Red sprayed up the stone. Bones were smashed into powder, organs pulped. Faith coughed, blood dripping from between her teeth. She fixed Cricket in her stare, tried to speak. And finally, she slumped forward over the twisted metal, her arc-blade dropping from her fingers.
“THAT’S FOR SILAS,” the big bot whispered.
He turned to Abraham, saw the boy sink to his knees, holding his bleeding head. He looked like seven slices of hell, warmed up in a faulty microwave. Cricket clomped to his side, looked down with burning blue optics.
“YOU ALL RIGHT?”
The boy nodded, gave the thumbs-up sign. Cricket looked to the bleachers, saw Solomon was on his feet, wobbling on his faulty dynamo. The logika gave Cricket a small round of applause, then wrote on his damn whiteboard.
Capital work, old friend!
Cricket shook his head. Lifted Abraham gently in his hand, dug his fingers into the concrete and climbed up out of the bloody killing floor.
“OLD FRIEND?” he said to Solomon. “YOU REALIZE WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR THREE DAYS, RIGHT?”
Solomon grinned, wrote another note on his board.
Which makes you my oldest friend. Now perhaps we should vacate this pigpen before it burns down around our ears?
Cricket looked at the chaos around them, the burning buildings and the rising smoke. Once again, the skinny logika was making sense. Leaning down, he picked up Solomon and plopped him on his shoulder.
“ALL RIGHT. LET’S FIND THE OTHERS.”
* * *
________
“Hit ’em when they’re on the bridge,” Preacher whispered.
Ezekiel was still crouched behind the power generators, looking into the sphere that held Ana’s life-support capsule. The air around him was freezing cold, thin frost already crusted in his dark curls. Gabriel and Uriel were busy uncoupling that glass coffin from the larger system, preparing it for transport.
The sphere was ringed by a frost-encrusted gantry, suspended over a deep fall into darkness. Preacher was right—hitting them on the bridge gave his siblings the least room to react. To fight. Ezekiel knew he had to be as cold as the ice on the walls now. The future of humanity itself was at stake here. Not to mention Ana’s life.
What was left of it, anyway.
But his stare was fixed on Eve.
She stood beside their brothers, watching Uriel and Gabriel work. The pair were as excited as children. The promise of their robotic legion and the resurrection of the lifelike program was within their grasp. But Eve’s eyes were locked on the girl floating in that softly glowing blue—the girl she’d been built to replace. The girl she’d searched for across the ruins of the Yousay.
Her hand was still at her own throat.
Fingertips digging into her skin.
Uriel and Gabriel finished their work, coupling the life-support unit to a small generator and disengaging the locks that held the capsule in place. It floated similar to a grav-tank: a small cushion of magnetized particles keeping it from touching the ground, the frost on the floor crackling with small arcs of current.
Preacher flipped the safeties on his shooters, scruffed Jojo behind his ears.
“Ready?” he whispered.
She’s not the girl you knew….
“Goddammit, wake up!” Preacher hissed.
“I’m ready,” Ezekiel whispered. “Just don’t hit Ana.”
“Told you, Zekey,” the bounty hunter winked. “I ain’t no killer. An artiste is what I am.”
Uriel pushed the hatchway wide, began backing out of the sphere.
Ezekiel had a clear shot at his brother’s spine.
“Come, sister,” Gabriel said to Eve. “Let’s get her home.”
Together, they pushed the support capsule out of the frozen compartment. Uriel came first, dragging the weight, Gabriel pushing the other end of the capsule. Eve came last, walking slower, clouded hazel eyes still fixed on her doppelgänger. And into the crackling, pregnant silence, she spoke. A question that made Ezekiel’s stomach flip.
“…Should we be doing this?” she whispered.
Uriel and Gabriel stopped, turning to look at their sister.
“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.
“I mean…” Eve looked at the sphere around them. The girl in that frozen coffin of glass. “We just need her DNA for the third Myriad lock. Maybe we could just take a blood sample? Leave her here. Let her sleep. Like her father wanted.”
“Her father?” Uriel spat. “Why do we care what he wanted?”
“I thought you wanted her dead?” Gabriel demanded.
Eve’s eyes were fixed on Ana. The face behind the glass. Like a mirror. Like a pale reflection of herself. Ezekiel’s breath came a little quicker as she looked down at her open hand, slowly shook her head.
“I don’t know….”
“Not you, too?” Uriel snarled. “Bad enough I have to endure this lovesick puppy’s idiocy”—he waved at Gabriel—“now I have to deal with an attack of your conscience? Can not a single one of you forget your human frailties long enough to see this through to the end?”
“Go to hell, Uriel,” Gabriel spat.
“I’m already in it!” the lifelike cried. “Surrounded by deluded fools who believe they’re human. We are better! Stronger! More! We are the nex—”
The bullet struck Uriel in the back of his skull, blew his pretty face clean out. Gabriel and Eve flinched as they were splashed with blood and brain, as another dozen shots ripped through Uriel’s throat, torso, belly. The lifelike tottered, arms twitching, toppling into the railing and tumbling down into the vent shaft below.
“Lord, your family’s mouthy, Zeke,” Preacher growled, lowering his pistols.
Gabriel and Eve were already moving as the bounty hunter reloaded, dashing across the causeway and into cover. Half in a daze, the picture of Uriel’s end flashing in his mind, Ezekiel started blasting, shots ripping into Gabriel’s belly and thigh as his brother dove behind a bank of equipment. His heart was aching as he fired. His mouth dry as the wasteland humanity had made outside these walls. He knew his siblings were monsters. He’d seen all the hurt they’d given the world. Gabriel had murdered Monrova, little Alex; put a gun to a ten-year-old boy’s head and smiled as he pulled the trigger. Uriel had murdered Tania, snuffed her out like a candle without a shred of remorse. And Eve was a killer, too—the massacre at Paradise Falls and who knew where else. All of her design.