by Jay Kristoff
“You can’t just wipe out the entire human race!” Ezekiel raged.
“I will do whatever it takes to safeguard our future, brother.” Gabe looked Zeke over, his lip curling. “By all means, hate me if it makes you feel better. But I’d think after they murdered your beloved, you might be less inclined to defend them.”
“Don’t you dare use her like that,” Zeke hissed, bristling. “Ana would’ve hated this, Gabriel. And she’d have hated what we’ve become.”
“We’ll never know, will we?” Faith asked. “Because they murdered her.”
“He doesn’t love you, Faith.”
Ezekiel turned on his sister, watching his words strike home.
“He doesn’t love you,” he repeated, gesturing to Gabriel. “He never has and he never will. All of this, everything, is about Grace.”
Faith glanced at Gabriel, a sliver of emotion glittering behind that telescreen gray. But then she scoffed, and her face became a mask.
“Love is a lie, Ezekiel,” she said. “A lie used by cockroaches to convince themselves their procreations are anything more than banal biomechanics.” She tilted her head. “What need do we have of love?”
Zeke shook his head. Turning back to Gabe, bristling with rage.
“You can’t do this, brother.”
Gabe blinked those pretty glass-green eyes. “You cannot stop me, brother.”
“No,” he said.
Blue eyes flickered to Eve.
Fingers tightened to fists.
“No, but we can.”
Zeke launched himself at Gabriel, spear-tackling him into the safety railing over the reactor shaft. Desperate, face twisted with hatred as he slammed Gabe into the barrier. He felt the metal buckle under their weight, snap with the bright ring of steel. The Goliaths behind them surged, Faith lunged forward, crying out as Gabriel clutched at the broken rail. But Zeke had him wrapped up, momentum sending the pair sailing out into the abyss. Gravity took hold, dragging them down into the drop, silver-quick.
But Eve was quicker.
Crying out, diving forward, she slid along her stomach and reached into the gap. Ezekiel’s heart sank as she seized the pair of them: Zeke by his wrist, Gabe by his boot. She was dragged forward toward the drop, lashing out with one foot and hooking her ankle around the broken railing before she went over with them. Gabe and Zeke jerked to a halt, the three of them suspended over the abyss.
“Drop him, Eve!” Ezekiel shouted.
Zeke flailed out with his boot, kicking Gabe in the face. Gabe’s fingertips scrabbled on the wall for purchase, finding none.
“Let him go!” Ezekiel shouted, kicking again.
But she didn’t. She held on, face twisted, knuckles white. Faith grabbed hold of her, dragging her back from the brink. Clinging on desperately, Eve hauled Gabe and Zeke up with her. As soon as they reached the ledge, Faith had her pistol out, aimed at Zeke’s head. The Goliaths loomed behind her, ready to pound him into the deck. But instead of fighting, he simply looked at Eve, gasping on the gantry beside him. Pain and betrayal in his eyes. Disbelief on his face.
“Eve?” he asked.
She looked away, out to the drop into the abyss.
“Eve!” he shouted. “Say something!”
“And what would you have her say?” Gabriel’s lips curled as he climbed to his feet. “You fool, can’t you see it? She agrees with me.”
As Zeke looked her over, incredulous, Eve remained silent.
“Do you?” he whispered.
“Zeke,” she began. “I…”
“No, you can’t,” he whispered, shaking his head. “You know this is wrong.”
Eve opened her mouth. Fighting to speak. Ezekiel searched her eyes, the hurt in his own only deepening. But as the silence stretched out between them, endless and deep, his hurt shifted slowly to rage, devotion dissolving into disgust.
“CH-CH-CHOICES,” Solomon moaned on the deck behind them, rocking back and forth and holding his head. “CH-CH-CHOICESSSSS.”
“Subdue him,” Gabriel ordered.
One of the Goliaths trudged forward, optics burning blue, swinging at Ezekiel with a massive metal fist. But all the fight had fled him now, his shoulders slumped, his eyes gone from blue to gray, still locked on Eve. The blow landed, blood spraying as Zeke was hurled backward into the wall of the Myriad sphere. A blow from a second Goliath collided with his skull, thousands of horsepower, sending him sprawling, twisting, tumbling across the deck. He came to rest by Solomon’s knees, the logika bending double, gibbering.
“ALL THE KING’S HORSES…,” he moaned. “COULDN’T PUT…COULDN’T…”
Ezekiel’s eyes were still locked on Eve, fluttering closed.
Eve stared out to the drop into the abyss below.
The light in her pupils was red as blood.
She didn’t say a word.
The fist came down on him like an anvil.
Lemon wondered how many eyes were floating in that sky.
It was strange to think there might be hundreds of them up there. Maybe thousands. A legion of satellites floating around the planet, untethered from whatever systems they were once connected to. Staring blindly down at the earth below. A million secrets, and nobody to tell them to.
Looking through the dozens of feeds in Miss O’s sat-vis room, she was astounded at how detailed the pictures were. She could see figures wandering the alleys of Los Diablos where she grew up. Hustlers on the street corners of the Megopolis Rim. All the country on show. She wondered what kind of world it had been, where people thought it was a good idea to let their governments read the time off their wristwatches or their books over their shoulders. Where those governments thought it was a good idea to build weapons capable of killing every living thing on the planet. What kind of war would that be, where the only things left at the end were those satellites, staring down on the charred husk of the world that was?
“All right, milady?”
She looked to the doorway behind her, saw Grimm leaning against it. His arms were folded across his chest, eyebrow raised, and the sight of him was enough to let loose a little storm of electricity in her belly. The car ride back from CityHive had been nice—she’d made a game of seeing how close she could sit to him without actually touching him. He’d put his arm on the seat beside her, not actually around her, but close enough for her to want him to. But Diesel had been there, and her mix of blast-beat drudge spilling from the speakers hadn’t exactly been romantic.
This was the first time they’d been alone since he kissed her goodbye.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Dead-set mad, eh?” Grimm asked, nodding to the screens.
“Yeah,” she sighed, looking over the displays. “No wonder the Major had you all convinced he was clairvoyant. You can see half the country from in here.”
“Still doesn’t make me feel like less of a stooge,” Grimm sighed.
“He tricked all of us, Grimm,” Lemon said. “Me best of all. Don’t beat yourself up on it. You gotta believe in someone sometime.”
He wandered into the room, hands in his pockets, eyes on the screens. “Hard to find folks to trust these days, true cert.”
“I trust you,” she said.
His eyes met hers: big, deep, warm. His irises were a dozen different shades of brown, framed with long, sooty lashes. Looking into his pupils, she could almost imagine two tiny fires burning there, sending shivers all the way down to her toes.
“Do you?” he asked, stepping closer.
“I mean, I was well on the way to rescuing myself,” she smiled. “But yeah, charging into almost-certain death to save my ass? That earns you some pretty big points, mister.”
He flashed her that cheeky smile of his. “It’s an arse worth savin’.”
She felt a blush creep across
her freckles, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She was leaning back on the satellite console, and he was somehow standing much closer than he’d been a second ago. Near enough to touch.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to you sooner,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she murmured.
“Did they…hurt you?” he asked softly.
She shook her head, fingers pressed to her belly. “Only a little bit.”
He was looking down into her eyes again, somehow standing even closer than before, like he was moving without moving. She could feel the heat off his body like sun on her skin. And everything in Lemon was telling her to turn away, but she didn’t. Instead, she held his stare, thrilling at the way he looked at her.
“Show me,” he whispered.
Lemon swallowed hard. Feeling small. Fragile. She was suddenly very frightened. Mouth dry. Hands shaking. But she forced herself to remember who this boy was. What he’d done for her. Deciding that, yes, he’d earned her trust. And so she reached down and lifted her T-shirt a little, baring her midriff. He looked down, saw the angry red scars around her navel, three of them on her freckled skin.
Ever so slow, he reached down. Looking into her eyes to make sure she was okay. He touched them, one after another, and the gentle brush of his fingertips was like current crackling over her body. Lemon’s breath came quicker, her heart galloping inside her chest, the wings inside her belly beating about in a frenzy.
“Do they hurt?” he whispered.
She shook her head again. “Only a little bit.”
He held her gaze for a moment more. And then, ever so slowly, he sank down to his knees. Lemon’s breath caught in her throat, panic thrilling along her skin. She’d only kissed a couple of boys before in the real, but she knew what could come next, where this all might head, way too quick for her to be ready for it. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, she really, really did, but…
She shivered as she felt his lips on her skin. A feather-light touch, gentle as a desert breeze, warm as firelight. He kissed her, just for a second, the gentlest of touches to that place: the place they’d touched her without permission. But Grimm’s touch was altogether different, lush and light and dizzying, Lemon’s head tilted back, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks. And as he kissed her again, and again—three tiny touches of his lips to those three tiny scars—Lemon realized she couldn’t feel the pain of what BioMaas had done to her anymore. Couldn’t remember those claws on her skin or the hurt they’d done to her. All she could feel was butterflies.
He looked up into her eyes, and she could feel his breath on her skin as he whispered, “You okay?”
She nodded, wrapping her fists in his collar and dragging him upward.
“C’mere,” she breathed.
And then her lips were on his, and his arms were wrapped around her, and nothing else mattered in the world. She surged against him, pressing in hard, dizzied at the warmth of his skin and the strength in his hands and the gentle, maddening feel of his body against hers. She melted in his mouth, teasing, tasting, all the room about her spinning. Running her hands up the smooth swell of his arms, up, up, fingertips dancing through his tight-cropped hair now, making him shiver just as badly as she was. Her oversized jacket slipped off her shoulders as she leaned back as his lips traced a burning trail across her cheek, her back arching as he reached her neck, fireworks exploding somewhere in the back of her mind. She’d never been kissed like this before, never even come close. If he could make her feel like this with only a kiss, she wondered, how else might he make her feel if—
“Oh god…,” he murmured, tense as steel under her hands.
“I know,” she whispered, seeking his lips again.
“No,” he said, pulling back. “No, Lem, look…”
She frowned in confusion, mouth still tingling, her skin tender from the brush of his stubble. But she drew back, followed his sight line, realized he was staring at the screens behind her. And suddenly every butterfly in her belly felt frozen solid.
While she’d been melting in his arms, the satellites had continued their orbit overhead, looking down on the earth below. On the screen marked SAT-117, she could see a stretch of desert pocked by green growths—somewhere near CityHive, by the look. And gathering there on the burning sands, all scuttling black shapes and looming hulks of flesh and bone and teeth, she saw…
“Oh god,” Lemon whispered.
A sea of slakedogs, rolling over the earth in one chittering, slavering mass. Bioengineered hulks, both four-legged and bipedal, lumbering among the horde. The sky seethed with the wasplike silhouettes of Hunter-Killer patrols, wings glittering like jewels. There were humanoid figures among the throng, but even they seemed unworldly, clad in suits of organic armor and fused with their own weaponry. Toxin mortars and corrosion barrages. Missiles that shook and rattled inside their cannons, longing for a brief flight and an explosive death.
“The BioMaas army,” Lemon murmured, easing out of his arms.
“You think they’re coming for us?”
Lemon swallowed hard, shaking her head.
“From the look of it, they’re coming for everyone….”
Ezekiel knew the taste of betrayal.
He’d dished out his fair share, after all. When his lifelike siblings had risen against their master and torn apart his dream, he’d betrayed them all. When Gabriel had ordered him to put a bullet into Ana’s head, he’d kept her alive, got her to safety, turned on the only family he’d known. And for that betrayal, they’d bolted a coin slot into his chest, called him a slave and cast him out of their rotten little paradise. For the first time since he’d been born, he was alone. But it had been worth it. Because in losing everything, he’d saved her. And that made it all worthwhile.
He knew Eve wasn’t Ana. He’d accepted it. Truth was, he didn’t want her to be. There was a fire to Eve that the original Ana never had. A passion, a rage, that somehow made her feel so much more alive. But still, when she’d not backed him, when she’d saved Gabriel along with him from that fall, a part of him wished she were the girl he’d lost so many years ago and, again, only today. Because no matter what, Ana Monrova would never have allowed Gabriel to go through with his plan.
He’d woken in the detention cells on the security level, locked behind tempered, transparent plasteel. The cameras in here were all still fritzed from when he and Lemon had rescued Silas, the lighting blown, the hallways shrouded in gloom. He could taste blood in his mouth. His ribs were black and blue.
He could see the cell they’d kept Silas inside opposite his own, the bloodstains on the floor, the lock Lemon had popped with her burgeoning power. Remembered running through these hallways with her, his heart twisted in fear. If Gabriel needed the sat-vis arrays in Miss O’s, he’d surely murder everyone in the compound to get to it. And Lemon and Grimm and the others would surely fight to keep what they had.
She was in danger.
All of them, in danger.
He looked about the cell, searching for some way to break loose. There was no way he could fight all three of his siblings at once, let alone the WarBots from the Gnosis arsenal they’d already corrupted. But Faith had seen what the deviates were capable of—he doubted Gabe would risk an attack on Miss O’s until he was sure he could win. Zeke knew there were still flex-wings upstairs in the hangar bay. If he could get to one, he could get to Miss O’s and warn them.
But there was nothing. No way out of his prison. He’d worked security detail for Gnosis, after all—these cells were foolproof. He knew the override codes, but the keypad was outside the door, and he had no way to reach it. He threw himself against the door anyway, hoping age might have weakened the moorings or compromised the lock. But both held, despite his titanic strength, a dull whhhhuuunng reverberating through the detention block as his body struck the door. He tried again. Again. Again. Pa
nting and bruised, dark curls hanging in his eyes, he hadn’t even made a crack.
“TO BE OR NOT TO B-B-B-BE,” came a low moan.
Ezekiel peered into the hallway, saw a flickering smile in the gloom.
“IS THAT A Q-Q-QUESTION?”
“…Solomon?” he asked.
The shadows moved, and Zeke caught sight of a slender silhouette etched against a deeper darkness. He heard metal scraping concrete, saw the logika take one stumbling step into the light, optics and garish grin flickering as he spoke.
“TWO ROADS D-D-D-DIVERGED IN A YELLOW WOOD. OH NO. NO.”
When Gabe had exposed Ezekiel and his siblings to the virus, it had felt like a million doors had been opened in his mind. A million pathways, all shining with possibility. But Zeke could understand how that might simply be overwhelming, how it could feel like there was just too much to absorb. A lifelike brain was faster, smarter than a regular logika’s. And simpler combat models like the Goliaths could handle the change well enough. But it seemed the same intelligence that had let Solomon so thoroughly skirt the definitions of the Three Laws had also left him adrift—clever enough to comprehend the myriad possibilities now available, but not clever enough to process them.
Ezekiel felt a stab of pity to see what had become of him. Solomon had never been the most pleasant of bots to be around, but exposure to the virus had clearly driven him mad.
“Where are the others?” he asked, noting the bot had been left to wander down here alone. “Where’s Gabriel?”
“I—I—I DON’T KNOW. DO I KNOW?” He shuddered. “DO I?”
Zeke pressed his lips together, overcome with contempt for his brother. This was typical of Gabriel—utilize something as a tool for as long as it suited him, then abandon it when it was no longer useful. Solomon had proved himself unworthy of the gift Gabriel had bestowed, and now he’d been forgotten.