Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(67)

“Open it up, Braintrauma.”

Ezekiel complied, peeling away the tarpaulin. Wrapped inside was a cybernetic arm.

It probably dated back to before the war. The cerebral relays were the old crappy kind that needed to be jacked into the nervous system directly at the spine. It was ugly, bulky, all pistons and bolts and smeared in grease. But it worked well enough—Eve had fixed most of the glitches between bouts of working on Kaiser.

“Figure it’ll tide you over till your old one grows back,” she shrugged.

The boy who wasn’t a boy looked her in the eye. Dimple creasing his cheek as he smiled his crooked smile, letting loose a storm of mechanical butterflies in her belly.

“Thanks.”

“Get your shirt off.”

Ezekiel’s eyebrow rose. He looked around at the assembled children, back to Eve.

“Ummmm …”

“Keep your pants on, Braintrauma. I need your shirt off to install the arm.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lemon said. She scanned the room, found a beat-up old recliner chair with the stuffing leaking out of it, dragged it near to Ezekiel, dropped into it, reclined backward and pulled her goggles down over her eyes. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Two dozen expectant pairs of eyes were now fixed on the lifelike.

“… Mmmaybe we can do this someplace private?” he suggested.

Eve grinned. Motioned to the workshop. “Step into my office.”

The pair walked across the tanker’s innards to the workshop and closed the door behind them. Lemon sighed in disappointment, pulled the goggles off her head. She scoped the assembled urchins, the moldy playing cards on their makeshift table.

“You wanna play?” a skinny boy asked.

“Hells no?”

“You scared?”

Lemon yawned. “I don’t get out of bed for bottle caps, Stinky.”

The children glanced at Daniella to see if she was looking. Having confirmed the coast was clear, each pulled a handful of credstiks from inside their clothes, flashed them at Lemon.

“So. You wanna play?” the skinny boy asked again.

Lemon looked the kid in the eye. Fingered the stolen creds in her cargos.

“All right, you little snots,” she muttered. “Let’s dance.”

“What’s your name?” Stinky asked as Lemon pulled up a chair.

The girl cracked her knuckles. Picking up the cards, she fanned them out over the table, swept them up into a riffle shuffle, dovetailed them into a perfect stack and set them down before the wide-eyed children. She dropped her stiks on the table and smiled.

“You can call me Daddy.”





1.22


IMMOLATION

“Is this going to hurt?” Ezekiel asked.

“As much as getting your arm ripped off in the first place? Probably not.”

Ezekiel sat on the workbench, side-eyeing the bulky cybernetic limb.

“I mean, we don’t have to do this. Mine will regenerate eventually.”

“Don’t be a baby. Off with the shirt, Braintrauma.”

“… You’re really back to calling me that now?”

“Off.”

The lifelike sighed, reached down with his one arm and wrangled his tee over his head. There was no trace of the Preacher’s bullet wounds anywhere—his skin was flawless. Eve tried not to notice the way the muscles flexed along his arm, rippled across his back. Tried not to notice the cut of his chest or the perfect hills and valleys running down his abdomen, the taut V-shaped line leading into his jeans.

Tried, and failed completely.

“Okay,” she said. “Hold still.”

She held the prosthetic to the stump of his arm. He’d regenerated most of his bicep along with the bone beneath, and she was forced to modify the limb so it’d fit, working in silence with welding goggles to her eyes. When she was done, she anchored the cyberarm to his bone with an interlocking cuff, wincing in sympathy as he hissed in pain.

“Sorry, that hurt?”

“It doesn’t tickle.” He grimaced. “Have you done this sort of thing before?”

“Not once.”

“Beautiful.”

“Why, thank you, kind sir.”

Eve secured the prosthetic with a leather shoulder guard and series of straps that stretched across the coin slot bolted between his pecs. Her fingers brushed his skin, and she couldn’t help but notice the way it prickled. She tightened each buckle, their faces inches apart. His eyes fixed on hers as the Ana in her breathed harder, the Eve trying her best to ignore him.

“You’re staring,” she finally said.

“Should I stop?”

Eve stomped the butterflies down into her boots, grabbed the handful of cerebral relays—long surgical-steel needles that plugged straight into his spinal column—that would connect the arm to his neural network. Under normal circumstances, this whole procedure would be done with anesthetic in sterile conditions, but she figured lifelikes weren’t human, so they probably weren’t susceptible to normal infections. Thing is, she didn’t even know if the prosthetic would recognize an artificial’s nervous system.

“Okay,” she warned. “This is really going to hurt.”

“Be gentle with m—”