Джей Кристофф - Lifel1k3 (Lifelike)

“You think now is a good time to find out?”

“I think now is a good time for both of us to stop being afraid.”

Lemon thought about that. About being frightened and what it had cost her. The lies she’d told because of her fear. The lies she’d lost herself inside.

It wasn’t possible to live in a world like this without being scared, she knew that. And being afraid was okay sometimes—fear was what stopped the Bad Thing eating you. But she realized it wasn’t being frightened that had cost her the things she loved. It was becoming paralyzed by it. Instead of asking for help, she’d closed herself off. Instead of opening up, she’d shut herself down. She didn’t want to make that mistake again. Didn’t want to lose herself to it anymore. Ana needed her. Cricket needed her.

It was okay to be afraid.

You just couldn’t let that fear stop you.

“All right.” Lemon looked at the ruins around her. Back into Ezekiel’s eyes, searching for the strength to take that terrifying first step. “But before we go in there, I need to ask you something. And I need you to be straight with me, okay?”

The lifelike nodded slowly. “Okay.”

Lemon flashed a small smile. “You really think I’m cute?”

Ezekiel laughed, his dimple creasing his cheek. She laughed with him, the feeling warming her insides. And in it, in him, in them, she found exactly what she needed. Taking a deep, trembling breath, she lifted her boot and took that terrifying first step.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The pair dashed across to the entrance. Lemon clomped and cursed in her oversized rad-suit as Ezekiel charged out ahead and into the bay. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness after the glare outside, but eventually, among the rows of lifeless logika and abandoned hardware, she made out the wreckage of Ana’s Titan. It was lying broken and blackened among a few thousand spent shell casings. Smoking sentry automata hung limp from the walls, spitting sparks. Excalibur lay on the concrete. But of Ana herself, Lemon saw no sign.

Ezekiel cursed under his breath. “We’re too late.”

Lemon bent down and picked up the stun bat. She caught sight of something in the wreck, breath catching in her throat.

“Oh no…”

Kneeling by the ruined Titan, she gathered up a broken little body. Spindly arms and legs, heat sinks like a porcupine’s quills running along his spine. Her eyes filled with tears, rage burning away her grief and swallowing her fear.

“Cricket,” she whispered. “Those bastards…”

“They got Ana,” Ezekiel said. “There’s only two places they’d take her. To the cellblocks in Security Division, or straight to the Artificial Intelligence levels to try and break into Myriad’s core.”

The lifelike looked at her cradling the little logika’s broken body in her arms.

Cricket’s head was missing.

“Lemon, are you listening to me?”

She sniffed thickly. Nodded. “Yeah. I hear you.”

“With Myriad locked down, I’m not sure how many of the automated security systems are still running. It looks like they’re on emergency power in here. I need you to fritz the camera systems, any automata turrets we might find. You think you can handle that?”

“I…I think so.”

“Security Division is closer. We’ll check the cellblocks first.”

“…Okay.”

“Ana needs us now. You have to be strong.”

She sniffed again, laid Cricket’s body gently on the ground. Grief closing her throat, blurring her sight. Strapping Excalibur to her back, she silently vowed that whoever had done this to him would get their payback in spades.

“I’m sorry, Crick,” she said.

Lemon tossed her bedraggled bangs from her eyes. Blinked away those hateful tears. She stood slowly, looking Ezekiel in the eye. Her jaw was clenched. Her hands were fists.

“Let’s go get our girl.”

The old man was dying.

He’d been dying for years, truth told. The cancer had Silas by the bones even back when this tower hummed with life, when the machines sang and his walking stick kept the time. But in the years since the revolt, the disease had spread through his body. A guest who’d overstayed its welcome. A promise he couldn’t break. And now Silas Carpenter was dying for real.

It seemed fitting that he’d die here in this tower, where it all began. He was slumped in a holding cell, somewhere in Security Division. The walls were transparent plasteel, the door had a small slot for meals to be passed back and forth. There were old bloodstains on the floor. He wondered dimly if this was the room where they’d killed Nic. Alexis. The children. He’d never seen the bodies, but when Ezekiel had appeared out of the smoke and chaos in those final hours with that broken, bleeding girl in his arms, the tears in the lifelike’s eyes had told Silas all he needed to know. His best friend was dead.

And their dream was dead along with him.

It had started out so pure. So true. They’d wanted to change the world, Nicholas and he. Reclaim it from the ruins and make it whole again. The lifelikes were meant to make that possible. Humanity at its most perfect. Its most passionate. More human than human. After Raphael’s suicide, Silas had known the project was flawed. That they’d made a mistake, playing at being gods. But after the bomb that killed Grace, after Ana ended in the hospital…Nicholas was never going to see reason after that. His rage and ego just wouldn’t let him. Pride cometh before the fall, they said.

And what a fall it’d been.

Silas put his hand to his mouth, coughed wetly, smearing his fingers with blood. His chest burned with every breath, tears welling in his eyes. They’d not even given him meds for the hurt. Faith had hauled him across the desolation of Dregs and Zona Bay and the Glass and laid him at Gabriel’s feet like a prize. At first, Gabe had been overjoyed to see him. But when it became apparent that Silas could no more unlock Myriad than he could sprout wings and fly, Gabriel’s joy had turned to sullen fury. They’d locked Silas in the dark, feeding him cans of processed slop to keep him an inch from death’s door.

Not for much longer.

He coughed again, tasting salt and death. They hadn’t given him any safety gear, and he’d been soaking up Babel’s ambient radiation for days. His gums had started bleeding last night. His fingernails, too. It was just a race now to see what would kill him first: the Big C or good old-fashioned internal hemorrhaging.

He deserved it, he supposed. An ending like this. He’d tried to make it right. He’d given her a life, at least. Away from this graveyard and its ghosts. With any luck, she was far from here, Ezekiel and Cricket by her side. They’d steer her true, even if he couldn’t. For all his failures, he’d given her some hope. And in doing so, given hope to himself.

It was all he had left.

“Hello, Silas,” said a voice.

He looked up through his tears, smudging the blood across his mouth. It hurt to breathe. Hurt worse to speak. And so he simply nodded, looking at Faith with a maker’s eye. Pale skin and dark hair and a voice like warm smoke. She was beautiful, no doubt. One of their finest. But tragic somehow. Broken. An angel who’d torn off her own wings.

The lifelike was smiling, hate shining in those gray eyes. Silas wondered where it came from. Faith’s persona had been modeled on Ana’s, and the Ana he’d known had always been kind. She had a streak of rebellion in her, true, but never a viciousness. Somewhere along the line, Faith had become something different. Taken Ana’s rebellious streak and turned it to outright defiance. Violence. Cruelty.

Was it the Libertas virus that had filled her so full of rage? Or had it been there all along? The same darkness that made Raphael strike that match? Gabriel pick up that gun?