Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(42)

“So. You know any good show tunes?”

“Wuff,” went Kaiser.

“Figures,” she sighed.





1.14


SURGERY

“You knew,” Eve whispered. “You knew who I was.”

Ezekiel was kneeling beside her on the island of scrap. Fear in his eyes.

“I tried to tell you,” he said. “But Silas …”

“You mean the bastard who pretended to be my grandfather the last two years?”

“Ana, I’m sorry,” Ezekiel pleaded. “Silas told me the shock of remembering might hurt you. You took a headshot during the revolt. It was all he could do to piece your mind back together afterward. He wanted to build a new life for you. Away from Babel and all that pain. There was nothing but hurt in your past.”

She stared down at the palm of her hand. The ruby-red chip that had contained the memories of her childhood. Except they weren’t her memories at all. Silas hadn’t built her a life. He’d built her a lie.

“Evie?” Cricket was hovering beside her, looking back and forth between her and Ezekiel. “Evie, what’s happening?”

She looked at the little logika with suspicion. He’d been made by Silas, after all… .

“Crick, did you know?”

“… Know what?”

“Who I am? Where I’m from?”

“You’re Eve Carpenter,” the little bot frowned. “You were from some dustneck mainland settlement, and now Dregs. And what are you talking about? ‘My name is Ana Monrova’? Evie, Ana Monrova died when Gnosis collapsed. Her whole family did.”

“No,” Ezekiel said. “She didn’t.”

Cricket waved a tiny finger in Ezekiel’s face. “Shut up, murderbot. When I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you. You just stay away from her, you read me? You lifelikes are the ones who butchered the Monrovas in the first place.”

“No, that’s not true,” Ezekiel said. “I saved her.”

Eve looked up at the lifelike. Seeing him for the first time. For the thousandth time. He was just as she remembered him. That night in her bed, that night in his arms. With Silas’s broken chip out of her skull, it seemed like yesterday. She swore she could still taste his kisses. Feel them falling on her skin like the sweetest rain.

They stared at each other in the gloom, a few inches and a thousand miles apart. Her optic whirred as she blinked. Her head was splitting.

“What do you remember?” he asked softly.

“My life in Babel. My father, my family. Doctor Silas.” She met his eyes then, chest aching. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to scream at him. “You and me.”

“The bomb?”

She nodded.

“The revolt?”

Eve frowned. Her skull was aching, her optic itching. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, pushing pieces together one at a time to see if they fit.

“Fragments,” she said. “I remember … a holding cell. My family …”

Shiny boots ring on the stairs as they march into our cell, four of them all in a pretty row. Blank faces and perfect skin, matte gray pistols in red, red hands. A beautiful man with golden hair says they’re here to execute us. No explanations. No apologies.

But they hadn’t been soldiers, had they?

A beautiful man with golden hair …

“Gabriel,” she breathed.

Ezekiel swallowed. Nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Faith. Hope. They … killed them. They killed us… .”

“Not you.”

My brother crawls to Father’s body and my sisters are still screaming. My tongue sticks to my teeth, and Mother’s blood is warm on my lips, and I— “Ezekiel.” She squeezed his hand so hard her knuckles turned white. “If there was ever anything between us that was real, tell me what the hells happened. Please.”

The boy who wasn’t a boy at all sat back on the refuse pile. Even dipped in drying slime and covered in muck, he was beautiful. But he looked so sad and alone, she forgot her rage for a moment. She just wanted to put her arms around him. Hold him like she had that night in her room, kissing his tears away.

Had that really been my life?

The walls shifted around them, strange warbling notes reverberating through the kraken’s flesh. The floor beneath them shuddered briefly, then fell still. Ezekiel’s eyebrow rose in alarm as he scoped the chamber. Eve had to steady herself against the floor.

“Maybe we should talk about this later,” the lifelike suggested.

She sighed, looking around them. Her mind was in turmoil, rage and sadness and denial all blurring together. She wanted the rest of the story. She wanted the damn truth. But as if on cue, the walls rumbled again and another great gush of black seawater roared in from the ceiling. The rusted shell of an old shipping container tumbled into the chamber, along with a tangled mash of plastic bags. The wreckage crashed down into the soup, pelting them all in a fine spray of sludge.

“We really need to get out of here,” Ezekiel said.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Cricket murmured, “but I’m starting to agree with Stumpy. We should finish this conversation someplace else.”

Eve dragged her nose across her filthy sleeve. Her eye was bloodshot, her cheeks streaked with tears. Her whole world had just been upended. Her whole life was a fiction. But Lemon and Kaiser needed her. And despite who she’d been, a part of her was still Evie Carpenter. Undefeated eight straight in the baddest WarDome this side of the Glass. Truth was, she could curl up and cry her little heart out or stand up and fight.