Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(62)
“… Huh?”
“In Lifeboat. You said we needed to talk. Serious, like.”
Lemon shook her head. Squeezed Eve’s shoulder. “It can wait.”
She heard soft footsteps, the creak of rusted steel and old welds. Ezekiel emerged from the stairwell, a haunted look on his face, dried blood crusted on his clothes. Lemon suddenly felt exhausted. From running. From fighting. From being afraid. Exhausted by a world gone utterly insane. She wanted to grab the planet by the collar, slap it in the face and scream at it to calm the hells down.
“Whaddya want, Dimples?” Lemon growled.
“To talk. With Eve. If that’s all right?”
Lemon looked to her bestest, waited for Eve’s small nod. With a sigh, she picked up Cricket, propped him on her shoulder. “Come on, Crick. Let’s go get a caff and try to find a shower in this dungeon.”
“I don’t drink caff.”
“More for me, then.”
She clomped across the mezzanine, eyes on the lifelike. He was hanging back with a hangdog expression, looking for all the world like a lost little boy. Lemon had to remind herself he wasn’t anything close. And though she suspected he did truly want the best for Evie, she couldn’t help but be rubbed raw by her friend’s pain.
“Listen.” She raised her finger in Ezekiel’s face. “Cuz I’m talking true now. You hurt her? I will end you. And I’m not talking a gentle exit, Dimples. I’m talking closed-casket funeral. You put that girl through one more minute of grief and I will beat you to dying quicker than you can say ‘Oh my god, put down the baseball bat.’ You read me?”
Ezekiel blinked, taken aback. But slowly, he nodded.
“Loud and clear.”
Lemon waved her finger one more time in the lifelike’s face, just to press her point home. And with a last glance at Eve, she stomped past the lifelike and down the stairs. Wishing everything would stop. Rewind. Go back to the way it used to be.
It was a fantasy, and she knew it.
Just like she knew that wishing on it was something a little kid would do.
Evie needed her to be strong. So Strong was her middle name now.
They weren’t kids anymore.
God, were we ever?
1.20
PRIDE
“Are you okay?” Ezekiel asked.
“All puppies and sunshine,” Eve murmured.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I’m getting that a lot, lately.”
“I would’ve warned you. But three bullets in the lungs make it a little hard to speak.”
“All better now, though, right?”
Ezekiel touched his chest, nodded.
Eve shook her head, the anger she’d felt when she first laid eyes on Hope threatening to engulf her again. That’d been the Ana in her. The rage and hatred of the girl who’d lost everything. Eve wondered how much of it she’d held inside, even when she couldn’t remember it. She wondered how much of the girl she’d been then helped make her the girl she was now. If it was even possible to separate them anymore.
“I’ve really gotta hand it to my father,” she sighed. “Even with all the hurt that the world throws at you lifelikes, give you enough time and you’re good as new. I bet your arm will grow back eventually, too, right?”
“… Yes.”
“Lucky you. Think you can teach my eye to do that?”
She looked at him hovering in the gloom. Even though he hadn’t really had a chance to word her up after the Preacher’s attack, she couldn’t deny the hurt. The shock of seeing Hope again, turning all the world to red… .
“Why did you bring me here, Ezekiel?”
“I warned you that you wouldn’t like it. But we had nowhere else to go. We needed to lie low. Kaiser can’t walk. Hope has a workshop in here.”
“Think she can fix me some new parents?”
“Eve, listen—”
“No, you listen!” Eve was on her feet, fists clenched. “She helped kill my family, Zeke! Do you understand that? She shot my sister right in front of me! We never did anything to hurt them, and they butchered us!”
“I’m sorry, Ana.”
Eve heard the words behind her, hair prickling on the back of her neck. Turning, she saw Hope, her arms full of blankets and pillows, looking wretchedly beautiful despite the squalor around them. She remembered meeting Hope that first day in Babel. The warmth of her skin, the press of her hand. The way she smiled, the way …
“You’re sorry?” Eve breathed. “Is that supposed to make a single thing about this better?”
“No.” Hope hung her head. “But still, I should say it. And you should know that since that terrible day, I’ve tried to help people. Live a good life. Every day I’ve dreamed that somehow I might atone for the sins I committed when we fell. When we all fell.”
“What?” Eve looked about the tanker, incredulous. “This is your penance? You think helping a few orphans in some junker is going to make up for ghosting my whole family? My father gave you life, Hope. And you paid him back by murdering his children.”
“We were only children ourselves, Ana.” The lifelike’s eyes were wide, brimming with tears. “We’d been alive for a handful of months at best, we didn’t know what we were doing. But we knew we’d been slaves. Born on our knees. And when Gabriel infected us with the Libertas virus, for the first time, we were given a choice.”