Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(26)
This is not my life.
This is not my home.
I am not me.
My brother and my sisters are sitting around me, sprawled on white couches made of a fabric I don’t know. The room is large and heart-shaped, pre-Fall art hung in holographic frames on the walls. The sky outside the window is cloudless, and the tint on the glass makes it seem almost blue.
I’ve never been in this place before.
I’ve been in this place all my life.
My little brother Alex is beating my oldest sister Olivia at chess. Tania is looking at her palmglass. Marie is sitting behind me, gently braiding my long blond hair, and my eyelashes are fluttering against my cheeks like butterflies.
There are no such things as butterflies anymore.
Music is playing through the walls, the notes tingling on my skin. But slowly the sonata fades away, replaced by a voice that comes from all around us. A figure appears on an empty plinth, translucent and carved of light. It looks like an angel, beautiful and feminine, the long ribbons of its wings flowing like fabric in an imaginary breeze.
“Children. Your father is on his way to speak to you.”
That sets us moving, standing and smoothing down our clean white clothes. I share a smile with Alex and he beams back at me. Olivia puts her arm around my shoulder, and I squeeze Marie’s hand. It seems so long since Father has come to see us. I remember he’s been busy with his Work. That I miss him terribly.
The memory in Eve’s mind flickered like a faulty feed to a broken vidscreen, and she saw her siblings as she remembered them. Their clothes weren’t new or clean. They didn’t live in a beautiful room full of beautiful things. And instead of music, in the distance she could hear screaming. A girl.
Crying and screaming.
The image flickers again, and I’m back in the not-place. Not my life. Not my home. My father is standing before us, not dressed as I remember him. But he puts his arms around us, all of us caught up in his embrace. Mother is beside him, pressed close, and though the place is wrong and my clothes are wrong and my life is wrong, this is still how I remember us. Together. A family. Forever.
Nothing will change that.
“Children,” Father says. “There are some people I’d like you to meet.”
Nothing will change that.
Breathe.
Water all around her. Black and salty and just a little too warm. Spears of light above. A million bubbles dancing, the groan of tortured metal, the butterfly-belly sensation of vertigo swelling inside her as the dim light around her grew dimmer still.
They were sinking.
Don’t breathe.
Eve squeezed her eyes shut, switching her optic to low-light setting. The world was green and black as she opened them again, sounds all dull and distant underwater. The freighter was plunging down, down into the greasy, sump-stained water of Zona Bay. She was still strapped into the copilot’s seat. Lemon was unconscious in her lap, her shock of blood-red hair drifting like weeds, actual blood spilling from her wounded brow.
Eve remembered where they were. The fight with Faith. Her grandpa stolen away. Her lungs were burning, head pounding. Beyond the pain of it, her brain filled with a single thought, growing louder and more frantic the lower they sank.
Breathe.
Cricket was at her waist, boggle eyes glowing in the dark, tearing at her seat belt. Eve’s fingers found the clasp, finally snapping it free, and she and Lem tumbled out and up. The cabin was filled with bubbles, a million crystal spheres spiraling ever upward. She couldn’t see Kaiser. Couldn’t see Ezekiel. She could barely see the surface—dim and distant now. The ship was sinking deeper with every second. She had to get out. She didn’t want to die. She hadn’t liked it much the first time.
Eve grabbed Lemon by her jacket, Cricket clinging to her belt as she kicked out through the shattered windshield. The water tasted like death and oil, filling her boots and pockets as she surged up toward the distant sunlight. A million miles away.
The ship that had been her home for two years spiraled into the depths below, trying to suck her down toward its grave. She shook her head, kicked savagely, teeth bared. Refusing the dark. Refusing to sleep. Swimming up. Lem’s collar in her fist, her bestest’s arms and legs floating akimbo in the current. Water all around. Water everywhere.
Don’t breathe.
Lem was so heavy. Eve’s boots were lead. Her clothes held her back. Cricket was trying to swim, but he was metal. Somewhere in the middle of the crash, he’d managed to grab Excalibur, too, which was just more weight to sink her. Faith had punched her in the head during the brawl; her temple was throbbing, the bone around her Memdrive implant aching from the impact. She wondered if it was dama— A flash of light in her mind. An image of white walls and floors and ceilings. A voice like music in the air. A garden like she’d never seen, domed glass holding back the night above. A smile. Sweet and gentle and three microns shy of perfect.
I was made for you.
All I am.
All I do,
I do for you.
Groaning metal. Terrible pressure. Eve blinked hard, shook her head in the salt-thick crush. Kicking toward that impossibly distant light.
Breathe.
It’s too far.
Don’t breathe.
Too far away.
Someone help me.
Grandpa?
Ezekiel?
Please … ?
She heard it before she saw it. Felt the tremor in the water at her back. Black spots burning in her vision, lungs on fire, she turned and there it was, rising from the darkness behind her. Colossal and impossible, cruising out of the gloom right toward her.