LIFEL1K3

Peeking back over the barricade, she fixed the Spartans in her stare. Last night’s bout was replaying inside her head. The way that Goliath had dropped like a brick onto the killing floor. The way she’d blown every circuit inside it just by willing it. She had no idea how she’d pulled it off, or if she could do it again. But this place was her home, and these people were her family, and letting someone else fight her battles just wasn’t her style.

So Eve stretched out her hand, fingers trembling.

“What’re you doing?” Lemon hissed.

“Trying to fritz one of those machina.”

“Riotgrrl, I’m not su—”

“Hsst, I’m trying to concentrate!”

Eve gritted her teeth. Picturing the leftmost Spartan collapsing into ruin. Trying to summon everything she’d felt last night—terror and fury and defiance—to curl it up in her fist and send it hurtling into the Spartan’s core. Sweat gleamed on her brow, the sun beating down like sledgehammers. The fear of losing Grandpa. The suspicion she was being lied to. The lifelike’s hollow, plastic stare and perfect, pretty eyes. She pulled all of it into a tight, burning sphere in her chest—a little artillery shell of burning rage.

These dustnecks wanted to nail her up? Bring her an ending? Well, she’d conjure them an ending like they’d never seen …

Eve drew a deep breath. Standing up from behind the barricade, she imagined the Spartan falling in a cloud of burning sparks, burned the picture in her mind’s eye. And then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed.

Screamed.

SCREAMED.

And absolutely nothing happened.

The Brotherhood boys started laughing. Bullets started flying. A lucky shot bounced off her torso guard, knocking her sideways. And as the indomitable Miss Fresh dragged her back behind cover, a shard of supersonic lead blew Eve’s helmet right off her head.

The pain was sledgehammers and white stars. Eve cried out, dirty fingers feeling about her skull to see if it’d been perforated. The hail of fire continued, she and Lemon crouched low as the air rained bullets for a solid minute. Eve was wincing, flinching, heels kicking at the roof beneath her. Thankfully, the shot seemed to have killed her headgear and nothing else. But still …

“That was a little on the wrong side of stupid,” she finally managed to gasp.

Lemon was staring wide-eyed at Eve, pale under her freckles. “You nearly got your dome blown off! Warn me when you’re gonna do something that defective again, will you?”

“Never again,” Eve muttered. “I promise.”

“Where’s this damn murderbot, anyways?” Lemon poked her head over the barricade once the firing stopped. “Shouldn’t he be … aw, spank my spankables …”

“What?”

Lemon chewed her lip. “You want bad news or worse news?”

“Um … worse?”

“No, that doesn’t work. Supposed to ask for the bad first.”

Eve rubbed her aching temples and sighed. “Okay, bad, then.”

“Tye and his little posse of scavverboys just rolled up.”

“Oh.” Eve nodded slow. “And the worse?”

“They brought the entire Fridge Street Crew with ’em.”

“Juuust fizzy,” Eve sighed. “Seriously, what is with this day?”

Peeking over the barricade, Eve saw a warband of Fridge Street thugs rolling up from behind the looping curl of some old roller coaster track. She spotted Tye and Pooh riding on the backs of beat-up motorbikes behind the older Fridge Street beatboys. The boss of the crew—a one-hundred-and-twenty-kilo meatstick in rubber pants who called himself Sir Westinghouse—climbed out of a modded sand buggy and started jawing with the Iron Bishop, apparently delighted to discover they were all here to lay the murder down on the same juvette.

Grandpa’s bellow crackled over the PA.

“What is this, a dance class reunion? You scrubs get the hell off my lawn!”

Sir Westinghouse stepped forward, a bruiser beside him handing over a bullhorn.

“Your granddaughter jumped a bunch of my juves out in the Scrap this morning, Silas!” Westinghouse bellowed. “Jacked some sweet salvage that rightways belongs to Fridge Street. Suggesting maybe you better limp out here and jaw on it.”

“I got … a better suggestion,” Grandpa called.

“And what’s that, old man?”

“Check your six.”

Eve watched Sir Westinghouse frown and look behind him just as one of the cassock boys flipped back his hood to reveal a prettyboy face and eyes just a touch too blue. The lifelike had a machine pistol in its one good hand, probably lifted from whatever Brother it’d stomped for the robe.

Lemon did a little bounce. “Clever boy.”

Every Brother and Fridgeboy had his fingers on his trigger. Eve strained to hear the lifelike talk over the machina hum and clawing wind.

“I’ll give you one chance to walk away,” it said. “All of you.”

“That’s him!” Tye slapped Sir Westinghouse on the back. “The lifelike!”

The Fridge Street chief glanced at the juve, back at Ezekiel. “So you’re the fugazi, eh? Look around you, prettyboy. You got an army against you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ezekiel said softly.

Westinghouse guffawed. “Who you trying to fool? You forget the Golden Rule? The Three Laws won’t let you hurt us, fug.”

The lifelike blinked at that. Its pistol wavered, and Eve wondered if …

“My maker thought the same thing,” Ezekiel said.

And then it moved.

Eve had seen fast before. She’d seen epinephrine-enhanced stimheads playing snatch on street corners in Los Diablos. She’d seen top-tier machina fights beamed from the Megopolis WarDome—the kind that got decided in fractions of a second. She’d seen fast, true cert. But she’d never seen anything move like that lifelike moved then.

The Iron Bishop raised his assault rifle behind the lifelike. And quicker than flies, Ezekiel spun and popped two rounds into the Bishop’s eyes. In almost the same instant, it dropped three of the closest Brotherhood thugs with headshots and finally blew out the back of Sir Westinghouse’s skull, painting Tye’s face a bright and gibbering red.

The air was scarlet mist and thin gray smoke. World moving in slow motion. Peeps shouting, firing at the lifelike as it grabbed a nearby Brotherhood thug to use as a shield. Lead thudded into the Kevlar cassock, muzzles flashing like the strobe light in Eve’s dreams, flickering as the figures danced and fell, the stink of blood uncurling in the air.

Eve covered her ears as the rooftop autoguns fired into the mob. The Spartans opened up with their own ordnance, one spraying a storm of hollow-points at the lifelike, the other unleashing its plasma and melting one of the rooftop sentries into slag. Lemon winced and hunkered lower, fixing Popstick with an accusing glare.