She’d hunted all over the Yousay for Ana Monrova. Intent on killing her, silencing her voice inside her head, proving once and for all she was more than this empty shell she was built to replace.
That blood-red pulse washed the sky again.
Eve felt a stab of pain behind her eyes.
“Who are you?” Ana asked her.
“I’m me,” Eve replied, hands in fists. “I’m me.”
The girl tilted her head, long golden tresses spilling over her face.
“But who do you want to be?”
* * *
_______
It took a moment for Eve to realize where she was.
The light was low and summer-warm. The silence soft and complete. She could see a broad window looking out on a murky night sky, white sheets around her feet. She could feel warmth pressed against her, butterflies moving in a long, languid dance inside her belly. But it was the smell that brought it home at last—the faded flowers and faint metal, warm breath and fresh sweat.
Ezekiel.
His hands were on her waist, and her arms around his neck, her fingertips weaving through his dark curls. His chest was hard against hers, and his lips were soft, skimming the line of her jaw and sending flushes of flame all the way down to her toes. She could feel his long lashes fluttering against her skin. They were in her bed, she realized. Bare and smooth and spent—that night he’d first come to her room before her world fell apart.
Her mouth found his, and his lips opened against hers, and for a moment, the ache of it was so sweet, it was all she was. The soft velvet of his kiss, the hard swell of his shoulder, her hands trailing down over the lines and furrows of his back and lower, lower still. She’d given all of herself to him, lost between the sighs and wrapped in the want, honey-sweet and secret-deep. She knew that this wasn’t made to last, that a life lived in the dark was half a life at best. But though he’d been made, not grown, this beautiful boy with an angel’s name was more real in that moment than anything else in her world. And if she were only to have half a life, let it be this half, she begged. One where she was happy and she was adored and she was real. Real as the almost-boy in her arms.
They eased away from each other, and the ache only deepened as she felt the places he’d been, now without him. For a moment, she wondered what use her lips were if they weren’t pressed against his. What point there was to her hands if they weren’t touching him. But then she looked up into his eyes, beautiful, blue, bright, and though they were full of love, framed by dusk-dark lashes and shining in the dark, she couldn’t help but remember he’d never, ever looked at her this way.
“All I am,” he said. “All I do, I do for you.”
“You never said that to me,” she told him.
Eve pushed away from Ezekiel, rolling out of the bed—a bed she’d never slept in, a night she’d never shared. She clutched a sheet she’d never touched about herself, looked around this room that was never hers, this boy she’d never loved.
Ezekiel held out his hand, his voice low and sweet with promise.
“Come back to bed.”
“Come back?” She almost laughed. “We were never together like this.”
He smiled at her, rising from the crumpled mattress. “Like this, then?”
Blood-red light pulsed, a thrust of pain crackled in her skull. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, her oversized boots digging into the small of his back as she crushed herself against him. They were in the workshop in Faith’s mission back in Armada, oil smudged on her skin and iron in the air. A fire was burning inside her, not soft and slow and sweet this time. No, this was gasoline and nitro, this was rage and want and teeth and bare skin on dirty concrete and fingernails clawing at his back and right, so right.
This had been real, she knew. This had been hers.
And so had he.
“Eve,” he murmured, breath hot against her skin. “Eve.”
“No,” she breathed. “Call me Ana….”
He lifted his head, looked at her with those pretty sky-blue eyes.
“Make up your mind,” he said. “Who do you want to be?”
* * *
______
It took a moment for Eve to realize where she was.
She was standing on a beach neither she nor the girl she’d been had ever visited. It was the kind of beach they used to put on postcards, back when there still was a post and people put cards into it.
Waves lapped at her ankles, shiver-cool on her skin. Not the black chemsludge that had slurped and sucked on the broken shores of Dregs. No, this was a beautiful blue, like sapphires and tumbling diamonds. The sand was cotton-soft between her toes, and there were no rusting auto hulks or discarded fridges or polystyrene scum. The sky was blue, clean, so bright it hurt her eyes to look at.
She was wearing loose white linen, just as spotless as the sand. The cool wind whispered in off the water and raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She could smell hot food sizzling somewhere nearby, hear distant music of a shape and tone she’d never known.
“I’m dreaming,” she realized.
“If you like, yes,” came a voice behind her.
Eve turned and saw a man reclining in a wooden sun lounge. He had a deep tan, offsetting the brilliant white of his shirt and shorts. He was tall and fit, perhaps in his midthirties, perfect teeth and a perfect smile. He wore mirrored sunglasses and held a long frost-rimed glass set with a little umbrella. He raised it to her in greeting.
“Good day, Miss Monrova,” he said.
“My name’s Eve,” she replied, soft anger slipping into her voice.
“Of course.” His smile only widened. “Would you like to sit?”
The man gestured, and Eve saw another sun lounge beside his. An identical drink rested on the chair’s arm, and a towel was laid out on the wood. The fabric was printed with a familiar shape—a small, agile-looking machina in hot pink urban camo, the words KISS THIS sprayed across its hind parts.
“Miss Combobulation,” Eve breathed.
A wave of melancholy washed over her at the sight, the memory of that dream: her life in Dregs with Lemon, little Cricket, Grandpa.
Except he wasn’t her grandpa, was he?
He’d lied to me about that, just like all the rest of it.
Anger seeped back into her mind, swallowed her nostalgia under sticky black. The waves shushed about her ankles, a song of azure and salt on her skin. Every sense was alive and tingling; she could smell the flowers and the ocean, hear and feel the whispering waves, see the crescent of lush green palms rising up from pale dunes ahead. There was no place on earth left like this, she knew.