He ran. Fast as he could. He’d never pushed himself as hard in his short life, his heart thundering, veins pumping acid. He was the peak of physical perfection, generated in the GnosisLabs to be more than human. But in the end, he was only bone and muscle, blood and meat. Even pounding the dust as quick as he could, hours had passed by the time he arrived, the sun burning high in the sky, his skin and clothes drenched with sweat. The gully was deathly silent. Like a tomb. Like that cell in Babel in the moments after he and his siblings had murdered the Monrova family. As he’d raised the gun to Eve’s head and whispered those two meaningless words.
“I’m sorry.”
The tank was exactly where he’d left it. But the hatch was open, and worse, there was no sign of Lemon or Cricket. Ezekiel drew his heavy pistol, crept through the rocks, listening intently with his enhanced senses and hearing nothing. He leapt up onto the tank, peered inside, saw it had been partially stripped—the computer gear, the cannon ammunition, the radio equipment was all gone. They’d tried to bust into the weapons locker, but hadn’t been able to burn through the metal.
In front of the scorched cabinet door sat Lemon’s helmet, spattered with vomit and a few drops of blood. And beside it lay a couple of squashed bugs.
No…not bugs…
Bees…?
He knelt by the little corpses, picked them both up and cradled them in his palm. His eyes were good enough to count the freckles on a girl’s face in a fraction of a second, track a moth in a midnight sky. Squinting at the insects, he saw the pair were twins—not just similar, but identical, down to the number of hairs on their bodies, the facets of their eyes. And turning them over on his palm, the lifelike saw the stripes on their abdomens were arranged in a tiny pattern.
A bar code.
The lifelike closed his fist.
“BioMaas,” he whispered.
When Ezekiel mentioned pony rides, Lemon was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind.
Maybe the beast had been a horse once, back before BioMaas gene-modded it beyond all recognition. It still had four legs, so that was kind of good news. But as far as Lemon knew—and granted, she’d only ever seen them in the virtch because they’d been extinct for decades—most horses wore their skeletons on the inside.
She was sitting near its neck, her wrists bound in translucent resin. The strange woman sat behind her, one arm about her waist to make sure she didn’t fall. The beast they rode was black, its hide covered in bony ridges—more like organic armor than actual skin. Its eyes were faceted like a fly’s, and Lemon was pretty sure its legs had too many joints. Instead of a mane and tail, it had long, segmented spines that clicked and shushed together as it moved.
They were riding south along the gully at a full gallop. Lemon’s captor was pressed to her back, and the girl realized she could feel a deep buzzing inside the woman’s chest when she exhaled. It made her skin want to crawl right off her bod.
“Where you taking me?” she asked.
“CityHive.”
The woman’s voice trembled like an old electric voxbox, as if her whole chest vibrated when she spoke. It was almost…insectoid.
“The BioMaas capital?” Lemon blinked. “What for?”
“Nau’shi told us about Lemonfresh. Lemonfresh is important. She is needed.”
Nau’shi was the name of the BioMaas kraken that had scooped her and Evie and the rest of her crew out of the waters of Zona Bay. A crew member named Carer had told Lemon the same thing before she’d climbed into the kraken’s lifeboat: “Lemonfresh is important. She is needed.” At the time, Lemon had just figured Carer didn’t have her boots laced all the way to the top. But now…
“I’m no kind of special, okay? So why don’t you just let me go?”
“We cannot, Lemonfresh,” the woman replied. “Only a matter of time before the Lords of the Polluted realize their error.”
“…The Lords of the Polluted?” the girl scoffed. “Is that some new drudge band I shoulda heard of?”
“Daedalus Technologies.”
“Wha—”
“Hsst,” the woman hissed.
Lemon fell silent as a fat bumblebee buzzed down from the sky, coming to rest on the woman’s shoulder. The girl craned her head, watched with horrified fascination as the bug crawled inside one of the hexagonal burrows in the woman’s throat. The woman’s golden eyes blinked rapidly as she softly sighed.
“Trouble ahead.”
“…What kind of trouble?”
“Oldflesh,” she growled.
These gullies seemed to go on forever—probably torn into the earth when the Quake created Zona Bay. Some of the cracks were hundreds of meters across, almost as deep. Lemon and her captor entered the remnants of a town that had collapsed into the fissure when the ground opened up. Toppled buildings and rusty autowrecks, the shell of an old fuel station, long sucked dry. What might’ve been an old sports arena had split clean down the middle, one half toppled nose-first into the rocks. Lemon saw a sign, faded from decades beneath the sun. The same helmet that had adorned the shirts of those scavvers that had jumped them yesterday was painted on it, chipped and faded lettering beneath.
HOME OF TH V GO KNIGHTS
st 20 7
Ahead, two tenements had collapsed together to form a crude archway. Lemon saw their path led right between them. The walls were steep, there was no room to dance—it was a perfect place for an ambush, true cert. Lem felt her heart beating faster, remembering the bushwhacking that had buried their grav-tank. Her eyes roamed the empty windows above, but she couldn’t see zip.
At some unspoken command, the horsething came to a halt on the open ground. The air about them hummed with bees, her captor’s eyes gleaming gold.
“Let us pass, oldflesh,” the agent called. “And remain in this living grave. Or stand in our way, and be sent to your next.”
Lemon caught movement in the ruins around them—a handful of scavvers in those same grubby gold shirts, armed with stub guns and rusty cutters. Heavy footsteps crunched on the asphalt ahead, and Lemon saw a brick wall of a man striding slowly toward them. He wore that old knight’s helm scrawled on a bloodstained jersey, a couple of six-shot stub guns at his belt. His armor was made of hubcaps and rusty street signs.
“Lo, gentlemen!” he drawled to his crew. “On my life, a challenge!”
“Challenge!” roared one of the scavvers.