Jay Kristoff - LIFEL1K3

A claxon sounded throughout the house, cranking her headache up to the redline. On top of everything else, something had just triggered the proximity alarms …

Grandpa was trying to get his coughing fit under control. He wiped his knuckles across his lips, flecked in red. His eyes had never left the lifelike.

They’ll come for her, you know they will.

“You …,” Grandpa coughed, wet and red. “You expecting c-company, Eve?”

“No one who’d be welcome.”

“Go ch-check cams,” he managed. “K-Kaiser’s got this in … hand.”

“Mouth,” Lemon murmured.

The old man managed a bloodstained grin. “Don’t start with … me, Freshie.”

A quick glance passed between Eve and Lemon, and without another word, the girls were dashing down the hallway. They bundled into what Grandpa wryly referred to as the Peepshow—a room with every inch of wall crusted in monitors, fed via sentry cams around Tire Valley. The alarms were tripped anytime someone arrived without an invitation. Most often, it was some big feral cat who loped into a turret’s firing arc and got itself aerated, but looking at the feeds …

“We,” Cricket said, “are true screwed.”

Lem looked at the bot sideways. “You have a rare talent for understatement, Crick.”

Eve’s eyes were locked on the screens. Her voice a whisper.

“Brotherhood …”

Just us two. Marie and me. The two youngest sisters. The closest. The best of friends.

Only she’d known my secret. Held it safe inside her chest. Father would never have approved. Mother would’ve lost her mind. But Marie held my hand and laughed with me, breathless with my excitement. She loved that I was in love.

Loved the idea of it more than I did.

She was crying now. Holding on to me like a drowner clings to the one who swims to save her, dragging them both down to the black. But when the pistol clicked, she glanced up, up into the face of the soldier looming over us. Long curling hair, the color of flame. Eyes like shattered emeralds. Beautiful and empty.

The name HOPE was stenciled above her breast pocket.

I almost laughed at the thought.

“None above,” Hope said. “And none below.”

A sun-bright flare.

A deafening silence.

And only I remained.

The Fridge Street Crew had warned her that the Brotherhood was posse’ing up. Eve hadn’t realized just how serious they were taking it.

She looked out through the view from Turret Northeast-1 just as something blew the feed to hissing static. Looking at Northeast-2, she could see a small army of Brotherhood boys, dolled up in their red cassocks and tromping toward Grandpa’s house. Oldskool assault rifles and choppers in hand. Scarlet banners set with the image of their patron, St. Michael, waving in a rusty wind. And marching in the vanguard, absorbing the withering hail of auto-turret fire, came four fifty-ton Spartans.

The machina were classic infantry models, responsible for most of the heavy lifting during War 4.0 in areas where the radiation was too hot for meat troops. They stood thirty feet high, the crescent-shaped heat sinks on their heads giving them the silhouettes of old Greek soldierboys from the history virtch. They were painted scarlet, snatches of mangled scripture on their hulls. Long banners flowed from their shoulders and waists, adorned with the Brotherhood sigil—a stylized black X.

“Grandpaaaaa!” Eve yelled.

A Spartan stomped up to Northeast-2 and smashed it to scrap. Eve felt a distant, shuddering boom as the thermex charges at the turret’s base exploded. She glanced at the screen for North-3, saw the Spartan on its back, smoking and legless. But the rest of the posse was still moving, just a few minutes shy of ringing the front doorbell.

Eve glanced at her bestest. “These boys mean biz.”

Lemon was looking down the corridor, back toward Eve’s workshop. Her face was unusually thoughtful, brow creased.

“What did Mister C do back on the mainland? Before you moved here?”

“He was a botdoc,” Eve said, watching the Brotherhood march closer. “A mechanic.”

“You remember where he worked?”

“Lem, in case you missed it, there’s a very angry mob outside our house carrying a cross my size. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Because that lifelike acted like he knew you. Like you’d forgotten him. And he called you by a different name, Evie. Someone in this game isn’t dealing straight.”

Eve knew Lem was right, but, true cert, impending murder just seemed more of a pressing issue right now. The Brotherhood mob was posse’ing around their three remaining Spartans, about a hundred meters from the house. The machina were armed with autoguns and a plasma cannon on each shoulder, and those things could liquefy steel. The house had only two auto-sentries on the roof, and against the bigbots’ armor, they weren’t going to be much help. As far as capital T went, Eve couldn’t remember being in much deeper. But she gritted her teeth, forced her fear down into her boots. She was a Domefighter, dammit. This was her home. She wasn’t giving it up without a kicking.

The lead Spartan’s cockpit cracked open, and a brief blast of choir music spilled across the Scrap. A barrel-chested figure in an embroidered red cassock vaulted down onto the trash, holding an assault rifle engraved with religious scripture. He wore mirrored goggles and had sideburns you could hang a truck off, a big greasepaint X daubed on his face. Eve knew him by reputation—a fellow who tagged himself the Iron Bishop.

“I am cometh not to bring peace, but a sword!” he bellowed.

“Amen!” roared the Brothers.

The Iron Bishop held out his hand, and a juve slapped an old microphone into his palm. With a flourish, the Bishop held the mic to his lips, his voice crackling through his Spartan’s public address system.

“In the name of the Lord! The Brotherhood demands that all genetic deviates housed within this domicile surrendereth themselves immediately for divine purification!”

Eve scowled, tried harder to swallow her growing dread. “Purification” basically meant getting nailed up outside the Brotherhood’s chapel in Los Diablos and left for the sun. The Brotherhood was always crowing about the evils of biomodification and cybernetics, and they had a major hate-on for genetic deviation. But they were big enough that the local law didn’t want to push the friendship. So if you happened to be born with a sixth finger or webbed toes or something a little more exotic, sorry, friendo, that was just life in the Scrap.

Cricket sat on Eve’s shoulder, peering at the feeds with mismatched eyes.

“Aren’t they hot in those cassocks?” he chirped.

“They make ’em out of Kevlar weave,” Eve murmured. “Bulletproof, see?”

“Got a bad feeling on this,” the bot said. “Right in my shiny metal man parts.”

“Keep telling you, you got no man parts, Crick,” Lemon sighed.

“Yeah,” said a tired voice. “I’m such a bastard.”

Eve turned with a surge of sweet relief, saw her grandfather sitting at the doorway in his electric wheelchair. But standing behind him …

“Um,” Lemon said. “Should he … be here?”

The lifelike.

It stood behind Grandpa in its high-tech flight suit, bloodstains on the fabric, Kaiser’s teeth marks on its throat. Old-sky blue eyes flitting from screen to screen.