…?
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 THE VEGAS GOLDEN KNIGHTS
Est 2017
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.
“Chaaaaallenge!”
The big scavver fixed Lemon’s abductor in his stare, fingers twitching over the shooters at his waist.
“By my heel, ma’am,” he smiled. “I accept.”
The woman didn’t move, but Lemon heard a small humming noise in the back of her throat. The big scavver’s grip closed around his guns just as a fat yellow bumblebee landed on his cheek. He cursed, flinching as the bee sank its stinger into his skin. Lemon heard a chorus of surprised yelps from the buildings around them.
The big scavver swayed, wide eyes fixed on the BioMaas woman. Lemon could see a tracery of fine red veins creeping out along his face where the bee had stuck him. He gasped, clutched at his throat like he couldn’t breathe. Gurgling as he fell to his knees. And quick as a morning-after goodbye, the scavver toppled facedown, dead as the dirt he was kissing.
“Insert fancy swears here …,” Lemon whispered.
From the sounds she heard in the ruins, she guessed the rest of the scavver crew were suffering the same fate as their boss. Lemon heard strangled cries, a few choking prayers. And then?
Nothing but the hymn of tiny wings.
She twisted to look at the woman sitting behind her, her belly cold with fear. Her captor’s face was impassive, dark skin filmed with dust. This close, Lemon could see her dreadlocks weren’t hair at all, but the same kind of segmented spines as the horsething’s mane and tail. Her eyes glittered gold in the scorching light.
“It’s a good thing I already puked this morning,” Lemon said.
That golden stare flickered to her own.
“Lemonfresh has nothing to fear from us.”
“Ooookay?” Lemon said. “Having trouble believing that one, but let’s just run with it for now. Since we’re being all chummy and whatnot, you got a name? You BioMaas folks are usually called what you do, right? I mean, I could just call you Terrorlady or the Doominator, both of those seem to fit pretty good. Am I talking