DEV1AT3 (DEVIATE)

She is needed.

Lemon offered her wrists to Hunter, but the woman shook her head. Truth was, the pair both knew Lemon had nowhere to run now. With Hunter’s help, the girl scrambled up onto Mai’a’s neck.

“Hold on,” the woman said, climbing up behind. “We ride swift.”

The horsething sprang into a gallop, the salt flats swallowed up under its smooth strides. Lemon could see mountains ahead, the beginning of a long, shattered road. She held on for dear life, fighting the churn in her belly, the fear slowly growing beside it.

Behind them, the wind picked up on the salt flats, the dust and grit scouring their tracks from the barren earth. It picked up Lemon’s abandoned cloak, vomit stains and all, sent it tumbling. Away from the place where the girl had crouched a moment before, knife in hand.

Carving two words into the sun-parched earth.

A message for the friends she hoped were following.

An arrow pointing west.

A warning.

New Bethlehem.

2.4 (#ulink_b334e4cd-89a1-5537-ae18-5f5f158f0c9a)

PROPOSITION (#ulink_b334e4cd-89a1-5537-ae18-5f5f158f0c9a)

“What the hell happened here?”

In the ruins of a forgotten city, a would-be boy knelt on the broken earth. The corpse beside him was fly-blown, bloated beneath a furious sun. It was dressed in a bloodstained jersey, an old-style knight’s helmet stitched on its back. Loaded pistols were still holstered at the body’s waist, untouched.

“Never even got a chance to draw,” Ezekiel muttered.

The lifelike turned the body over. A dark stain marked the man’s swollen cheek, spreading across his face. Searching the ground around him, Zeke found a dead bee a few meters from the corpse, bar-coded yellow and black.

I’m on the right trail.

But none of this made any sense.

Ezekiel had been trailing Lemon and her captor through the gullies for hours. He’d salvaged a bunch of weaponry from the grav-tank munitions locker, stashed it all in a satchel that bounced on his back as he ran. The gully floor was mostly stone, and the tracks of the BioMaas agent’s transport were almost impossible to spot. But whatever Lemon and her captor were traveling in, there was no way it was big or heavy enough to be hauling Cricket, too. And yet, when Ezekiel had arrived back at the stranded grav-tank, both Lemon and the logika were missing.

So where the hell did Cricket get to?

Truth told, despite the animosity between him and the big bot, he was worried about the pair of them. But Cricket was a seven-meter-tall armor-plated killing machine, and Lemon was a lone fifteen-year-old girl. A girl he’d made a promise to never bail on, only a few hours ago.

He glanced down at the scavver’s corpse again. Wondered what kind of person would’ve done that to a human. What they might have done to Lemon. He could only guess at their motivations for snatching her, but there was at least one certainty in all this mess:

If BioMaas wanted her dead, she’d already be dead.

So Ezekiel pushed the fear aside and ran on.

He cleared the broken maze after a few hours, emerging out of the long shadows and into an endless stretch of salt flats. Like the rest of him, his senses were better than human—he could count the beats of an insect’s wings, shoot a bullet from the air. But truth was, he hadn’t been built for this. He’d served with the Gnosis security forces inside Babel Tower, a place of luxury and impossible wealth. Of soft skin and gentle curves and lips that tasted sweeter than anything he’d ever known.

Ana.

She was alive. Myriad had confirmed it. She’d been critically injured in the assassination attempt on her father, yes, but she’d survived. She was hidden somewhere—some secret Gnosis holding or base out in this wasteland.

But where?

He’d searched for years after the revolt, looking for any sign. They said you never love anyone quite the way you love your First. But Ana had been his Only. The only thing that had kept him going. The only memory that had kept him sane. The thought of seeing her face again, of feeling her pressed against him …

And then he’d found her.

Or what he thought was her.

Eve had looked like Ana.

Felt and sounded and tasted like Ana.

Did I love her like Ana?

The girl he’d known in the impossible tower of Babel. The girl who saved him from the corroding scrap pile of Dregs. The pair of them, side by side in his mind, both now beyond his reach. Both had shown him what it was to feel alive. Both had taught him what it was to care for something more than himself. To strive to be more than just an imitation, a simulacrum, a parody of what it meant to be …

… to be human.

He shook his head, willed the image of their faces away.

You promised Lemon you wouldn’t leave her.

He nodded to himself, jaw clenched. As much as Ana meant to him …

You promised.

But the ground was bare rock, the wind scouring it like a blast furnace. He’d been walking for two hours now without a trace of his quarry—not a mark, not a scratch. He came to a stop, eyes to the setting sun. Nothing out here. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. Just endless kilometers of dust and blinding white and rusted ruins. The bones of a carcass long picked clean.

They’d had it all.

Humans.

And look what they did with it.

Ezekiel knelt, running his fingertips over bare and burning stone. Looking around him, he guessed the BioMaas operative had come this way for a reason; they were counting on being followed. He realized he’d been an idiot to even try to trail them on foot with nothing but keen eyes to track them. BioMaas wouldn’t send amateurs out looking for the weapon that’d end their cold war with Daedalus once and for all. They’d send their best.

Ezekiel stood slowly, turned his eyes back to the northeast.

They’d send their best.

Just like Daedalus did …

He took a long sip of water from his canteen, ran his hand through his mop of sweat-damp hair. Weighing the thoughts in his head, trimming the impossibilities, the shots in the dark, until he was left with only one. It would mean abandoning the trail for now, that Lemon would be at the mercy of her captors. It would mean leaving any hope of finding Ana or reuniting with Eve behind. It would mean a dance with the devil. But out here alone, blundering in the dust? No clues, no path, no way forward?

What other option do you have?