Detective Ayer turned to me, and her defeated expression regained a little of its spark. “You didn’t know, did you?” she asked.
“Didn’t know what?”
“That your alibi was out there, ready and waiting. That you could have ended this farce before it started.”
“Maybe I just enjoyed your company,” I said, pride overcoming curiosity.
She shook her head. I could see from her expression that she knew she’d be crazy to push the issue—and she was going to do it anyway. Her last stand. “I don’t think so. You asked how we tracked you down. Don’t you want to know?”
“Lia, we’re leaving,” my father said. Like I was still his perfect, darling daughter, who lived in the bedroom down the hall, said please and thank you and of course, yes, whatever you want, Daddy, like I hadn’t seen him on his knees praying to a God he’d never believed in, wishing that he’d had the strength to let me die.
He’d done me a favor, convincing me once and for all that I wasn’t the same person anymore, no matter how much we both might have wanted it. I’d done him a favor in return: I left.
“No. I want to hear this.” Knowing that he was my only option, that if he changed his mind about rescuing me and left me here, here is where I’d rot. Knowing that if I said one more yes and walked out the door with him, I’d keep walking, straight to the car, then to the house, to the old bedroom and the old life, the one that didn’t fit me any better than all the old clothes in Lia Kahn’s closet, custom-tailored to a body that was now a pile of ashes in some biowaste landfill.
“BioMax is tracking you,” Detective Ayer said. “BioMax knows where all you mechs are, every minute of every day. Took a couple days to get them to release the data, but once they did, we would have found you anywhere.”
Relief, that was first. No one had turned me in. Riley hadn’t betrayed me. Relief, and then disgust—with BioMax, and with myself for not figuring it out.
My father’s face was as blank as mine.
“That’s your big secret?” I said coolly. “You think I didn’t know that?”
As an org, I’d been good at bluffing; as a mech, I was a pro. Empty expression, inflection-free voice—Ayer would never know how much she’d thrown me. “Seems like you’re the one who’s been wasting time. All that data and you still can’t figure out who attacked the corp-town? What kind of detective are you anyway?”
Judging from her expression, the kind that wanted to violate the Human Rights Covenant and throw me into the wall. But she behaved. “BioMax doesn’t archive its tracking data,” she said tightly. Apparently my father wasn’t the only one who could release his bottled-up anger word by bitter word. “They can only tell us where you are, not where you were.”
Lie, I thought. BioMax would never collect the information just to throw it out. Ayer didn’t seem dumb enough to believe the line, but maybe she was smart enough to know it was all she’d get.
What else was BioMax lying about? Was it just a GPS tracker, or could they see what I saw, hear what I heard? Could they somehow know what I was thinking? My brain was a computer, after all—a computer they’d built. Shouldn’t it have occurred to me that they could read it as easily as I could read the network? That maybe they could write over it as easily as I could update my zone?
“Did you want to hear the rest?” Ayer asked, giving herself away with an inadvertent glance at my father. Because he’d given the secops something they didn’t have, I realized. Evidence that had convinced them to let me go—evidence that shouldn’t have existed.
“BioMax feeds the tracking data to my father,” I said flatly, confirming the guess with one look at Ayer’s face. My father remained unreadable. “They may not archive it, but he does.”
The detective looked disappointed that I wasn’t freaking out. She didn’t know him like I did. You didn’t say no to my father—if the information existed in the world, it was only a matter of time before he claimed it for himself.
“And according to him, you’ve spent the last several days at home with your family.” Detective Ayer smiled coldly. “I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t have mentioned that yourself, saved us both all this trouble.”
“I’m sure there are lots of things you don’t understand,” I said. “You must be used to it by now.” I could feel my father’s eyes on me, sense his approval.
“Unless there’s anything else, we’ll be going now,” my father said. “Once you apologize to my daughter for wasting her time.”
Detective Ayer looked like she’d rather die. “If you come across any information about the attack, I hope you’ll come to me,” she said. “We do intend to solve this case.”
“I hope you can,” I said. “Oh, and apology accepted.”
The clothes felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else. Which they did. They’d come from a dead girl’s closet. But I put them on anyway, grateful to trash the city rags. I laced up the dead girl’s sneakers. And let the dead girl’s father take me away.
My BioMax rep was waiting for us in the parking lot. Just as repulsively handsome as I remembered, even in his tacky suit with its thermo-pulse lapels and gold net-links at each cuff. The first time I met Ben, I’d fixed on the dimpled chin and the full lips, instinctively turning on the flirt even though I was stuck in a hospital bed unable to do anything but blink—and even though, at the time, my skull was stripped bare to expose the tangled mess of circuitry that lay beneath. That was back when I thought we were on the same team, still members of the same species. Before he leaned in close, gave me that sickly fake grin, and said, “Call me Ben,” my first tip-off that he wasn’t a doctor or a savior but just some guy who wanted to sucker me into trusting him. Even though I saw him every time I went into BioMax for a checkup or repair, I could never be bothered to remember his last name. Call-me-Ben it was. And now, apparently, we were on the same team again.
“Good to see you again, Lia,” he said. “Though not under these circumstances.”
“Seems like you’ve been seeing me nonstop,” I snapped. “So you like to watch? Seen anything you like?”
Ben raised his eyebrows at my father. “She knows?”
“She knows,” I said.
“We don’t watch,” Ben told me. “We keep track of where you go, but that’s it. No spying.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. That’s not spying at all.”
“It’s precautionary,” he said. “To make sure none of you get into any trouble. Like, say, wandering into a corp-town that’s about to become the site of biological warfare.”
“What’d you do?” I asked my father. “Pay him off to give the cops fake information?”
“BioMax is not in the business of violating its clients’ privacy,” Ben said stiffly.
“Especially not if it would prove your clients are a bunch of terrorists,” I guessed. “You know who attacked that corp-town, don’t you? And you’re protecting them.”
“We’re protecting all of you,” Ben said.
“You’re protecting your investment.”
“You don’t want to become an object of fear and hatred.”
“I didn’t want to become an object at all,” I snapped. “But no one asked me.”
“Enough,” my father said. He didn’t have to raise his voice. “Ben, thanks for your assistance. Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
“Of course,” Ben said smoothly. “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
We walked. In silence, at first, until Ben was out of sight. The secops headquarters looked like a silver pyramid that had been smashed with a giant sledgehammer, leaving behind a crushed jumble of razor-sharp points and jagged edges. The planes of the building jutted at awkward angles, so that wherever you stood, it appeared ready to topple over on your head. Covered in silver-plated panels, it likely gleamed in the sun—but on a day like this, like most days, the sky a swirl of murky grays, it nearly faded into the clouds.
We kept the station at our backs, and instead wand
ered through its carefully groomed gardens, which burst with the bright purples and pinks of tropical flowers, genetically coded to survive the cold. It was something I never would have noticed before the download, the way the flowers looked wrong, almost plastic, sprouting from the frost-tipped grass. My father stopped abruptly, staring down at a large pink blossom the size of a fist, its stiff petals barely flickering in the breeze. For a moment I thought he was going to pluck it—ill-advised as that would have been, given the fact that despoiling private gardens was illegal and this garden happened to belong to the secops. Besides, what would my father want with a flower?
Finally he looked up from the flower—to me. I didn’t like it. It was too easy to imagine what he was seeing, the machine that usurped his dead daughter’s life. The mistake.
In his eyes I wasn’t some wondrous machine, a marvel of modern technology. I wasn’t a mech, I was a skinner. A thing, just like the Brotherhood of Man said, the thing that the people in the corp-town and the city saw when they glared at me, the thing, the object, with the unnatural gait, the unblinking eyes, the man-made brain.
In his eyes I wasn’t a miracle. I was a desecration.
His hair was a different color than the last time I’d seen him, black instead of his natural blond. He was a vain man, but not about his appearance—that was my mother’s domain, and I could only assume that, as usual, she’d decided to mod her look and changed his to match. It made his skin look paler, throwing the lines ridging his eyes and mouth into sharp relief; past time for another lift-tuck.
There had been a time, when Zo and I were kids, that our mother had insisted we all conform to some Kahnian Platonic ideal. Blond hair, blue eyes, Zo and I with identical waves in our shoulder-length manes, our honey-haired mother towing our father like an accessory, the two of them looking enough alike to be siblings. It was popular in those days, families looking alike, parading their designer genes like a uniform, but Zo and I put a stop to it as soon as we were old enough to fight back. It had been years since the two of us had been a matched pair, and my mother had given up trying to keep pace. But she’d never before picked a look so drastically un-Kahn. Although—given the metallic purples and silvers glimmering across my body—I wasn’t looking very Kahn myself these days.
No one watching us together would guess we were father and daughter.
“Do you mind if I . . . ?” He broke off, then folded me into an awkward hug, his body stiff and unyielding against mine. Or maybe it was my body that was unyielding, my arms that stayed at my sides. “That’s from your mother,” he said, letting go, staring at the stupid flower again.
“Oh. I guess, give her one for me too?” It was hard to imagine. The last time I’d seen them touch, I was lying in a hospital bed. I couldn’t remember the time before that.
“You could do that yourself,” he said.
So we were done with small talk and onto the main event. “I’m sorry,” I said. I’m not sorry. “For leaving like that.” But not for leaving.
“Without saying good-bye?” he asked. “Or telling us where you were going? Telling us anything? Yes, I guess you would be sorry.”
Now I was the one staring at the ground. “It was easier that way.”
“For you,” my father snapped.
“Sorry,” I mumbled again.
“Your mother thought . . .” He shook his head. “You know how she gets.”
I tried to catch his eye, hoping for a smile. It was one of the things that brought us Kahns together—me, my father, and Zo, at least. We all knew how my mother got. But he wouldn’t look at me.
“But you knew where I went,” I said. “Because you’ve been watching me.”
“Can you blame me?”
“I had to leave,” I said.
“I realize you think that.”
“This is better.”
“I realize you think that too.” He frowned. “Though I can’t say I understand why.”
I wasn’t about to tell him what I’d seen, that I knew he felt obligated to treat me like a daughter and pretend everything was the way it used to be, even if it was tearing him apart. My father didn’t do weakness. Another reason my leaving was a gift to him. “How’s Zo?” I asked instead.
“She misses you.”
No, she missed her sister. As far as she was concerned, I was just an imposter, come to steal her sister’s identity and life. So Zo had stolen it first. Starting with Walker. But I wasn’t about to ask my father if Zo was still sleeping with myex-boyfriend.
I didn’t even care anymore. Walker felt irrelevant. I remembered wanting him, I just couldn’t remember why. Zo was welcome to him, as she was welcome to all my old friends and old clothes, my old spot on the track team, my old spot as favorite daughter. Only daughter.
“She didn’t want me there,” I said.
“She’s a child. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“She’s only two years younger than me,” I pointed out. Waiting for the inevitable: You’re a child too.
You don’t know what you want.
Come home.
But he didn’t say it.
Your sister misses you. Your mother misses you. Never I miss you.
It started to rain. My father glanced up, looking annoyed that the weather would dare interrupt him, then down at his shoes, already spattered with grime from the fat, filthy raindrops.
“Whatever you were doing in that corp-town,” my father said, steering us back toward the car, “I know it’s because you’re mixed up with these . . .” His face twisted. “People.” He raised his arm, letting his hand fall lightly on my left shoulder for just a moment, like he was choosing arbitrarily from a list of “fatherly gestures,” seeking one that felt right. This wasn’t it.
Did he think I had something to do with the attack?
Did he think I was capable of something like that? And if he did, why would he be here now?
Just ask me, I thought. Ask me what happened.
And I resolved that if he did ask, I would tell him everything.
“I don’t want to know about it,” he said, hunching his shoulders against the rain. “Just be careful.”
I was still a minor; if he wanted to force me to come home, he could. Or at least he could try. I’d been wondering all these months why he hadn’t—certainly he had enough credit and enough reach to find out where I was. To drag me home. But he hadn’t.
And now it turned out he’d known where I was the whole time. Known, and just left me there.
I didn’t miss you either, I thought.
And I missed you too.
I never understood it as an org, how a thing could be true and not true in equal amounts. When we were kids, they always tried to drill it into our heads, the way the universe constructed itself through a simultaneity of opposition: Light is a particle. Light is a wave. Light is both, at the same time it’s neither. Every reality contains its own opposite; every whole truth rests on two half lies.
These days, it made a lot more sense. That’s what happens when your whole life is an oxymoron.
Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn’t exist, all at the same time.
I am the same; I am different.
But when it came to my family, different won out. Some things create danger just by existing. I couldn’t go home again, even if he’d asked.
Which he hadn’t.
“I don’t think the authorities will be bothering you anymore,” he said. “But if they do, voice me.”
“Thank you,” I said. Formal, proper, like a stranger. Like him. “And for today. Thanks.”
Like it was no big deal that he’d made it okay, the way I used to think he could make everything okay. I wasn’t a child anymore; I knew better. Some things could be fixed with credit and power and properly applied pressure. Most things,
the important things—things like bodies on the ground, bleeding from their eyes, things like what happened when the secops arrived and the guns came out and the losers fell, things like me, stuck between being a person and a thing—no one could fix. Not even him.
My father patted me on the back, twice. Item number two on the list of awkward “fatherly gestures.”
“Ben’s agreed to drive you back,” he said.
“Oh. Now?”
“Unless there’s something else you need?”
As I watched him, trying to figure out what he was expecting me to say, he met my gaze for the first time. But if there was a message encrypted in his blue stare, I couldn’t crack the code. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”
WATCHERS
“It’s for your own protection.”
I would have expected someone like call-me-Ben to drive a late-model Trivi or maybe even a Petra, one of those neutered bubble cars with a rotating cabin and a collapsible gel body—bland as his wardrobe, suitable for middle-aged trend chasers who preferred safety to style. But the car was a Taiko, black and practically dripping with credit, its bullet shape so streamlined that it was hard to imagine how a human form could fit inside. The wheels were hidden beneath the frame, so there was nothing to break the smooth, sleek line. I’d never seen one up close before, much less ridden inside, but I heard that with the right patch, you could override the velocity restrictions and push it to almost two hundred. Walker had always wanted one, and the fact that I knew anything about them at all was a testament to how crazy he’d been on the subject. You can’t tune out three years’ worth of obsession. (Trust me, I tried.)
The paint was supposedly some kind of special alloy that absorbed even infrared light—it looked like someone had carved a car-shaped hole in the universe and filled it with pure nothingness.
The door swung open. Ben was behind the wheel. I climbed into the backseat, hoping to endure the ride in silence. No such luck. He programmed the nav-unit for Quinn’s estate, then climbed in beside me. I stared out the window, watching my father’s figure recede into the distance.
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