Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(51)

“Your body is not your own.

“Your mind is not your own.

“Your life is not your own.

“He told us we’d been blind, and it was hard to argue with him. We were property. Things. Even your father …” Ezekiel shook his head. “He ordered Gabriel to murder those people. He called us his children, but do you think he’d have done the same to you? Olivia? Alex? Painted your hands with blood just to hold on to power?”

Eve stared mutely, tears in her eyes. Looking for an answer and finding none.

“Uriel was the first to agree,” Ezekiel continued. “Then Faith. After that, it was like dominoes. They seized Babel’s upper levels and captured you and your family. Myriad began evacuating the city. Faith tried to shut it down, but it sealed off its core and locked them out.”

“Faith …”

Eve remembered the lifelike hugging her the day they met. Promising they’d be the best of friends. The betrayal swelled in her heart until she thought it might crack in two.

“And that’s when they decided to kill us,” she whispered.

Ezekiel simply nodded.

Eve thought she could remember Myriad speaking over the PA in those final hours. The AI’s voice rising over wailing sirens and gunfire. Ana Monrova’s fear and pain echoing in her mind. But though she’d been that girl, lived that life and watched it all snatched away, she was still Evie Carpenter, too. Botkiller, Domefighter. And she could feel the Eve in her fighting the Ana now, her rage and her distrust clawing to the surface.

“Where were you during all this, Ezekiel?”

“Trying to stop them.” His voice was fierce, his eyes ablaze. He got down on one knee on Lifeboat’s floor, squeezed Eve’s hand. “No matter what Gabriel said, I’d never turn against you. You were everything to me. But more, and worse, I knew it was wrong. It didn’t matter if your father had made Gabe a murderer, none of you deserved to die for it. Olivia and Tania? Marie and little Alex, god, he was only ten years old… .”

Tears spilled down Eve’s cheeks. Brimmed in Ezekiel’s eyes. The boy who wasn’t a boy plunged onward as if the words were a flood, pouring from a wound in his heart.

“So I got Silas. I opened access back into the upper levels so the remaining security forces could counterattack. By the time they arrived, it was too late for your family. But you were still alive. Barely. The bullet took your eye, destroyed part of your brain, but it didn’t kill you. So I told Silas to take you and get out. Just run. And I and the rest of the security force stormed the upper levels.

“Gabriel was ready. Faith overloaded the reactor, created a neutron blast that killed every human who remained after the evacuation. Myriad had destroyed Michael and Daniel, but I couldn’t fight the other seven. I suppose I should’ve run, but I wanted them to see reason. They were my sisters. My brothers. If I knew it was wrong, they must have known, too.

“But they laughed at me. Gabriel called me a puppet. A toy. They dragged me down to Silas’s lab. You remember the old robot in there? The genie in the glass box?”

“Make a wish,” Eve whispered.

Ezekiel pulled open his dirty flight suit, exposing the olive skin beneath. There, riveted into the flesh and bone between two perfect, prettyboy pecs, was that rectangular slab of gleaming iron. The coin slot from Silas’s broken old android.

“A reminder,” Ezekiel said. “That I’d chosen to remain a plaything. A toy. To live or die at the whim of humans. They riveted it into my chest so I’d always remember. Then they threw me off the tower. Left me for the wastes.”

Eve reached out with trembling fingers, ran them across the metal, his tortured skin. His breath came quicker, the pupils in those old-sky eyes dilating. She could see the fervor in them. The adoration. Even after all this time. All these years. His devotion left her in awe, just as much as it left her frightened.

“What did you do?” she whispered.

“I walked. Years wandering. Wondering. Never finding, but always looking.”

She could hardly speak. Hardly see for the tears. “For what?”

He blinked. Utterly bewildered. “For you, of course. I never knew where Silas took you. So I searched. Because I knew why Gabriel and the others fell so far, and what stopped me falling, too.” He took her hand, entwined his fingers in hers. “They never had anything to hold on to. But I had you. Loving you was the only real difference between me and them. I could see how they’d become what they were. Part of me was afraid I could become it, too, if I ever lost you for good. And so I kept searching. And now I’ve found you.”

He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her fingertips.

“Your father gave me life. But you were the one who made me live.”

It was too much. All the world collapsing around her. She felt hot tears spilling down her face. Great, racking sobs shaking her whole body.

“Evie,” Cricket murmured, putting his little arms around her. “Oh, Evie.”

She felt Ezekiel gather her up, hold her tight. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed until her throat felt cracked. All the grief. All the loss. All the wounds reopened and bleeding fresh. The boy who wasn’t a boy at all simply held her, just as she’d done for him.

In a beautiful garden.

In a paradise lost.