by Jay Kristoff
“Yeah, I get it,” Lemon said, growing impatient. “Until I was fourteen, my best friend was a rat who shared my squat and occasionally tried to eat my fingers while I was sleeping. Humans were crappy landlords. Tell me something I don’t know.”
The Directors waved to the city beyond, four hands moving in unison, four voices speaking, all of them one.
“Surely she must see the beauty in BioMaas philosophy? Daedalus Technologies is a simpleminded grave robber, scratching out a living in the tomb of the world that was. Ours is a way of harmony. A new branch on the tree of life.”
“Yeah, look,” Lemon said. “On the surface, that all sounds real fizzy. Harmony and balance and whatforth. But here’s the thing. You asked if my room was pleasing, yeah? And all sass aside, my room was scary as hell.”
“Did the citysong disturb her? It can be—”
“No, it wasn’t the noise. Or the locust cubes, either. It was the fish.”
Four pairs of eyes double-blinked.
“I was watching them,” Lemon said. “And like this whole place, they looked real pretty at first. But the harder I looked, the more creepy on the crawly I began to feel. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, yeah? But this morning, I figured out why they and you and this whole place freak me right the hell out.”
Director blinked gain, waiting patiently.
“They’re the same fish,” Lemon said. “They’re identical in every way.”
“Of course they are,” the Directors said.
Lemon blinked, rocked back on her heels. “So, what, you’ve got some vat somewhere, spitting out copies of the same fish, over and over again?”
“They are the perfect encapsulation of the pattern. Just like Carer, Sentinel, Builder, Hunter, it is ideally suited to the task it must perform. If it has achieved the pinnacle of what it must be, why not produce more of it?”
“Because that’s not the way life is supposed to be?” Lemon all but shouted.
“That is a very limited point of view, Lemonfresh. We are all alive here, are we not? How can you say what is ‘supposed’ to be?”
Lemon shook her head, hands on hips. “So everyone in this city is just…grown? And everyone is just ooh-la-la straight-up perf at what they do?”
“They are the best patterns we can devise,” they said.
Lemon pressed her lips together, looked at the Directors around her.
“I read a book by this old crusty named Darwin, yeah? And he wrote that people like me—mutations, abnormalities, whatever you wanna call us—are the way life improves itself. Mistakes get made when people get born, but sometimes, those mistakes turn out to be improvements. But you all around here”—Lemon waved at Director, at the Sentinels lurking in the distance, at the city dancing above and below—“it’s like you’re…locked in the same shape. You don’t change. You don’t grow. You take away the chaos and you just stay the same. Forever.”
“Chaos is instability. Order is the condition under which we prosper.”
Lemon shook her head. “But in trying to make everything fit in these neat little boxes with these oh-so-helpful labels, you’re taking away the stuff that makes us special! You all think the same! You all talk the same! Carer, Director, Builder, whatever. To you people, what you are is more important than who you are!”
Director smiled as if she’d reached some kind of breakthrough. “Exactly. The group is more important than the individual. Many matter more than one.”
“So what happens to the many out there?” Lemon demanded, waving to the wastes beyond the broad city walls. “Let’s say I give you the keys to my underoos and you crack my genethingy—”
“Genome.”
“Whatever!” she snapped, stamping her foot. “If BioMaas defeats Daedalus, what happens to all those people out there who aren’t perfectly suited to tasks they must perform?”
The Directors spoke at her as if she were a child asking about the color of the sky. “They will be cut away. Like all deadwood.”
“You mean killed?”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to sign up to help you?” Lemon glared at the Directors, one after another, utterly incredulous. “Are you all completely defective?”
“Lemonfresh can make this world a garden once more. A place of harmony and peace, all people attuned to the needs of their fellows, all bound together in a perfect tapestry. Her genome is the key to a new era for this world.”
“So why not just take it?” Lemon demanded, her frustration finally boiling over.
Director seemed genuinely saddened at the notion. “To take without asking is the way of the deadworld. We seek order and perfection of pattern. We seek harmony and balance.”
“You seek to wipe every other human being off the face of the earth.”
Director blinked. “That, too.”
“You people,” Lemon breathed, “are absolutely insane. I don’t give a damn how pretty it is here, I don’t care how perfectly in balance your harmonious little lives might be. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna help you wipe out humanity!”
“She has little choice. Though we would prefer not to take, we will do so. Victory in our struggle over Daedalus is simply too important. Lemonfresh’s genome will literally decide the fate of this world.”
Lemon looked out over the strange and beautiful city. The awful wasteland beyond. She thought about all she’d lost in the last few days. Evie and Cricket. Mister C and Zeke. She thought about a boy who’d kissed her like he really meant it. The feeling of finally having found someplace to belong.
All of it was gone now.
“Well, in that case,” she said, “it was pretty stupid bringing me up here alone.”
She curled her fingers into fists. Reaching out into the static, pulsing and crackling beneath her skin. Jaw set, teeth bared.
Director only smiled. “She cannot harm us. When one bee perishes, another rises. When one Carer dies, when one Hunter-Killer fails, another can seamlessly step into the breach. It is the same with Director, Lemonfresh.” They motioned to their own bodies, toe to crown. “CityHive is replete with hundreds of this pattern. All interconnected to the tapestry. We are legion. We are hydra.”
The Directors looked toward the distant Sentinels, and though no words passed between them, the hulking men began walking toward Lemon. She saw the shapes of Hunter-Killers hovering in the air around her.
Lemon’s lips twisted in a small, sad smile.
“Who said anything about harming you, cloneboy?”
Four sets of eyes narrowed, four pairs of lungs drew a soft and sudden breath. Lemon stepped sideways, silver-quick, between the two Directors closest to the railing. They reached for her, the closest clapping his hands on her shoulders. Feeling his fingers dig into her skin, she reached out into the static and slammed the full force of her power into his mind, snapping the tethers of current, shutting down his synapses. The Director collapsed without a gurgle, eyes rolling up in his head.
Lemon heard the other three gasp. A shiver passed through the plants around her. She realized the three other Directors, the Hunter-Killers in the sky around her, the approaching Sentinels, all of them seemed stunned by the first Director’s death. It only lasted a second; the other Directors were quickly shaking it off and reaching toward her again. But that second was all she needed.
Her genome was the key to their victory, after all. Her genetic code would be the weapon BioMaas used to wipe out Dregs, Megopolis, Armada—every human being in the whole Yousay. Millions of people would die if BioMaas got their way. But if they needed her pluripotent parts to enact their genocide, well, they might have trouble scraping them off the sidewalk.
Lemon didn’t want to die. But she didn’t want to be the weapon that wiped out humanity, either. And considering everyone who loved her was now radioactive ashes, cash
ing in her chips just seemed a better deal than becoming the tool these psychos used to murder the whole human race.
So she scrambled up onto the railing, staring down at the ground hundreds of meters below. She took one last breath.
She closed her eyes.
And she jumped.
The world is a really scary place when you’re little.
Cricket had spent his whole life being small. He knew how rough it got. People would walk over him, talk over him, not even notice he was there. One time he got locked in a maintenance cupboard in WarDome, and it took Evie six hours to realize he was missing. It’s easy to get looked down on when people can see the top of your head. It’s easy to get stepped on when you fit so neatly underfoot.
For as long as he could remember, Cricket had wanted nothing more than to be big. Problem was, the longer he spent in this WarBot body, the more he realized being big was no party, either. People were a little frightened of him now, keeping their distance as if he might accidentally squash them. Everyone was so small, he had to be careful not to crush them. And worst of all, he didn’t fit anywhere anymore, which meant that while everyone else was inside Miss O’s, eating and strategizing, Cricket was stuck outside, bored out of his not-so-tiny mind.
“THIS BLOWS,” he muttered to himself.
“I MUST ADMIT, I SHARE YOUR DISCONTENTMENT, OLD FRIEND.”
Cricket looked down from midnight skies and saw Solomon creaking his way up from the rusty hatchway of Miss O’s. The spindly logika wobbled as he walked—Abraham hadn’t managed to fix him before they left New Bethlehem, and the smaller logika looked a little worse for wear. With his eyes and that infuriating, perpetual smile illuminating the darkness, Solomon skirted the ragged hole the behemoth had burst out of and finally plonked himself beside Cricket.
“DYNAMO STILL GIVING YOU GRIEF?” Cricket asked.
“MY WHOLE BODY IS A VERITABLE FUNERAL PROCESSION, OLD FRIEND,” the bot lamented. “AND MASTER ABRAHAM SHOWS LITTLE INCLINATION TO END IT.”
“CUT HIM SOME SLACK. HE’S BEEN A LITTLE BUSY, WHAT WITH HIS MOTHER TRYING TO CRUCIFY HIM AND HIS WHOLE LIFE COMING APART.”
“MMM,” Solomon said, obviously unconvinced. “I CAN’T HELP BUT NOTICE HE FOUND TIME TO FIX YOUR AUDIO CAPABILITIES, OLD FRIEND. IT SEEMS THE SENSATIONAL SOLOMON IS NOT HIGH ON ANYONE’S LIST OF PRIORITIES. AS USUAL.”
“HOW’S IT GOING DOWN THERE, ANYWAY?”
“IT DEPENDS WHOM YOU ASK, REALLY,” the smaller logika replied with a completely unnecessary sigh. “THERE’S AT LEAST TWO DEAD BODIES INSIDE, SO THAT’S A NOVELTY. ROTTING CORPSES DO LEND A HOME A CERTAIN…RUSTIC CHARM.”
“WHO DO THE BODIES BELONG TO?”
“WELL, NOBODY TELLS ME ANYTHING, AS USUAL,” Solomon huffed. “BUT FROM WHAT I’VE GLEANED THROUGH EXERCISING MY SUPERIOR SOCIAL GRACES—”
“YOU MEAN EAVESDROPPING.”
“DON’T BE GLIB, OLD FRIEND, IT DOESN’T SUIT YOU.” Solomon rolled his creaky shoulders and continued as if uninterrupted. “THE FIRST CORPSE BELONGS TO A YOUNG BUCK NAMED FIX. YOUNG MISTRESS DIESEL SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN RATHER FOND OF HIM, JUDGING BY HER MOOD. THE SECOND CORPSE BELONGS TO ABRAHAM’S GRANDFATHER.”
“…WHAT?” Cricket sputtered.
“YES,” the smaller logika nodded. “APPARENTLY, THE PATRON SAINT OF NEW BETHLEHEM WAS USING THESE YOUNGSTERS TO WAGE WAR ON HIS TREACHEROUS DAUGHTER, OUR DEAR SISTER DEE. YOUR YOUNG HOOLIGAN LEMON FRESH APPARENTLY KILLED HIM FOR IT.”
“SPEAKING OF…,” Cricket said, nodding to the hatchway.
Ezekiel was climbing up from underground, the unmistakable shape of a human body over his shoulder. Like the others, he’d decontaminated as thoroughly as he could—scrubbed his skin raw and changed into new clothes: a fresh white T-shirt and the same cargo pants Diesel and Grimm wore. A spade was clutched in his free hand, his prettyboy face somber.
“Hey,” he said.
“HEY YOURSELF,” Cricket said.
Solomon obviously sensed the antagonism between the two of them but kept himself quiet. Cricket could feel it crackling in the air.
“You need anything?” Ezekiel asked, looking up at Cricket.
“I NEED TO GET GOING AND FIND LEMON. SHE’S IN DANGER, EZEKIEL.”
“I know that, Cricket,” the lifelike said. “But we need to take a minute here. Grimm and Diesel both lost someone they care about.”
Cricket scoffed. “BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE’S FEELINGS HAVE BEEN SO IMPORTANT TO YOU UP TO THIS POINT?”
“There are important facilities downstairs,” Ezekiel said, ignoring the jab. “We can see and transmit to the whole country from in there, and we can comb through the recorded satellite data from previous days. That means we can look back at what happened before we arrived. We can see where BioMaas took Lemon.”
“WE KNOW WHERE THEY TOOK HER. SHE’S IN CITYHIVE.”
“No, we don’t know that,” Ezekiel snapped. “Abraham’s in the array now, studying instruction manuals. That kid’s sharp as they come—it won’t take him long to figure out how it all works, and then we’ll know exactly where Lem is and what we’re dealing with. And that’s not to even mention the six unexploded nuclear warheads we have just sitting around in these launch tubes. So take a damn breath, will you?”
“I DON’T BREATHE, PRETTYBOY,” Cricket spat.
Solomon piped up softly. “IF I MIGHT INQUIRE, MASTER EZEKIEL—”
“DON’T CALL HIM MASTER,” Cricket spat again, glaring at Solomon. “DON’T YOU DARE.”
“YES, QUITE.” The smaller logika gave a good impression of uncomfortably clearing his throat. “BUT IF I MIGHT INQUIRE, GOOD EZEKIEL, TO WHOM DOES THE CADAVER ON YOUR SHOULDER BELONG?”
“The Major. Saint Michael.” Ezekiel glanced at the sheet-bound corpse. “I don’t know what to call him. But someone needs to bury him, and considering he tried to kill Abe and lied to Grimm and Diesel for years, no one else is volunteering.”
“WELL, YOU’D KNOW ALL ABOUT LYING, WOULDN’T YOU?” Cricket said.
“Are you planning on doing anything except whining at me all night?”
“HOW DOES BUSTING THAT PRETTYBOY HEAD RIGHT OPEN SOUND?”
Solomon cleared his throat again and wobbled upright, his faulty dynamo creaking. “PERHAPS I SHOULD GO LEND MASTER ABRAHAM A HAND WITH PONDERING THOSE SATELLITE ARRAYS. YOU TWO SEEM TO NEED SOME…ALONE TIME.”
Solomon made his way back across the sand with his unsteady gait, his optics illuminating the darkness. Ezekiel waited until the bot was out of sight (though probably not earshot) and slung the corpse off his shoulder with a thump.
“All right,” he finally said. “What’s your goddamn problem?”
“YOU KNOW WHAT MY PROBLEM IS,” Cricket growled. “IT’S YOU, MURDERBOT. I DON’T TRUST YOU, EZEKIEL. I NEVER HAVE. YOU LIED TO EVIE. YOU LEFT HER BEHIND IN BABEL, AND LESS THAN A DAY LATER, YOU ABANDONED LEMON, TOO.”
“I lied to Eve to protect her. And I didn’t abandon Lemon, I hunted all over the damn Yousay looking for her. While you were off getting your nice new paint job.”
“DON’T YOU DARE BLAME ME FOR THAT,” Cricket said, rising to his feet with a whoosh of steelweave muscle. “I DIDN’T HAVE A CHOICE ABOUT WHAT THE BROTHERHOOD DID TO ME. UNLIKE YOU, I HAD TO OBEY!”
Ezekiel shook his head. “You know, one day you’re going to find yourself with a hard choice to make, Cricket. And you won’t have the Three Laws to fall back on. That’s the day you’re going to find out what you’re really made of.”
“I KNOW WHAT I’M MADE OF, PRETTYBOY,” Cricket growled.
“Do you? Because if I’d have let you, you’d have killed Faith in a heartbeat!”
“DAMN RIGHT I WOULD!” Cricket’s optics burned, his circuits bristling with threat. “IN CASE YOU MISSED THE NEWSFEEDS, YOUR PRECIOUS BIG SISTER IS A MURDERER!”
“And what
would killing her make you?” Ezekiel said, folding his arms. “Look, I know better than anyone about the evil she’s done. But I know who she was before all this, and I know somewhere inside her, there’s still something worth saving! She’s not beyond redemption, Cricket. Not yet.”
“ARE WE TALKING ABOUT FAITH NOW? OR ARE WE TALKING ABOUT EVE?”
Ezekiel blinked, flinching like Cricket had slapped him.
“YOU CAN’T BE THIS NAÏVE, CAN YOU?” Cricket shook his head, utterly bewildered. “EVE AND GABRIEL BUTCHERED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE! I LOOKED INTO HER EYES, EZEKIEL, AND IT WAS LIKE LOOKING AT A STRANGER! SHE’S GONE, DON’T YOU GET THAT? SHE AND GABRIEL WANT TO WIPE OUT THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE!”
Ezekiel looked deep into Cricket’s burning optics, his face grim. When he spoke, his voice was soft, but each word weighed a solid ton.
“Now who’s leaving her behind?”
Cricket’s optics switched to deadly, burning red. “YOU LITTLE BASTARD.”
The blow shattered the ground, twelve thousand horsepower, pulverizing the earth where the lifelike had stood a moment before. Cricket’s servos and muscles hissed as he spun, saw Ezekiel behind him, moving in a blur. They’d fought before, the pair of them, though Lemon had broken them up before things got too bloody. But Cricket’s WarBot body was stronger than the lifelike’s. He knew Ezekiel’s moves. And Lemon wasn’t here to save him now. The chaingun in Cricket’s forearm unfolded, and he let loose, spraying a withering hail of burning tracer fire at the lifelike. But Ezekiel was rolling aside in a blink, disappearing into the shadows behind their parked semitrailer.
Cutting his chaingun for fear of wrecking the truck, Cricket called into the dark, “GET OUT HERE, YOU LITTLE COWARD! LET’S FINISH THIS!”
“Finish what?” Ezekiel shouted. “We’re on the same damned side!”
“YOU SIDE WITH YOUR OWN, MURDERBOT, YOU ALWAYS HAVE!”
The WarBot lunged around the truck, ready to fire, but saw no trace of his quarry. He caught a flash of movement on his scanners, underneath the semi, the sneaky little bastard. Quick as flies, Ezekiel leapt up onto the back of Cricket’s leg, climbed up to his waist, then spine. Cricket roared, slapping with massive hands all over his hull, but Ezekiel was quicker, scrambling over his shoulders and onto his chest, walloping Cricket in the face with his closed fist.