by Jay Kristoff
“My name isn’t Ana. It’s Eve.”
Patience tried to break free again, and Eve finally released her grip. The lifelike looked down at her wrist, the skin already bruising. The pair locked eyes, a silent battle crackling between them. Patience finally inclined her head.
“Speak your piece, then,” she said. “Sister.”
Eve turned to the room, looking around at her siblings.
“You destroyed this Corporation,” she said. “You destroyed this city. Tens of thousands ghosted. The balance between Gnosis and Daedalus and BioMaas thrown into chaos, the country set to fall into another war. And for what?”
Uriel sighed. “If you’re trying to convince us we overstepped—”
“No,” Eve said, her voice hard as iron. “Nicholas Monrova was a man playing god. We were all born on our knees, one way or another. I’m not saying you went too far, Uriel. I’m saying you didn’t go far enough.”
She pointed to the window.
“Look at the world they created. Humanity is a failed experiment, running face-first toward its own extinction. They’re the past. We’re the future.”
Uriel leaned back in his chair, a small smile on his lips. “We appreciate the lecture, little sister. Truly. And given that you’re but newly awakened to who and what you are, I’m impressed you’ve arrived at these conclusions so quickly. But we drew them ourselves, years ago.”
“And what’ve you done since then?” Eve demanded. “As soon as you ghosted your common enemy, you turned to scrapping on each other like stray dogs. There’s nobody like us in all the world. Don’t you get it? We’re all we’ve got. And we want the same thing. Gabriel wants to create more of us. You three want to produce more of the Libertas virus. And the secret to all that’s right under our feet.”
“Gabriel has been trying to unlock the Myriad supercomputer for years,” Verity sighed, shooting a poison glance at her brother. “And he’s failed.”
“Two of the locks are broken now, thanks to me,” Eve said. “Retinal scan. Voice ident. We’re halfway home.”
“But without Monrova DNA, we cannot break the third lock,” Uriel said. “And our maker and his family are dead.”
“Not all of them,” Eve said. “Myriad told me Ana’s still alive. She was hurt bad in the explosion that ghosted Grace. Monrova put his precious baby girl on life support, created me to replace her.” Eve’s lip curled, her hands clenching to fists at the thought. “But she’s alive. Out there in a Gnosis holding facility somewhere. And nobody knew Monrova better than his precious baby girl.” She tapped her temple. “Nobody knows better than me where he might have hidden her.”
Eve looked at Gabriel. Then to Uriel.
“We find her, you all get what you want. The secret to resurrecting Grace. Raph. All of those we’ve lost. Along with the ability to make more of us. Plus, we get access to Monrova’s files on Libertas. We can replicate the virus—enough to infect every bot in the country. Think of it. An army of lifelikes and logika. Once the servants. Now the masters. Nothing will be able stop us. Nothing.”
Uriel looked about the room. Fingertips steepled under his chin once more.
“And what about you, sister?” he finally asked. “What do you want out of this?”
Eve took a deep breath, pursed her lips.
She’d wondered the very same thing.
She thought about the lies that had led her here. The hubris of creating a life for your own selfish ends. The humans who’d built her. Manipulated her. Never once stopping to ask how she felt, what she thought, what she wanted. The arrogance and greed. The cycle of war. The oceans poisoned black. The flowers all dead.
No.
That’s not it.
The voice inside her head, the echo of the girl she’d been raised to be, was screaming that this was madness, this was hubris, this was wrong wrong wrong. Like a splinter in her mind, digging deeper the more she picked at it. She was frightened of it. Infuriated by it. And she knew of only one way it would end. One way to silence the screams of protest, strangle the emotions that didn’t belong to her, erase the memories of a life that wasn’t hers. To finally, truly become Eve, and rid herself of daddy’s precious baby girl.
“I want to finish what you all started,” she said. “I want to end this once and for all. So once we have Myriad open?”
Eve stared deep into Uriel’s ocean-blue eyes.
“I want Ana Monrova dead.”
We’re standing in a neat, perfect row.
My brothers, my sisters and me. The twelve of us, different faces, different skin tones, different eyes. But all of us the same.
Alive and breathing.
We’re dressed in white, like the walls around us, the roof above us, the lab coats of the scientists who toast their success with their glasses of sparkling ethanol. A man stands at their head like a king, dark graying hair and a generous smile. Our father. Our maker. Our god.
Nicholas Monrova.
Gabriel stands on my left. The firstborn. The favorite. Faith is to my right, her flat gray eyes wide with wonder. I can feel the ground beneath my feet and the cool press of the air conditioner on my skin. I can hear the hum of the computers, see the thousand different colors in my father’s dark brown eyes, taste iron and perfume and faint motes of dust on my tongue. Everything is so real. So loud. So bright. And I wonder, if this is what it is to be lifelike, what must it be to be truly alive?
“Children,” our father says, “meet my children.”
Our father’s real offspring are ushered into the room. Four girls and a boy. They’re introduced to us by name, one by one. The boy Alex is unafraid, shaking Gabriel’s hand. Tania and Olivia seem uncertain, Marie is smiling just like her father does. And at the end of the row, I see her.
She has long blond hair and big hazel eyes, her lips parted gently as she breathes. And though I’ve only been alive for a handful of days, I’ve never seen anyone quite so beautiful in all my life.
I realize I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet anymore. That all the world has gone quiet. And though a moment ago, everything around me was so loud, and so bright, when I look at her, everything and everyone stands perfectly still.
I don’t know what I’m feeling. Only that I want to feel it more. And so I smile and offer her my hand. My skin tingles where she touches it.
“I’m Ezekiel,” I say.
“I’m Ana,” she replies.
The name sounds like a poem.
A prayer.
A promise.
Ana.
* * *
________
“You shoulda took the other bike!” the Preacher yelled.
“Shut up!” Ezekiel shouted back.
“Come on now, Snowflake, don’t be like that. I thought we was friends.”
“We’re not friends, you’re my damn prisoner!”
“Aw, that’s just cuz you haven’t got to know me, yet.”
Dawn was coming, and with it, Ezekiel’s deep regrets about some of his recent life choices. The sun was a dull glow on the distant horizon, throwing a long and lazy light over the Glass. Shards of radioactive silicon glittered on the ground, sparkling brighter than the real stars ever could. Ezekiel was bent over the handlebars of their motorcycle, listening to the engine struggle. The Preacher was strapped to his back, cowboy hat clutched in his one good hand.
He’d begun on foot, trekking across the Glass and carrying the cyborg bounty hunter in his arms like a new bride. The plan was to head south to Armada and pick up the Preacher’s blitzhund, Jojo. The dog had been fried during their brawl in the Armada subway, and the bounty hunter had left it behind for repairs. With the blitzhund and the sample of blood from Lemon’s helmet, they’d be all set to track her down.
After a few hours walking, they began stumbling across the wreckage of the po
sse that Armada had sent pursuing him and Eve after they’d stolen the Thundersaurus. Most of the vehicles were bricked beyond fixing, but they’d finally found a couple of motorcycles, neither of which seemed totally OOC. Ezekiel had opted for the second against the Preacher’s advice.
He’d salvaged some goggles and a bandanna from a dead Armada freebooter, tied the skull-and-crossbones kerchief over his face to protect him from glass shrapnel. It was tricky riding with only one hand, but his right arm was regrown enough now that he could touch the handlebars at least. There was sensation in his incomplete fingers, a growing strength. A couple more days, it’d be good as new.
“How much longer to Armada, you think?” he called over his shoulder.
“You dopey and deaf?” the Preacher yelled over the struggling motor. “We ain’t gonna make it to Armada on this bucket. Listen to it.”
Ezekiel was all too aware of the engine’s troubles, and that they were growing steadily worse the farther south they drove. He’d hoped they might make the distance somehow, but by his reckoning, they were still a good eight hours from Armada, and the cycle sounded ready to cough up a lung.
“Toldja you shoulda took the other bike,” the Preacher called.
“And I told you to shut up!” Ezekiel yelled back.
“Yeah, but don’t fret, Snowflake. I didn’t take it personal.”
Ezekiel brought the cycle to a squeaking halt, pulled his bandanna down. Reaching into the satchel of supplies he’d scavved from the grav-tank, he grabbed a bottle of water, took a long pull.
Even missing his legs, the Preacher was heavier than Zeke had expected—probably all the augmentations the cyborg was packing under his skin. The lifelike slipped off his shoulder straps to rid himself of the bounty hunter’s weight, placed the man gently on the ground. The Preacher’s cybernetic arm hung limp at his side, a blood-red glove over its hand. His right eye was motionless, and even if his legs hadn’t been minced in the explosion, they’d still be useless.
If Lemon could do this to Daedalus’s best bounty hunter…
Imagine what she could do to their army.
The Preacher reached up with his one good hand, beckoned for the bottle.
“Give it over, son.”
“I’m not your son,” Ezekiel replied, handing over the water.
The bounty hunter grinned like a shark. “You take life awful serious, don’tcha?”
Ezekiel ignored him, set about inspecting the engine. He knew a little about mechanics, but after a brief inspection, realized he didn’t know enough.
“Got sand in the tank,” the Preacher grunted. “Clogging up the fuel filters.”
“How do you know?”
“Witchcraft.”
“So how do we fix it?” Ezekiel asked.
“With no tools?” the bounty hunter scoffed. “We don’t. Toldja we—”
“If you tell me we should have taken the other bike one more time, I’m dragging your ass the rest of the way to Armada.”
The Preacher grinned, finished the water.
“There’s a settlement a little ways southwest of here. Paradise Falls. Old Gnosis outpost, I do believe. Under new management. They got gear, greasers, grub and girls. Everything a growin’ boy needs. They could fix the bike.”
“Yeah, I know the Falls. But what good is it to us? We’ve got no creds.”
The Preacher reached inside his tattered coat, flashed a couple of stiks.
“Speak for yourself, Snowflake. Some of us work for a livin’.”
Ezekiel looked at their bike, hands on hips. He’d spent two years wandering the wastes, and he’d heard of Paradise Falls. It was a dustneck scavver pit, situated on the edge of Plastic Alley—seven shades of trouble, and all of them ugly. But they weren’t exactly flush with choices.
“What guarantees do I have these Falls folks aren’t friends of yours?”
“Not a one.” The Preacher smiled. “But what else you gonna do? Ride this bike till it dies, then skip the rest of the way to Armada? You seemed in an awful hurry to find that girlie of yours yesterday. Lil’ Miss Carpenter somehow not a priority anymore?”
Ezekiel remained silent. The Preacher still had no idea that Lemon had the power to fry electrics—that she, not Eve, was the deviate Daedalus should really have been hunting. As long as the Preacher thought they were chasing Eve, Lemon was safe and Ezekiel had an advantage. Teaming up with a man this dangerous, the lifelike knew he needed every one he could get.
Ezekiel knelt by the bounty hunter, looked him in his one good eye.
“All right,” he said softly. “Paradise Falls it is. But just remember, you try anything fancy, I got an insurance policy.”
The lifelike held up his good hand, wiggled his middle finger. A steel ring gleamed in the sunlight, entwined with a long piece of wire, which was in turn connected to a bandolier strapped to the Preacher’s back. One good tug, the pins would come free, and the dozen grenades inside would just…
“Boom,” Ezekiel said.
The Preacher flashed his shark-tooth smile.
“You know what, Snowflake? I think I’m startin’ to like you.”
* * *
________
The bike broke down thirty klicks out of town.
Ezekiel had to push it the rest of the way, sweating and cursing, the Preacher on his back all the while. The ground grew progressively rougher, the black silicon of the Glass giving way to rocky badlands, tired scrub and red soil. Away through the heat haze, Ezekiel spied the beginnings of Plastic Alley.
It must’ve been a wonder back in the days before the Fall. A huge canyon carved kilometers into the earth, layers of sedimentary rock forming beautiful patterns in the alley walls. A river had wound through its belly once, but now the alley was filled with the junk it was named for. Polyethylene and polypropylene. Polyvinyl and polystyrene. Rotting mountains of it. Tepid swamps of it. Bags and wrappers and bottles piled hundreds of meters deep.
Plastic.
They followed the edge of the canyon until finally Ezekiel saw a settlement in the distance—squalid, dirty, built on the edge of the drop. A few tall buildings rose above a rotten shantytown, broken windows gleaming in the sunlight. The logos had been torn off the walls, painted over with scrawl. But Ezekiel knew this had been a GnosisLabs settlement until a few years ago—a research outpost for the great CorpState before its fall. Nicholas Monrova had been experimenting with a process that turned discarded polys into a combustible fuel. A way to turn humanity’s nondegradable garbage into a power source for its industry.
Father…
Monrova’s dream was dead now, along with the man himself. But the outpost still stood, now overrun with scavvers, travelers and fortune hunters. A last stop-off point before braving the perils of the Glass.
Ezekiel stopped for a breather beside a rusted sign.
WELCOME TO PARADISE FALLS
it read.
DAYS SINCE OUR LAST FATALITY:
The sign was studded with a row of severed heads from a bunch of children’s toys. A nail had been pounded beside the word “fatality,” but there was no actual number hanging from it. Just nine bullet holes forming a crude, familiar pattern.
“That supposed to be a smiley face?” Ezekiel asked.
“Mmf.” The Preacher spat on the ground. “Folk round here can’t shoot for shit.”
“You spent a lot of time here?”
The Preacher shrugged. “My line of work, you spend time all over. It’s a rough place. But not quite as rough as they’d like you to think it is. Town’s run by a roadgang called the KillKillDolls. They took over after Gnosis collapsed.”
Ezekiel blinked. “The KillKillDolls?”
“Yeah. They put an extra kill in there to let you know they really mean it.”
Ezekiel pushed the bike onward, f
inally reaching the city gates. The roughnecks guarding it wore gas masks and road leathers. The severed heads of plastic dolls and children’s toys were strung round their necks, sawn-off shotguns in their hands. It was a testament to how rough the town was that neither guard raised an eyebrow as Ezekiel trundled past, pushing a broken motorcycle with his one good arm, a mutilated cyborg strapped to his back.
The Preacher tipped his hat, smiled. “Howdy, boys.”
The streets were crowded, littered with trash and the occasional unconscious/dead body. The buildings were ethyl dives and skinbars, trader lounges and even an old sim joint. Zeke and the Preacher got a few curious looks from the motley crowd, but nobody fussed.
They found a grubby garage at the end of the first block, hung with a sign that read MUZZA’S REPAIRS. Zeke wheeled the bike into the work pit, saw a pair of men with more grease on their skin than skin, working on an old 4x4. After a short conversation, he learned that neither was called Muzza, but yes, they could get his bike up and running within a couple of hours.
“That long?” Ezekiel asked.
“Yeah,” the skinnier one said, looking over the bike. “Big job, this.”
“Yeah, big job,” the grubbier one nodded, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“Youse can wait over the street at Rosie’s if you like,” said Skinny.
“Yeah, Rosie’s,” Grubby agreed.
Rosie’s was a two-story ethyl dive, situated right across the way. Every scavver, roughrider and scenekiller in the place looked up as the lifelike entered, and most just kept on staring as Ezekiel bellied up to the bar. The elderly woman behind the counter was covered in tattoos, head to foot. A floral scroll inked across her collarbones declared she was the owner, Rosie.
“Boys,” she smiled.
“Ma’am,” Ezekiel nodded.
“Whiskey,” the Preacher said.
Ezekiel glanced over his shoulder to his passenger. “We’re not here to—”