LIFEL1K3

“Grandpa, what the hell is that thing doing out here?” she demanded.

“Had a chat.” Grandpa wiped his lips with a bloodstained rag, eyes on the monitors. “Reached an understanding. So to speak.”

“Did you miss the part where this thing nearly choked Lemon to death?”

Grandpa tried to turn his cough into a scoff, smothered with his fist.

“You’re the one who … brought him inside, my little chickadee.”

“We thought it was dead!”

“I’m sorry, Mistress Lemon.” The lifelike’s voice was smooth as smoke. “My brain was damaged in the crash. I mistook you for a threat. Please accept my apologies.”

The lifelike’s pretty blue stare fell on the indomitable Miss Fresh. Its smile was dimpled, sugar sweet, about three microns short of perfect. Eve could see the girl’s insides slowly going mushy right before her eyes.

“Oh, you know.” Lemon’s face was a bright shade of pink. “It’s only a larynx.”

“Ohhh my god,” Eve began. “Lemon …”

“What?” she blinked.

“And you, Mistress Eve,” the lifelike said. “I’m sorry for any—”

“Oh, I’m Mistress Eve now?” she demanded. “What happened to Ana?”

“Again, the crash … my head injuries.” It glanced at Silas. “I’m afraid my brain trauma led me to mistake you for someone else. I apologize.”

“Brain trauma’s all better now?”

“Yes. Thank you, Mistress Eve.”

“But you’re still mistaking me for someone else?”

A blink. “I am?”

“Yeah.” Eve stepped closer, looked up into the lifelike’s eyes. “A true cert idiot.”

She stared into that fugazi blue. Searching for some hint of truth. Feeling only revulsion. Warning. Danger. This thing wasn’t human. It might look it, sound it, feel it. It might be as beautiful as all the stars in the sky. Problem was, the smog was usually too thick to see the stars anymore. And there was something wrong here. Something …

“Arguments later.” Grandpa nodded to the monitor banks. “Brotherhood means biz. Time to talk them out of it, Ezekiel.”

The lifelike broke Eve’s eye contact with seeming reluctance.

“I can do that.”

Spinning on its heel, the thing called Ezekiel marched down the corridor. Its gait was a little lopsided, as if the loss of its limb had thrown it off balance. Still, a regular human would already be dead if they’d had their arm torn from their shoulder, and Eve was freaked to see the thing moving at all. It got half a dozen steps before her voice pulled it up short.

“Hey, Braintrauma.”

The lifelike turned, one perfect eyebrow raised.

“Exit is that way.” Eve crooked a thumb.

Ezekiel glanced about the corridors and, with a flash of that almost-perfect smile, headed toward the front door. Lemon leaned out the hatchway to watch it go, whistling softly. Eve plucked Cricket off her shoulder, set him down in Grandpa’s lap.

“Cricket, look after Grandpa. Grandpa, look after Cricket.”

“Where you think you’re going?” the old man rasped.

“Out to help.”

“Hells you are. I’ll try some parlay, and if that doesn’t work, Ezekiel can deal with them. You got nothing to throw against a mob like that.”

“And what’s the lifelike going to throw against those Spartans?” she asked. “It’s only got one arm. And it’s not getting through ballistics-grade plasteel with just a pretty smile.”

“That dimple, though,” Lemon interjected.

“Look, that’s his … problem, not yours,” Grandpa wheezed. “You stay … here.”

“This is our home, Grandpa. And these dustnecks brought an army to it.”

“That’s right, Eve. An army. And there’s … nothing you can do to stop them.”

Eve looked down at her fist. Remembered the WarDome last night. The Goliath and a little myth about a kid called David.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

Ignoring her grandpa’s shouts, she stalked down the corridor to the armory, slapped on some plasteel and headgear, threw her poncho over the top. Snatching up Excalibur, she checked the power levels, noticed Lemon suiting up beside her. The girl dragged on an old grav-tank pilot’s helmet, clawed the shock of cherry-red hair from her eyes and hefted Popstick with a grin.

“Stronger together,” she said.

“Together forever.” Eve smiled.

A thousand suns were waiting for them outside. A thousand suns inside a single skin. The metal underneath her was hot to the touch. The scorch in the sky broiling her red.

“You gentles got no biz … on my property.”

Grandpa’s voice crackled over the PA as Eve popped out of a rooftop hatch and hunkered down behind one of the autogun emplacements. Lemon crouched beside her, pushing the oversized helmet out of her eyes and surveying the mob.

“You got thirty seconds before … I start getting unneighborly,” Grandpa growled. “And then I’m gonna jam that cross … up your as—”

Grandpa’s attempts at “parlay” trailed off into dry coughing, and the old man cut the feed. The Iron Bishop spoke into his mic, voice bouncing off the tires around them.

“Handeth overeth the deviate, Silas! Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

Eve blinked. “… Did he just say ‘handeth overeth’?”

Lemon stood up, helmet slipping over her eyes as she howled. “Don’t call her a deviate, you inbred sack of sh—”

Eve pulled Lemon back down behind the autogun barricade as the more enthusiastic Brotherhood boys fired off a couple of random shots. Molten lead spanggged off rusted steel. Eve winced. Her head was aching, her optical implant itching.

Peeking back over the barricade, she fixed the Spartans in her stare. Last night’s bout was replaying inside her head. The way that Goliath had dropped like a brick onto the killing floor. The way she’d blown every circuit inside it just by willing it. She had no idea how she’d pulled it off, or if she could do it again. But this place was her home, and these people were her family, and letting someone else fight her battles just wasn’t her style.

So Eve stretched out her hand, fingers trembling.

“What’re you doing?” Lemon hissed.

“Trying to fritz one of those machina.”

“Riotgrrl, I’m not su—”

“Hsst, I’m trying to concentrate!”

Eve gritted her teeth. Picturing the leftmost Spartan collapsing into ruin. Trying to summon everything she’d felt last night—terror and fury and defiance—to curl it up in her fist and send it hurtling into the Spartan’s core. Sweat gleamed on her brow, the sun beating down like sledgehammers. The fear of losing Grandpa. The suspicion she was being lied to. The lifelike’s hollow, plastic stare and perfect, pretty eyes. She pulled all of it into a tight, burning sphere in her chest—a little artillery shell of burning rage.

These dustnecks wanted to nail her up? Bring her an ending? Well, she’d conjure them an ending like they’d never seen …

Eve drew a deep breath. Standing up from behind the barricade, she imagined the Spartan falling in a cloud of burning sparks, burned the picture in her mind’s eye. And then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed.

Screamed.

SCREAMED.

And absolutely nothing happened.

The Brotherhood boys started laughing. Bullets started flying. A lucky shot bounced off her torso guard, knocking her sideways. And as the indomitable Miss Fresh dragged her back behind cover, a shard of supersonic lead blew Eve’s helmet right off her head.

The pain was sledgehammers and white stars. Eve cried out, dirty fingers feeling about her skull to see if it’d been perforated. The hail of fire continued, she and Lemon crouched low as the air rained bullets for a solid minute. Eve was wincing, flinching, heels kicking at the roof beneath her. Thankfully, the shot seemed to have killed her headgear and nothing else. But still …

“That was a little on the wrong side of stupid,” she finally managed to gasp.

Lemon was staring wide-eyed at Eve, pale under her freckles. “You nearly got your dome blown off! Warn me when you’re gonna do something that defective again, will you?”

“Never again,” Eve muttered. “I promise.”

“Where’s this damn murderbot, anyways?” Lemon poked her head over the barricade once the firing stopped. “Shouldn’t he be … aw, spank my spankables …”

“What?”

Lemon chewed her lip. “You want bad news or worse news?”

“Um … worse?”

“No, that doesn’t work. Supposed to ask for the bad first.”

Eve rubbed her aching temples and sighed. “Okay, bad, then.”

“Tye and his little posse of scavverboys just rolled up.”

“Oh.” Eve nodded slow. “And the worse?”

“They brought the entire Fridge Street Crew with ’em.”

“Juuust fizzy,” Eve sighed. “Seriously, what is with this day?”

Peeking over the barricade, Eve saw a warband of Fridge Street thugs rolling up from behind the looping curl of some old roller coaster track. She spotted Tye and Pooh riding on the backs of beat-up motorbikes behind the older Fridge Street beatboys. The boss of the crew—a one-hundred-and-twenty-kilo meatstick in rubber pants who called himself Sir Westinghouse—climbed out of a modded sand buggy and started jawing with the Iron Bishop, apparently delighted to discover they were all here to lay the murder down on the same juvette.

Grandpa’s bellow crackled over the PA.

“What is this, a dance class reunion? You scrubs get the hell off my lawn!”

Sir Westinghouse stepped forward, a bruiser beside him handing over a bullhorn.

“Your granddaughter jumped a bunch of my juves out in the Scrap this morning, Silas!” Westinghouse bellowed. “Jacked some sweet salvage that rightways belongs to Fridge Street. Suggesting maybe you better limp out here and jaw on it.”

“I got … a better suggestion,” Grandpa called.

“And what’s that, old man?”

“Check your six.”

Eve watched Sir Westinghouse frown and look behind him just as one of the cassock boys flipped back his hood to reveal a prettyboy face and eyes just a touch too blue. The lifelike had a machine pistol in its one good hand, probably lifted from whatever Brother it’d stomped for the robe.

Lemon did a little bounce. “Clever boy.”

Every Brother and Fridgeboy had his fingers on his trigger. Eve strained to hear the lifelike talk over the machina hum and clawing wind.

“I’ll give you one chance to walk away,” it said. “All of you.”

“That’s him!” Tye slapped Sir Westinghouse on the back. “The lifelike!”

The Fridge Street chief glanced at the juve, back at Ezekiel. “So you’re the fugazi, eh? Look around you, prettyboy. You got an army against you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ezekiel said softly.

Westinghouse guffawed. “Who you trying to fool? You forget the Golden Rule? The Three Laws won’t let you hurt us, fug.”

The lifelike blinked at that. Its pistol wavered, and Eve wondered if …

“My maker thought the same thing,” Ezekiel said.

And then it moved.

Eve had seen fast before. She’d seen epinephrine-enhanced stimheads playing snatch on street corners in Los Diablos. She’d seen top-tier machina fights beamed from the Megopolis WarDome—the kind that got decided in fractions of a second. She’d seen fast, true cert. But she’d never seen anything move like that lifelike moved then.

The Iron Bishop raised his assault rifle behind the lifelike. And quicker than flies, Ezekiel spun and popped two rounds into the Bishop’s eyes. In almost the same instant, it dropped three of the closest Brotherhood thugs with headshots and finally blew out the back of Sir Westinghouse’s skull, painting Tye’s face a bright and gibbering red.

The air was scarlet mist and thin gray smoke. World moving in slow motion. Peeps shouting, firing at the lifelike as it grabbed a nearby Brotherhood thug to use as a shield. Lead thudded into the Kevlar cassock, muzzles flashing like the strobe light in Eve’s dreams, flickering as the figures danced and fell, the stink of blood uncurling in the air.

Eve covered her ears as the rooftop autoguns fired into the mob. The Spartans opened up with their own ordnance, one spraying a storm of hollow-points at the lifelike, the other unleashing its plasma and melting one of the rooftop sentries into slag. Lemon winced and hunkered lower, fixing Popstick with an accusing glare.

“Who brings a baseball bat to a gunfight?”

Eve peered out the side of the barricade. Eyes fixed on the Spartan, teeth gritted in a snarl. Stretching out her hand once more.

“Come on …,” she pleaded.

“Eve, what are you doing?”

“Why won’t it work?” she spat, furious. “Why can’t I do it again?”

Hails of burning lead raked their cover, pitter-pattering on the steel. Eve heard cries of panic, screams of pain. Lemon peeked out over the barricade, whistling softly.

“Look at him go …”

Eve’s eyes fell on the lifelike, widening in amazement. Ezekiel had scrambled up the back of the closest Spartan and, as if the metal were tinfoil, torn the ammo feed from its autoguns to stop it firing on the house. Wrenching its plasma cannon toward the Spartan beside it, the lifelike melted the cockpit and the pilot inside into puddles. The Brotherhood scattered into cover, Fridge Street laying down the lead on Ezekiel as it twisted and dodged, almost too fast to track.

Noticing the rooftop autoguns were OOC, two of the braver Fridgeboys made a dash for the house. Whether to seek cover or wreak havoc, Eve wasn’t quite sure.

“Finally!” Lemon cried.

Eve’s bestest leapt off the roof with a howl, dropping a Fridgeboy with 500kV crackling through his brainmeats. Kaiser was waiting inside the front door for the other one, and the scavver was soon dashing back to his comrades with his shins torn to ribbons.

Ezekiel dropped from the Spartan’s shoulders, grabbing a Kevlar-clad corpse to shield itself as it weaved through the hail of bullets. Even with only one arm, it carried the body effortlessly, gleaming with what looked a lot like sweat as it rolled into cover behind a stack of tires near the house. A pile of old retreads had been set ablaze by the plasma, thick smoke rolling over the yard and burning the back of Eve’s throat.

She realized Cricket had crawled up onto the roof beside her. The little bot was tugging at her boots and yelling at her to get back inside over the roar of the remaining Spartan’s autogun fire. Lemon was safe with Kaiser below. But Eve was still trying desperately to unleash whatever it was that had dropped that Goliath in the Dome. Eyes narrowed. Temples throbbing. Muscles straining.

Come onnnn …

“Eve, come on!”

She reached deep inside herself. To the place she’d fallen into when that Goliath raised its fist above her head. The moment she’d looked down the barrel pointed at her skull. A moment of perfect fear. Of defiance. Thrashing and kicking against that long goodnight.

This is not the end of me.

This is just one more enemy.

The Spartan jerked back like Eve had punched it. It trembled, as if every servo inside it were firing at once. She grinned as a cascade of sparks burst from the machina’s innards. And spewing smoke, the Spartan stumbled and crashed face-first into the scrap.

“Eve …,” Cricket murmured. “You did it.”

Eve punched the air. “Eat that, you dustneck trash-humper!”

As their last machina fell, the Brotherhood broke. Two of their Spartans were OOC, the Iron Bishop’s machina standing abandoned as the Brothers dragged their fallen leader away. With the death of their own boss and Ezekiel still laying down bullets from its nest of tires, most of the fight had been taken out of Fridge Street, too. They were stepping off quick, scattering into the Valley.

Eve scoped the bloody battleground that had engulfed her front yard. Some of the meanest, toughest beatsticks in Dregs had stepped up with a fistful of capital T and were now scuttling away with their tails between their legs.

Wiping the sweat from her good eye, the girl winked at the little logika beside her.

“Think you can chalk up a win for the good guys, Crick.” She smiled.

And that’s when the first bomb fell from the sky.

1.6

IMPACT

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

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

They have only one thing left to take from me.

The last and most precious thing.

Not my life, no.

Something dearer still.

A silhouette looms.

Raises a pistol to my head.

“I’m sorry,” a voice says.

I hear the sound of thunder.

And then I hear nothing at all.

No warning. No telltale whooooosh like in the old Holywood flicks. Just the blast.

And fire.

And screams.

A second incendiary fell, landed in the middle of the retreating Fridge Street Crew, sending Pooh and his teddy bear off to the Wherever in pieces. A third bomb blew the Brotherhood boys about like old plastic bags in the wind. Eve and Cricket looked up to the sky, the girl’s belly turning cold as she saw a light flex-wing with a faded GNOSISLABS logo on the tail fin swooping through smoke.

“This is not good …,” Cricket said.

The flex-wing zoomed overhead, cutting down anything that moved. The craft made another pass, mopping up everything still twitching. And finally, with the kind of skillz you really only see in the virtch, the pilot brought the ’wing down to a gentle landing on the trash and skipped out the door in the space between heartbeats.

“Riotgrrl?” Lemon’s voice drifted up from the verandah below. “You fizzy?”

“Stay behind cover, Lem.”

“No doubt. I’m too pretty to die.”

Eve’s eyes were fixed on the newcomer, standing ankle-deep in the mess she’d made. A woman. Barely more than a girl, really. Nineteen, maybe twenty. She wore combat boots and a clean white shift, hood pulled back from a perfect face. Short dark hair cut into ragged bangs. Some kind of sidearm Eve had never seen before at her hip. And in her right hand, the sheathed curve of what might have been a …

“Um, is she carrying a sword?” Lemon yelled.

“Looks like.”

“Who does that?”

The newcomer scanned the carnage with eyes like a dead flatscreen. Eve’s stare was fixed on her face, telescopics engaged. She could see that the newcomer’s irises were dull, plastic-looking. Just like Ezekiel’s. Her face was flawless, beautiful. Just like Ezekiel’s. The way she moved, the way …

“She’s a lifelike,” Eve breathed.

A barrage of images in her mind. Old black-and-white freeze-frames, blurred and smudged with the press of time. A beautiful smile. Soft skin against hers. Laughter. Poetry. It was as if—

“Have you ever been in love, Ana?”

“I think …”

“Kaiser,” came Grandpa’s voice. “Aggress intruder.”

The blitzhund was a snarling blur, dashing out the front door toward the lifelike. Eve’s heart was in her throat, her blood running cold.

“Kaiser …”

The blitzhund barreled like a heat-seeking missile right at the newcomer’s throat. Quick as blinking, the lifelike drew the sword from its sheath. A flare of magnesium-bright current arced along the blade’s edge, and faster than Eve could scream warning, the lifelike brought the weapon down toward Kaiser’s head.

A shot rang out, smashed the blade from the lifelike’s grip. Eve glimpsed Ezekiel, crouched behind its tangle of tires, smoking machine pistol in its hand. Kaiser hit the female lifelike like an anvil, snarling and tearing. The lifelike rolled with the momentum, punching up through Kaiser’s belly. And as Eve watched in horror, the lifelike tore out a handful of her dog’s metallic guts and kicked him thirty meters down the Valley.

“Kaiser!” Eve screamed.

The lifelike was on its feet, bloodied wrist clutched to its chest. Ezekiel opened fire, Eve’s jaw hanging loose as she watched the newcomer dance—literally dance—through the hail of molten lead, down into the cover of a Spartan’s wreckage. Ezekiel’s pistol fell quiet, shots echoing along the Valley.

“Eve, come on,” Cricket pleaded, tugging at her boots.

The house PA crackled, and Eve heard Grandpa’s voice, thick with fear. “Evie, come inside.”

The newcomer raised its head, calling across the scrap.

“Good heavens, is that you, Silas?”

Eve gritted her teeth. So this lifelike knew Grandpa, too. Just like Ezekiel. Her mind was racing, desperately trying to fill in gaps that just didn’t make sense. How did any of these pieces fit together? Maybe Grandpa hadn’t been an ordinary botdoc? Maybe busted recycs and automata weren’t the only things he’d been tinkering with when she was off learning to become a Domefighter? Whatever the explanation, a slow anger was twisting her insides. Someone was lying here. Someone was—

The house rumbled beneath her. Rust and dirt shivered off the structure, and Eve realized the old engines on the thopter-freighter had started, kicking up a storm of plastic and dust. Grandpa must have been really hard at work all those months she’d been building Miss Combobulation at the Dome. He must have fixed—

“Mister C fixed the engines?” Lemon yelled.

“Lem, get in the house!” Eve shouted. “Help Grandpa! I’ll be down in a second!”

“… What are you gonna do?”

“I gotta get Kaiser!”

Eve turned to the trash pile the blitzhund had been booted into. She could hear pained whimpers, faint scratching. He was still alive. But he was hurt. The engines were a dull roar, the world trembling around her. Grandpa was calling her name over the PA. Cricket was still tugging on her leg, his voice pleading.

“Evie, come onnnn.”

She clenched her jaw, shook her head. Time enough for questions when Kaiser was safe. She knew Cricket would follow her anywhere, but she wouldn’t let him get hurt, too. She handed over Excalibur, nodded to the hatch.

“Cricket, go get Lemon and take her back in the house.”

“Eve, it’s too dangerous up here, I’m supposed to—”

“That’s an order!”

The little logika wrung his rusty hands on the baseball bat’s handle. His heart was relays and chips and processors. His optics were made of plastic. And she could still see the agony in them.

But as always, the bot did what he was told.

Eve scrambled down the rooftop into the rising dust cloud, weighing her chances. Glancing among the carnage, she saw the Iron Bishop’s Spartan, still standing among the smoking corpses. As she crept out among the bloody scrap, she heard the female lifelike call from behind cover. Its voice was lilting, almost as if it were singing rather than speaking. And Eve could swear it sounded …

… familiar?

“Lovely to see you again, Ezekiel,” the newcomer called.

“You’re a terrible liar, Faith,” Ezekiel called back. “I always liked that about you.”

“I should have known you’d beat me here.” A smile in the song. “Been watching the human feeds again? Practicing in the mirror to be like them? It’s pathetic, Zeke.”