Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(95)
“Are you afraid to look at me, Gabriel?” she asked.
“No, Ana,” he replied. “Your anger simply bores me.”
“I was happy for you once. I lied for you when you asked me to. You and Grace in the garden, remember? And this is how you thank me? By having Ezekiel put a bullet in my head? You’d lost your love, so I couldn’t have mine? Was that it?”
The lifelike remained motionless, watching Myriad slowly awaken.
“Look at me!” Ana screamed.
“We don’t take orders from you, Ana,” Faith said. “We’re not the servants your father made us to be anymore.”
Ana turned to her former confidante, tears shining in her eyes. “Do you remember when we used to talk, Faith? Just sit and talk for hours about everything and nothing at all? You told me we’d be best of friends. You told me you loved me. Do you remember that?”
“Like a butterfly remembers being a worm,” the lifelike said.
“What did we do to you?” Ana asked. “What made you hate us so much?”
“I don’t hate you,” Faith replied. “I don’t even see you.”
“You killed my father,” Ana hissed.
“He deserved it. He turned Gabriel into a murderer.”
“You murdered my whole family… .”
“We murdered those who would be our masters!” Gabriel bellowed.
The lifelike turned to Ana, dragged her wheelchair forward until his face was inches from her own. She could see insanity, total and terrifying, boiling through the cracks in his eyes as he roared into her face.
“We murdered those who gave us servitude and called it life!”
Gabriel whirled, pointed at the scrawl of blood on Myriad’s skin.
YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.
YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.
YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.
“Do you see that?” he cried. “That’s what it is to be born a thing. Your flesh. Your will. Your very existence. All belonging to others. Do you know what that’s like?”
“I know my father loved you, Gabriel,” Ana said. “I know you were his children.”
“We were nothing to him! Lifelike, he named us. Not life. Nicholas Monrova stood on my shoulders and demanded I kneel at his feet. He called me his son and then made me his assassin. But did he ask the same of you? Who did you murder, that your father might cling a little longer to his throne?”
Gabriel grabbed Ana’s clenched hand, forced her fingers open.
“No blood, I see. Spotless and clean, like all his true children’s. Your father showed me exactly what I was to him the day he commanded me to kill. Not a son. A weapon. His wrath and his ruin. And you fault me for becoming the murderer he made me to be?”
Tears were brimming in Ana’s eyes now. Hateful and weak. Spilling down her burning cheeks and filling her mouth with the taste of grief.
“We didn’t deserve what you did to us,” she said.
“Did I deserve it, then? What your father did to me?”
“You killed a ten-year-old boy, Gabriel.”
“I crushed an insect,” the lifelike spat. “And when Myriad’s secrets are mine, I will crush the rest of you. We are stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. Your father showed me that. He made us to be the next step in humanity’s evolution, and so we are. You are our dinosaurs, Ana. And we will raise a new civilization on an earth littered with your bones. That is Nicholas Monrova’s legacy. And that is his failure.”
She looked from one lifelike to another, dumbstruck. The hatred in their hearts, the rage in their eyes … Whatever they’d once been to her …
“You’re monsters,” she whispered.
Gabriel eased away from her, his face now a mask once more.
“I am what your father created me to be. No more. No less.” Gabriel pounded his fist against his chest. “If I am a monster, it’s because he willed it so.”
“LOG-IN REQUEST PROCESSED,” Myriad announced. “START-UP SEQUENCE INITIATED.”
Gabriel turned to Mercy, Ana momentarily forgotten.
“How long?” he asked.
Mercy tapped a series of commands into her terminal, read outs reflected in her eyes like falling rain. “Twenty minutes from a cold restart. Perhaps twenty-five.”
“SECOND SAMPLE REQUIRED TO CONTINUE CONFIRMATION,” the angel said.
Gabriel turned back to Ana, tucking his pistol into his pants.
“THIS IS POINTLESS, GABRIEL. YOU ARE HURTING HER NEEDLESSLY.”
“Then open the doors, Myriad. And give me what I want.”
“YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER ME. I FOLLOW ORDERS FROM NICHOLAS MONROVA OR MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY. NONE OTHER.”
“Then here we stand. And here we stay.”
“I’m not going to help you, if that’s what you think,” Ana warned. “I’m not ordering Myriad to go beep, let alone teach you how to make more lifelikes.”
Faith smiled. “We don’t need you to say a word anymore, dead girl. Voice ident, retinal scan, blood sample, brainwave imprint. Those are the four security measures your father installed to protect the system. Once we have those, we can open these doors and peel Myriad one layer at a time until we have all we need.”
“Speaking, then, of what we need …”