TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  You humans only know to destroy.

  “Do you p-promise?” Faith whispered.

  Ezekiel released his breath in a sigh.

  “Once we have Lemon?”

  He slowly nodded.

  “Okay, I promise.”

  * * *

  _______

  The sun was setting by the time they arrived.

  The sky was the strangest color Ezekiel had ever seen—one last gift from the nuclear conflagration that had split the heavens. As the sun sank, the sky was drenched in sepia and crimson, twisted into strange watercolor swirls. To the east, Ezekiel could see a dark smudge on the earth: the beginnings of the irradiated wasteland known as the Glass, where the bombs had fallen so hard, the desert was fused into black silicon.

  You humans only know to destroy.

  “Is this it?” he asked, peering out through the dirty windshield.

  “Home sweet home,” Diesel said, pushing open the door.

  The girl hopped down onto the sand, Grimm close behind, already calling loudly for Lemon. Diesel looked decidedly better now that she’d had some rest, but Grimm still seemed shaky. The pair disappeared through a hatchway in the dirt, a concrete stairwell beyond. Zeke saw the hatch had been painted once, but only a few letters remained on the rusty surface.

  MISS O

  “Miss O’s,” he murmured. “Missile silo.”

  “Most amusing.”

  Zeke glanced over his shoulder at Faith, still laid out on the backseat. His sister was looking fragile after her outburst, tear tracks cutting through the blood and dust on her face. Her dark bangs hung in telescreen eyes, full lips parted as she breathed. She was beautiful—smooth lines and long lashes and a perfect, ethereal symmetry. But they were all beautiful, really. Monrova had sculpted his lifelikes into masterpieces of physical perfection.

  It was a shame he’d not been so masterful with their minds.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Somewhat.” She gestured at her legs. “These might take a while.”

  “I’m going to take a look around. Stay here.”

  She gave him a wry smile. “I’ve little choice, little brother.”

  “You were only activated thirty-seven minutes before me, Faith.”

  “I’m still your elder, bratling.” She waggled her finger. “Don’t forget it.”

  He smiled despite himself, shoved open the door. “Sing if you spot any trouble.”

  “Fa-la-la-laaaaa,” Faith sang, pointing.

  Her finger was aimed through the window toward Cricket’s semi. The brakes squealed as the big rig came to a shivering stop, and Ezekiel saw Solomon behind the wheel. Zeke climbed out of the monster truck and walked over to the stick-thin logika as he wobbled out onto the desert floor. Solomon’s inane grin lit up as he spoke.

  “THIS IS ALL RATHER PICTURESQUE, YES?”

  “Shouldn’t Abraham be driving? Where is he?”

  “I’m here,” came a voice.

  Zeke saw the boy hop out of the semi’s trailer, a toolbox in his arms. “Thought I’d take the chance to fix Cricket’s aural arrays while we were driving.” He frowned at the spindly logika. “You busted them up pretty good, Solomon.”

  “APOLOGIES, MASTER ABRAHAM, BUT IF SOMETHING’S WORTH DOING, IT’S WORTH DOING RIGHT.” The logika clapped his metal hands together as Cricket climbed out of the trailer, his massive feet thudding into the earth. “AH, FELICITATIONS, DEAR PALADIN. WELCOME BACK TO THE LAND OF THE AUDIO-CAPABLE. HOW DO YOU FARE, OLD FRIEND?”

  The big bot aimed his glowing stare at Faith, then settled it on Ezekiel.

  “JUST PEACHY,” he growled.

  “TELL ME, OLD FRIEND, YOU HAD ME RUIN YOUR HEARING IN ORDER TO AVOID RECEIVING FURTHER ORDERS FROM HUMANS, YES? WHY REPAIR THE DAMAGE?”

  “BECAUSE THE NOVELTY OF THAT DAMN WHITEBOARD WAS WEARING OFF PRETTY QUICK, SOL. BESIDES, ABRAHAM’S COBBLED A BETTER SOLUTION.”

  The boy nodded. “I’ve rigged some hardware into Paladin’s audio unit so he can cut his aural inputs at will.” He tossed a small remote back and forth between his palms. “Or via this, if needs be. We get into trouble, Cricket can just cut his feeds.”

  “VERIFIABLE GENIUS, MASTER ABRAHAM. NOW, HOW TO PUT THIS POLITELY…”

  “Don’t worry,” the boy nodded. “I can rig a unit for you, too.”

  “IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T LOVE TAKING YOUR ORDERS, BUT—”

  “Lemon?” came a call.

  “Shorty!” came another. “Get out here!”

  Ezekiel saw Grimm and Diesel climbing back up out of the hatchway, looking equal parts worried and annoyed. The boy scanned the desert around them, the broken rocks and shifting sands, putting his hands to his mouth.

  “LEMON?”

  “She’s not downstairs?” Ezekiel asked.

  Diesel shook her head, her expression grim.

  “WELL, WHERE IS SHE?” Cricket demanded.

  “Gotta be round here somewhere.” Grimm looked about in consternation. “Deez, you check the garage. Everyone else, split up, grab a butcher’s.”

  “A what?” Abraham asked.

  “A look!” Grimm snapped. “ ‘Butcher’s hook,’ rhymes with ‘look,’ mate!”

  Hearing the fear and frustration in his voice, Ezekiel found himself wondering exactly what Lemon had come to mean to Grimm. He raised an eyebrow at Diesel and was met with a small shrug. The girl spun on her heel, stomped over to a stretch of desert sand and peeled back a large tarpaulin, revealing another long metal hatchway concealed under the earth.

  Grimm had already stalked off past a rocky outcropping, shouting Lemon’s name. Zeke looked to Abraham, Cricket and Solomon and nodded eastward.

  “I’ll look this way.”

  “I’ll come,” Abraham said. “Paladin, can you and Solomon help?”

  The group split up for their search. Cricket strode off south, massive feet crunching on the parched sands, while Solomon headed north. Zeke and Abe wandered the rocky badlands around the installation. Ezekiel was shouting for Lemon at the top of his lungs, but he wasn’t exactly worried yet—the girl had grown up in the alleys and squeezeways of Los Diablos, and she knew how to take care of herself. Lemon was small, quick and clever, and he figured she was simply hiding.

  Stomping over a small dune, Zeke saw a wide circular opening carved into the ground: a mouth with metal lips yawning at the sky. He realized it was one of the installation’s weapons silos. Stepping up to the edge, he peered down, saw a nuclear missile crumpled against one wall. The hull was blackened by flame, and a faint stink of chemical smoke hung in the air.

  The globes inside the silo were shattered, the electrical wiring melted. Zeke realized this must have been one of the birds Grimm and Lemon prevented from launching. The lifelike shuddered to think what might have happened if the pair hadn’t stopped the warheads in time, and he resolved to give the inimitable Miss Fresh a big hug on behalf of the entire country when he found her.

  “Lemon?” he shouted down into the hole.

  The cries of the others were the only answer. Zeke looked around them, hands on hips, shouting again into the dying light. He could see tracks up here—dozens, he realized. They were almost scoured away by the winds, but his eyes were sharper than a human’s, more sensitive in low light. Crouching beside the marks, he noted they were a strange shape—stabbed into the dirt rather than trodden, arranged in a scuttling gait. His stomach sank into his boots as he recalled the masses of dead constructs he and Preacher had found at the Clefts, those strange dogthings with translucent skin and six legs and faces full of wicked teeth.

  “BioMaas,” he whispered.

  “You find something?” Abraham asked beside him.

  Zeke stood, calling over the dunes. “Cricket, we might have—”

  His shout w
as cut off by a tremor at his feet. The sound of crunching earth and twisting metal. And above it all, Faith’s bewildered, terrified shout.

  “EZEKIEL!”

  The lifelike broke into a run back toward their truck. Leaping over an outcrop of tumbled boulders, dashing across the sands, he barreled out to their impromptu parking lot, his breath leaving his lungs.

  “Holy crap…”

  An enormous shape had burst from under the earth and seized the monster truck in its claws, with Faith still inside. Vaguely insectoid, it was the size of the semi, and the failing sunlight gleamed on its hide. It had six limbs: two ending in feet, two in clawed hands, and the top two in massive scythes of black bone. A long tail stretched out behind it; its skin was armor-plated, ridged and spiked, a dark desert red. Its skull was as big as the monster truck, eyes glowing a baleful green, mouth filled with entirely too many teeth. Ezekiel had seen images of these things in briefings, back when he worked security in Babel. It was a BioMaas construct, a warbeast from their CityHive, a creature genetically engineered to be a perfect engine of destruction.

  “Behemoth!”

  Faith threw herself clear as, with one sweeping blow from those massive bone scythes, the truck was sliced in three. Faith hit the ground hard, crying out as her mangled legs twisted, rolling aside as the engine block crashed on the dirt where her head had been. The behemoth roared, lips peeling back from foot-long teeth. A chuddering, bubbling sound rose up from its belly.

  “Faith, move!”

  Ezekiel charged, feet pounding the dirt, scooping his sister up as the creature exhaled. A gout of snot-green liquid boiled up from its gullet, an acrid stink filling the air as hissing goop spattered across the dirt where Faith had lain a second before.

  “Bloody hell!”

  The rank hiss of acid filled the air, the ground boiling where it struck. Rolling to his feet, Zeke saw Grimm had returned to investigate the commotion and was now standing transfixed before the towering warbeast. The behemoth turned on the boy with a snarl, armored tail lashing at the dirt as it swung those awful scythes.

  “Grimm, look out!”

  Zeke’s pistol was up and out, blasting away at the monster’s back, but the bullets were pebbles against a mountainside. Grimm raised his hands, the air rippling, his breath escaping his lips as a puff of pale frost. And as those massive claws arced toward him, set to slice him into pieces as easily as their truck, they smashed into a wall of…nothing.

  The air around Grimm shivered and warped, like ripples on clear water. The behemoth bellowed, striking at the boy again. But again, the blows stopped short, tiny slivers of bone splintering free as the scythes crashed into that invisible wall.

  Ezekiel glanced behind him, saw Abraham standing with his hands raised. The boy’s fingers were curled into claws as he roared, “Run, dammit!”

  Grimm took two fumbling steps backward, his face pale with shock. He opened his mouth to speak, words turning into a yelp as a gray tear opened up in the earth under him and he tumbled down into it. Reloading his pistol, Zeke heard a thump, another yelp off to his right. He saw Diesel crouched in that underground metal hatchway, Grimm picking himself up off the concrete beside her.

  A robotic shout echoed across the badlands, and the thunder of chaingun fire tore the air. A blinding spray of high-velocity shells arced through the night, carving swaths through the warbeast’s hide. The thing roared in pain as Cricket emerged from behind a tall spur of stone, his shoulders unfolding like beetle wings to reveal pods of short-range missiles. A half dozen of the projectiles howled and streaked forward, lighting up the behemoth’s hide with rolling blooms of flame.

  The beast drew a shuddering breath, chest expanding as its lungs filled.

  “Paladin, look out!” Abraham yelled.

  A gout of luminous green burst from the construct’s mouth, sizzling the air. Servos whining, engines screaming, Cricket leapt aside. The acid struck him as he dove, coating one of his missile pods in a soup of hissing green. The WarBot unloaded with another burst from his chaingun as Ezekiel gave up on his pistol, stowing the weapon and picking Faith up again. He dashed toward Diesel and Grimm and placed his sister on the ground beside them.

  Zeke felt his skin prickling as Grimm curled his fingers, the temperature dropping through the floor. The warbeast bellowed as its armor blackened, as the muscle beneath warped and smoked. Grimm’s face was fixed in a snarl, his eyes aglow like burning embers, like that flare of light over the New Bethlehem desert. The air around them was now positively arctic—Zeke’s joints aching, frost spilling from his lips. And with another shriek, the behemoth burst into flames.

  It roared as the fire spread, as another blast of armor-piercing rounds carved its chest. The construct lashed out with its tail, knocking Cricket backward. The spray from the WarBot’s chaingun lit the skies as he fell, the beast leaping toward him, skin aflame, those bone scythes reared back to carve his head off his body.

  A gray tear opened in the ground beneath it, and with a furious screech, the creature toppled down into it. Clawed hands scrabbled at the shimmering edges of the rift as it slipped down into the void. Diesel was standing tall beside Ezekiel, one hand stretched out, the other pointed upward.

  The lifelike heard faint roaring far above. Growing louder by the moment.

  Squinting up into the dark, Zeke saw the second of Diesel’s rifts, hundreds of meters in the air overhead. The behemoth tumbled out of it, plummeting back toward the earth, screeching and flailing. Her dark hair crusted with pale frost, lips twisted in a smug smile, Diesel shouted over the rising noise.

  “You all might wanna cover your ears!”

  Ezekiel watched with grim fascination as the behemoth plunged out of the sky. It disappeared past the gentle curve of the nearby dunes, and Zeke heard a thud, a disgusting wet crunch. He felt the impact through his boots, the beast’s shrieks silenced. The temperature began rising, the frost fading from the air.

  Grimm held out his fist. “Smashing work, freak.”

  Diesel bumped his knuckles. “Tell me something I don’t know, freak.”

  Abraham was stumbling over the shattered ground toward them, eyes wild, mouth agape. “My god, did you see that thing?”

  “Is everyone okay?” Ezekiel asked.

  He looked around the group, who all murmured affirmative—all save Faith, who simply quirked an eyebrow at her legs and said nothing at all. Cricket was picking himself up off the ground, his optics burning bright blue. His left missile pod was partially melted, the casing split and spitting smoke. The logika scanned the sands about him, his gaze finally falling on Diesel and Grimm.

  “DID YOU TWO DO THAT?” he asked.

  The boy winked. The girl just shrugged.

  The big bot rolled his massive shoulders. “I COULDA TAKEN HIM. BUT… THANKS AND STUFF.”

  Diesel’s black lips curled in a smile. “You’re welcome and stuff.”

  “Speakin’ of thanks,” Grimm said, clapping Abraham’s shoulder, “that’s twice I’d be brown bread if not for you.”

  Abe frowned. “What does bread have to do with anything?”

  “Brown bread,” Grimm explained. “Dead.”

  Diesel rolled her eyes. “Keep up, will you, Brotherboy?”

  Ezekiel’s head was reeling. The abilities he’d just seen wielded by these kids…telekinesis, energy manipulation, bending the elements as casually as walking and talking—it was almost impossible to believe. But peering into the jagged pit the behemoth had lain in wait beneath, he realized there were bigger issues at hand. The lifelike felt his heart drop and thump in his chest.

  “What was that thing?” Abraham demanded, also peering into the hole.

  “A behemoth,” Ezekiel replied softly. “A BioMaas war construct, built to fight infantry units and enemy machina. They grow them in CityHive.”

  �
�BioMaas…,” Grimm whispered.

  Ezekiel turned to the boy, saw fear in his eyes. “Yeah.”

  “But if Lemon was here…if they…”

  “…Yeah.”

  “Bloody hell.” Grimm sank onto his haunches, staring at the broken earth. He looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “They took her.”

  “Hours ago, by the look of things,” Ezekiel said. “They must have left the behemoth to clean up anyone who came poking around.”

  “HOW?” Pistons hissed and whooshed as Cricket’s massive hands gesticulated wildly. “HOW CAN A GIRL THAT SMALL GET IN TROUBLE THIS BIG?”

  “You think they’ll hurt her?” Diesel asked softly.

  Ezekiel looked at the acid burns on the ground, the gouts of bright green behemoth blood soaking the dirt. “Preacher said something to me,” he murmured. “He told me CityHive doesn’t break out their warbeasts unless they think they’re in a war. BioMaas doesn’t want to hurt Lemon, they want to use her.”

  “Lemon’s a lot of things,” the girl said. “But somehow I don’t see her at the spear tip of some BioMaas army.”

  Ezekiel shrugged. “Like I said, Daedalus tech all runs on conventional electrical current. If BioMaas could weaponize Lem’s abilities, they’d be able to roll right up to Megopolis and kick the front door down.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “You lock the biggest, meanest dogs you can find in a cage together, someone’s eventually getting bitten.”

  “The people running these companies aren’t dogs,” Grimm said.

  “No.” Faith looked up at Ezekiel with shining eyes. “They’re worse.”

  Zeke breathed a soft sigh and nodded.

  “They’re human.”

  This monster’s insides stank like old socks.

  Lemon Fresh sat in a curve of smooth, dark bone inside the Lumberer’s belly, rocked back and forth by the motion of the construct’s massive wings. Her freckled skin was damp with sweat, her jagged red bangs wilted about her green eyes. The walls were crawling with softly glowing, semitranslucent bugs, skittering about and stopping occasionally to bump antennae. The smell was septic. The air was heavy and rank and, worst of all, moist.