Джей Кристофф - Lifel1k3 (Lifelike)

“Ain’t we a pair,” she sighed.

The lifelike glanced at her, the pain of it too fresh to let him speak. Kneeling in the dust in that ridiculous pink radiation suit, Lemon squinted up at him, sun burning her eyes.

“…Did you really shoot her?” she asked. “During the revolt?”

Ezekiel looked down at his open hand. Nodded slow.

“…I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, one of the others would have. They were out for blood. I couldn’t have fought them all. So I tricked them instead.”

“Tricked them? You shot her in the head, Dimples.”

“I can shoot bullets out of the air, Lemon. I can count the freckles on your face in a fraction of a second. I sure as hell can put a low-caliber round through your eye and leave you alive. At least for a little while. I needed it to look convincing. I needed the others to think Ana was dead. And afterward, while they were busy fending off the Gnosis security forces, I pumped her full of meds to slow her vitals and got her to Silas. I figured if anyone could keep her alive, get her to safety, it’d be him.”

“…So you did get her out.”

He gestured to the coin slot in his chest. “Got the scars to show for it.”

“So why didn’t you tell her the truth right away?”

Ezekiel sighed.

“Same reason as you, I suppose.”

She scoped the wrecked machina around them, the chaos she’d wrought with but a thought. Remembering the hurt in her bestest’s eyes. The betrayal she’d put there. All out of fear. Fear of what she’d think. Fear of breaking something she could never repair.

“Touché,” she said.

Ezekiel glanced at the ruin she’d made. His voice softening as he spoke.

“How long have you been…?”

“A trashbreed?”

“Special,” he said.

Lemon chewed her lip. Looked down at her fingers, entwined in her lap.

“I manifested when I was twelve,” she sighed. “Fritzed a Neo-Meat™ auto-peddler one night after it swallowed my credstik.”

“…You killed a vending machine?”

She sighed. “Not the fizziest origin story for a hero, to be sure.”

“And you can fry anything electronic just by thinking about it?”

Lemon shrugged. “Bigger things are a lot harder. It used to just happen when I got mad. I can control it better now, but it still works best when I’m angry.”

Ezekiel nodded to Babel. “You still feeling angry?”

Lemon glanced toward the city. No sign of the girl who’d walked into it.

“She told us not to follow her.”

“Since when do you do what you’re told?”

“She doesn’t want our help, Dimples.”

“We can’t just leave her in there alone, Freckles. You know that.”

“We lied to her. She hates us now.”

“It’s simple to love someone on the days that are easy. But you find out what your love is made of on the days that are hard.”

The lifelike held out his hand.

“And we still love her,” he said simply. “Don’t we?”

Lemon looked to the hollowed city. The ruin and the rot. And suddenly, the thought of letting her bestest walk through that hell alone made Lemon’s chest ache. The tears welled up in her eyes again. She squinted up at the lifelike from her seat in the dust, silhouetted against that burning sun.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess we do.”

And reaching out, she took his hand.

In the end, it was easier for Lemon to ride on Ezekiel’s back.

Even carrying the Preacher’s salvaged flamethrower, Dimples moved faster than anyone she’d ever seen, and he never got tired. After running a few hundred meters through the ruined suburbia outside Babel, Lemon had been gasping, sweating buckets inside her rad-suit and trailing hopelessly behind. So Ezekiel strapped the ’thrower to her, scooped her onto his back instead. She’d slung her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist, holding on for dear life as the lifelike dashed away toward the city.

Long, easy strides chewing the meters up beneath them, past the abandoned factoryfarms and moldering suburban sprawl, until at last Zeke vaulted the broken wall and brought them into the city proper. Lemon had never seen a place so big, so flash, run so utterly to ruin. Everything was covered with dust and rust, cracks in the pavement and sand in the streets. The desert outside was already creeping in, as if it longed to scour the city from the planet’s face. Knowing what had happened here, Lem couldn’t really blame it.

They made their way toward Babel, rising like a stake in the metropolis’s heart. Lifeless automata stared with hollow eyes as they passed. The empty streets. The lonely stores and abandoned tenement blocks. The broken promise of it all raising the hair on the back of Lemon’s neck. As the pair hurried on through the ruins, they began finding bodies, Ezekiel never lingering long enough to look too hard. Lemon closed her eyes against the worst of it, her mouth dry as dust.

In the shadow of Babel now. That great interwoven spire of glass and metal rising into the sun-blasted heavens. The bodies were more numerous here, strung up on the fence line as some kind of grim warning to trespassers. Lemon flinched at the sight—she’d never seen so many dead things up close before. Trying to find a joke, some way to camouflage her fear with sass like she always did, she came up empty, a soft whimper escaping her lips instead.

Ezekiel glanced over his shoulder at the sound.

“You okay, Freckles?”

“No,” she murmured. “No, I’m not.”

“I’m here.” He squeezed her little hand with his big metal one. “I’m with you.”

She smiled weakly, but the thought didn’t make her feel much better. She didn’t know what would be waiting for them inside that tower, or how they’d deal with it. The pair of them charging in blind seemed a fizzy way to get perished.

They worked their way around the building, found a mass of long-dead bodies scattered around a large loading bay. Lemon grimaced at the carnage, feeling sick to her gut. Ezekiel let her climb down off his back, strapped the flamethrower onto his shoulders again. Lemon was just trying to stop her hands from shaking. Looking around at all those wrecked machina and dead soldierboys made her feel more than a little outgunned.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

“Get in. Find Ana. Get out.”

“…That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“It’s not exactly complicated, is it? I mean, as far as master plans go.”

“We don’t know how many of them are in there until we get inside.” Ezekiel crouched behind a rusting armored personnel carrier, surveyed the scene. “So we move quick, and we move quiet. Hopefully Ana and Cricket haven’t gotten far.”

“What if all your murderbot brothers and sisters are up there waiting for us?”

“We use our secret weapon,” he said.

“Okay, now you’re talking.” Lemon sighed with relief. “Fabulous as it is, I knew you weren’t dense enough to just march into certain doom with nothing but a smile. Is this secret weapon inside? What’s it look like?”

“About five foot two. Red hair. Freckles. Kind of cute.”

Lemon blinked.

“…This secret weapon of yours sounds disturbingly familiar, Dimples.”

“Listen,” Ezekiel said. “All the systems in that tower, the lifelikes—in fact, every living thing on earth? They need electrical current to function. You can stop machina and logika with a wave of your hand. Who knows what you can do to a lifelike or a living person?”