Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(87)

Lemon took a step back at that. Hand at her chest as if to hold in the ache.

“… But where will I go?”

“Anywhere but here.”

She’d left them both on that broken highway, with the Preacher’s body and the tiny pieces of shrapnel that had been Kaiser. They’d begged her to listen. To wait. To stay. But she’d turned her back on them both. It had been bad enough when she’d discovered the life Silas had built her was a lie. Bad enough when she’d remembered Faith and Gabriel’s betrayal. But now that Ezekiel and Lemon had deceived her, too? How could she trust either of them ever again? How could she call either of them her friend?

She pushed the question aside, leaving it in the dust. Intent now only on Babel. The murderers within. She didn’t even know what she wanted anymore. But whatever it was, she knew it lay inside that tower.

“Are you sure about this?” Cricket asked her.

The little bot was nestled on her shoulder as she piloted the Titan down the highway. The only one she could count on. The only one left to trust.

“I’m sure,” she replied.

“You don’t have to do this. We could turn back now. Just run away again.”

“Again?” She shook her head. “Crick, I don’t think I ever left this place.”

“Listen, I can see you’re hurting. But there’s still folks who love you.”

“I know you do, Crick.” She reached out and squeezed his little metal hand. “And I’m sorry about what I said in Armada. You’re the only one who’s always steered me true. I’ve never doubted you. But even if they didn’t have Grandpa, somehow I was always going to end up back here. This is where it began. And this is where it ends.”

He looked at her with those glowing, mismatched eyes.

“I’m just worried about the kind of end you’re looking for,” he said.

Ana clenched her fists inside the control gloves and marched on. The Titan climbed through the shattered wall encircling the ruined city, crunched and clomped through the broken streets, closer to that winding spire of glass and steel. A lonely, cancerous crow called in the skies above. Her reckoning, dead ahead.

She remembered this place like she’d left it yesterday. The lives and dreams born here, dying in a sun-bright shear of neutron radiation. She could see withered bodies scattered among the ruins, skin like rags. Had they looked to a god to save them in those final moments? Or to the man who’d simply styled himself as one? Who’d built himself angels to destroy all he’d created?

Father …

Closer to the tower. Buildings with hollow eyes and open mouths. Bodies growing thicker. Cricket sat silently on her shoulder, his stare locked on that colossal structure. Her Titan’s Geiger counter was crackling in the redline, the radiation outside still hot enough to ghost her with a few hours’ exposure, and it was only getting hotter as they approached Babel’s reactor. Dust rolled like clouds of phantoms through the abandoned streets, shapeless and howling. On they stomped, wrapped inside their metal shell with only the lonely dead and each other for company.

No sign of life. No sound but the endless, whispering winds.

No resistance. No automata. No sentry guns.

“This is too easy,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Cricket muttered.

At last, they stood before the tower, ringed by a broken security perimeter of metal and wire. Ana saw the wrecks of Daedalus machina all around her, a winged-sun logo emblazoned on their hulls. The bodies of soldiers wearing that same logo were strung up on the security fence in the hundreds. A lifeless parade, silently screaming. It looked like an entire division—perhaps the remnants of an invasion force that had tried to seize Babel’s secrets and been beaten back by whoever, or whatever, still lived inside it.

“Hell of a KEEP OUT sign,” Cricket said.

“They don’t like visitors, I guess,” Ana muttered.

She knew her best point of entry would be through the Research and Development division’s storage bay, where Gnosis used to store their machina and logika. The place Grace had died. The place Gabriel’s descent into madness had begun. She knew she’d have to fight to break her grandpa free, and her only edge over Gabriel and the other lifelikes was the Titan she was piloting. She couldn’t afford to leave it behind. And so, heart hammering in her chest, she stomped around to the entry of R & D.

The two large doors leading into the loading bay were open wide. She saw abandoned personnel carriers and flex-wings. Empty turret emplacements. Broken machina. All of them slowly turning to rust. She could hear the explosion inside her head, picture Grace silhouetted against those flames as she shattered like glass.

She saw more bodies. Hundreds, clad in the charcoal gray and armored blue of Gnosis security members. It looked like they’d been mustering a counterattack against the lifelikes when the neutron blast ripped through their ranks. They lay crumpled where they fell, empty eye sockets open to the sky.

“They didn’t even bury them,” she whispered.

She remembered Hope’s words in Armada. Her talk of Gabriel’s obsession and madness. Nobody could love like a lifelike, she’d said. What had Gabriel filled himself with when his love had died? What was waiting for her inside that tower? What kind of monsters had they created? And what had those monsters become in the years she’d been gone?