As far as ways to go, I suppose this isn’t the worst. I was never into blazes of glory anyway.
I reach over and stop Mikky from pounding her fists against the concrete. Her bioskin is shredded down to the circuitry. Our fingers entwine.
I want to say good-bye. Thank you. So many things, but the words sound stupid in my head.
Then Mikky goes tense.
I can hear the thudding of my heart. And then the sound I wasn’t expecting to ever hear: the metallic scrape of shovels.
Rescue.
Mikky and I start screaming until I’m nearly hoarse. Their answering shouts make tears well up in my eyes. They found us.
It takes sixteen people, plus a backhoe, to get the building debris off us. The sun’s just peeking over the tops of the destroyed buildings when we’re finally pulled from the rubble. I take a deep breath, and the sudden rush of oxygen makes me dizzy.
I blink in the light, flooded with relief. I can’t believe we made it.
But in the distance, I hear the pop of gunfire. I turn to KrisBo, the leader of our rescue crew. Her makeup is long gone, and a gash over her cheek reveals the lattice of her engineered muscles. “Are we still fighting?” I croak.
Her strong arms lift me onto a stretcher. “The city center is ours. But there’s a Hu-Bot brigade holding steady on the edge of town.”
Mikky limps over, her clothes in tatters and her black hair gray with dust. I’ve never seen someone look beautiful and terrible at the same time—until now. “Is it broken?” she asks, pointing to my leg.
KrisBo nods. “I think so.”
I half sit up on the stretcher, grimacing from the pain. “We have to go.”
“Go where?” Mikky asks.
“To the battle,” I say through gritted teeth.
“No,” KrisBo says. “We have to get you to the compound. To J.J.”
So the old bastard’s still alive!
And I’m still alive, too—which means I’m going to keep fighting.
Mikky frowns at me. “Six, you’re in no shape to—”
“I don’t need two legs to hold a gun,” I interrupt firmly.
She gives me a look. I give her one right back. I am not backing down. I helped start this fight, and now I’m going to help end it.
Eventually she nods briskly. She turns to KrisBo. “We’ll go,” she says.
KrisBo shakes her head, but she doesn’t argue.
When we reach the edge of the City, we find a tattered band of humans in a standoff against three hundred Hu-Bots barricaded inside an old factory. When our side sees us, an enormous cheer bellows up.
Trip lets out a shriek so loud, I wince, and then she fires her gun into the air.
“Aim at the enemy, idiot!” I shout. It feels unbelievable to be laughing again.
Seeing us—two leaders they thought were gone—lifts everyone’s spirits. We move closer to the building, ducking behind piles of bricks and collapsed pillars. Kris hands out more guns she looted from the arms museum: Lugers and AKs and Uzis. Zee Twelve gets his hand on an assault rifle so big, he can barely lift it.
Mikky props me up so that I’m shielded behind a burned-out van, and I aim my weapon and fire it like there’s no tomorrow. My ears ring. The air fills with the acrid smell of gunpowder.
I fire and fire and fire until I can’t hold up my arms anymore. Until smoke billows out of the Hu-Bot barricade. Until the darkness comes over my eyes, and I fall back, senseless.
CHAPTER 87
I NEVER THOUGHT I’d see this day.
Celebrating humans throng the streets. Tens of thousands of us, congregating—an act that was outlawed for a decade. Some of the kids have bottle rockets. Others carry bags of shredded paper, which they throw in the air like confetti. Music blares from jerry-rigged speakers, the deep bass echoing off the empty buildings.
Out on the main thoroughfare, though, there’s a long, slow parade of the defeated as the last of the enemy Hu-Bots are led out of the City. Their beaten-down shuffle is familiar to me: it’s the way I used to walk when I was a Rezzie.
Now I want to jump up and down and cheer. But, unfortunately, my new crutches make that impossible.
“Too bad we can’t just engineer you a new tibia,” Mikky says, eyeing the cast that stretches from my toes to my knee. “Fix you up as fast as we fixed up Kat.”
“Tell me about it,” I groan. I’ll be wearing this thing for months.
“We could get you some other improvements, too,” she says brightly. “Like better lung capacity and greater adrenaline stores.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I could be the first human–Hu-Bot hybrid.”
J.J., who’s standing a few feet away from us, raises his eyebrows at me.
“I’m joking,” I tell him. “Don’t get any ideas.”
He smiles.
Mikky and I turn back to the Hu-Bot procession. As I watch our former overlords disappear into the brown wasteland, my heart surges with hope. The City is ours now, the way it was before the Great War.
We call it New Denver.
Sure, craters pockmark the roads, and the buildings are missing most of their windows. The place is a disaster. But I’m from the Reserve, so I’m used to disasters. Compared to that shit hole, this bombed-out street looks like freaking Disneyland.
I’m humming along to the music when a hush falls over the crowd. Someone turns off the speakers. I look at Mikky in confusion. She shrugs.
The silence is strange, expectant.
Mikky stands on her tiptoes, craning to see. Whispers, “Oh!”
“What?” I demand.
But a moment later, I can see for myself. A long, black limousine crawls up the street, following the retreating Bots. There’s a ragged Hu-Bot Nation flag still mounted on its hood. Next to the flag is a charred-looking loudspeaker.
A vision flashes before my eyes: Dubs and I, in the market square, our faces pressed to the ground as those three dreaded words seared our souls. “HUMANS, BOW DOWN!”
For a split second, I wish for a gun. I’d blast that loudspeaker to pieces. Even though I know I don’t need to—not anymore.
The limo comes to a stop, and a door opens. Someone steps out.
Beside me, Mikky gasps. Grabs my shoulder. “It’s the premier!”
J.J. nods curtly. “He was captured as he tried to escape the City. Now he joins his soldiers in exile.”
But, for a defeated leader, he looks… smug. He scans the crowd, his features twisted by hate. “You will be cut down like the animals you are!” he bellows.
Two of his guards try to push him back into the car, but he resists. Mikky and I watch in disbelief as the premier keeps screaming at the crowd. He raises his fists at the gathered humans—as if he could somehow kill them all himself.
“You have not won!” he yells. “This is not over! The Hu-Bots will triumph!”
Then he turns to climb back inside his car. But he hasn’t even ducked his head when a single shot rings out.
For a moment, nothing happens. Then the expression on the premier’s face changes. Instead of rage, there is shock. Confusion. Pain.
The premier looks down at his stomach. There’s a bullet hole in it. And blood is pouring out.
Red blood. Human blood!
I inhale sharply, grabbing Mikky to steady myself. What the—?
KrisBo steps out of the crowd and stands facing the premier. There’s a gun clutched in her manicured hand.
“Will that do?” she asks the premier in her deep baritone. “Or do you need another shot from the walking glitch?”
The premier opens his mouth, but he doesn’t answer her. Instead, he falls face forward onto the pavement. His legs twitch and spasm. Then they go still.
I turn to J.J., who’s nodding slowly. Like he knew it all along.
That our greatest enemy was one of our own.
I poke him in the leg with one of my crutches as the guards silently lift the body of their former leader into the car. “Holy crap, old man,” I bark. “Is
there anything else you aren’t telling me?”
A shadow passes over my grandfather’s worn face. He shakes his head. “Come with me. You and Mikky both.”
CHAPTER 88
J.J. WALKS OVER to his beloved piece-of-crap jeep and motions for us to get in. We do, but then he doesn’t turn on the engine. He just stares out the windshield.
And eventually, he begins to talk.
“Yes, the premier is human,” he says quietly. “Why? Because no Hu-Bot is capable of cruelty in the way a human is. Nor can they rival us in treachery. They simply weren’t engineered to understand deception—whereas humans have been perfecting this terrible art for thousands of years.”
“Thanks for the history lesson, Gramps,” I say. “But I get the feeling there’s something else.”
J.J. exhales slowly. “Your brother has fled,” he says. “We believe he has gone to the Central Capital City to join forces with the Hu-Bot settlement there.”
My stomach feels like it’s fallen down to the floor of the jeep. “What?” I gasp.
“No,” Mikky whispers.
“Who knows what damage his incarceration caused?” J.J. asks. “Maybe he, too, has been reprogrammed, in a way.” Then he looks right at us. “It doesn’t matter. There will always be informants. We will always have enemies.”
I can’t take it; I fumble my way out of the jeep. J.J. calls for me to stop, but I need space to think, to process this awful knowledge. I hobble over to a small rise overlooking New Denver.
A moment later, Mikky appears next to me. Together we stare down at what looks like the beginning of a spontaneous human–Hu-Bot parade. Reservers, Reformers, and their reprogrammed former enemies are walking arm in arm, waving signs that say WE THE PEOPLE!
I can even see my sister down there, arm linked with a towering, golden-haired Hu-Bot. The dude looks like freaking Apollo.
We the People: the first three words of our old constitution and now the rallying cry of the new human–Hu-Bot alliance. It’s almost too much for me to take in.
Mikky puts her arm around my shoulders. Her skin is warm, and she smells like lilacs.
“I should have left him in prison,” I say bitterly.
Mikky shakes her head. “Don’t think about it,” she urges. “There’s nothing you can do about his choice. So pay attention to this.” She sweeps her arm out, taking in all the happy, cheering people and their smiling, demurely clapping Hu-Bot friends.
When I don’t say anything, she puts her hands on my shoulders and turns me around so I’m facing her.
“Or pay attention to me,” she says.
Her blue eyes search mine. They’re the exact same color as the sky.
Mikky steps closer to me. “When I thought you were dead,” she whispers, “I wanted to die, too. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided I would never feel anything again. I would become what I was before: a robot.”
A tear glistens in the corner of her eye. I reach out and wipe it away.
For the first time in a decade, I begin to let down my guard. “You were never a robot, Mikky,” I say softly. “Not to me.”
She smiles then. Its beauty lights up her face and everything around her, and I feel something inside me release. How can I explain it? It’s like there was always a clenched fist in my chest, and now that fist is opening.
Now… it’s just a girl’s hand.
“Mikky,” I say, “what does a joy rush feel like?”
I didn’t think it was possible, but her smile grows wider. “It feels like this,” she says simply.
And I don’t understand it, exactly, but I’m a Rezzie girl: I’m used to uncertainty.
I think of all Mikky and I have been through, and I know one thing: we’re in this together. Right now, and whatever comes next.
The music swells again, filling the bright and glittering air. Nothing at all is certain except that we’re free.
For now, we are free.
HOW CAN YOU PROVE
YOUR INNOCENCE WHEN YOU CAN’T
REMEMBER THE CRIME?
FOR AN EXCERPT, TURN THE PAGE.
PATTY HARNEY STOPS her unmarked sedan two blocks shy of her destination, the narrow streets packed with patrol cars, the light bars on top of the units shooting a chaos of color into the night. Must be twenty squad cars at least.
Patty ditches her car, puts the lanyard around her neck, her star dangling over her T-shirt. The air outside is unseasonably cold for early April. Still, Patty feels nothing but heat.
She runs a block before reaching the yellow tape of the outside perimeter, the first officer stepping forward to stop her, then seeing her star and letting her past. She doesn’t know that perimeter cop, and he doesn’t know her. All the better.
Getting closer now. The sweat stinging her eyes, the T-shirt wet against her chest despite the cold, her nerves jangling.
She knows the condo building even without following the trail of police officers to the place where they’re gathered under the awning outside. One of those cops—a detective, like Patty—recognizes her, and his face immediately softens.
“Oh, Jesus, Patty—”
She rushes past him into the lobby of the building. It’s more like a funeral than a crime scene, officers and plainclothes detectives with their eyes dropped, anguished, their faces tear-streaked, some consoling each other. No time for that.
She works her way toward the elevator, casting her eyes into the corners of the lobby for security cameras—old habit, instinct, like breathing—then sees a group of techies, members of the Forensic Services Division, working the elevator, dusting it for prints, and she spins in her gym shoes and pushes through the door to the stairs. She knows it’s on the sixth floor. She knows which apartment.
She takes the stairs two at a time, her chest burning, her legs giving out, a riot breaking out in her stomach. Woozy and panicked, she stops on the third-floor landing, alone among the chaos, and squats down for a moment, grabbing her hair, collecting herself, her body trembling, her tears falling in fat drops onto the concrete.
You have to do this, she tells herself.
She motors up the remaining stairs, her legs rubbery, her chest burning, before she pushes through the door to the sixth floor.
Up here, it’s all business, photographs being taken, evidence technicians doing their thing, blue suits interviewing neighbors, and Ramsey from the ME’s office.
She takes a step, then another, but it’s as if she isn’t moving forward at all, gaining no ground, like she’s in some circus house of horrors—
“Can’t go in there.”
“Patty.”
“Detective Harney. Patty!”
A hand taking hold of her arm. As if in slow motion, her eyes move across the face of the Wiz, the bushy mustache, the round face, the smell of cigar—
“Patty, I’m—Mary, mother of God—I’m so sorry.”
“He’s… he’s…” She can’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
“They all are,” he says. “I’m sorry as hell to be the one to say it.”
She shakes her head, tries to wrangle her arm free.
“You can’t go in there, Patty. Not yet.”
The Wiz angles himself in front of her, blocking her from the door.
She finds the words somehow. “I’m a… I know how to… handle a crime scene.”
A crime scene. Like this is just another act of violence she would encounter in the course of her job.
“Not this one, Detective. Not yet. Give us a chance to—Patty, c’mon—”
She bats away his hands, drives him backwards. He struggles for a moment before he braces her shoulders.
“Patty, please,” he says. “Nobody should see their brother like this.”
She looks into his eyes, not really seeing him, trying to process everything, thinking that he’s right, that she doesn’t want to see him, because if she doesn’t see him he won’t be dead, he won’t really be gone—
The di
ng of the elevator.
But—the elevator’s been taken out of service. The boys with FSD were dusting it. Who’s using the elevator? Someone must have pulled rank—
Oh—
“Chief of Ds is here,” someone says.
She looks over Wizniewski’s shoulder.
The tall, angular figure, those long strides, the beak nose—which she did not inherit.
“Dad,” she says, the word garbled in her throat, feeling every ounce of control vanishing.
Her father, chief of detectives Daniel Harney, a sport coat thrown over a rumpled shirt, his thinning hair uncombed, his eyes already shadowed. “Baby,” he says, his arms opening. “Oh, my little angel.”
“Is it true, Dad?” she speaks into his chest as he holds her tight, as if he would know, as if she’s a toddler again, looking to her father for all the answers in the universe.
“I want to see him,” says her father, not to her but to Wizniewski. He locks arms with Patty, as if escorting her down the aisle, and turns toward the door.
“I understand, sir,” says the Wiz, “but it’s—it’s not—brace yourself, sir.”
Her father looks down on her, his face bunched up, a dam holding back a storm. She nods back to him.
His voice breaks as he says, “Lead the way, Lieutenant.”
SHE CLICKS OFF something in her mind and flicks on a different switch. She will be clinical. She will be a detective, not a sister. She will view a crime scene, not her dead twin brother. Clutching, clinging with all her might to her father’s arm, stepping onto the tiled entryway of the condo.
She knows the place. It opens into a great room, a small kitchen to the left, bedroom and bathroom in the back. Pretty standard high-rise condo in Chicago, anyway, but she knows this one in particular. She’s been here before.
The first time was yesterday.
The apartment goes immediately silent, as if someone raised a hand for quiet. Everyone busy at work dusting or photographing or collecting samples or talking—everyone stops as the chief of Ds and his daughter, a detective in her own right, enter the room.