TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  “Once we surface, we keep our heads down and head for the Spire.”

  “YOUR ARMOR WILL HELP MAINTAIN OUR ANONYMITY,” Solomon said. “REGULAR CITIZENS DON’T TRIFLE WITH MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES. THE ONLY PEOPLE YOU NEED CONCERN YOURSELVES WITH ARE OTHER DAEDALUS SECURITY PERSONNEL.”

  Zeke nodded. “Okay, let’s do this. Pray that thermex can melt those bars.”

  Solomon squeaked a small protest as Zeke lifted him up onto his shoulder. Zeke looked at the rat happily chowing down on his lump of processed pseudo-meat.

  “Sorry, big guy.”

  BOOM.

  The explosion was white-hot, shockingly loud even inside their helmets. But before the walls had even stopped shaking, Ezekiel was dashing through the slop, past the bent and smoking bars and the ruined automata. The pipe was filled with dark smoke, but his power armor’s optics cut through the haze, and Ezekiel ran quick. He could hear Faith behind, moving slower with her injuries, but still faster, stronger, better than any human could hope to be.

  “LEFT,” Solomon said, pointing to a tunnel branch.

  Dashing into another tributary, Zeke spotted a service ladder ensconced in the grimy walls. He hefted Solomon off his shoulder, his heart pounding, imagining teams being scrambled, sec-drones already on their way.

  Zeke grabbed the ladder, dragged himself upward, six meters to the surface. Punching the manhole cover free, he climbed out into a grubby alleyway hung thick with smog and packed with waste-disposal drums. The sun had set while they’d crawled beneath the Wall, and night had fallen over Megopolis. The sky overhead was shrouded in a low veil of multicolored fumes, pretty and poisonous all at once.

  Solomon climbed up behind him, and finally, gasping, trembling, came Faith. She clawed her way out of the manhole and rolled onto her back, breath hissing. After a brief struggle, she managed to pull her helmet off to breathe better. Zeke could see her face was pale with pain, eyes squeezed shut. He wondered what shape her legs were in under her armor.

  He dragged off his own helmet, knelt on the asphalt beside her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Next stupid question,” she whispered.

  He said nothing. Just looked into her eyes. Seeing her hurt like this, seeing her pain, he couldn’t help but feel a stab of pity. He and Faith were still family, despite everything, and that still counted for something.

  That was just who he was. Who he’d decided to be.

  Faith met his eyes, and Ezekiel expected some kind of rebuke for his softheartedness. His all-too-human frailty. But instead, her own eyes softened at his concern. Her armor of disdain and sarcasm cracking just a touch.

  “Just…give me a moment,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “What the h-hell?” came a bewildered growl behind them.

  Ezekiel turned, searching the gloom. A man was looming up from between the dumpsters, blood spattered on his face. His lip was split, his face twisted and shrouded in shadow, but Ezekiel would have recognized it anywhere. Chest thrilling with rage at the sight of a long black coat and a red right hand.

  Faith rolled up onto her knees, reaching for her pistol.

  Preacher stuffed a wad of tobacco in his swollen cheek.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Snowflake.”

  “That was a very foolish thing to do, Lemonfresh.”

  The voice dragged Lemon up from dreams of roaring wind and tree-lined streets rushing up to meet her. Of gleaming claws made of bone and a cold hardness somewhere deep in her belly. The girl opened her eyes, squinting in the blurred glare, finally focusing on the three Carers leaning over her. The women wore their concern like old, comfortable jackets, double-blinking with big black eyes as Lemon groaned and tried to sit up.

  “What…” She blinked against the blinding light. “What…happened?”

  “She leapt from the seventeenth overpass,” the first Carer said.

  “Hunter-Killers caught her before she struck ground,” said the second.

  “Very foolish,” the third said as all three shook their heads.

  “I feel like…I got p-punched in the guts by a WarBot,” Lemon whimpered, trying to sit up again. “And I already did the cramp thing this month.”

  “Be gentle,” Carer murmured. “Let us assist her.”

  With all three women clucking and helping, Lemon sat upright, the pain in her abdomen subsiding to a low and steady ache. She remembered her confrontation with the Director, killing one and staggering the rest, leaping over the railing in her best impersonation of idiotic courage. But other than that, nothing.

  Blinking hard, she peered around her, the space beyond the Carers slowly coming into focus. She was back in her bed in the CityHive tower, the texture of the sheets vaguely organic against her skin. She wondered why she could feel the sheets against her at all, but peering underneath, she saw she was wearing only the military-issue briefs and less-than-sensational bra she’d acquired at Miss O’s.

  And when she looked down at her aching lower belly, her whole world turned upside down at the sight of three puncture marks in her skin.

  Small.

  Red.

  New.

  Lemon stared at those marks for what seemed like an age. All the possibilities she could conjure running through her head. They might be cuts from the struggle, she reasoned. The Hunter-Killers could have scratched her when they caught her. She might have been bumped or tussled when they carried her back up to her room—she’d killed one of those Directors, after all. But looking down at the smooth expanse of her skin, those three angry red dots positioned equidistant around her navel, Lemon knew with awful, absolute certainty how they got there.

  The Carers looked at each other, black eyes shining with concern.

  “Lemonfresh—”

  “You did it?”

  She spoke in a whisper, looking up with disbelief into those pale and worried faces. Lemon felt her eyes filling with burning tears, her chest with burning rage.

  “You did it.”

  She felt the static crackling in the darkness behind her eyes. She could feel the current inside the women, skipping from neuron to neuron, pulsing through the hearts in their chests, racing up their spines. It would have been so easy then to just reach in and turn them off. To lash out in her fury, to scream and tear and break. She wanted to so desperately, so completely, she could feel it in her bones.

  But somewhere deep inside, someplace even the trauma of her childhood and the pain of the road and the rage of this final violation couldn’t quite burn away, a part of her knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better. Hurting these women wouldn’t undo what had been done to her. And they weren’t the ones responsible anyway, not in any real sense—Lemon could see her anguish reflected in each of their eyes. They were hurting just as badly as she was. They cared. That was their purpose.

  No, the BioMaas Director was the one to blame here. The one orchestrating everything. Killing these women, lashing out at them in some brief and pointless display of fury…in a way, that’d make Lemon just as bad as them.

  “We are sorry, Lemonfresh,” said the first Carer, wringing her hands.

  “We know she is hurting,” said the second.

  “But her pain is for the greater good,” said the third, touching her cheek.

  Lemon shied away from the touch, closed her eyes against her tears. She could feel the pulse of the static in the warm dark behind her closed eyelids. It took a moment for her to drown out its voice and find her own again. So soft, she almost couldn’t hear it herself.

  “Do me a favor and get out, will you?”

  She opened her eyes, met those dark, liquid stares. The women’s faces dropped even further, and the trio hung beside Lemon like broken mirrors. But the girl ignored them, ignored their pain, turning her bloodshot stare to the endless
dance of the fliers outside the spire’s translucent walls.

  Wondering what they’d taken out of her.

  What exactly they planned to do with it.

  How horrified and violated it made her feel.

  Resigned, shoulders slumped, the Carers finally turned and shuffled across the room. Lemon watched from the corner of her eye as the first gently touched the wall. The same place as she’d noted before. With that same leathery whisper, the wall opened wide, and Lemon caught a glimpse of the corridor outside—smooth bone, crawling with little glowbugs, three Sentinels standing stern vigil—before the living portal closed again.

  She dragged her knees up under her chin. Wrapped her arms about her shins. For a minute, it was all too much. She hadn’t asked for any of this. She never wanted it. She was supposed to be the comedy relief. She was the sidekick in someone else’s story. For all her sass, all her front, Miss Lemon Fresh never felt big or important enough to be anyone’s hero.

  But chest shaking, tears finally spilling down her cheeks, she grabbed that thought by the throat and she gouged out its eyes. Punched and stomped and kicked it, leaving it where it belonged—in the gutter, picking up broken teeth with broken fingers. Small she might be. Unimportant, sure, maybe. But Lemon had lived almost a decade in the shitpit that was Dregs, hustling and fighting for everything she ever had. And truth was, self-pity wasn’t ever her style.

  She found herself angry again. Furious all the way down to her boots. Static electricity crackled on her skin as she pawed at those tiny and somehow enormous marks on her belly, the ache of what they’d done to her burning away under a wash of kerosene and matches. Anger was fuel. Anger was focus. And so, reaching out, Lemon began searching among the little rivers of electrical current that pulsed through this entire structure. Feeling for its shape again. Noting its colors. And remembering which pulse had flared when the wall had opened wide.

  She wasn’t a master of her gift by any stretch. She was only just learning to use it on living things. But the more time she spent here, the more she realized this whole building, this whole city, was, in some bizarre way, actually living. The first time she’d ever used her power, she’d been angry, too, and that fury was going to help her again. Because a girl who’d grown up rough and filthy as Lemon Fresh wasn’t the kind of damsel to sit up in a tower waiting for some handsome prince to rescue her.

  The handsome prince was dead in this story.

  Time for the damsel to rescue herself.

  And then burn this whole tower to the ground.

  Lemon slipped out of her bed, holding her stomach. She found her uniform from Miss O’s neatly folded by the water fountain and looked down again at those four identical fish swimming in forever circles. Dragging on her shirt, cargos, boots, she limped over to the wall and pressed her palms against it. She could feel the pulse of life inside, distended, tingling, the brightest flavor of strange she’d ever tasted. But she closed her eyes, reached out into the familiar static. This was who she was now. Not a sidekick. Not the comedy relief.

  She was the flood, they’d told her.

  She was going to wash all of this away.

  Lemon took hold of those hidden strings, and frowning in concentration, gently, oh so gently, she pulled. The static flared. Her power pulsed. The wall creaked like old leather and parted slightly, revealing the corridor beyond. At the sound, the three Sentinels outside turned, mouths opening as they saw her through the crack, pale, disheveled, furious. But before any could shout, she seized hold of the signals dancing through their minds, the little arcs and sparks of electricity, neurons and electrons, making hearts pump and lungs breathe.

  And she ripped them out.

  All three men dropped like bricks, crumpling to the floor with the softest of sighs. Lem felt a momentary stab of guilt, a wrongness at the thought of killing them. But she drowned it under her rage, remembered her time among the freak show under the desert, the lessons she’d learned in Miss O’s. The Major had been a madman, true cert. But after what these bastards had just put her through, there was one lesson the Major had imparted that Lemon had decided to take to heart.

  Only the strong survive.

  So Lemon slipped out into the hallway, started to run.

  Eve collapsed on the floor of her cell with a shuddering gasp.

  Her face was wet with tears, her body soaked with sweat. Her grav-chair made barely a whisper as it was pushed from the room, the logika who’d escorted her sealing the cell door shut with a crackle of electricity.

  Eve’s whole body was tingling, arms and legs shaking at the remembered pain. She had no idea how long her session with Drakos had lasted—maybe hours, maybe days—the concept of time itself melting and bubbling and peeling away under the constant barrage she’d been subjected to.

  Pain.

  Such a little word for such a colossal thing. She thought she knew it so well, she could almost call it a friend—the bullets, the lies, the betrayal, the loss. She’d turned it all to steel and worn it like armor, thinking she couldn’t possibly be hurt more than she’d already been. But over the past few hours/days, the Director of Daedalus Technologies had shown her just how little she knew about pain.

  Cold and acid. Fire and steel. They’d subjected her to every form of agony she could imagine, and some others she’d never dared dream of. And even though she’d known in some small corner of her mind it was all in her head—a virtual construct that was in no way real—that didn’t make that tiny word any less colossal.

  But she hadn’t broken. Hadn’t bent. No matter how much they hurt her, in the blissful nothings between each new round of agony as Drakos asked her about Lemon—what she could do, what she was capable of—Eve never wavered.

  It wasn’t loyalty to her former bestest that kept her from cracking. It wasn’t the years they’d spent together. It was simple pride. Eve wasn’t prepared to let these cockroaches win, that was the plain and simple truth. She was more than them—better, stronger, faster. And if they thought a few hours/days of something as mundane as agony would be enough to break her, well, they didn’t know her at all.

  Her hands were shaking. Her fauxhawk hanging low, soaked with perspiration. The floor of her cell was cool against her burning skin, and she closed her eyes, thankful for a moment to feel this, only this.

  She heard hard knuckles rapping on cold steel. Looking into the cell beside her, she found Gabriel looking back. His jawbone had almost knitted back together. His lips and cheeks would take longer, though, his voice still garbled and ruined.

  “Uhreyooulrgght?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes again for a moment. Reveling in the cold press of metal against her body, the nothing-else she felt. But finally, Eve breathed deep and pushed herself up to sitting, meeting her brother’s stare.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Insekz,” he hissed. “Hrrtyoo?”

  She nodded, wincing at the remembered pain.

  “Whhhy?” Gabriel asked.

  “They’re trying to map my brainwave patterns, combine them with whatever they’ve dragged out of Ana so they can open Myriad. But…I think something is wrong. The way our brains are designed…I think they’re having trouble with it.” Eve dragged one shaking hand through her hair. “But they want to know about Lemon, too. What she can do, how much of a threat she is. So while they figure out how to replicate my brainwaves, they’re torturing me to find out about her.”

  Gabriel lifted his hand, held it palm out, as if to press it against the electrified field crackling between them. “Veyh wull pay.”

  She held up her hand to mirror his own. “They will. But we have to find some way out of here, Gabe. And I can’t see one.”

  True cert, Eve had been looking for an escape ever since they’d brought her here. But cockroaches though they might be, these humans were good at what they did. Eve was elec
trified into submission before anyone entered her cell. The bonds strapping her to the grav-chair were stronger than she could break, and being pushed to her virtual torture sessions every day, she saw very little of the compound—just pristine hallways and the empty, glowing optics of servitor logika.

  She knew no system was perfect. But she also knew, with a growing certainty, that she couldn’t withstand this punishment forever. Drakos would eventually find out what he wanted to know about Lemon. The logika techs would eventually figure out how to replicate her own brainwaves. Her usefulness would be at an end.

  And what then?

  Eve heard a small rumble, like distant thunder. Gabriel heard it, too, a frown marring the perfect skin of his brow. A moment later, the building shuddered—perhaps too faint for a human to feel. But the light around them shifted from cool blue to purple, public address system announcements ringing in the air.

  “Wussut?” Gabe asked.

  Eve shook her head, listening carefully. “I don’t know….”

  The building shuddered, stronger this time, and that distant thunder rumbled again, closer now. The two lifelikes met each other’s eyes, uncertainty and curiosity in Gabe’s glass-green stare. The lighting shifted again, purple now to red.

  “Attention, all Daedalus employees: Lockdown Protocol is now in effect. All security personnel, report to commander for briefing. This is not a drill. Repeat, all Daedalus employees: Lockdown—”

  The announcement kept repeating, but Eve lost interest as the floor suddenly crackled with a burst of electrical current. The shock rocketed up her spine, landing like a boot heel in the base of her skull. She was dimly aware that they’d shocked Gabriel, too—they’d never done that in the past. But before she could ponder too hard on it, Sec logika were stomping into the cell with her grav-chair.

  The building was shaking—tremors running up the foundation and shivering the walls. The bloody light deepened, alarms started blaring, the song of what she thought had been thunder now coalescing into something more familiar.