she whispered.
Lemon held her breath, staring cross-eyed into the little bugger’s beady black stare.
“… You know, when I said tell your friends, I was just being sassy.”
She heard the droning of lazy wings in the sunshine heat. She didn’t dare move, eyes fixed on the nose invader’s pointy butt parts. But as the buzzing grew louder, she glanced about, careful not to move her head. She saw a dozen more bumblebees on the gully walls, doing lazy circle-work in the air around her. Moving slow, she tapped the transmit button on her helmet’s commset.
“Um … Dimples?” she asked. “Dimples, do you read me?”
She heard a short crackle of static, Ezekiel’s faint reply.
“Lemon? Is everything okay?”
“Um, that depends. What do bees eat?”
“… What?”
“Seriously, what do they eat?”
“Well, I’m not an expert or anything. But I think they probably eat honey?”
“… Not people?”
“Nnnno. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t eat people. Dare I ask why?”
The air was full of bees now, a swaying, rolling swarm, filling the air with a droning hum. Lemon heard soft, scuffing footsteps above, slowly craned her neck to look at the gully walls overhead. Lem saw a strange woman standing on the ridge above, looking down at her.
She was tall, pretty, deep brown skin. Her hair was woven into long, sharp dreadlocks. Her eyes were a strange, glittering gold—Lemon figured they must be cybernetics of some sort. She was wearing a long desert-red cloak despite the heat, a strange rifle slung on her back. Under the cloak, she wore a suit of what might’ve been black rubber, dusty from a long road, skintight and molded with strange bumps and ridges over some serious curves.
I’ve seen that kind of outfit before …
Lemon was motionless, bee still perched on her nose, eyes fixed on the stranger above. The woman peeled aside the high collar of her suit, exposing the throat beneath. Lemon’s belly ran cold as she realized that the woman’s skin was pocked with dozens, maybe hundreds, of tiny hexagonal holes.
Honeycombed …
More bumblebees were crawling through her hair, along her face, across her smile. And as Lemon watched, dozens more swarmed out from beneath the strange woman’s skin.
“Oh, spank my spankables,” the girl whispered.
The woman looked down at Lemon, golden eyes gleaming.
“Lemonfresh,” she said. “We have been hunting her.”
Endless dunes and jagged rocks and dust as far as the eye could see. Ezekiel cut through the wasteland with a long loping stride, the kilometers disappearing beneath his boots. He was making good time; he figured he’d be back at Babel by sundown. He could see the tower ahead, rising up from the horizon in its double-helix spiral, his shadow stretching toward it.
He didn’t know what he’d do when he got there, truth told. If Gabriel and Faith had recovered from the beatings they’d taken, if Eve …
Eve.
He didn’t really know what to do about her, either. He’d not talked to Lemon about their last exchange right before he left the tower. The veiled threats the newly awakened lifelike had made. The dangerous gleam in Eve’s eye as she’d spoken those final, fateful words.
“Next time we meet? I don’t think it’s going to turn out the way you want it to.”
He wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant. Eve was furious, he knew that. About the lies Silas and Nicholas Monrova had heaped on her. The false life they’d built her. She had a right to be angry. With them. With him. But Lemon had been correct—even if he did love Ana, a part of him had loved Eve, too.
Is that why you’re headed back there?
So soon after leaving?
It was more than the fact she was Ana’s doppelgänger. Eve had a strength and determination he’d never seen in the original Ana. A fire and resourcefulness, born from years of clawing out a living in a trashpit like Dregs. But if Eve threw her lot in with Gabriel, or worse, their brother Uriel, if she used that fire to aid his siblings in ridding the world of the dinosaur that had been humanity …
What could she become?
“Um … Dimples? Dimples, do you read me?”
The lifelike slowed his pace, tapped the receiver on his headset.
“Lemon?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Um, that depends. What do bees eat?”
“… What?”
“Seriously, what do they eat?”
Ezekiel rubbed his chin, wondering what the girl was on about. “Well, I’m not an expert or anything. But I think they probably eat honey?”
“… Not people?”
“Nnnno. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t eat people. Dare I ask why?”
“Oh, spank my spankables …”
“Freckles? Are y—”
“Dimples, help!” came the crackling plea. “There’s a cr—”
A squeal of static washed over the headset, and the transmission died.
“Lemon?” Ezekiel tapped the headset. “Lemon, can you hear me?”
Nothing. No reply at all. But he’d caught the fear and adrenaline in her voice, and with a curse, he turned and began running back the way he’d come. No easy loping stride this time, but a furious, flat-out sprint. His teeth were gritted, his arm pumping, boots pounding the dirt. He yelled her name into the commset, got no answer, the fear in his belly blooming into a freezing panic.
He’d told her to stay in the tank. She should’ve been safe there. What on earth could’ve gotten to her inside a shell of rad-proofed armor plating?
Unless she got out …
You never should have left her.
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,