“And I thought you were a Brotherhood head case,” he said. “So I guess our reputations precede us.”
She ignored him. “You’re taking me with you,” she told me.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“When you take him down,” she said. “Him and the whole corp. I’m going with you.”
“She’s spunky,” Jude said. “You sure she’s related to you?”
“Is he always this big an asshole?” Zo asked.
“Definitely related,” Jude said.
This time we both ignored him.
“So?” she prompted me. “Do we have to fight, or do you want to save the energy and give in now?”
“Why would we let you in on anything?” Jude asked, replacing his charm offensive with a real one.
“Oh, you two are a we now?”
When he didn’t crack a smile, much less fire back, Zo realized he wasn’t joking. “What’s his problem?”
“You,” Jude said.
“Yeah, I’m an ‘org.’” She made finger quotes around the word. “Deal.”
“You’re an org who went along with Savona’s crap,” Jude said. “Who decided we were subhuman, and treated your sister like dogshit you scraped off the bottom of your shoe.”
Zo squared her shoulders. “I did what I did. I didn’t know—”
“That it could have been you?” Jude finished for her. “Changes things, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t know what it would mean to join the Brotherhood,” Zo said firmly. “And I didn’t know … Lia. My father’s mistakes have nothing to do with that. Neither do you.”
“She’s right,” I said. They looked equally surprised. “We could use her help.”
Jude rolled his eyes. “She’s twelve.” “She’s seventeen,” Zo said. “And she’s in.”
Jude sighed. “Fine. She’s in.” He smirked at her. “But you owe me one.”
She scowled back—Zo’s version of batting her eyelashes. “So collect. I dare you.” The scowl morphed into a brilliant, triumphant smile when it was clear he was out of ammunition. “In that case, can we get out of here and go plan this thing somewhere civilized?” she added. “I realize you two don’t care, but it’s about zero degrees out here and I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
I let her tromp through the mud ahead of us, which gave me a chance to dig my nails into Jude’s arm and, quietly but firmly, make one thing clear. “My sister is off-limits.”
“She’s an org,” he said, as if that settled the issue.
“Like that would stop you.”
“Jealous?”
“Screw you.”
“Then we don’t have a problem.”
“Jude …” I let it hang there, my tone the best threat I could muster.
“She’s a big girl,” he said. “Seems like she can protect herself. In fact she seems a lot like you.”
“She’s nothing like me.”
“Really? Huh.” Jude put on his thoughtful look. “Funny, because she definitely reminds me of someone.”
I knew what he was thinking, because I’d been thinking it too, ever since the day I met him.
You, I thought, but I would never say it out loud, especially not to him. She reminds you of you.
Waiting was interminable. As was playing along, playing the roles that had been written for me: Riley’s dutiful girlfriend, keeping her simmering rage under control; BioMax’s willing stooge, putting aside her personal feelings for the sake of a greater cause. This was key, Jude assured me, when I balked at showing my face the next morning for a weekly meeting with Kiri, Ben, and my father. I had to find out what he’d told them, and if they knew that I knew; I had to pretend I was past it, over it, somehow beyond it, or risk losing all access. It seemed like a wasted effort—if they knew, then it was over. Ben might be dense, but surely even he wouldn’t believe that I’d forgive the corp for what they’d done, no matter how many “proud to be a mech” soliloquies I may have delivered at their beck and call. But when I arrived for the meeting, Kiri hadn’t yet arrived, and Ben seemed neither surprised to see me nor overly solicitous. There was only one small, irrelevant matter to be dispensed with—“Your father says an important matter’s come up that he has to deal with, and he’ll have to step away from our project for a bit; he said you’d understand”—before we got down to business. I did understand. As far as my father was concerned, this was a family issue, and we would deal with it—or hide it—as a family. My father loved his boundaries, his neat little compartments. This time he’d left all of them vulnerable.
Good.
Ben and I sat there, on our own, waiting for Kiri and doing our best to ignore each other’s presence. He buried himself in his ViM screen while I pretended to focus on mine, trying not to leap across the table, wrap my hands around his throat, and force him to tell me what he knew.
But I had to do something.
I started pacing, which seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to do when you were nervous and frustrated and killing time. But I realized, as soon as I started wearing a track in the rug—seventeen steps to the end of the room, turning on my heel, then back again—that there was a reason people were always talking about pacing but never actually did it. It was boring. And more than a little odd-looking.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, finally looking up from his screen.
“Nothing.” I returned to my seat, taking the long way around so I could catch a glimpse of what he was staring at so intently, just in case it was something I wasn’t supposed to see. Which it was, but not in the way I’d expected. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?” I teased.
The girl in the pic couldn’t have been more than seventeen. She was pretty, if not in a particularly flashy way. Except for the brown hair, she looked a lot like Zo, though it may have just been her scowl.
“I wouldn’t have thought that was really your style,” I added. Ben’s tastes ran to conspicuously expensive suits that were always fashion-forward, if in the blandest of ways, and I’d never seen him less than impeccably attired. The girl on the screen was wearing some kind of faded flash dress two sizes too small, and not in the “oops, my button popped!” kind of way.
Ben slammed the ViM on the table, screen down, and glared at me. “She’s my daughter,” he said quietly.
“Oh.”
That made significantly more sense.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“That’s right. You didn’t.”
He didn’t lift the screen, nor did he look at me. Not for several long minutes, until Kiri walked in and the meeting began. Then he was all business again, same old Ben, smooth and insincere. Except that he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wondered if the subject of fathers and daughters cut a little too close to home when it came to me—if that meant he knew what BioMax had made my father do.
Or if it was something else. More secrets.
“We have a proposition for you,” Ben said, toward the end of the meeting. “And I think once you consider it, you’ll see the wisdom in—”
“You’re going to hate it,” Kiri cut in. No-bullshit Kiri, that’s how I thought of her, and now I couldn’t look at her without thinking, Did you know? Who was in the room, when they decided? Who was left that I could trust? Another reason I needed those files—but these offices were just for show; there was no access to anything. Even if I managed to get hold of Kiri’s or Ben’s ViM and get in remotely, Jude and I were reasonably sure they wouldn’t show us much. BioMax, like most corps, kept their dirty little secrets on secure, firewalled servers—likely nothing that could stand up against the full weight of a network invasion, but nothing we’d be able to topple remotely on our own. We had to get in at the source.
“Try me.” I offered up a perfect smile. Nothing to hide. What you see is what you get.
“As you know, the Brotherhood of Man has been making overtures in our direction,” Ben said. “They claim they’d like to publicly bur
y the hatchet.”
“In our backs?”
Ben cleared his throat. “They have a powerful voice and numerous followers—”
“Hate sells.”
“—and if we can tap into that, it could be very helpful to our cause.”
“Where is this going?” I asked. Circumlocution was call-me-Ben’s specialty; he could talk for hours without saying a thing.
As usual it was Kiri who cut through the crap. “We’re staging an event,” she said. “A public peacemaking. The Brotherhood will announce their willingness to help incorporate the mechs into society, and BioMax will graciously accept their offer.”
Kiri was one of the only BioMax people who actually used the word “mech.” It was one of the things I liked best about her. The rest of them all said “download recipient” or “client” or, if they didn’t realize I was listening, “skinner.” But Kiri used the name we’d given ourselves. She was smart—too smart to buy into the Brotherhood’s line. Maybe Auden was sincere. But that was irrelevant, now that the Honored Rai Savona was back in the picture. “You do realize they’ve got an agenda?” I said.
“Quite honestly, their agenda doesn’t matter to us,” Ben said. “Right now they’re doing exactly what we need them to be doing. If they take an ill-considered path in the future, we’ll take whatever measures we see as necessary.”
Translation: Squash them like a bug.
“So what do you want from me?” I was sickened enough being in these offices, facing them, pretending nothing had changed. Throw Savona into the mix—and Auden, who I tried not to think about, couldn’t think about—and almost bearable turned into not. “Since it’s obviously not my opinion.”
Is it ever?
Jude’s voice, Jude’s disgust. They want you to dance for them, I could imagine him sneering, not talk. Certainly not think.
“The Brotherhood is extending an olive branch, Lia,” Ben said. I hated when he said my name in his oily voice, like he was granting me a gift by acknowledging my identity. I know what’s inside your head, his expression always seemed to say. I’ve seen your flesh peeled away, your brain exposed. I know what you really are. “We don’t want to turn our backs on that.”
“Fine. I still don’t see—”
“We want you to represent BioMax,” Kiri said. “Stand up at a podium with Savona and Auden, make a little speech, shake their hands, sit down again. Simple as that.”
“Simple?” I laughed. “You’re a bad liar, Kiri.”
“You don’t have to marry them,” Ben snapped. “You’ll speak, you’ll shake hands, and then we’ll start the music and serve the food and you can go skulk in a corner or visit your friends upstairs or whatever antisocial course suits your fancy.”
“What friends upstairs?”
“On the thirteenth floor,” Kiri said. “The event’s down at our research facility—there’s a nice banquet space there, and we think it’ll send a good message, get the word out about the limitless technological horizon, all that. We’ll be packaging a whole vid segment on the rehabilitating mechs, give the public more insight into the process. Better our turf than theirs, right?”
I nodded, distracted by the possibilities. With all those people it would be easy to slip away from the crowd, into the corners of the building that I’d never been allowed to enter. With an event like this going on downstairs, it seemed likely that the place would be understaffed, maybe even cleared out, which would give us a clear path.
It wouldn’t do to give in too quickly. Not when they both knew exactly how I felt about Savona and, I could tell, had come in girding themselves for a fight. So I let them argue and spin and cajole; I let them explain all the ways that this could be a new start for us, that many of the most vicious antiskinners were followers of the Brotherhood and their watching the leaders recant could change everything, that I was the key to forgiveness. Especially given my history with Auden—
That’s where I stopped them. “I’ll do it.”
Kiri beamed. “I promise, if it’s a disaster, you’re welcome to say I told you so.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I will.”
I twirled for the mirror, and the nearly weightless silk skirt billowed around me. Under any other circumstances it would have been an optimal opportunity for preening. The sleek ball gown hugged every curve of my perfectly sculpted mech body, and the shimmering blue—which shifted across the spectrum from sky to indigo and back again as I moved—glowed against my smooth, pale skin. Riley brushed his lips against my neck, then traced a finger down my bare back until it reached the sash of silk slung low over my hips. “You sure you have to go out tonight?” he said softly. “You could stay here, and—”
“I’m sure,” I said. The ball gown wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of delinquent style, and I suspected the idea of breaking into BioMax might have seemed slightly less surreal if I’d been decked out in something more appropriate. But camo gear, even the kind programmed to blend into any background, wouldn’t offer much invisibility at the BioMax ceremony. The idea was to blend, and—I shot a final confirming glance at the mirror, taking in the elaborately twisted blond braids, the jeweled designs sparkling along my arms and breastbone, the oceans of silk—I blended.
“Whoa,” Riley breathed, eyes widening as Zo stepped out of the bathroom, her shoulders hunched and arms crossed her chest as if she were preparing for attack.
Her hair was clean and shining for the first time in years, pulled up in a loose chignon that highlighted the long arc of her neck. She’d traded in her standard uniform of baggy shirts and sagging retro jeans for an asymmetrical black gown. Satin coated one arm, leaving the other bare, and a latticework of temp tattoos crawled from her wrist to her neck. It looked like her skin was knit from silver lace, and somehow it worked. She looked beautiful, but not in a shocking ugly-duckling-turns-swan kind of way. Zo was still Zo, and crap clothes and greasy hair couldn’t hide a genetic bounty for which our parents had paid a fortune. She looked better, but no matter how much she tried to hide it, she’d always looked good. I’d always known Zo was beautiful.
I’d never known how much she looked like me.
Or at least, the me that used to exist, in a different body with a different face. Zo was now almost exactly the age I’d been when the accident happened. And it occurred to me that watching her get older would be like getting a glimpse into the future I didn’t get to have.
“You look great,” I told her.
She scowled. “Whatever.”
“You look like some old lady,” Sari commented, from her habitual sulking spot in the corner.
“You look amazing,” Riley said. “Both of you.”
Zo stopped hunching after that. She kept sneaking glances at herself in the mirror, and I wondered what she saw. If she saw me.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Riley asked. He pressed his hand to the small of my back. As an org I’d found that gesture irresistible—something about a warm hand on cold skin, at exactly the spot where I felt strongest and most vulnerable all at the same time. But I was a mech, and it was just a hand. I smiled at Riley.
“You hate parties,” I reminded him. “I realize I look hot enough to make you forget that. But you’d remember as soon as we walked in, and you’d be miserable.”
“I don’t like the idea of you going alone,” he said.
Zo cleared her throat, loudly.
“Both of you, alone,” he clarified. “Aren’t you afraid your father will be there?”
Zo flinched, but fortunately, his eyes were on me.
“I hope he’s there,” I said. It was only a half lie. We needed him there, if this was going to work. But it didn’t mean I was looking forward to the encounter.
“Me too,” Zo said, and if you weren’t her sister, you wouldn’t notice that it was the voice she used when she was lying, and when she was afraid. But there was fury in it, along with the fear. It leaked out exactly the way our father’s did, like radia
tion—stealthy but lethal. “He’s the one that should be afraid to see us.”
I almost believed her. The more time we spent together, the more we fell into our old patterns: me the rule-abiding, cautious good girl, her the wild child who threw herself headfirst into anything, her life a constant dare to the universe to do its worst. While I was playing nice with BioMax, doing my job and pretending nothing had changed, lying to Riley and hating myself for how easy it had become, Zo had spent the last few days with Jude, putting her hacking skills to good use by helping him ferret out blueprints, plot strategies, conspire, spew out one convoluted plan after another until hitting on one that at least had a prayer of working. It all seemed so easy for her, and I’d assumed that was because it was easy, because she was fearless. But it suddenly occurred to me that she was fearless because she couldn’t conceive of having anything to fear—maybe all this still seemed like something out of a vidlife, a melodrama with an inevitably happy ending. I knew it was possible to delude yourself that way; after the accident, I’d done it myself.
“Zo. You sure you’re up for this?”
“I’m sure.” She glared at me, daring me to try to talk her out of it or, worse, forbid her.
“Then let’s go,” I said. That won me a grateful look.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Riley said, as we were leaving. “They can’t make you.”
I kissed him and wondered when he’d gotten so naive.
There were only a hundred people crammed into the BioMax banquet room, but the walls were net-linked, and thousands of faces stared at us from all over the country. It was easy enough to ignore them; I was used to being watched.
While Zo haunted the room, hovering by the buffet table and avoiding our father, I sat up on the dais with the assembled dignitaries, waiting for my cue. It was usually frustrating the way the mech body created a distance between me and the world, every touch and sound a painful reminder that nothing seemed quite real only because I wasn’t. But times like this it was an advantage. I could stay locked in my head, watching my body move as if it belonged to someone else, shaking repugnant hands, smiling at the enemy, forming words I would never mean. Standing at a microphone, looking out over an audience of corp directors, BioMax suits, Brotherhood sympathizers, following the script: “I’m so gratified that we can come together in dialogue.” “I’m looking forward to our shared future.” “Tolerance.” “Forgiveness.” “Common ground.” “This is a new beginning.” And other such bullshit.
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