by Jay Kristoff
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.<
br />
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.