Джей Кристофф - Lifel1k3 (Lifelike)

“You might try a ‘please,’ ” Gabriel said. “If your father ever taught you how to say the word, that is.”

Ana looked at the lifelike. He was disheveled, barefoot. Thinner than he’d been. Hollowed cheeks and tangled hair. Ana glanced at the nicks and scratches in Myriad’s shell. Gabriel’s Three Truths, scrawled in dried blood on the chrome. Beside the creed, she saw tiny dimples in the metal, spattered with old blood. Little groups of four, side by side. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds.

Knuckle dents, she realized.

She scoped Gabriel’s hands. Strong and white and flawless. Imagined him down here, night after night, beating those hands to bleeding on this door. Waiting until they healed so he could begin pounding on it again. The secrets to resurrecting his beloved trapped behind it. Forever beyond his reach.

“No one can love like we do. And when two of us love each other…”

She looked up into those glass-green eyes, boiling with madness and obsession. And for the first time in a long time, she was truly afraid.

“I apologize for your restraints. But I’m quite unsure what your…gift is capable of doing to one of us.” Gabriel waved at the logika looming around the door. “You can destroy Goliaths, at least. So, best for your hands to remain bound. If you so much as wave them at me, I’ll have Faith break them both.”

Ana saw the female lifelike standing nearby at the gantry’s railing, jagged bangs draped over flat gray eyes. Looking at Ana’s hands with a dark smile.

“Where’s Cricket, Faith?” she demanded. “What did you do with him?”

“Your little logika?” Faith asked. “He’s with Silas. They’re getting reacquainted.”

Ana glanced around the space, looking for some kind of help or escape. Aside from the massive double doors over the bridge at her back, there was no other easy access to the Myriad chamber. She saw a third lifelike sitting at the access terminal to one side of the Myriad sphere, gently tapping away at a series of keyboards. She had hazel skin, lustrous dark curls framing bottomless black eyes.

“Mercy,” Ana whispered.

Three of them. But not counting Ezekiel, there were seven lifelikes alive after the revolt.

“Where are Uriel and the others?” Ana asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “You needn’t trouble yourself over family matters.”

“Hope said they’d broken away from you.”

“You spoke to Hope?” Faith asked, suddenly alert. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead.”

Mercy looked up at that, she and Faith sharing a glance.

“You humans,” Gabriel sighed. “You destroy all you touch.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

Gabriel walked to the sealed door on the Myriad sphere, running fingertips across the thousands of tiny, bloodstained dents.

“No matter,” he said. “Our wayward sister can be reborn. Once we unlock Myriad, we can remake her, perfect in every detail. And not only her. Daniel. Michael. Raphael. Grace. Everyone taken from us. Everyone we’ve lost.”

“Not everyone, you selfish bastard,” Ana spat. “Unless you’re going to resurrect my family, too? My little brother? Alex would be twelve years old now, did you know that?”

The lifelike turned away, staring at the door that barred his way to his creator’s secrets. The door he’d worn himself thin against. Ana could see the torture of it. She knew what it was to have those you loved torn away. The rage you could feel at the ones who’d taken them from you. That rage was eating at her now, chewing away at the fear she felt in the face of this murderer and his madness. What more could they do to her, after all?

“Are you afraid to look at me, Gabriel?” she asked.

“No, Ana,” he replied. “Your anger simply bores me.”

“I was happy for you once. I lied for you when you asked me to. You and Grace in the garden, remember? And this is how you thank me? By having Ezekiel put a bullet in my head? You’d lost your love, so I couldn’t have mine? Was that it?”

The lifelike remained motionless, watching Myriad slowly awaken.

“Look at me!” Ana screamed.

“We don’t take orders from you, Ana,” Faith said. “We’re not the servants your father made us to be anymore.”

Ana turned to her former confidante, tears shining in her eyes. “Do you remember when we used to talk, Faith? Just sit and talk for hours about everything and nothing at all? You told me we’d be best of friends. You told me you loved me. Do you remember that?”

“Like a butterfly remembers being a worm,” the lifelike said.

“What did we do to you?” Ana asked. “What made you hate us so much?”

“I don’t hate you,” Faith replied. “I don’t even see you.”

“You killed my father,” Ana hissed.

“He deserved it. He turned Gabriel into a murderer.”

“You murdered my whole family….”

“We murdered those who would be our masters!” Gabriel bellowed.

The lifelike turned to Ana, dragged her wheelchair forward until his face was inches from her own. She could see insanity, total and terrifying, boiling through the cracks in his eyes as he roared into her face.

“We murdered those who gave us servitude and called it life!”

Gabriel whirled, pointed at the scrawl of blood on Myriad’s skin.

YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.

YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

“Do you see that?” he cried. “ That’s what it is to be born a thing. Your flesh. Your will. Your very existence. All belonging to others. Do you know what that’s like?”

“I know my father loved you, Gabriel,” Ana said. “I know you were his children.”

“We were nothing to him! Life like, he named us. Not life. Nicholas Monrova stood on my shoulders and demanded I kneel at his feet. He called me his son and then made me his assassin. But did he ask the same of you? Who did you murder, that your father might cling a little longer to his throne?”

Gabriel grabbed Ana’s clenched hand, forced her fingers open.

“No blood, I see. Spotless and clean, like all his true children’s. Your father showed me exactly what I was to him the day he commanded me to kill. Not a son. A weapon. His wrath and his ruin. And you fault me for becoming the murderer he made me to be?”

Tears were brimming in Ana’s eyes now. Hateful and weak. Spilling down her burning cheeks and filling her mouth with the taste of grief.

“We didn’t deserve what you did to us,” she said.

“Did I deserve it, then? What your father did to me?”

“You killed a ten-year-old boy, Gabriel.”

“I crushed an insect,” the lifelike spat. “And when Myriad’s secrets are mine, I will crush the rest of you. We are stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. Your father showed me that. He made us to be the next step in humanity’s evolution, and so we are. You are our dinosaurs, Ana. And we will raise a new civilization on an earth littered with your bones. That is Nicholas Monrova’s legacy. And that is his failure.”

She looked from one lifelike to another, dumbstruck. The hatred in their hearts, the rage in their eyes…Whatever they’d once been to her…

“You’re monsters,” she whispered.

Gabriel eased away from her, his face now a mask once more.

“I am what your father created me to be. No more. No less.” Gabriel pounded his fist against his chest. “If I am a monster, it’s because he willed it so.”

“LOG-IN REQUEST PROCESSED,” Myriad announced. “START-UP SEQUENCE INITIATED.”

Gabriel turned to Mercy, Ana momentarily forgotten.

“How long?” he asked.

Mercy tapped a series of commands into her terminal, readouts reflected in her eyes like falling rain. “Twenty minutes from a cold restart. Perhaps twenty-five.”