TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  Cricket saw Abraham climbing up out of the workshop doors, black hair askew, tech-goggles pulled over his eyes. He saw the dark-skinned boy atop the monster truck brace himself, feet spread, palms outstretched. He saw a wall of boiling, burning darkness sweeping in out of the north, a storm born in the heart of that brief sun, set to immolate all in its path.

  “ABRAHAM, GET DOWN!” Cricket roared.

  And then, it hit them.

  It was strange, watching it all unfold in total silence. It was an engine without the roar. A storm without thunder. It crashed on them like a tsunami, impossible force, unthinkable power. The earth shook, the dark swallowed them, thousands upon thousands of degrees, the burning remnants of the gods’ stolen fire come to scorch them to their bones. But as that elemental fury crashed down upon the walls, as the flood arrived on their broken shores…

  Something stopped it dead.

  The air about them rippled. Awash with tiny sparks, like static on a faulty vidscreen. The dust and fire and withering weight blasted the walls and the outer city to pieces. But in the town square, stretching out to envelop the desalination plant, the broken buildings where the desperate citizens of New Bethlehem cowered and prayed, a sphere of…something kept the destruction at bay. It was invisible, intangible, its borders shimmering like the air above a bonfire.

  Cricket saw the dark-skinned boy bending into the blast. Behind him, Abraham stood with arms flung out against the tempest, teeth bared in a snarl. The blast rolled over them, a wave of dust and flame. But though the temperature rose, it wasn’t enough to burn them. Though the radiation levels spiked, it wasn’t enough to kill them. And though the shockwave crushed everything around it to dust and ashes, there in the heart of that sphere, earth shaking below, sky boiling above, all was somehow calm. The crackling eye of a ravenous storm.

  The worst washed over them, passing the bayside wall and dispersing over the black and foaming ocean. Burning winds followed in its wake, dust and debris swirling against the sphere of force enveloping them. To the north, a mushroom-shaped cloud was rising off the desert floor, kilometers into the heavens. Cricket saw Abraham had lowered his arms and was sinking to his knees. The boy atop the monster truck was swaying on his feet, dragging his goggles off his head. And if Cricket had breath, it would have been stolen away at the sight of him.

  The boy’s eyes were burning. Aflame, like the heart of that brief sun. The girl who came with him was looking up at him with awe and fear. As Cricket watched, the boy dropped off the truck and onto the hard-packed earth. The ground shattered beneath him, as if he weighed hundreds of tons. He staggered toward the water’s edge, black footprints burning in his wake. He looked ready to fall, the fire in his eyes rolling down his cheeks like tears. The girl was screaming, pointing at Cricket.

  “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” he shouted.

  Solomon banged on his shin, held up his whiteboard.

  The ocean, old friend!

  Cricket had no idea what was happening, let alone how or why, but in the absence of a better plan, he obeyed. Dashing across the broken square, Solomon hanging on to his leg like some metallic limpet, he scooped the dark-skinned boy up in his hands. An alarm blared inside his metal skull, and he realized the boy’s skin was scorching hot, enough to melt his armor if he held him too long. Smashing through gutted buildings, Cricket carried the burning boy to the boulevard on the city’s edge, the black salt water lapping at rotten piers.

  The boy leapt from his palms, out into the sea. Steam burst from the water where he touched it, boiling as the boy held out his arms, away from the settlement, fingers spread. The air shivered, churned, erupted, a storm of gamma radiation and kinetic force released from his outstretched hands, carving through the ocean in a long, sweeping arc.

  The waves turned to vapor, the foam to steam. Cricket was blinded for a moment, a great dark fog rising off the churning sea. But when it cleared, there the boy stood, waist-deep in black chop, his T-shirt and cargos soaked through, vapor rising off his skin. Head bowed. Eyes closed. Fists clenched.

  But somehow, he was alive.

  Somehow, they were all still alive.

  People were peering out from the rubble, from the windows of the desalination plant. By the looks on their faces, they were reaching the same conclusion Cricket was. New Bethlehem was a city owned by the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood operated under one absolute and unwavering mantra: Only the pure shall prosper.

  Deviates, abnorms, trashbreeds—whatever you called them, they were the enemy of the people who lived here. But now those people looked out with wondering eyes at the boy in the boiling waves. At Abraham, making his way through the shattered concrete to stand, breathless and sweating, on the boulevard. At the girl with the black-paintstick lips, rushing past Abe and jumping into the water, throwing a fierce embrace about the dark-skinned boy before punching him repeatedly in the arm.

  This was a city where deviates were nailed to crosses in the name of “purity.” Where a mother was willing to sacrifice her own son to appease the mob.

  But three deviates had just saved it from total destruction.

  Among the slowly gathering crowd, Cricket could see the Brotherhood’s leader, Sister Dee. The woman was clad in a white cassock, now stained with black dust and spatters of blood. Her dark hair fell in bedraggled waves around her shoulders, a greasepaint skull on her face. She was standing among her elite guard, watching Abraham with uncertain eyes.

  But Abraham was looking at the pair in the water, something between elation and awe on his face. Dragging his dark hair back from his grubby cheeks, he met Cricket’s eyes, shaking his head in wonderment.

  “I TOLD YOU TO STAY PUT,” Cricket said.

  Abe simply shrugged, offering a sheepish grin.

  Behind him, Cricket saw another familiar figure pushing through the crowd. One hand was pressed to a cluster of bullet holes in his chest, and his shirtfront was soaked with blood. His face was picture-perfect, dark, sweat-damp curls framing eyes of beautiful baby blue. He was staring at the deviates in wonder. But along with the bafflement, the bewilderment, Cricket could see anguish in his eyes.

  “EZEKIEL.”

  The lifelike met his stare, raised one bloody hand in greeting. His eyes were filled with sadness, his face haunted. Though they’d been separated only a few days ago, it seemed like a lifetime had passed. They’d parted on ugly terms—Cricket had spoken harsh words about the lies Ezekiel had told Evie. But talking true, the WarBot was glad to see a familiar face among all this madness.

  His brain was processing the events of the last few moments now, replaying footage of the Preacher as he’d made his escape. When the bounty hunter had emerged onto the de-sal plant’s roof, he’d been pushing a cylindrical case—some kind of cryo-tube. And through the smoke and flame, Cricket had spotted two bloodstained figures being hauled into the Preacher’s waiting flex-wing. A pretty boy with a mop of bloody blond hair. And beside him, dripping scarlet from the multiple holes in her chest, had been Evie.

  The girl Cricket had been programmed to love. The girl he’d been programmed to protect. The girl who’d turned out not to be a girl at all. She’d fallen so far after she’d learned the truth of what she was. She’d done things Cricket wouldn’t have believed her capable of. But now she and her “brother” had been abducted by Daedalus Technologies. Along with whatever, or whoever, was inside that cryogenic coffin.

  What a mess…

  The dark-skinned boy was being helped back to the pier by his friend, leaning hard on her shoulder. Abraham was looking back at his mother and her goons edging a few steps toward Cricket. Ezekiel had pushed his way through the mob now, bloody and beaten, looking up at Cricket with his plastic baby blues.

  The WarBot looked to the boiling clouds, to the wreckage of the city that should’ve only been dust and bones. He felt metal knuckles banging on his skull, saw
Solomon had clambered up onto his shoulder once more. The logika was spindly, his cream-white chassis decorated with gold filigree. He held up his whiteboard, his mouth fixed in that permanent, maddening grin.

  It appears we all have some explaining to do!

  On paper, Ezekiel had a genius-level IQ.

  His artificial synapses processed input at speeds unthinkable for an actual human. He could count the lashes on a person’s eyelid in a fraction of a second, track a bullet as it cut the air. Nicholas Monrova had created him to be more than human. Stronger. Better. Smarter. And on paper he was all that and more. On paper, Ezekiel was a perfect synthesis of mechanical and biological engineering that completely surpassed the beings that had created him.

  But it turned out paper didn’t count for much in the real world.

  I feel like an idiot.

  He’d had no choice but to throw in his lot with the Preacher. He knew it was a risk at the time. But he’d wanted to believe the cyborg might be something close to honorable, that all his talk of having a code, of paying his debts, of being more than a killer, might prove true. Ezekiel had saved his life, after all.

  That had probably been his first mistake. Unless you counted falling in love with Ana Monrova. Or lying to Eve about his role in the downfall of the Monrova clan. Or abandoning Lemon in the Clefts. Or any one of the other hundred boneheaded things he’d done since Eve found him in that ruined flex-wing on Dregs.

  Make that a complete and total idiot.

  Truth was, though he looked like a teenage boy, Ezekiel was only two years old. When they’d been created, he and his siblings had the architecture of the finest minds in Gnosis Laboratories incorporated into their own. Billions of ones and zeros uploaded into their psyches, the compiled knowledge of dozens of lifetimes. But Ezekiel was learning the hard way that it wasn’t the same as actually living.

  The world was more than ones and zeros. The beat of a butterfly’s wings could change the weather on the other side of the globe. A single kiss could bring down an empire. The only way to understand what life meant was to live it, and the longer he did, the more he understood how little he understood. How he still had so much more to learn. About life. Himself. What kind of person he wanted to be.

  So what did he learn about Preacher’s betrayal? Eve’s descent into violence and rage? That inevitably, the people you put your faith in will let you down? That he should trust no one?

  What kind of person would that make him?

  He was standing in New Bethlehem—what was left of it, anyway. His first thought was that they should all be dead. His second was of Preacher’s betrayal, of Eve and Gabriel in his custody. But his last thought, his heaviest, the one so dark he couldn’t bear it for long, was the memory of Ana. The girl he loved, the girl he’d spent the last two years searching for, floating inside that frozen cryo-pod. No brainwave activity. No pulse or breath except what the machines pumped into her.

  His first and last and only.

  Now nothing but an empty shell.

  The sky to the north was dark with dust and smoke, that awful mushroom cloud slowly smearing itself across the cigarette sky. The city was shrouded in ashes, the taste of burned rubber and charred salt clinging to the back of his throat. His once-white T-shirt was torn and bloodstained, his black jeans caked with dust and grime. The bullet wounds Preacher had given him hurt like broken glass and dirty acid, but they were gradually knitting closed—one more gift from the folk who’d made him more human than human.

  A Brotherhood posse in red cassocks had gathered on the shoreline. A group of burlier-looking thugs in black surrounded a tall woman with a greasepaint skull on her face—some kind of authority figure.

  The boy and girl in the military uniforms had climbed out of the ocean onto the boardwalk, both looking exhausted. He hadn’t seen them arrive, but he’d seen what that boy had done. Zeke wouldn’t have believed it possible, but somehow, this kid had redirected the edge of a nuclear firestorm.

  Cricket stood at the waterline. His WarBot body loomed eight meters tall, twelve thousand horsepower of bleeding-edge hardware. But somewhere in the last three days, he’d been repainted in Brotherhood colors—blood red and black, a bone-white skull daubed over his face. He was glaring at Ezekiel now, eyes burning a luminous blue.

  The spindly logika with the luminous grin sitting on Cricket’s shoulder had called himself Solomon. Zeke knew the boy in the greasy coveralls with the slick hair was Abraham. Aside from that, he was completely in the dark.

  “WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?” the big WarBot demanded.

  Ezekiel took a deep breath and sighed. “Nice to see you, too, Cricket.”

  Solomon wrote quickly on a whiteboard so Cricket could understand his reply—the big bot had deafened himself to avoid having to take further orders from humans. Pretty smart, Zeke thought. Though he wasn’t about to tell Cricket that.

  “Who are you?” Abraham asked.

  “My name’s Ezekiel.”

  “Not you,” Abraham replied, staring at the pair in the military uniforms. “You.”

  The girl was supporting the boy’s weight, glowering at the assembled Brotherhood thugs. She had dark shadows under her eyes, fury in her glare.

  “What, don’t you recognize us?” She frowned at the assembled brethren, the tall, white-clad woman leading them. “We’re the enemy.”

  “You…” The dark-skinned boy with the radiation symbol shaved into his hair faltered, looking at Abraham. “You…helped me. The heat, the radiation…that I could handle. But the shockwave…you stopped it.”

  Abraham shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Trashbreed filth,” one of the Brotherhood thugs muttered.

  “Really?” the dark-skinned boy growled, turning on the man. “You’re gonna spew th-that purity crap now?”

  The girl raised her voice over the burning wind, long bangs caught at the corners of her mouth. “In case you missed it, we’re the trashbreed filth who just saved your lives. But if it were up to me, you’d all go straight to hell.”

  One of the Brotherhood boys reached for the pistol at his belt, a few more unslinging their assault rifles. Ezekiel knew Cricket couldn’t do anything to harm a human, but with a whoosh and whine of heavy servos, the WarBot scooped Abraham up and cradled him inside the shelter of his metal hands. The air around the two newcomers rippled, shivered, the boy closing his fists. More brethren reached for their guns, and Ezekiel was slowly drawing his pistol when—

  “Mother, stop this!” Abraham shouted.

  The boy glowered at the skull-faced woman.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” Abraham demanded, his voice trembling with anger. “Thomas, I salvaged the humidicrib your son lived inside for three months. Caleb, who built the respirator that helped your wife breathe at night? James, we’ve known each other since we were kids! Your damned purity means so much, you’re willing to murder the people who just saved your lives? Every one of you would be dead if not for us!”

  Ezekiel could see tears of frustration and rage shining in the boy’s eyes as he looked among the assemblage: the thugs, the mute citizens in ruins around them and, finally, the woman who was apparently his mother.

  “You should all be ashamed of yourselves,” Abraham spat.

  His words brought stillness to the scene. Ezekiel saw a few brethren sharing guilty glances, looking to their leader for direction. The woman was staring up at her son, her face unreadable beneath the smeared paint and dirt.

  “Radiation’s g-gonna keep blowing in on those winds,” the dark-skinned boy told her, his eyes bruised with exhaustion. “And I’m not s-sticking around to keep them away. Considering you nailed me to a cross a few days back, you should be thanking your damn god I’ve kept them off this far. But if you care about your people, you sh-should trundle them out of here while
the trundling’s good, bitch.”

  The woman’s jaw tightened. A long moment passed, silent but for the whisper of poisonous winds. Ezekiel’s pistol felt like a brick in his hand.

  “Brother Jonah,” the woman finally said. “Assemble the vehicles.” She raised her voice, looked to the buildings around them. “All of you, gather what provisions you can. Weapons. Water. We must leave this place, my children. And quickly.”

  “But where will we go?” someone cried.

  “Know no fear!” she called. “I have led you this far, haven’t I? This is all a part of God’s plan. As the chosen were led out of the desert in the Goodbook, so, too, shall we survive this exodus. Have faith, my children.” She met her son’s stare, dark eyes glittering. “The pure will prosper.”

  The brethren moved swiftly at the woman’s command. The folk in the buildings about them were less certain, but as the first few shuffled away, more followed, bewildered. Ezekiel supposed they had no other option. When you’re lost in the wilderness, you follow anyone who claims to have a map.

  As the brethren and citizens prepared to abandon their ruined city, Abraham and his mother simply stared at each other. Zeke could feel the weight between them. The sorrow and anger. But finally, with no other words of explanation, the woman marched off into the throng.

  Ezekiel looked to the uniformed pair again. The Asiabloc girl looked utterly exhausted, and the dark-skinned boy looked even worse. If Zeke looked hard enough, he could still see a glow in his eyes, ember-soft and red.

  “What are your names?” Ezekiel asked.

  They looked at him curiously—the bullet holes in his chest slowly knitting closed, the metal coin slot in his flesh gleaming through the tears in his shirt. Burning winds kissed Ezekiel’s skin, the air about them still crackling and rippling.

  “I’m Grimm,” said the boy, thick with WestEuro accent. “This is Diesel.”

  “You’re deviates,” Abraham said.

  The girl named Diesel stared up at the boy with suspicious eyes, brushing her black waterlogged bangs out of her eyes. “Ditto, kid. You wanna explain how the heir to the goddamn Brotherhood turns out to be a freak just like us?”