Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(39)
“I … what …”
“Shhh, hush now.”
“Was anyone hurt?” I croak, my heart hammering.
Father can’t meet my eyes.
“… Grace?” I ask.
He sighs. I see Ezekiel hang his head.
“Oh, no,” I breathe.
Poor Grace.
… Poor Gabriel.
What will he do without her?
“I’m sorry, Princess,” Father says. “I was blind. But my eyes are open now. This attack came from within Gnosis. They don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve here. They never will. And I’m taking steps to ensure this never happens again.”
Father’s voice is dark, his eyes darker still. His face makes me frightened, and for a moment, I feel I don’t know him at all.
This is not my life.
This is not my home.
I am not me.
“Father …”
“You rest easy now. You’ve been brave enough for one day.”
He presses a button on the machine beside me, and I feel a chill creep into my arm through the IV at my wrist. I look to Ezekiel. I want so desperately to hold him. For us to be together again, far from here, far from this. But he doesn’t move a muscle. And as sleep takes me, I hear Father’s voice, his vow, hissed through gritted teeth.
“No one hurts my children. No one will hurt you again. I promise, Ana.”
And I remember.
Ana.
My name is …
1.12
REVELATION
“My name is Ana Monrova,” she breathed.
The girl was on her hands and knees, beneath the surface of a black sea.
A homunculus of spare parts beside her, bewilderment in his plastic eyes.
A beautiful boy, who was nothing close to a boy, watching silently.
She hung her head.
Tasted ashes.
Ashes and lies.
“My name is Ana Monrova… .”
1.13
LEMON
She woke in blackness.
Spots of luminous green. A subsonic hum. A thudding rhythm echoing in the walls around her. Lemon Fresh winced, spat the taste of oil off her tongue. She was on a soft slab, hands and feet encased in translucent resin. Her belly felt full of ice and greasy flies.
Her memories were fragmented, bloodied around the edges. She remembered the throwdown with the Brotherhood and Fridge Street boys. That lifelike descending from the sky like some angel of death and blowing their favorite bits and pieces all around the yard. The frantic flight from Dregs.
Everything else was kinda blurry, talking true.
She had no idea where she was. No idea what had happened to that murderbot with the spankable tail section, or Crick or Kaiser or Evie or even Grandpa, for that matter.
Grandpa.
It was stupid to think of him that way. She’d only known him a year. But he’d been kind to her, in a world where kind only came at a price. He’d given her a roof when most creeps only ever offered a bed. Fifteen years in the stinking scrap pile that was Dregs, and Silas and Eve were the first people who’d ever given her more than a taking.
Funnily enough, take was exactly what she’d tried to do to them.
Lemon had been living hard on the streets of Los Diablos since she was a sprog. Hanging with the other gutter runners a year back, she’d caught some talk about an old man who worked wonders with tech troubles. Mechanical genius, folks said. Could fix the broken sky, they said. Figuring a gent like that would be carrying some decent scratch, she’d followed Silas and Eve through the LD sprawl one day. And when the moment was right, Lemon cut the old man’s pocket and lifted three shiny credstiks, right into the greasy palm of her hand.
Sadly, she was so fizzy at the sight of all that scratch, she lingered too long. Eve had spun around and collared her. Lemon fought and bit and broke away, leaving Eve with nothing but a torn poncho in her hands.
Lemon figured she’d gotten off free and clean. Didn’t count on Kaiser, though. Didn’t know blitzhunds could track you over a thousand k’s with a single particle of your DNA.
They found her in some fetid corner of the Burrows. Curled under a cardboard roof, clutching the credstiks to her chest like a mother holding a newborn sprat. She’d woken to the blitzhund’s growl. And old Silas Carpenter had looked around at the squalor she lived in, and he’d spoke with a voice like she supposed fathers would use.
“You ever want a decent meal,” he’d said, “come out to Tire Valley and look us up.”
“You’re too old for me, Gramps,” Lemon had replied.
He’d laughed then, a laugh that had turned into a racking cough. It’d be six more months before it gripped him so tight he couldn’t walk, but the cancer had him by the insides, even back then. And still, he’d managed to smile.
“I like you, kiddo,” he’d said.
He’d let her keep the credstiks. And when she fronted up to his door after the scratch ran out, he fed her, just like he’d said. And though she never called him Grandpa to his face, it’d always be the name he wore inside her head.
She wondered where he was now. Where Evie was. If they were okay.
If she was okay …
“Helloooo?” she called. “Anyone there?”
She heard a whimper, soft and electronic. Craning her neck, she saw Kaiser on a slab beside her, his gut leaking wires and broken feeds. He tried to paw toward her, but he was bound in the same translucent resin that held her hands and feet in place.