Sari bared her teeth, but before she could do anything, the door eased open. A thin, vertical strip of face appeared through the crack. An inch of pale lip, split by a deep red scar, a sharp nose, hooded brown eyes. “Let’s go!” the mouth commanded. “Things to do.”
Mika scrambled, tipping me off. This was the final puzzle piece, the alpha to their pathetic betas. Riley’s replacement. Sari glanced at the door, eyes shining. She smirked at me. “This is all Riley’s fault, you know.”
“I doubt that.”
She jerked her head toward the shadow behind the door. “You piss off Wynn, you pay. Riley knew that then, and he knows it now. Ask him. If you ever see him again.”
She left me alone.
“Riley?” I VM’d. But again there was no answer. Possibly he was out of range. Gone to get help. Or just gone.
Mechs feel fear, just like orgs. Sharp, imminent fear, a red, flashing danger sign, like when you’re hurtling toward the earth at a hundred miles per hour. And when the fear’s sharp enough, it overpowers that annoying voice, the one wanting to know If I’m afraid, why aren’t my hands shaking? Why aren’t my teeth chattering? If I feel fear, why don’t I feel fear? You don’t think about it, because when the danger sign’s flashing brightly enough, you don’t think at all.
Fear I felt. But not the thing that comes after the fear, the thing that shows up when the door closes and the noise stops and you’re just waiting—and waiting—for something to happen. The tight-chest, stiff-neck, rigid-muscle, can’t-breathe thing that serves as a constant reminder that Something Bad is on its way.
I never noticed it when I was an org—that’s part of being an org, having the luxury not to notice anything—but some emotions are more inside your head than others. Happy, that’s a brain feeling. But sad ? That’s in the body. In the gut and the throat and the jaw. Anxious too. Worried. Nervous. All the feelings your brain would escape from if it could. So your body grabs hold and doesn’t let go. Org minds can go to as many happy places as they want, but their bodies always drag them back down to sweaty palm–ville.
Org bodies. Not mine.
So when I forced my mind to something else—clothes, in this case, and the new morphdress I was considering, almost solely for the pleasure of watching Jude’s face fall as its skirt transformed from mini to maxi before his eyes—it went.
I can’t escape, the train of thought went. And they can’t kill me. They can’t hurt me in any way that counts.
So why think about what was going to happen next?
Why not just stop being afraid?
And then the lights went out.
I’m not afraid of the dark, I told myself, then repeated the words out loud. My voice sounded strange, floating through the black. Disembodied.
It was just curfew, I thought. Nothing more mysterious or dire than that.
I’m not afraid of the dark.
It was what the dark meant. The cities were primitive. Energy ran through wires, snaking through the air or buried in the ground, safe from those who would steal it, abuse it, use it up. Unlike out in the real world, where energy was wireless and, as long as you could afford to pay, there for the taking, as much as was needed. That was the world I was built for. That was the world that powered the converter in my chest.
I’d last three days, maybe four. But that was it. Then no more power, which meant . . . what?
As long as the artificial brain was intact, it sent out a signal that interfered with the functioning of any other brains with the Lia Kahn pattern. It was how BioMax ensured that I remained Lia Kahn, the one and only. The memories I stored every night were guaranteed to stay locked away in storage. Until the brain in my head was destroyed and the signal failed, giving BioMax the automatic go-ahead to download Lia Kahn into a brand-new body. No harm, no foul.
But power failure meant I stayed in this body, even if it was useless. Maybe indefinitely, an unconscious lump of parts. And maybe that was the plan. Toss me out with the garbage—or keep me around, a life-size doll, to do with what they would.
None of the mechs I knew had played around with power failure. Maybe my brain would stay active while they did whatever they did. Maybe it would be like being trapped underground, blind and frozen, forever.
I said I wasn’t afraid of the dark.
I say a lot of things.
“Lia.” It was Riley’s digitized voice in my ear, low and urgent. The VM link only worked within a few miles, which meant they hadn’t taken me too far away. “Where are you?”
“Trapped.” I wiggled my fingers. If I’d been an org, they probably would have gone numb by now. “I don’t know where they brought me.”
“I shouldn’t have left you alone. I never thought Sari would—”
“It’s done,” I said. “Where are you?”
“They tried to . . .” A pause. “It doesn’t matter now. I got away. It was too easy—I think they let me. You okay?”
“They can’t hurt me.”
“They won’t try.” He didn’t sound as sure as I would have liked. “They’re not after that.”
“So what do they want?”
“It’s complicated.”
It was always complicated.
“There’s this guy Wynn,” he said. Then stopped.
Keep talking, I thought. And not just because I needed to know. His voice, even in this monotonic form, was warm, something to hold on to in the dark.
“He thinks he runs things around here,” Riley said finally. “And I . . . pissed him off.”
“I heard.” Sound tough, be tough. That was the rule. “So he wants some kind of revenge?”
“He wants me,” Riley said. “And Jude. For you. That’s the trade.”
“He had you,” I pointed out. “He took me instead.”
“Because that was easier.”
Because he knew you’d fight back, I thought, disgusted with myself. Because he knew I couldn’t.
“And he needs me to get Jude,” Riley added. “He wants both of us.”
“Why?”
There was another pause so long, I was afraid he’d gone.
“So do we have a plan?” I asked. “I assume Jude’s not just going to walk in and give himself up?”
Say yes, I thought. Say Jude’s already here, ready to play martyr.
But Jude didn’t do martyr, any more than I did damsel in distress. Self-preservation was his defining quality. Like it was supposed to be mine—I just wasn’t proving to be very good at it. Maybe Jude would sacrifice himself for someone else. For Riley, maybe—I was sure Riley thought so. Maybe even for Ani. Never for me.
“It’s complicated,” Riley said again, like I didn’t know what that meant. “But we’ll find you. Wynn’s got the top thirty floors of the east tower. Security’s good but not perfect. We can get through. Find you.”
“Take your time,” I said, wondering if sarcasm could travel through the VM line. “Not like I’m in any—”
The door eased open.
“Lia? What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Later. Company’s here.” A tall, slender figure stood in the doorway. It was too dark to see his face.
“I’ll get you out of there, I promise.”
Feel free to hurry, I thought. The man stepped into the room, slamming the door shut behind him. “Wynn?” I guessed.
A hard laugh. “Not as dumb as they said.” His voice was deep but hoarse, like the words scraped his throat on their way out.
“This is insane.”
Another laugh, more genuine this time. “Damn right. Welcome to the city, skinner.”
“I’ve never done anything to you.” It sounded lame, even as I said it, like I was starring in a vidlife, reciting someone else’s script, forced to play out the scene, though we all knew how it would end.
“You picked the wrong people to be friends with,” he said. “Bad luck. And they owe me. So now you pay up.”
“Whatever you want. I’ve got plenty of credit, I can�
��” But even in the dark, I could see he was shaking his head.
“Eye for an eye, baby.” His face was an unnerving blank in the dark. “Life for a life.”
Jude would never give himself up, not for me, I thought. And even if he did, this guy might never let me go. Everything in a city belonged to someone, Riley had told me, and you never gave up what you had, not if you were smart. Wynn wasn’t stupid, not if he’d set this whole thing in motion. I belonged to him.
“I never had a skinner before,” he said, approaching me. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t do anything but watch the shadow loom, the dim outline of a hand swoop toward my face. He dragged his knuckles across my cheek. Softly. Rested a hand on the back of my neck. Gently. Bent his head to mine, his lips feathering across my ear. “This could get interesting.”
The door exploded. There was a burst of light, someone screamed—maybe it was Wynn, maybe it was me—and a thud. Wynn’s body, smacking the floor. The man who’d shot him, his green uniform and black faceplate illuminated by dancing flashlights, ducked back into the hallway, leaving me alone again. Out there it sounded like a war, or at least the way war sounded on the vids: voices shouting on top of one another, boots pounding, thuds and thumps like punches landing, bodies falling, “Fucking animals!” someone yelled, another shot, and then silence. In the room, just one mech tied to a chair, an org sprawled at her feet.
A phalanx of secops marched in, stunshots drawn. “Lia Kahn?” the lead guy said.
It wasn’t a real question, so I didn’t bother answering.
“You’re coming with us.” Though the unidirected sonic blast of the stunshot could knock an org unconscious in seconds, we both knew it wouldn’t have any effect on me. Not that it mattered. I was outnumbered, outpowered—and almost as eager to get out as they were to bring me in.
As two of them began to untie me, a third kicked Wynn out of his way. His body rolled a few feet, then stopped, one arm flung over his head, palm up, fingers slightly bent as if he were holding an invisible hand. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
I never saw his face.
DEAD END
“Do you want a war?”
They wore the standard green uniform of secop foot soldiers, a Synapsis logo swooshing across their chests to mark where their loyalties lay. Less a fashion statement than a fail-safe, the logo housed tracking and recording tech, relaying all data back to their corp-town bosses. For the lawless, it meant that once one secop had found you, they all had. For the secops, it meant Big Brother was always watching.
For me it meant there was no point in fighting back or running away, not unless I wanted my face on record as resisting a security action, which meant automatic detention. Given the other things my face was on record doing, detention no longer seemed much of a worst-case scenario. But there was the small matter of being tied to a chair.
Three of the men in green swarmed around me while two others guarded the door, their stunshots aimed at the hallway. There was no movement out there, no noise. Meaty hands untied the knots around my wrists and ankles.
“Hold still,” one growled, and without giving me a chance to obey, yanked my arms out in front of me. He clamped my wrists together in his large grip.
I reminded myself not to knee him in the groin. “You don’t have to—Hey!”
With his other hand he slipped a pair of cuffs from his belt and, with a smooth, practiced flick, snapped them around one wrist, then the other. The metal edges chewed into my skin.
“It only hurts if you fight it,” he muttered.
Nothing hurts me, you crackbrain. But I stopped straining against the cuffs. “How did you find me?” I asked, not expecting much of an answer. I didn’t get one. I didn’t get anything: no concerned questions, no reassurances, no urgency, just silent efficiency as they hoisted me out of the chair like I was an object. I got it. This wasn’t a rescue operation. It was a retrieval.
But how did they know where to find me?
The burliest of the secops slung me over his shoulder, treating me to another ass in my face, another upside-down ride. This time I wasn’t blindfolded. So I saw Sari and Mika as we passed—saw their bodies, that is, faces planted into the dirty floor, limbs twisted at wrong angles. A gun lay on the ground next to Sari; a knife glinted by Mika’s shoulder. The four bodies laying next to them, all strangers, rested next to equally useless weapons.
The privatization of security operations meant no more guns, I reminded myself. At least not the bullet-shooting kind that drilled bloody holes in your head.
And there was no blood.
Just unconscious, I told myself. The secops would have stunned them like they did to Bliss Tanzen’s boyfriend that time he took too many Xers and tried to set the school on fire.
But that guy’s father had been VP and part owner of the Freetower Corp, and the secops knew it. We were in a city now, where no one owned anything. And the bodies weren’t moving.
“Are they dead?” I forced myself to ask as my head bounced against the secop’s back. I could feel his shrug; my body rose and fell with his jerking shoulder.
He grunted. “What’s the difference?”
Another room. Another lock. Another chair. At least I wasn’t tied down, even if I was still trapped. And this time, I wasn’t alone.
There were six of us. All with the same blond hair, the same blue eyes, the same pale hands with long, tapered fingers, the same pert nose and full lips. I was beautiful, there was no arguing that.
Just not unique.
It was one of those impersonal, featureless waiting rooms—beige walls, beige tiling, uncomfortable beige chairs—and it should have been easy to imagine that we were just waiting for a doctor’s appointment or some kind of disciplinary encounter with the school principal. But there were little touches—the lack of a ViM screen on the wall, of windows, of anything that wasn’t nailed down, the uniform glowering by the door, the small Synapsis logos engraved into the ceiling tiles—that made it impossible to forget where we were. This wasn’t the kind of place in which people waited by choice.
“What?” the girl next to me said suddenly. “You’re staring.”
“No I wasn’t,” I said, quickly looking away. But everywhere I looked, there I was. In sonicshirts and net-linked hoodies and Zo-style retro gear, in full-on org drag and in silver-streaked mech mode that even Jude would be envious of. And still, all of them so much like looking in a mirror that when the girl turned to me, I had to touch my own lips to make sure they weren’t wearing the same scowl. I kept my eyes on my lap, which seemed safer. “You know what we’re doing here, anyway?”
“Quiet!” the secop at the door snapped.
The girl with my face just shrugged, unintimidated. “Don’t you watch the vids?” she whispered. “They called in every F-three-one-six-five in a two-hundred-mile radius of Synapsis. Can you blame them, after what happened?”
It hadn’t been difficult to memorize my serial number: F3165-11. It popped up on the glowing readouts that scrolled across my eyescreen whenever I performed a self-diagnostic check. F for female; 11 for my place in the production line of identical models. I’d never bothered to ask what the other numbers meant, since all I needed to know was that they meant me—along with everyone else in the room.
Called us in, she had said, but no one called me. They found me—they must have known where to look. Riley? I thought. Maybe he’d decided it was the only way. Maybe I’d been stupid one too many times, trusting my life to a near stranger who’d made it very clear he only cared about two people: Jude and himself.
“So you think one of them did it?” I asked, eyeing the other Lia’s. Not Lia, I reminded myself. “What’s your name?” I asked abruptly, before she could answer my first question.
“Why?” she asked. “You think I’m the one who did it?”
“Sorry, I just—”
“Kidding. I’m Katya.” She held out a hand for me to shake. But I couldn’t force myself to take it. “So was
it you?”
“No!”
“Quiet!” the guard barked again, loudly enough that we both flinched.
“Trank out,” the other girl advised. “They just want to talk to us and then they’ll let us go home.”
Not all of us, I thought. Not the one they’re looking for. I was innocent—but how was I supposed to explain where they’d found me? Of course, if Riley had told them that much, maybe he’d told them everything. They could already know I’d run from Synapsis.
“And you believe them? That they’ll just send us home?” I asked.
The mech shrugged, looking like she didn’t have time to care. With her smooth, blond hair, self-assured smile, and immaculate clothes, she looked more like me than I did. It was like watching myself in a vid, acting out a scene I had no memory of performing.
“Why not?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
The door swung open, and a woman in a dowdy tech-free suit with the telltale Synapsis logo stencil across its collar poked her head in. “F-three-one-six-five-eleven,” she said, glancing at a ViM that fit discreetly in the palm of her hand. “Lia Kahn.”
“So you were nowhere near Synapsis Corp-Town at the time of the attack.” Detective Ayer’s voice was nearly as flat as that of a newbie mech, but she was org all the way. You could tell by her dry, flaky skin, pulled too tight by some cut-rate lift-tuck and not helped in any way by the stiff copper curls molded around her face. I knew the corps screened kids around the age of ten, tracking them for manual labor, for data entry, for the factories, wherever their aptitude would allow them to excel, and I wondered what it was about Detective Ayer that had screamed secops. Obviously it had been the right verdict—the corps only farmed out their best officers for off-site work. So she was either unusually good or unusually determined. Or both.
“How many times are you going to ask me the same question?”
“Until I get the truth.”
The car, I thought suddenly in alarm. What if they’d found our car at Synapsis and somehow traced it back to me? I tried not to panic. The car belonged to some mech I barely knew, who had contributed it for general use when he arrived at Quinn’s estate. There was nothing connecting it to me.
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