “A BioMaas war construct, built to fight infantry units and enemy machina. They grow them in CityHive.”

“BioMaas …,” Grimm whispered.

Ezekiel turned to the boy, saw fear in his eyes. “Yeah.”

“But if Lemon was here … if they …”

“… Yeah.”

“Bloody hell.” Grimm sank onto his haunches, staring at the broken earth. He looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “They took her.”

“Hours ago, by the look of things,” Ezekiel said. “They must have left the behemoth to clean up anyone who came poking around.”

“How?” Pistons hissed and whooshed as Cricket’s massive hands gesticulated wildly. “HOW CAN A GIRL THAT SMALL GET IN TROUBLE THIS BIG?”

“You think they’ll hurt her?” Diesel asked softly.

Ezekiel looked at the acid burns on the ground, the gouts of bright green behemoth blood soaking the dirt. “Preacher said something to me,” he murmured. “He told me CityHive doesn’t break out their warbeasts unless they think they’re in a war. BioMaas doesn’t want to hurt Lemon, they want to use her.”

“Lemon’s a lot of things,” the girl said. “But somehow I don’t see her at the spear tip of some BioMaas army.”

Ezekiel shrugged. “Like I said, Daedalus tech all runs on conventional electrical current. If BioMaas could weaponize Lem’s abilities, they’d be able to roll right up to Megopolis and kick the front door down.”

“But why would they do that?”

“You lock the biggest, meanest dogs you can find in a cage together, someone’s eventually getting bitten.”

“The people running these companies aren’t dogs,” Grimm said.

“No.” Faith looked up at Ezekiel with shining eyes. “They’re worse.”

Zeke breathed a soft sigh and nodded.

“They’re human.”

3.5

GENOME

This monster’s insides stank like old socks.

Lemon Fresh sat in a curve of smooth, dark bone inside the Lumberer’s belly, rocked back and forth by the motion of the construct’s massive wings. Her freckled skin was damp with sweat, her jagged red bangs wilted about her green eyes. The walls were crawling with softly glowing, semitranslucent bugs, skittering about and stopping occasionally to bump antennae. The smell was septic. The air was heavy and rank and, worst of all, moist.

“I hate the word ‘moist,’ ” Lemon declared.

The woman sitting across from her glanced up with her strange golden eyes. She was tall and pretty, her hair woven into long, sharp dreadlocks. She wore a skintight suit of black rubber, molded with odd ridges and bumps over her dangerous curves. Her skin was deep brown, pocked with hundreds of tiny hexagonal holes. And she was crawling with bees.

“She does?” Hunter said, her voice rasping like a broken voxbox.

“Yeah. ‘Moist’ is probably my least favorite word in the entire dictionary. It’s definitely worse than ‘phlegm.’ ” Lemon glanced at the six-legged dogthings around them, drooling on the spongy floor. “I hate the word ‘slurp,’ too. And ‘pulsing.’ But yeah, ‘moist’ is the worst word ever. Worse than ‘throbbing,’ even.”

“Lemonfresh is doing it again,” Hunter said.

“… Doing what?”

“Talking swiftly and continuously about inanities to cover her nervousness. Lemonfresh told us to warn her when she repeated the behavior.”

“Oh,” Lemon said, somewhat deflated. “Okay.”

Hunter reached down and patted one of the dogthings, running her fingertips over the blunt, eyeless snout. The rows of razor-sharp, finger-long teeth parted, and a long, wet tongue slipped out, slurped softly at Hunter’s hand.

“Lemonfresh has no need to be nervous,” the operative said.

“Yeah, you say that, and then you roll up to my squat and you snatch me up into the belly of this ginormous flying cockroach thing—”

“They are called Lumberers.”

“I know what they’re called, I grew up on Dregs and we saw them all the time, thank you very much,” Lemon said, getting slightly cross at being interrupted. “Point is, you didn’t ask me if I wanted to go with you, you just snaffled me, and while I didn’t put up too much of a fight—sorry again about the toothbeasties I fried, by the way, but considering you had about a hundred of them with you—”

“They are called slakedogs.”

“That’s very interesting but so not the point,” Lemon said, building a really good head of steam now. “The point is, it’s all well and good to say ‘Lemonfresh has no need to be nervous’ when you’re not the one surrounded by a bajillion slakedogs and deathbees and whatever this thing crawling up my leg is!”

Lemon scowled down at the thing in question, which was about the size of her fist. It had glowing skin and six legs and big button eyes in a sort-of-cute face. It wiggled its antennae at her and trilled softly.

“Would Lemonfresh like to know what they are called?” Hunter asked.

Lemon sent the bugthing flying with a sharp flick to its sort-of-cute face.

“No,” she said, brushing away her bangs. “Lemonfresh doesn’t give a damn.”

The other bugthings on the walls and ceilings let out a series of high-pitched chirps. Lemon raised her middle finger to the lot of them.

“Lemonfresh is important,” Hunter said softly. “She is needed.”

“So you keep telling me,” the girl scowled.

“When Lemonfresh reaches CityHive, she will understand.”

Lemon pouted but made no reply. Truth was, when Hunter and her tiny army had rolled up on the doorstep of Miss O’s, she’d put up a hell of a fight. The shock of watching that nuke explode over New Bethlehem had worn off quickly, replaced with a frightening anger. She’d reached out into the static, seizing hold of the electrical current inside the slakedogs that Hunter had brought with her and killing dozens of them in an instant—just turning them off as if she were flicking a switch. But then she’d felt a sting on her neck, the buzz of Hunter’s genetically engineered bees on her skin, and after that came a terrifying drop down into blackness.

She’d only seen those bees kill things before, and as she fell, she wondered briefly if she was dying. It surprised her to realize how unafraid she was at that thought. Grimm dead, Evie gone, Zeke and Cricket vapor—she had very little left to hang on to, talking true. But waking up inside the Lumberer what must have been hours later, she supposed not all Hunter’s bees were deadly. And after an initial wave of relief that she wasn’t, in fact, fertilizer, she’d assessed her situation and realized how deep in the fertilizer she actually was.

Like she’d told Hunter, Lemon had seen Lumberers before. The beasts used to dump trash on Dregs—discarded machine parts, old hulks, any tech that BioMaas thought belonged to the “deadworld.” Lumberers were big as houses, and they flew on huge translucent wings, kinda like a mash-up of a cockroach and a hot-air balloon. Being inside one was more than a little creepy. But if Lemon used her gift to knock it out of the sky while flying in it, well, gravity might have a thing or two to say.

Lem was tempted to start talking again. It wasn’t that she was nervous—she knew BioMaas wanted her alive. But if she was talking, she didn’t have to think. About that boy who’d kissed her as he drove off toward certain doom. About the feel of his big arms lifting her almost off the ground, the taste of his lips, warm and pillow-soft. The memory made Lemon’s head spin all over again, her fingertips trailing the line of her mouth and setting her skin tingling. Grimm had kissed her like she’d never been kissed before. He’d kissed her like he really, truly meant it.

And now he’s dead.

The thought was just too heavy, too sad, too much. In the last few days, she’d lost everyone she was ever close to. Silas. Cricket. Grimm. Evie. It seemed so unfair, she wanted to scream, she wanted to reach into that warm wash of static, the million, billion tiny burning sparks in the minds of the things around her, and just turn

them

off.

But there was the aforementioned problem of flying. More important, her inability to do so. And, you know, gravity.

I’m so boned.

The droning wing beats shifted in tone, and Lemon felt a subtle shift in their direction. She glanced up into Hunter’s golden eyes.

“She is here,” the operative smiled.

“Oh, fizzy,” Lemon deadpanned.

The wing beats deepened in tone as they slowed, and Lemon’s stomach rose into her chest as they began to descend. They were jostled and bumped for what seemed like years, until, with a final skittering thump, they came to rest. A series of wet sloshings rang in the creature’s innards, burbling, gurgling. And then, with a revolting slurp, the Lumberer’s shell opened wide, letting in garish daylight.

It was blinding after the soft glow of the bugthings on the walls, and Lemon squinted against the glare. She saw Hunter brush her fingers along the Lumberer’s ribs, murmur thanks. And then the operative was taking Lemon’s hand, leading her out into what was true cert the most astonishing sight of her young life.

It was a city.

A city unlike any she’d ever seen.

No concrete. No steel. No glass. Instead, everything was … green.

The structures were semitranslucent resin, bone-colored and gleaming. Great winding spires rose all around them, like the termite nests she’d seen in Silas’s old nature sims. Every structure was covered with plant life—tall trees and flowing vines and flowering shrubs—and the scent of all that green was close to heaven. There were no hard lines, no right angles; all the shapes were smooth, swirling, organic. The spires were connected with walkways, patterned like a vast spiderweb.

The skies were moving—Lemon saw the wasp shapes of Hunter-Killers, the bulky silhouettes of Lumberers, other figures big as bootballs, furry as bumblebees. The air was filled with the endless monotone of their wings, the bright perfume of flowers and the sighing, shushing whisper of a billion bright green leaves.

It was … beautiful.

“Lemonfresh,” came an extraordinary, reverberating voice.

Heart hammering, breath stolen from her lungs, Lemon turned from the city to the scene before her. A legion of figures awaited her. There were more slakedogs, long tongues lolling between their too many teeth. Lemon saw more of those cute, tiny button-eyed bugs crawling over every surface. But mostly she saw people.

At least, she presumed they’d been people.

There were perhaps a thousand standing in a broad semicircle around her, all looking at her expectantly. Differing shapes and sizes, male and female, all clad in some variation of the formfitting organic black suit that Hunter wore. But looking among the throng, Lemon realized many of the faces were the same, repeated over and over again.

And she recognized some of them.

There were multiple copies of the lady who’d helped her friends escape the belly of that BioMaas kraken—the woman called Carer. She thought she recognized a man called Sentinel, too: dozens upon dozens of him, all of them tall and dark and utterly identical. Belly sinking, mind awhirl, Lemon realized there were Hunters in the crowd, too, perfect copies of the woman standing beside her.

The Hunter that had found her in the Clefts had been killed in New Bethlehem, and Lem had suspected there was something squiffy at work when a second copy showed up. She hadn’t pondered it too hard at the time. But now she tried to recall Hunter’s words to her: We have many sisters, Lemonfresh. And CityHive has many Hunters. As she looked among the sea of faces, she finally realized what was going on here.

“Clones,” she whispered.

“Lemonfresh,” came that reverberating voice again.

A man speaking. He was tall and strangely handsome, with big dark eyes and a chin sharp enough to cut yourself with. Dark hair was swept back from his brow, and he wore an elaborate version of that same rubber suit, covered by a long coat with a high, upturned collar, decorated in a swirling design. He smiled as if seeing her was genuinely the best thing that had ever happened in his life.

“We are Director,” he said.

Lemon suddenly realized what made his voice so extraordinary. Looking among the crowd, she spotted three other copies of the same man, all of them identical. And when one spoke, the others spoke in unison.

“We are so pleased to see her,” they said.

Lemon glanced at the Hunter beside her. The beautiful green city around her, the sea of identical faces before her, all smiling in anticipation. She should say something, she realized. Something impressive. Something that made her look like she had a handle on this situation, like she was the most brilliful little badass this side of Dregs and nobody, nobody, was gonna trifle with her and get away with it.

She thrust her fists into the pockets of her cargos and cleared her throat.

A legion of eyes stared back at her expectantly.

“I need to use the bathroom,” she declared.

Lemon looked at the pile of small blue-gray cubes on the plate in front of her with deep suspicion. She poked one, scowling when it failed to respond, then peered up into the faces of the three Carers hovering over her.

The Carers all blinked twice: once with regular old-fashioned eyelids, and again with a translucent membrane that closed horizontally along their featureless black peepers.

“She must eat,” said one.

“Her energy reserves must be quite low,” nodded another.

“They are extremely nutritious,” promised the third.

“They look dangerously close to that crap Hunter tried to feed me in New Bethlehem,” Lemon muttered. “Afraid I’m not much of an algae girl.”

“Oh, no,” said the first Carer. “Hunter informed us of Lemonfresh’s distaste for nourishment based upon photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms.”

The second Carer nodded. “This is a concentrated blend of proteins, amino acids and minerals derived from powdered orthoptera acrididae.”

Lemon blinked. “Powdered orthowhat now?”

“Locusts,” explained the third.

Lemon’s stomach tapped her on the shoulder and declared it wanted to leave the building now, please. She peered down at the plate with newfound revulsion.

“This is powdered bug?”

“Yes,” all three declared proudly.

“Oh my god.”

“Thank you, Carer, that will be all. Lemonfresh will eat when she is hungry.”

The Carers looked upward at the command and bowed simultaneously.

“Your wish, Director,” they said.

Without further fuss, all three turned and walked toward the edge of the conference room. With a whispering, rubber sound, the wall parted like a curtain, sealing itself up again once the Carers departed.

Lemon watched the trio leave, trying her best not to look as puketastic as she felt. The space she’d been brought to was broad, circular, high in one of those spires. Everything was made of bone-pale resin, the surfaces run through with phosphorescent green veins—curling and abstract and kinda pretty, if Lem was talking true. Beautiful plants with pale, delicate flowers grew about the room, bringing a pleasant sweetness to the air. There were no windows, but the walls ranged from opaque to almost transparent, and Lemon could see out to the bustling city below.

She was seated at a circular table, with a large indentation at its center. This recess was filled with a velvety dark liquid, and a glowing BioMaas logo was projected on the surface—a double helix, like a twisted ladder, constantly spiraling.

The table was set with five chairs, rising up from the floor. Aside from hers, the seats were each occupied by a copy of the Director. They all blinked at the same time. They all spoke at the same time. And every one of them was smiling at her.

“Keep it together, Fresh,” Lemon muttered.

“Do not fear,” the Directors said in unison. “Lemonfresh is in no danger here.”

“Listen,” Lemon said, clearing her throat. “I don’t wanna offend you or anything, but do you figure maybe only one of you could answer instead of all of you speaking together, because it’s getting really creepy on the crawly.”

“One of us?” the Directors all asked.

“Yeah.” Lemon held up a solitary finger. “One.”

All four Directors shook their heads. “We are one, Lemonfresh. Many forms, but one mind. One will. One purpose.”

“… And what purpose would that be?”

“We are the Director of BioMaas Incorporated.”

Lemon blinked around the room. “All of you?”

Four heads nodded in perfect synchronicity. “We are the pattern best suited. We are not Architect or Soldier, nor Worker or Breeder. We are Director.”

“You’re … all the same?” she said, a slow horror creeping into her chest. “Everyone in this city is just a copy of someone else?”

“Just?” the Directors said. “CityHive is an organism devoted to the perfection of the lived experience. Each pattern is ideally suited to the task to which it is assigned. Each cell perfectly enmeshed in a larger, exquisite tapestry.”

“I thought you were just another CorpState,” Lemon said, bewildered. “You know, wageslaves and managers and all that stuff. Like Gnosis and Daedalus …”

Four identical faces hardened in vague disgust. “Daedalus Technologies is mired in the technologies of the deadworld. Devoted to the perpetuation of a tyranny that almost destroyed this earth. Once, BioMaas possessed such structure. Inefficient. Selfish. Fractious. But we have evolved beyond such primitive notions.”

Lemon looked around the room, her jaw agape.

“This is pants-on-head crazy.”

“Does she truly think so?”

The pool of smooth black liquid in the center of the table shivered, like a stone had been dropped into it. The fluid became silver, and Lemon realized she could see images on the surface, as if it were a vidscreen. She saw an ugly settlement nestled on an island of trash. A city where she scratched out a desperate living, stealing and grifting, until Evie and Silas took her in.

“Los Diablos,” she said.

“A grave of the deadworld,” the Directors said. “Filled with inferior patterns, living in the garbage CityHive throws away.”

Before Lemon could get too indignant about these jokers spitting on her old stomping grounds, the image shifted. She saw a sprawling city at night. The remnants of old 20C skyscrapers rose into the sky, ringed by a huge wall. The air was filled with drones, smudged with methane, the smog lit up like some toxic rainbow. The streets were filled with people and logika, scurrying like ants, all living on top of one another, crushed into the streets and splitting them at the seams.

“Megopolis. Capital of Daedalus Technologies. An infected scab, hopelessly dependent on robotic labor, spitting poison into earth, sea and sky. The dying gasp of a civilization that did not have the good sense to perish with dignity.”

The image shifted again, and Lemon saw a grimy settlement crusted on the edge of a black sea. She recognized the shape of the New Bethlehem desalination plant, the massive iron gates, the barbed wire and broken glass.

A bright flash burst over the scene, and Lemon felt the floor rumble. A shockwave of fire bloomed bright, burned white-hot. The image dropped into sudden darkness and was replaced once more by that spinning helix logo. Lemon felt four pairs of eyes pinning her with their stare.