LIFEL1K3

When Grandpa spoke next, it was with a voice Eve had never heard before.

“… Ezekiel?”

The lifelike looked up at Eve again. Imploring.

“Ana, we need to get out of here. They’ll be coming for you.”

“Who’s Ana?” Lemon looked about, totally bewildered. “How do you know Mister C? What the fresh hells is going on here?”

Eve lowered the wrench, hands slick on the metal. The lifelike was looking up at her with pretty plastic eyes, full of desperation. Fear. And something more. Something …

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Ana, it’s me,” the lifelike insisted. “It’s Zeke.”

“Eve.”

Grandpa’s voice echoed through five centimeters of case-hardened steel.

“Eve, get away from the door. Cover your ears.”

“Oh, crap,” Lemon breathed. “He really did get the—”

The blast was deafening. A train-wreck concussion lifting Eve off her feet and tossing her across the room like dead leaves. She collided with the spray-foam wall, hitting the ground with a gasp. Grandpa wheeled through the ruined doorway in his buzzing little chair, smoking rocket launcher in hand, hair blown back in a smoldering quiff. He scoped the scene in an instant, pointed to the lifelike and growled.

“Kaiser. Aggress intruder.”

The blitzhund leapt through the hatchway, seizing the lifelike’s throat in his jaws. A low growl spilled from between the hound’s teeth and a series of damp clicks echoed within his torso. His eyes turned blood red. Eve shook her head as Grandpa hauled her to her feet. The lifelike remained motionless, hand raised in surrender. Eve figured she’d probably be the same with a blitzhund wrapped around her larynx.

“Wonderful invention, blitzhunds,” Grandpa wheezed, hauling Lemon up by the seat of her pants. “Daedalus Tech invented them during the CorpWars. They can track a target across a thousand klicks with one particle of DNA. ’Course, the smaller ones only have enough explosives to take out single targets. But a big model like Kaiser here?” Grandpa coughed hard, spat bloody onto the deck. “If he pops, there’ll be nothing left of this room but vapor. Think you can heal that, bastard? Think we made you that good?”

The lifelike croaked through its crushed larynx. “Silas, I’m not here to hurt you.”

“’Course not.” Grandpa was ushering both shell-shocked girls toward the door. Cricket was beckoning Eve wildly. “You just happened to be in the neighborhood, am I right?”

“Ana, stop.”

Eve realized the lifelike was looking at her, the world still ringing in her ears.

“Ana, please …”

“Shut up!” Grandpa’s roar came from underwater. “Breathe another word, I—”

And then it started. That awful cough. The sound that had kept Eve awake every night for the past six months. Grandpa tried to push Eve through the door even as he bent double in his chair, coughing so hard she thought he might bring up his lungs. The cancer had him by the throat. Claws sinking deeper every day into the only thing she had left …

“Grandpa,” Eve breathed, hugging the old man tight.

“Silas, she’s in danger,” the lifelike pleaded. “I came here to warn you. Ana was on the feeds. Some trouble at a local bot fight last night. She manifested in front of hundreds of people. Manifested, you hear me? Fried a siege-class logika just by looking at it.”

“Not …,” Grandpa wheezed, “not possib—”

“Silas, they’ll know. One of them is bound to be monitoring the feeds. Even the data from a sinkhole like this. They’ll come for her, you know they will.”

“Grandpa, who is this?” Eve’s voice was trembling, her real eye blurred with frightened tears. “What’s going on?”

“Ana, I’m—”

“Shut up!” Grandpa shouted at the lifelike. “Shut … your t-traitor … mouth.”

The old man fell back to coughing, bubbling breath dragged through bloody teeth.

Eve held him tight, turned to Lemon. “Med cabinet!”

“On it!” Lem wiped the blood from her ears, stumbled down the hallway.

Grandpa was choking, fist to his lips. Hate-filled eyes locked on the lifelike.

“Just breathe easy, Grandpa, we got—”

“We got two tabs left!” Lemon dashed back down the hall, skidded to her knees. Two blue dermal patches were cupped in her palm. “Cabinet’s dry, Evie. This is the last.”

“No, that can’t be right,” Eve said. “Why didn’t he tell me we were so low?”

“He didn’t want to worry you,” Cricket said in a sad little voice.

Eve slapped the tabs onto Grandpa’s arm, massaged his skin to warm them up. Lemon returned with a cloudy glass of recyc, holding it to his lips. Eve’s heart wrenched inside her chest as he sipped, started coughing again.

Don’t you dare die on me …

The lifelike was staring at her, those blue plastic eyes locked on hers. “Ana, I—”

“Shut up!” Eve shouted. “Kaiser, it speaks again, tear out its throat!”

The blitzhund growled assent, tail wagging.

What the hells could she do? No meds left. No scratch. That dose might see Grandpa through this attack, but after that? Was he going to die? Right here? The only blood she had left in the world? She remembered sitting on his lap as a little girl. Him holding her hand as he nursed her back to health. And though the memories were monochrome and jumbled and fuzzy at the edges, she remembered enough. She remembered she loved him.

Eve dragged her fist across her eyes. Took a deep, trembling breath.

A claxon sounded throughout the house, cranking her headache up to the redline. On top of everything else, something had just triggered the proximity alarms …

Grandpa was trying to get his coughing fit under control. He wiped his knuckles across his lips, flecked in red. His eyes had never left the lifelike.

They’ll come for her, you know they will.

“You …,” Grandpa coughed, wet and red. “You expecting c-company, Eve?”

“No one who’d be welcome.”