by Jay Kristoff
The machina were classic infantry models, responsible for most of the heavy lifting during War 4.0 in areas where the radiation was too hot for meat troops. They stood thirty feet high, the crescent-shaped heat sinks on their heads giving them the silhouettes of old Greek soldierboys from the history virtch. They were painted scarlet, snatches of mangled scripture on their hulls. Long banners flowed from their shoulders and waists, adorned with the Brotherhood sigil—a stylized black X.
“Grandpaaaaa!” Eve yelled.
A Spartan stomped up to Northeast-2 and smashed it to scrap. Eve felt a distant, shuddering boom as the thermex charges at the turret’s base exploded. She glanced at the screen for North-3, saw the Spartan on its back, smoking and legless. But the rest of the posse was still moving, just a few minutes shy of ringing the front doorbell.
Eve glanced at her bestest. “These boys mean biz.”
Lemon was looking down the corridor, back toward Eve’s workshop. Her face was unusually thoughtful, brow creased.
“What did Mister C do back on the mainland? Before you moved here?”
“He was a botdoc,” Eve said, watching the Brotherhood march closer. “A mechanic.”
“You remember where he worked?”
“Lem, in case you missed it, there’s a very angry mob outside our house carrying a cross my size. What does this have to do with anything?”
“Because that lifelike acted like he knew you. Like you’d forgotten him. And he called you by a different name, Evie. Someone in this game isn’t dealing straight.”
Eve knew Lem was right, but, true cert, impending murder just seemed more of a pressing issue right now. The Brotherhood mob was posse’ing around their three remaining Spartans, about a hundred meters from the house. The machina were armed with autoguns and a plasma cannon on each shoulder, and those things could liquefy steel. The house had only two auto-sentries on the roof, and against the bigbots’ armor, they weren’t going to be much help. As far as capital T went, Eve couldn’t remember being in much deeper. But she gritted her teeth, forced her fear down into her boots. She was a Domefighter, dammit. This was her home. She wasn’t giving it up without a kicking.
The lead Spartan’s cockpit cracked open, and a brief blast of choir music spilled across the Scrap. A barrel-chested figure in an embroidered red cassock vaulted down onto the trash, holding an assault rifle engraved with religious scripture. He wore mirrored goggles and had sideburns you could hang a truck off, a big greasepaint X daubed on his face. Eve knew him by reputation—a fellow who tagged himself the Iron Bishop.
“I am cometh not to bring peace, but a sword!” he bellowed.
“Amen!” roared the Brothers.
The Iron Bishop held out his hand, and a juve slapped an old microphone into his palm. With a flourish, the Bishop held the mic to his lips, his voice crackling through his Spartan’s public address system.
“In the name of the Lord! The Brotherhood demands that all genetic deviates housed within this domicile surrendereth themselves immediately for divine purification!”
Eve scowled, tried harder to swallow her growing dread. “Purification” basically meant getting nailed up outside the Brotherhood’s chapel in Los Diablos and left for the sun. The Brotherhood was always crowing about the evils of biomodification and cybernetics, and they had a major hate-on for genetic deviation. But they were big enough that the local law didn’t want to push the friendship. So if you happened to be born with a sixth finger or webbed toes or something a little more exotic, sorry, friendo, that was just life in the Scrap.
Cricket sat on Eve’s shoulder, peering at the feeds with mismatched eyes.
“Aren’t they hot in those cassocks?” he chirped.
“They make ’em out of Kevlar weave,” Eve murmured. “Bulletproof, see?”
“Got a bad feeling on this,” the bot said. “Right in my shiny metal man parts.”
“Keep telling you, you got no man parts, Crick,” Lemon sighed.
“Yeah,” said a tired voice. “I’m such a bastard.”
Eve turned with a surge of sweet relief, saw her grandfather sitting at the doorway in his electric wheelchair. But standing behind him . . .
“Um,” Lemon said. “Should he . . . be here?”
The lifelike.
It stood behind Grandpa in its high-tech flight suit, bloodstains on the fabric, Kaiser’s teeth marks on its throat. Old-sky blue eyes flitting from screen to screen.
“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.”<
br />
“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 fr
om 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.