Jude leaped off the couch, nearly landing on Quinn. She just glared at him and proceeded to slowly, calmly pull her shirt back on. “I changed my mind,” she said.
Jude rushed the doorway, chest still bare, hair rumpled, eyes wild. “Ani, look—”
Ani slammed the door in his face.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told me.
“I wasn’t even going to try,” I said with a small, hopeful smile. But she just turned away from me and walked briskly down the hall, neck stiff, head erect, arms tight against her sides.
I didn’t try to follow her. I didn’t try anything.
But I should have.
SKIN TO SKIN
“It was almost like being alive.”
When you don’t eat, you don’t exercise, you don’t work, and you don’t have to slog through school, there’s no obvious start to the morning. Sometimes, especially when you can go back to “sleep” simply by instructing your brain and body to shut down, there’s no obvious reason to start at all.
Which is why I figured I might not see Ani for another day or two. But instead she showed up at my door just as the sky was pinking up.
She didn’t come all the way inside, just leaned in the doorway. “About yesterday,” she said. “I just want to make sure you know it’s a nonissue.”
“If you want to talk . . .”
Ani flashed a bright, fake smile. “Nonissue means non-discussion.”
“Fine.” I decided not to point out that she was the one who’d come to me.
She traced her finger along the doorframe like she was examining it for cracks. “Interesting, isn’t it? That stuff Savona was saying about how we can’t be blamed for what we do, because we have no souls?”
“No one has a soul,” I pointed out. “Orgs or mechs. It’s a fictional concept. Like unicorns. Or zombies.”
“Right.” Ani choked out a bitter laugh. “Can’t imagine why anyone would believe in the walking dead.”
“We’re not dead.”
“We used to be.”
I tried to ignore the image that popped into my head, the gleaming morgue, the burned corpse with my face. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Look, human morality comes from human mortality, right?”
“Says Savona.”
“Fine,” she granted me. “Says Savona. Life on Earth is unfair, but after you die, God punishes the evil and rewards the good.”
I grinned. “Soul is one thing, Ani. You want to start telling me you think there’s a God?”
“That’s not the point,” she snapped. I dropped the smile. “If people are good because they believe they’ll be rewarded after they die, that’s all that matters. So what does that say for skinners—”
“Mechs,” I corrected her.
“We don’t die,” she said. “So what do we have to be afraid of? What’s to stop us from doing whatever we want?”
“What’s to stop anyone?” I asked. “God doesn’t exist, heaven and hell are fictions, and only a few crazy Faithers still think otherwise. So under your theory, the whole world should be going crazy with bad people doing bad things.”
She just looked at me, like, Your point?
I thought of the corp-town attack. Of the reason the corp-town had biosensors to be hacked, all the attacks that had preceded it. The weapons ban. The prison ships that used to circle the continent, and the islands for the cases too hard-core for the ships, and the cities that had replaced them both, a useful repository for nearly anyone who colored outside the lines.
“And no one did anything wrong back when the God delusion was still going strong,” I said sarcastically, arguing with the voice in my head as much as with Ani. “You don’t need to believe in heaven to be good, just like you don’t need to believe in hell to know you don’t want to go there.”
Ani shrugged. “Jude’s the one always saying mechs play by different rules,” she pointed out. “Maybe things like loyalty, doing the right thing, keeping promises have nothing to do with us.”
Keeping promises. Now we were getting somewhere. “And none of this has anything to do with Jude and Quinn, right? Because you don’t want to talk about that.”
“Monogamy’s impractical when you’re going to live forever, right?” Ani forced a smile. “No big deal.”
I noticed she wasn’t wearing Quinn’s necklace anymore.
“Ani, look, maybe you should—” I broke off as my ViM pinged with a text from call-me-Ben.
Remember our deal. I don’t have forever.
“Lia, I should probably get out of here.”
“Wait, I really want to talk to you,” I said, keying in a response. Working on it. Need more time to get the info out of Jude. Ben had granted me two more weeks to produce the name, but now he was texting me at least twice a day with annoying reminders not to drop my end of the bargain. I was beginning to think that ferreting out his BioMax mole didn’t matter to him nearly as much as bending me to his will and forcing me to acknowledge, on a daily basis, that he was in charge.
“I’m out of here,” Ani said.
“Wait. Please.”
“Why?”
I could have told her about the deal with call-me-Ben. But that would mean making a decision. Because no matter how she felt about Jude now, she’d never let me betray him.
Not that I was planning to. But.
“You heard everything I said to Zo yesterday,” I said.
She nodded.
“So you know Zo started hooking up with my boyfriend. After the download.”
“I figured,” Ani said. “Sorry.”
“I saw them.” I could still picture the two of them, pressed up against the brick wall behind the school, skin to skin. I didn’t care anymore. Walker belonged to a different Lia, and she was gone. “That’s how I found out.”
“So what?” she asked, face twisted in sour anger. “What do you want from me? You tell your pathetic story, and I tell mine? Except that you saw mine, right? You know how it ends.”
“I just thought—”
“Sorry,” she said. Though she didn’t sound it. “But it’s different for you. That guy was your boyfriend. Zo was your sister.”
“Right, and Quinn is your—”
“Nothing,” Ani said. “No labels, no obligations.”
“And Jude is supposed to be your friend,” I reminded her. “Like a brother, you said.”
“Guess I was right,” Ani said. “Because look what your sister did to you.”
“Yeah, and it sucked. I just thought you’d want . . .”
“What?”
A long pause. “I don’t know,” I said feebly.
She smirked. “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.” She sounded like Jude.
We just watched each other for a moment, like animals gauging a potential predator, weighing the options: fight or flight. Riley chose for us. He appeared behind her, leaning over her shoulder into my room.
“You busy?” he asked. “I can come back.”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” Ani said at the same time. “Not busy.”
“We’re talking,” I said firmly.
“We’re done,” Ani said. “I should go, anyway. I’m late.”
“Go where?”
“Back to the Temple,” she said. “Savona sent me a message this morning, said he and Auden are willing to talk to me if I want to come in. This could be the way to end all this.”
“Then I’m going with you,” I said.
“He told me I should come alone.” Ani shifted her weight. “He said to remember what Auden said yesterday. About you not coming back.”
“I can go,” Riley said, looking uncomfortable. “Whatever you guys want—”
“I told you, we’re done,” Ani said, slipping past him. “I meant what I said, Lia. Everything’s fine.”
Riley glanced after her. “Doesn’t seem fine.”
“Tell me about it.”
He stepped out of the doorw
ay, tipping his head in the direction Ani had disappeared. “You want to . . . ?”
I shook my head. “You can’t force someone to feel better.”
Riley rubbed the back of his neck. “Then maybe I should get out of here.”
“Wait—Why? What’d I say?”
“Well, you didn’t ask me what I was doing here.”
“Okay . . . what are you doing here?”
He gave me an embarrassed grin that, for one strange second, made him look like a little kid. “Came to force you to feel better.”
“Exactly how is this supposed to cheer me up?” I asked when the car dumped us out at the Windows of Memory. We’d driven in silence, like the last road trip we’d taken together—and like the last time, Riley knew where we were going, while I was clueless. I wondered if he was trying as hard as I was not to think about the last time, and whether he was having any better luck.
“I thought you said you didn’t need cheering up,” he teased. “I thought nothing was wrong.”
“I didn’t say it was,” I corrected him. “But if I was upset about something, I don’t see how this is supposed to help.”
I’d been to the museum before on class trips. It was the closest dead zone to our school, and unlike most of the dead zones, it wasn’t toxic or radioactive, just uninhabitable. Unless you were a jellyfish.
When you’re ten years old, wandering through an underground aquarium whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the submerged ruins of a drowned city wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon, but there was a reason I’d never been back. It should have been creepy, staring into the blue depths at algae-covered buildings lit by the museum’s underwater floodlights, schools of jellyfish skittering through the wreckage of abandoned cars, but it was hard to get creeped out when you were safely behind reinforced glass, watching Zack Bana pretending to jerk off while the tour guide blathered something about early twenty-first-century traffic patterns.
“You’ll see,” Riley said, steering me away from the main entrance. Most of the museum was below sea level, but visitors entered through a shallow glass dome surrounded by seven glowing crystalline spires. One spire for every ten thousand deaths. A wide plaza stretched around the perimeter, dotted with memorial statues and plaques, wilted flowers and soggy notes cluttering their feet.
The plaza was on a hill overlooking the sea, and a tall barbed-wire fence discouraged anyone who might have ideas about testing the water. We walked along the fence until the museum shrank to doll size and the laughter of the tourists faded into the tide. After nearly a mile, the fence turned at an abrupt right angle. But instead of following it around, Riley took a flying leap and landed midway up the fence, dangling by his hands. His feet scrabbled for purchase, and a moment later, he found toeholds in the chain link. He grinned down at me. “Coming?”
I looked up dubiously at the coils of jagged wire running along the top, wondering if it was electrified.
“Nervous?” he asked.
“You’re joking, right?” I said, then began to climb. I scrambled to the top in seconds—and not that we were racing, but I made it there first. I closed my hand over the tangle of wire lining the edge, letting the barbs dig into my palm. “No pain, no gain,” I said, grinning, and vaulted over the top, letting myself drop the fifteen feet to the ground. My feet slammed into the grass. I let momentum carry me forward into an awkward somersault, feet over head and back to feet again, then stumbled forward and did a full face-plant, arms splayed, mouth in the dirt.
“Graceful,” Riley said, climbing safely down the other side and offering me a hand.
I spat out a mouthful of grass and climbed to my feet.
“You’ve got a little . . .” Riley gestured at my pants, the front of which were covered in a thick layer of reddish brown dirt.
“So?”
Riley raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t think you were the type, Lia Kahn.”
“What type?”
He shook his head. “Just come on.”
We skidded down the shallow grassy hill and found ourselves at the edge of the ocean. It was strange—in all the times I’d been to the Windows of Memory, I’d never actually been anywhere near the water. It had always looked pretty from atop the hill, the floating scum shimmering in the sunlight. But up close, it just looked like sludge.
Still, there was something about this place. The sky seemed bigger here—staring out at the horizon, it was easy to picture a time before the world was round, when the glassy sea stretched infinitely far and flat. The shore curved around, forming a narrow bay, and soon we were standing almost directly across from the Windows, too far to see anything but the glow of the crystal spires.
“Weird to think there’s a whole city under there,” I said, nodding at the water.
“Yeah.”
“Especially since it feels like—I don’t know. Like we’re at the edge of the world. Like there’s nothing left but us. You know?”
There was a long pause, and I suddenly felt like an idiot for saying anything at all. But then: “Yeah.”
It was something.
We fell into step together, our arms swinging in sync, our faces turned to the ocean, eyes slitted against the wind. It was peaceful, and not the kind of empty quiet that forced unwanted thoughts into my head. This quiet was full—of rustling grass, of wildflowers, their bright blues and purples suggesting fragrant perfumes I could no longer smell. Full of Riley, forging the way, his head bent, his gait rangy and loose, his facial muscles losing a little of their tightness with every step, something relaxed and almost happy creeping across his face.
But then he stopped. “Here’s good.”
“Good for what?”
“I borrowed a bathing suit from one of the other girls,” Riley said. “I hope that’s not weird—I didn’t want to ruin the surprise by—”
“The surprise is we’re swimming?” I asked.
He hesitated, noticing the anger in my voice.
“I don’t swim,” I said.
Everybody knew that.
“But you can,” Riley said.
“Yes.”
“So what’s the problem?” He tossed me a ball of material, a garish red suit that looked like something my grandmother would have worn back before they fixed the ozone. Rolled up in it was a small, slim lightstrip with a square of adhesive on the back. “Stick it on your forehead,” he advised. “It’s good for about an hour of light. We won’t be down longer than that.”
I hadn’t been in the water since that day Auden and I had raced back and forth in the frigid stream, shouting over the thunder of the waterfall. The day I’d been so oblivious that I hadn’t noticed how cold it was, how cold he was, hadn’t noticed anything until he’d drifted away from me . . . over the edge.
“I don’t swim,” I said again.
“This isn’t the same,” Riley said.
“Same as what?”
“Same as the waterfall.”
“I can see that,” I snapped. “This is sludge.” The waterfall, and the river feeding into it, were man-made, one of the nature preserves erected a couple decades ago to restore and replace the natural habitats killed off by water shortages, temperature change, and smoggy sky as viscous as soup. But there was nothing to be done about the oceans, especially the coastal regions clogged with remnants of drowned cities. The acidic water had killed off most of the fish, leaving behind only roving schools of jellyfish and a thick layer of blue and red algae, stretching toward the horizon. They called it the rise of the slime.
“This isn’t about the water,” Riley said. “It’s about what happened. Isn’t it.”
So that was the game. Find my weakness and bear down, watch how long it would take until I broke. No wonder he and Jude got along so well.
“It doesn’t matter what it’s about,” I said. “I’m not going in.”
“Scared?”
“You think you can trick me?” I had a weird, childish urge to shove him in the water and run aw
ay. “What, I’m going to say, ‘Who, me? I’m not scared. I’ll prove it to you!’ Like I’m some idiot ten-year-old?”
Jude would have struck back. Riley looked like I’d punched him. He sat down with his back to me, cross-legged in front of the still, dark water, playing his palms across the surface of the slime. It shimmered in the light, iridescent like the Brotherhood robes, colors shifting in the dim sun. “That’s not what I meant,” he said quietly. “I asked because I wanted to know.”
“Oh.”
I sat down next to him, not mad anymore. Still confused. “That’s none of your business.” But I didn’t say it meanly.
“I know.”
I cupped my hand and plunged it through the layer of algae, into the water. It was the same temperature as my body—or close enough that I couldn’t tell the difference. “I used to love to swim,” I admitted.
“It was an accident, you know,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“You only know the story he tells on the vids—”
“Jude told me what happened,” Riley said. I swore under my breath. So much for keeping my secrets. “And he told me it wasn’t your fault.”
“That’s not what he told me.”
Riley pounded a fist softly against the water. “That’s just Jude.”
Whatever that meant. “Why’d you bring me here?”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“But so what?” I asked. “Why try to cheer me up or whatever this is?”
I was starting to recognize the crooked smile, one side a little higher than the other, eyes wide. Innocent and knowing at the same time. “That’s none of your business.”
But he didn’t say it meanly.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” I stood up, staring into the sludge. No reflections here. “But I’m not wearing the granny suit.”
It was nothing like the waterfall.
It was like nothing I’d ever experienced as a mech.
It was almost like being alive.
The water felt like nothing. But not the same way everything else felt like nothing, or slightly more than nothing. It was warm, almost body temperature. Even when I was alive, swimming through water like that had meant an absence of feeling, a feeling of absence, no sense of where my body left off and the water began. Buoyant, cutting effortlessly through the water, my body itself faded away.
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