Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(77)

“Craaaap.”

“Preacher,” Ana breathed.

Ezekiel glanced into the rearview mirror, squinting against the sunset.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s him.” Ana nodded. “Definitely.”

Ezekiel’s face went pale, his hand gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. The metal groaned in his grip. His eyes were just a little too bright.

“Hope … ,” he whispered.

Ana didn’t know quite how to feel. Hope had betrayed her father. Helped murder her family. Forgiveness was never going to be an option. But the lifelike had been trying to make some kind of amends in that ministry. Atone as best she could. She’d given them sanctuary. Helped them when the whole world seemed arrayed against them.

Did she deserve to die?

Murdered by some psychopath in a fight that wasn’t even hers?

Ana had no time to fret over the question. Squinting through the dust, she realized even worse news was riding hot on the Preacher’s tail. Not just one motorcycle, but dozens. Flanked by heavier trucks, tricked-out dirt racers, juiced-up 4x4s. Skull-and-crossbones flags fluttering from their aerials, daubed across their hoods. A posse of Freebooters from Armada by the look, hell bent on getting back their bosslady’s stolen wheels.

Didn’t think she’d take it that personally …

Ezekiel pointed through the windshield.

“Ana …”

She looked to where Zeke was motioning. The sunset to the west was spectacular, but the sight in front of them almost stole her breath away. Through her telescopics, Ana could see black clouds on the northern horizon, a looming wall of darkness that stretched from the earth far up into the heavens. Lightning streaked across the sky, crackling a strange, luminous orange. The rolling wall was still kilometers away, but looked to be right in their path. Her belly turned cold with dread.

“You frightened of a little thunder, Stumpy?” Cricket growled.

“That’s no rain cloud,” Ezekiel said.

“It’s a glasstorm,” Ana breathed.

Lemon blinked in confusion. “They make those in glass now?”

“I remember them from when I was little,” Ana explained. “They’d sometimes blow in all the way to Babel. The Glass is basically just a big section of desert melted by the bombs back in the war, yeah? So when the winds pick up hard enough, sometimes the glass gets whipped up along with all the sand and dust. Glasstorms can be hundreds of kilometers across. They can last days. Sometimes weeks.”

“Well, that sounds like a whole bunch of zero fun,” Lemon said.

“Depends if you consider being torn to pieces by shards of radioactive silicon fun.”

“Point of order,” Cricket said, rapping his knuckles on the seat. “I can’t help but notice we’re driving directly toward this whole bunch of zero fun about as fast as we can. Shouldn’t we be headed right the hell away from it?”

Ana glanced at Ezekiel. “My learned colleague raises a good point, Zeke.”

“It’s over a thousand kilometers between here and Babel, even cutting direct across the Glass,” he replied. “Nearly twice that if we go around the storm. If we lost a quarter of our fuel in that stray shot to the tanks, I’m not sure we have the juice to make a detour that big. This truck runs fast, but she’s thirsty.”

“Wait,” Cricket said. “So you want to take us into it? If you’re that keen on murdering us, there’s less obvious ways to get it done, Stumpy.”

“Take a look behind us,” Ezekiel said. “That’s a whole bunch of murder on our tails already. We head into the Glass, any of those Freebooters who didn’t bring rad-suits will have to turn back or risk dying of radiation poisoning.”

“We stole rad-gear from the Wheelhouse,” Cricket pointed out. “They’ll know where we’re headed. They’d have come equipped, for sure.”

“Even if they did, half of them are riding bikes. They follow us into the glasstorm, they’ll risk being ripped to ribbons. Halving the number of angry people with guns chasing us would be a good way to stay unmurdered, wouldn’t you say?”

Ana scoped the wall of blackness through the dirty windshield. It looked like a rolling cloud of smoke, kilometers high. She remembered the bad ones that had hit Babel when she was a little girl. Curled up in bed with Marie and Alex, Myriad’s reassurances rising over the howling song of millions of razor-sharp shards scraping against her bedroom window. One time it was so bad, she and all her siblings had ended up in their parents’ bed, cowering under the silken sheets. And Babel had only ever caught the edge of the storms. She had no idea what it would mean to actually drive into one.

But if they didn’t have the fuel to drive around it …

“Doesn’t sound like we have much choice,” she declared. “Number One, your thoughts?”

Lem pulled down her goggs, gave a thumbs-up. “Unmurdered sounds grand to me.”

“Looks like the ayes have it again, Mister Cricket,” Ana shrugged.

The little logika growled and shook his head. “You know, democracy sounds like a great idea until you spend three minutes with the average voter.”

Ezekiel gunned Thundersaurus toward the tempest. Ana and Lemon broke out the radiation gear they’d stolen from the Wheelhouse—two lumpy plastic suits with sealed, gas-mask-style helmets. One was a disgusting shade of green, the other a violent pink.