out here. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. Just endless kilometers of dust and blinding white and rusted ruins. The bones of a carcass long picked clean.
They’d had it all.
Humans.
And look what they did with it.
Ezekiel knelt, running his fingertips over bare and burning stone. Looking around him, he guessed the BioMaas operative had come this way for a reason; they were counting on being followed. He realized he’d been an idiot to even try to trail them on foot with nothing but keen eyes to track them. BioMaas wouldn’t send amateurs out looking for the weapon that’d end their cold war with Daedalus once and for all. They’d send their best.
Ezekiel stood slowly, turned his eyes back to the northeast.
They’d send their best.
Just like Daedalus did …
He took a long sip of water from his canteen, ran his hand through his mop of sweat-damp hair. Weighing the thoughts in his head, trimming the impossibilities, the shots in the dark, until he was left with only one. It would mean abandoning the trail for now, that Lemon would be at the mercy of her captors. It would mean leaving any hope of finding Ana or reuniting with Eve behind. It would mean a dance with the devil. But out here alone, blundering in the dust? No clues, no path, no way forward?
What other option do you have?
Just a few hundred meters from where Ezekiel stood, two words sat baking in the sun-parched earth. Two words that might have changed everything—avoided all the misery and pain and death that was to come. Just a few more steps forward, and he might have spotted them.
The message for the friends she’d hoped were following.
The arrow pointing west.
The warning.
New Bethlehem.
But with a sigh, Ezekiel turned and ran back toward Babel.
Preacher had been hurt worse. But only just.
It’d happened back in the CorpState Wars, when he was just a regular grunt, still ninety-seven percent meat. Fighting for Daedalus as the company claimed its place among the three most powerful corporations in the whole Yousay. To this day, he still didn’t know what hit him. He’d been pinned down by enemy machina when the explosion went off. He dimly remembered pieces of himself not being attached to himself anymore. Red on his hands. Screaming for his momma. Then he woke up in a Daedalus medcenter. Metal where the missing pieces of him should’ve been.
The Lord had saved his life that day. But it was Daedalus who plucked him from that carnage and made him better. Faster. Stronger. In return, they bought themselves a soldier who knew what it was to look dying in the eye. A soldier more machine than man. A soldier loyal to the death.
Which looked like it might be about now, come to think of it.
Preacher was crawling. He didn’t have much else to do, talking true. After that blitzhund blew his legs away, he’d been laid flat, knocked cold. He’d woken up on that broken stretch of highway outside Babel hours later, surrounded by a dozen broken machina. It looked like lil’ Evie Carpenter had worked her magic again—every one of those bots was fried to a crisp, and almost every cybernetic component in Preacher’s body had been cooked. His right arm was a lump of dead titanium with a red glove stuck on the end of it. His right eye was blind. His combat augs, his reflex stims, his comms, all dead.
He’d not had a chance to give his position when he called for evac, and lil’ Miss Carpenter appeared to have fried his retrieval beacon along with everything else. Which meant Daedalus probably didn’t know where he was.
Which meant he was probably gonna die out here.
But still, he crawled. Back across the Glass. Dragging himself with his one meat arm across shards of irradiated silicon, the mangled scrap metal that had been his legs trailing behind him. Hoping to find one of those wrecked Armada trucks, maybe. One with a working radio, maybe.
Wasn’t like him to just lie down and die.
But after a whole day and night of this crap, it surely was tempting.
The bounty hunter stopped crawling, rolled onto his back. His mouth was ash dry, coated with dust. He pulled off his black, beaten cowboy hat, held it up against the merciless sun.
“And God said, let there be light,” he muttered. “And I ain’t complainin’, Lord. I could just use a little less of it right now, is all. Maybe some kinda miracle if you’re in a giving mood? A little one’ll do just fine.”
And, as if on cue, Preacher heard footsteps.
Slow and steady, crunching on the black glass toward him. He thought he recognized the tempo, but without his augs, he couldn’t be sure. Lifting his head with a wince, he focused on the approaching figure with his one working eye.
“Well, well,” Preacher chuckled, leaning back on the glass. “Snowflake.”
The boy stopped a good forty meters away, leveled a pistol at his head.
Smart.
“I’m wondering if that skull of yours is bulletproof,” the boy called.
“Matter of fact, it is,” Preacher replied.
“You move sudden, we find out for certain.”
The boy advanced slowly, gun aimed steady. He looked like hell—bloodstained and filthy, a bulky satchel on his back. But last Preacher had seen the boy, that right arm of his ended at the bicep, outfitted with a prosthetic that predated the war. Now his arm extended below his elbow, and the bounty hunter could see five small nubs sprouting at the end of the stump.
“Well, you surely are a special one, ain’tcha?”
“Considering you survived a point-blank blitzhund explosion and a shotgun blast to the chest, I’m guessing I’m not the only one,” the boy replied.
Preacher reached into his shredded coat, stuffed a wad of synth tobacco in his cheek. “What’re you doin’ out here, Snowflake? Shouldn’t you be with your girl?”
“Well, one of them told me to go to hell, and I lost the other one. Along with my logika and my tank and what little remained of my good mood.”
Preacher nodded. “That does sound a goodly dose of misfortune.”
“Not really. In fact, this is my lucky day.”
“How you figure?”
The boy knelt beside Preacher’s head, barrel aimed right between his eyes.
“Because you own a blitzhund. And you find things for a living.”
He held up a grav-tank pilot’s helmet, smudged with spots of dried blood.
“And
