When I was alive, swimming had been the inverse of running, and yet somehow the same. Running was all about the body, feeling every pound of the pavement, every screaming muscle, every pant, every gasp, running was my mind letting go, my body taking over, sensations flooding everything out, filling me up. Running, before the download, before it became a mechanical exercise in pumping limbs, had been like flying.
But swimming, the body disappeared. Swimming was silent and dark. Null. And somehow in the end, the same release, the same emptiness, this time filled up not with a rush of speed and adrenaline but of quiet. Swimming, before the download, had been like dreaming.
It still was.
Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought, cutting through the water, matching Riley stroke for stroke. It wasn’t just the same as before; it was better. Because this time, I didn’t have to rise above the surface to draw a breath. I didn’t have to ruin the silent still by blowing out bubbles or thrashing around with the last of my air. I could just swim and swim and swim. I could swim forever.
We were built to withstand pressure differentials, so there was nothing to stop us from diving deep, kicking slowly to propel ourselves toward the submerged city.
We played our lights across the algae encrusted buildings poking up like massive coral from the debris-covered seafloor, overturned cars mingling with toppled roofs, tangled masses of traffic signs, the corroded, severed head of a stone statue, strewn clothing billowing in the gentle current, broken glass diamond-bright in the lightstrips’ beams. The water had preserved the ruins, enough that it should have been easy to imagine them teeming with life, intact and unsubmerged. But it was too quiet, too still, the contours of its broken buildings fading into the darkness. Hard to imagine the city thriving, even without the rising waters; easy to imagine that decay was inevitable, built into its foundation.
Riley stayed away from the buildings, but I was curious. I drew close. He shook his head, jerking a thumb up, away. I ignored him and swam up the side of one of the tall, narrow buildings, pressing close to the windows, smearing my hand across the growth of algae. Riley tugged my arm, shaking his head wildly. His hair floated like stubby seaweed above his head. I pulled away, catching hold of the window frame, pulling myself toward it—and caught sight of the bodies within. Not skeletons—bodies. Bodies preserved, mummified by the sea, bodies with bloated, waxy skin, bobbing and shaking in a watery prison. Most of the city had been evacuated in time, but there had been plenty who refused to leave. The tour guides at the Windows of Memory always made that very clear—but none of the windows looked in on the results.
I let go. Let myself float.
Down, because there was no air left in my body.
And down farther, until I sank to the ground, a cement pavement almost completely covered in soft, mossy growth. Civilization reclaimed, permanently.
Riley kicked down to me, grabbing my shoulder, pointing his index finger up to where the sky should have been. Jellyfish darted away from our lightstrip beams, like the light would burn. I shook my head; he nodded. A silent fight, and a moment later, I let him win, launching myself off the ground, my body a rocket, arms straight up, legs straight down. It was a superhero pose, and soon we were flying again.
We stayed a safe distance this time, enough space between us and the dead city that it was just that, dead buildings, dead cars, dead iron and steel and brick. No dead people.
But this time, I didn’t forget they were there.
“I’m sorry,” Riley said when we finally came back to the surface. “I didn’t think—I didn’t want you to see that.”
I climbed out of the water, using the ugly bathing suit to pat myself dry. I’d gone swimming in my tank top and underwear. Still, Riley turned away until I was dry enough to put my clothes back on. I watched him climb back into his jeans, water still dripping down his bare chest.
“No, it’s okay. Actually—thank you,” I said. “For bringing me here. For making me—Why didn’t you tell me it would be like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know,” I said. “Like when we were alive. It felt the same as swimming always felt.”
He shrugged and started walking back. “I didn’t know. I never went swimming before the download.”
“How’s that even possible?”
He stopped and glared at me. “You’ve been to the city,” he said. “See any pools?”
I kept doing that. Forgetting we didn’t all come from the same place. Forgetting that it mattered.
“I just thought you’d like it,” he said, his expression softening.
“I did.”
He smiled.
“You come here a lot?” I asked as we began walking together along the shore. “It’s kind of a long way to go, just for a swim. Not to mention it’s kind of . . .”
“Depressing?” he suggested.
I shook my head. “I know it should be, but somehow it’s just—”
“Not,” he said with me. Our arms swung in time together, close enough that our sleeves brushed and, once, the backs of our hands. Like the water had loosened something in him, Riley talked. “It’s the first place that’s ever belonged to just me. It’s big here, you know? No walls. And even down there, under the water . . .” He knotted his hands together, then released them. “The city was never like that for me. Before. It’s quiet. Safe. Like you said. Being alone in the world. That’s why I come.” He glanced at me and risked a shy smile. “I never brought anyone here before.”
“Not even Jude?”
He shook his head.
I wanted to ask why. But I was starting to get a feel for Riley: He’d tell me when he wanted to. Until then, there was no point in asking. “So how long have you guys actually been friends?”
He looked like he’d never thought about it before. “He’s just always been there. Since we were kids.”
“But you guys are so different,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not so different. We come from the same place. That matters. When it’s hard . . .” He sloshed his foot through the sludge lapping at the shore. “You find out who you can count on.”
“So what were you like?” I asked. “Before.”
“Different.” He crossed his arms, brushed his hands up and down his biceps, rough, like he was trying to wipe off the skin. “You saw the pic. You know.”
Black instead of white; org instead of mech. “Your face was the same,” I said. “I mean, not—Obviously it’s not the same face. But something about the expression.” I had a sudden impulse to touch his face, to show him what I was talking about, the way his mouth set in a permanent frown, the way his lids hung heavy over his eyes, like he was half asleep, or like he just didn’t want to see. “Ani told me what happened to kids in her city, the ones who were . . . sick,” I said, thinking of predownload Jude, org Jude, trapped in his ruined org body, sunken cheeks and useless legs. “Was Jude . . . ?”
Riley didn’t answer. He turned away from me, staring out at the ocean. It was gray in the dimming light, fading into the sky. “Jude wasn’t sick,” he said quietly, glancing over his shoulder as he always did when he neared the edges of Jude’s secrets. “He wasn’t born that way. It happened when we were six or seven. Older kids. They—” He walked faster, still watching the water. “I was there, but I wasn’t big enough to stop them. It just happened, and then it was over. He almost died.”
“You took care of him after that,” I guessed. “He needed you.”
Riley shook his head. “I needed him. He figured things out. He’s smart—”
“Not as smart as he thinks.”
“Smart enough,” Riley said. “He got us food, got us power. Kept us safe. I’m the one who screwed things up. And when I did . . .” He held his hand in front of his face, turning it over as if he’d never seen it before. Searching his fingertips like he was looking for imperfections. Or maybe for prints, the identifying whorls and eddies that mechs did without. “He figured out a way to fi
x that too.”
“He got you into the download program?” I said, disgusted. “Just so he wouldn’t have to go through it alone?”
“I got shot,” Riley said flatly. “And thanks to Jude, I got a choice. Death or . . .”
“This.”
“They didn’t tell me what I was choosing,” Riley said. “They didn’t tell me I’d be like this. Or that I’d look like this. They didn’t tell me I could never go home.”
“Why would you want to?”
Riley’s face was blank. “I don’t.”
We reached the fence and climbed over, carefully this time, returning to civilization. The crowds milling through the memorial plaza had mostly dispersed, but we still skirted the edges, keeping our faces averted from the orgs. I paused for a moment in front of a glass sculpture of an antelope, its antlers sparkling in the light like the memorial spires. The golden plaque stretched across its flank marked it as one of the Committee for Animal Remembrance and Education’s extinction tributes. At every testament to loss of human life, CARE erected one of its own statues, ever-present reminders that, as the plaque said, “In the midst of our human sorrow, let us never lose sight of the greater tragedy, the death of millions, innocent victims of civilization.” And then, as the list of extinguished species—the endless Latin names for bears and squirrels and deer and apes, even the ones who’d been repopulated in genetically modified form—scrolled across the LED screen, their final battle cry: As cities fall, may nature rise again.
There’d been riots, back when CARE had first started planting these things around dead zones like they were glad to see all those hundreds of thousands of humans knocked out of the way so the animals could return. But by now they were just background noise. It had been years since I’d actually stopped to read the list of names, to rest my hand against the cool glass head of a fantastical animal and wonder if it had been as beautiful in life as the sculptor had rendered it in death. That was the thing about the Windows of Memory, about all these memorials. They made death into something elegant and clean. Even—if you were stuck on a field trip—something boring. They cleared out the bodies, dumped them in another section of the underwater city, sanitized death to make it safe for the living.
“If mechs ever went extinct, you think someone would build one of these for us?” I asked Riley as we began walking again.
“You ask Jude, eventually we’ll be building one for them,” Riley said. I glanced up at his face, trying to figure out if he was joking. He caught my eye and held it. There was something too intense in his gaze, like he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to, and I wanted to look away. Which is why I didn’t.
Which is how I almost stepped on the baby.
I screamed.
“What?” Riley asked, alarmed.
“Nothing.” It’s not alive, I assured myself, picking up the wriggling, crying doll. Some new trend in realistic toys, though I didn’t know what kid would want to deal with a squalling infant that stared up at you with creepy blinking eyes, drooled yellowish saliva, and from the feel of the thing, wet its diaper.
“Some kid must have dropped it,” Riley said.
The baby’s flesh was soft and pliant, almost lifelike, just like ours. Maybe they’d used the same material.
I pictured Zo and me as little kids, playing house, Mommy and Daddy to a bedful of dolls less advanced but just as creepy as this one. And suddenly I wanted to throw the baby as far as I could.
It’s as close as I’ll ever get, I thought. Playing house. Mech mommy. Mech daddy. And our mech baby.
The doll dropped out of my hands. The impact bumped its screeching up another decibel. Somewhere nearby, a child’s piercing scream added to the fun. “You hurt her!” the kid shouted, running up to us on short, chubby legs. Brown pigtails flew out behind her. The Mickey T-shirt marked her as a student at one of the Disney elementaries. Surprising, since the doll was a generic. I’d always heard the Disney kids couldn’t play with anything but corp-approved toys.
Riley picked up the doll and offered it to her. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She burst into tears. Angry tears spurting out of swollen eyes, streaking down her bulging red cheeks. She squinched up her eyes and nose into a little old man face and began emitting a sirenlike wail, the noise cut short every few seconds as she drew in a loud, gasping breath, just enough air for another round.
We backed away. But not quickly enough to avoid the attack of Mama Bear.
“What’d you do to her?” The woman was just as chubby as her child. She snatched the girl’s hand, yanking her away from us.
“Nothing,” I stammered. “She just dropped her doll, and we—”
The woman grabbed the doll away from the kid, who started sobbing again. “Who knows what they did to it,” she snarled. “We’ll get you a new one.” She glared at us. “Skinners don’t belong here—this place already stinks of death. Or is that why you’re here? Come to laugh at our grief?”
I opened my mouth—nothing came out.
“Well?” she snapped, shaking the doll in my face. “Are you getting out of here, or should I call the secops?”
The thought of the secops was enough to get my voice working again. “Why don’t you shove that doll up your—”
“We’re leaving,” Riley said quickly, slipping his hand into mine.
Her eyes widened, and her face paled. I saw it: She’d recognized me from the vids. “You,” she said in a weak, shuddering voice. “It’s you!” That wasn’t so weak. I could tell she was gearing up for a scream.
“Now,” Riley hissed, pulling me away.
He didn’t let go of my hand until we reached the car.
“I feel sorry for that kid,” I said, reluctant to get in. Surely the woman wouldn’t go to all the trouble of calling the secops. And I refused to let her ruin the calm that had descended over the day. Besides, we’d parked far enough from the crowds that the lot felt empty. Riley was right, there was something about this place, the wide open space, the heavy sky . . . I wasn’t ready to leave.
“I almost feel sorrier for the mom,” Riley said. “Having to listen to that screeching all day.”
He was right. Getting stuck with a kid like that would be a nightmare. Any kid would be a nightmare—now, at least. But there was supposed to be a later. A later when we weren’t seventeen, when we would want all that crap. The screaming. The diapers. The kid.
We were supposed to grow up.
Riley leaned against the car, arms crossed. He tipped his head back, gazing up at the swirling clouds. It was clearer here, since the wind blew most of the crap inland, and I wondered if at night you might actually be able to see the moon. “I chose this,” he said wonderingly. “I chose to live like this.”
“You chose to live,” I corrected him. “Anyone would.” I joined him at the car, my back resting on the metal, our arms almost touching.
“Would you?” Riley asked. “If you could go back? If you’d had a choice?”
“I’d choose for the accident not to happen,” I said. “After that, there were no more choices.”
“Jude loves it. Being a mech.”
“You’re not Jude.”
“He hates talking about this stuff. Thinks we should forget all about it. That we’re lucky now.”
“You’re not him,” I said again.
“Yeah.” He turned to face me. “He’s right, though. It’s hard. Talking about it.” He shook his head. “So I just don’t. But you’re different. You get it, right? You miss it too, you know?”
No, I thought. Because that was the answer I gave everyone, including myself. “I miss home,” I admitted. “I miss who I used to be. I don’t . . .” But that was enough truth telling for the day. I couldn’t say it out loud. I don’t want to live like this.
I didn’t say it because there was no point. It didn’t matter what I wanted. This was reality. This was life.
“Thank you,” he said. “For not lying.” He leaned forwa
rd, raised his fingers to my jaw, grazing the skin midway between my cheek and chin. So lightly I could barely feel it. “It’s good talking to you. Like I can say anything.”
I should tell him about Ben, I thought. Riley would know what to do. Whether I should give call-me-Ben what he wanted, whether it my was job to keep Jude’s secrets.
I should tell him, because not telling him is a lie.
But telling him would be like telling Jude. Telling him meant no more choices.
Riley rested his other hand at my waist. Drew me toward him. “I don’t know who you used to be. But this version isn’t so bad.”
“Because you don’t know me.” But I let him hold on, and I let him believe. And when his fingers traced the line of my jaw, down my neck, I pressed my hand over his. Flesh to flesh.
“You don’t know me either,” he said.
His lips were soft and fit perfectly against mine, as I fit in his arms, huddled against his chest.
His lips were soft, and his kiss was soft, and if I didn’t feel it in my body, if it didn’t rip me open, leave me trembling, torn out of myself, if the sensors on my lips, my back, my chest, my fingertips registered the pressure of his skin, the temperature, and not the electric shock of raw desire, it didn’t matter.
Because we fit together. Because his lips were soft but his arms were strong and they held me up.
And when he let go, I held on, his hand in mine, our fingers linked. And I wasn’t alone.
SAFE OR SORRY
“Sometimes talking makes you look weak.”
As always: Things got back to normal.
As always: Nothing got back to normal.
But this time, in a good way.
This time, Riley was there.
We spent hours, whole days, walking through the orchards, watching apple blossoms flutter to the ground as we walked, hands linked, sometimes silent but often, more often than I would have expected, talking. Never about Jude, who had barricaded himself in the vidroom, searching for a clue about how to turn the tide of public opinion in our favor; never about Ani, who was rarely around anymore and rarely wanted to talk when she was; never about the Brotherhood-inspired crowds camped out at the estate borders, shouting, spray painting the gate, throwing things over the electrified fence, usually things like rocks and fiery wads of paper and rotted fruit, sometimes things like pig intestines, and once a thing set to explode, a homemade thing with a timer and a defective fuse.
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