Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(94)

“Yes, Myriad,” he said. “Yes, please.”

“THIS IS POINTLESS, GABRIEL. YOU WILL NOT FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR HERE.”

“I said proceed!” Gabriel snarled.

“PROCESSING LOG-IN REQUEST. PLEASE WAIT.”

Ana finally realized they were on the Artificial Intelligence levels, right in the core of the tower. The Myriad computer was the figurative and literal heart of Babel, connected by enormous lattices of optical cable and wireless networks to every other system within Gnosis. Its interface wore the shape of that holographic angel, but it was actually a vast series of liquid-state servers and processing cores, housed within this single gleaming sphere. Its shell was meant to withstand a nuclear blast, its knowledge preserved even if the city around it died. Ana remembered it from her childhood—a constant companion, watching and hearing and touching every part of her life within the tower.

Only now it had shut itself down. Locked itself off rather than see its knowledge used by the things that had destroyed its creator.

And only a Monrova could open it again.

Four huge logika stood on either side of that sealed door. They were all Goliath-class: eighty-tonners with sky-blue optics, glowing purple in the blood-red light. They wore the perfect circle of the GnosisLabs logo on their chests, standing like statues and staring impassively. A human was in danger—the Three Laws were being broken right in front of them. And yet, they weren’t lifting a finger to help her.

Ana scoped the closest bot’s ident number, tagged on its chest.

“7849-1G, help me,” she commanded. “Get me out of this chair!”

The Goliath didn’t move a single metal muscle.

“I said help me!” she shouted.

“You might try a ‘please,’” Gabriel said. “If your father ever taught you how to say the word, that is.”

Ana looked at the lifelike. He was disheveled, barefoot. Thinner than he’d been. Hollowed cheeks and tangled hair. Ana glanced at the nicks and scratches in Myriad’s shell. Gabriel’s Three Truths, scrawled in dried blood on the chrome. Beside the creed, she saw tiny dimples in the metal, spattered with old blood. Little groups of four, side by side. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds.

Knuckle dents, she realized.

She scoped Gabriel’s hands. Strong and white and flawless. Imagined him down here, night after night, beating those hands to bleeding on this door. Waiting until they healed so he could begin pounding on it again. The secrets to resurrecting his beloved trapped behind it. Forever beyond his reach.

“No one can love like we do. And when two of us love each other …”

She looked up into those glass-green eyes, boiling with madness and obsession. And for the first time in a long time, she was truly afraid.

“I apologize for your restraints. But I’m quite unsure what your … gift is capable of doing to one of us.” Gabriel waved at the logika looming around the door. “You can destroy Goliaths, at least. So, best for your hands to remain bound. If you so much as wave them at me, I’ll have Faith break them both.”

Ana saw the female lifelike standing nearby at the gantry’s railing, jagged bangs draped over flat gray eyes. Looking at Ana’s hands with a dark smile.

“Where’s Cricket, Faith?” she demanded. “What did you do with him?”

“Your little logika?” Faith asked. “He’s with Silas. They’re getting reacquainted.”

Ana glanced around the space, looking for some kind of help or escape. Aside from the massive double doors over the bridge at her back, there was no other easy access to the Myriad chamber. She saw a third lifelike sitting at the access terminal to one side of the Myriad sphere, gently tapping away at a series of keyboards. She had hazel skin, lustrous dark curls framing bottomless black eyes.

“Mercy,” Ana whispered.

Three of them. But not counting Ezekiel, there were seven lifelikes alive after the revolt.

“Where are Uriel and the others?” Ana asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “You needn’t trouble yourself over family matters.”

“Hope said they’d broken away from you.”

“You spoke to Hope?” Faith asked, suddenly alert. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead.”

Mercy looked up at that, she and Faith sharing a glance.

“You humans,” Gabriel sighed. “You destroy all you touch.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

Gabriel walked to the sealed door on the Myriad sphere, running fingertips across the thousands of tiny, bloodstained dents.

“No matter,” he said. “Our wayward sister can be reborn. Once we unlock Myriad, we can remake her, perfect in every detail. And not only her. Daniel. Michael. Raphael. Grace. Everyone taken from us. Everyone we’ve lost.”

“Not everyone, you selfish bastard,” Ana spat. “Unless you’re going to resurrect my family, too? My little brother? Alex would be twelve years old now, did you know that?”

The lifelike turned away, staring at the door that barred his way to his creator’s secrets. The door he’d worn himself thin against. Ana could see the torture of it. She knew what it was to have those you loved torn away. The rage you could feel at the ones who’d taken them from you. That rage was eating at her now, chewing away at the fear she felt in the face of this murderer and his madness. What more could they do to her, after all?