Wired (Skinned, Book 3)

by Robin Wasserman

  "I didn't get to say anything to him, before it happened." It was the first time I'd said it out loud. "I didn't get to tell him ... He thought I didn't care." I could still see myself in that parking lot, would always see myself, frozen, looking up at Riley, cartoon shock painted across my face. Looking at him and judging him and saying nothing. Letting him walk away.

  "You're wrong."

  "I should have gone with him," I said.

  "Great idea," Jude said. "You could have both uploaded, and then you'd both be dead. Is that what you want?"

  "It's what I should want."

  Now it was Jude who looked away.

  "Why did you?" he asked finally. "Let him leave."

  "What do you mean?" But I knew what he meant.

  "That day. If you wanted to stop him, why didn't you?"

  He asked like he already knew the answer. That made one of us. But before I could come up with something, two BioMax goons appeared before us, jackets strategically swept back to reveal their holsters, refuting an argument we hadn't thought to make.

  "I'm going to need you to come with us," one of them said.

  "Kind of busy here," Jude said, looping an arm around me. His other hand crawled across my knee and up my thigh. "If you know what I mean ..."

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  I forced a smile. "What he said," I told the guard. "Maybe you could come back later?"

  "Now," said the talky one, while the other one rested a hand on the butt of his pulse gun.

  Jude and I exchanged a look: Whatever this was, we were going to have to postpone the strike. Ani and Quinn had their eyes on us from across the room, and hopefully Zo was catching this on one of the monitors and would figure out she needed to wait. Assuming, of course, they hadn't caught Zo, too.

  We followed the guards along the same path we'd mapped out for ourselves--through the locked door, down the corridor, coming nearer and nearer to the central vents.

  I wondered if there was some way we could turn this to our advantage. I had the toxin on me--if we could distract the guards for a minute and slip away ... "Maybe if you told us exactly what the problem is?"

  "No problem," the chatty one said. "Not anymore." He grabbed me, snatched my thrashing arms behind my back, looping them together with plastic twine. I screamed, and he shoved something thick and scratchy into my open mouth, then pulled a bag over my head. I was blind, mute, and bound, all in under ten seconds. And from the sound of things--an angry oof from the other guard, a scuffle, a muffled scream, then silence--things had gone about the same for Jude.

  Meaty hands folded my knees to my chest, and I felt myself lifted off the ground for a moment, then gently placed

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  back down. Into something, it turned out, because soon the ground lifted beneath me, like I'd been loaded into a giant sling, and, cradled in the darkness, we began to move. Going somewhere--wherever this guy wanted me to go.

  So much for saving the day. But I wasn't thinking about the mechs we were leaving behind--I was thinking about myself.

  I was afraid.

  He can't hurt me, I told myself, the familiar mantra kicking in, except now it was a lie, because now this body was all I had, and if he broke it, that was it. No more second chances. No more extra lives.

  No more Lia.

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  FOR YOUR PROTECTION

  You don't try to understand the Grim Reaper; you don't forgive.

  So this is how garbage feels, I thought, right before it gets dumped.

  Scared. Hopeless. And very alone.

  Would they leave me in a landfill? Toss me in a lake? Bury me so deep no one would hear me scream, which I would only be able to do once decades passed and the gag in my mouth decayed to dust? Or maybe they'd decided to get rid of me for good. A trash compactor would do the trick, though why grind up the body when it would be so easy to wipe the mind?

  I wondered what it would be like to not exist. Maybe some part of me still would, deep in the bowels of BioMax, where for all I knew they'd lobotomized my stored neural patterns the way they had so many others, and some other, obediently simple-minded version of me was piloting war planes and enjoying target practice on guerrilla warriors.

  This is what human garbage thinks about, on its way to

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  the dump. Until the bag drops to the ground and hands reach in and pull it out.

  Then all thinking stops, replaced with blind, animal panic.

  Even when the garbage is a machine. Simulated emotion seems real enough when that emotion is stark terror, when every inch of you is singing out an alarm of I don't want to die.

  They pulled out the gag, and the scream began again as if it had never stopped.

  "Enough drama, we get it," a deeply familiar but somehow alien voice informed me. Alien because I'd never heard it sound like this: authoritative, impatient, absolutely certain.

  Familiar because it belonged to my mother.

  I was in a van, windowless and in motion, filled with people I would have preferred never to see again. Jude and I sat in the back, sandwiched between the two BioMax guards, who, as it turned out, didn't work for BioMax at all. They worked for my mother. Who sat in the front seat, shoulder to shoulder with call-me-Ben.

  At least it looked like my mother, but my mother wasn't the type to hire armed guards, or to kidnap her own daughter, or to bark commands like "Shut him up"--when Jude's gag came out and then promptly went back in again until he'd promised to behave--and "Stop acting like a child." She'd always been the one who acted like a child, so easily persuaded by my father that whatever she'd done was wrong.

  My mother didn't have steel in her voice.

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  "What's he doing here?" I asked, glaring at call-me-Ben, because starting with him was easier than figuring out what this new mother had done with the old one.

  "Ben's doing me a favor," she said.

  "If that's what you want to call it," Ben said, then mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like "blackmail."

  She favored him with an icy smile. "I simply explained to your friend what I knew about the inner workings of his corp and how reluctant he might be for certain information to emerge."

  "We've already gone public with everything," I said. "No one cares about what BioMax does to mechs."

  "Your version of 'everything' is somewhat narrow, dear. And the 'public' isn't exactly anyone's greatest concern. Ben knows that when I talk, the right people listen. So he decided on a different course."

  "Kidnapping me?"

  "Extricating you from a dangerous situation," my mother said. "One I would never have guessed you were foolish enough to put yourself into. I wasn't about to leave you there."

  "So you trusted him?" Jude asked.

  "You're here, aren't you?" she said coolly. "Both of you. Though I can't say that was my intent."

  The guards dropped their heads. "I told you, taking him seemed like the best way not to make a scene," one of them mumbled. "Didn't think you'd care--"

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  "And I told you, I'm not paying you to think."

  "Did your mother learn her gangster talk from watching the vids?" Jude whispered.

  She cleared her throat, pointedly.

  "What the hell is going on, Mom?"

  "There's something wrong about this whole situation, and that corp-town wasn't safe for you," she said.

  "I've tried to assure your mother that her fears are misplaced," Ben said. "But she won't believe me."

  "The question isn't whether I believe him," my mother said, as if he weren't there. So at least one thing hadn't changed: She was still treating the help like dirt. "Living with your father, I've become quite skilled at knowing when people are lying. Your friend Ben here isn't--he's just ignorant. M. Poulet, on the other hand, is like your father. Nothing but lies, all the way down. And whatever's going on there, I don't want you to be a part of it."

  What about Zo? I almost said, but stopped myself. Because either she didn't
know Zo was there--in which case I wasn't about to enlighten her--or she did know, and didn't care. In which case she'd learned more from my father than the ability to spot a liar.

  "Who are you?" I asked instead. "And what have you done with my mother?"

  "I know what you think of me," she said. "I played the part I had to play. I did my job. But think about it: Your father

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  may treat me like a fool, but does he really seem the type to marry one?"

  "Nobody's saying you're a ... fool." Not out loud, at least. Had I been imagining it? Had she been like this the whole time, and I hadn't noticed? Or had she, for whatever perverse reason, spent the last seventeen years in hiding? "If you're so good at seeing through bullshit, then I guess that means you knew all along? What he did? What BioMax 'made' him do?"

  All the air went out of her. "No."

  "And when you found out, you didn't see the need to do anything."

  "I stayed," she said.

  "Fucking right. You stayed."

  "Watch your language," she said. "Yes, I stayed. That's what I did. If he was capable of ... what he did--"

  "Murder his daughter," I said loudly. "That's what he did."

  "If he's capable of that, he's capable of anything."

  "You were watching him," Jude guessed. "Guarding him."

  "Someone had to. Make sure he stayed in line. Make sure he stayed miserable."

  "Even if it meant you were miserable too," Jude said.

  "No more than she--" I stopped myself.

  "Deserves?" my mother suggested.

  Ben cleared his throat. "Give your mother a break."

  "Shut up, Ben." The response came in chorus, my mother and me in sync.

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  "It doesn't matter why I stayed," my mother said. "I did. Which is how I knew it was time to help you."

  "I've tried to explain to your mother that she's overreacting," Ben said.

  "Nothing unusual about that," I agreed, fingering the vial of Amperin adhered to my upper arm. "Now that you've done your motherly duty, any chance you could drop us back where you found us?"

  "You see, M. Kahn," Ben said, "they're perfectly happy to--"

  "They're children," my mother snapped. "What makes them happy isn't really my concern."

  "With all due respect, M. Kahn, I'm not your kid," Jude said. "If you want me to contact my parents, I'm sure they'd be happy to take me off your hands."

  She laughed. "So I see you've told all your friends about your idiot mother, Lia." She twisted around in her seat to get a better look at him. "You think I don't know about you? That you came from nothing? That you have no parents? You think I didn't learn everything I could about the person who stole my daughter right out from under me?"

  "Jude didn't steal me. I'm not some thing that belongs to you, like your stupid Chindian tea set."

  "You'll be safe at home," my mother said. "Both of you."

  "It won't be for long," Ben said. "I'm taking a tech crew out to one of the server ships on Sunday. They're pretty sure they

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  can cut off the virus at the root, restore the server integrity, and then all this will be behind us."

  "Always the optimist. You must--" I stopped, mouth open, the rest of the thought vanishing as his words registered, and everything clicked into place.

  Sunday. As in the day that phase three would be put into action.

  Because if it doesn't happen now, we'll have to wait another month.

  For security reasons they sent launches to the server farms only once a month. It was the best way to minimize and control access. Everyone knew that.

  "I must what?" Ben prodded, when I didn't continue.

  But I shook my head, gears turning. Sunday. So we had three days. Three days to figure out what they were planning to do at that server farm--and stop them.

  "Forget it," I said. "You're in charge, right? We're just children. Do whatever you have to do."

  "I will," my mother said.

  So would I.

  The van pulled up to the estate. Jude had never seen it before. But I could tell, from the way he looked at me, that he'd just had all his suspicions confirmed. I was exactly the person he'd always thought I was: the poor little rich girl, doing what Mommy told her to do because it was easier than fighting

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  back. He didn't say a word to me, or to any of us, as the guard escorted him into the house. Ben caught hold of me before my guard and I could follow.

  "I know you hate me," he said quietly, keeping his eyes on my mother and his voice low enough to ensure she wouldn't hear.

  "I don't have any feelings toward you one way or another. You're irrelevant."

  "I wasn't part of what the corp did to you," Ben said. "I didn't even know about it at first."

  "Even if I believed you, it doesn't matter. And I don't believe you."

  "We've done good things." Ben sounded desperate. "This technology is a miracle. It can change everything. Artificial intelligence. Space exploration. Medical miracles. We've only just begun to imagine the possibilities. It can save us all, like it saved you."

  I almost bought it. Could he actually be this naive? Maybe. Did it matter?

  Not at all.

  "Let me prove it to you," he said.

  "Prove what?"

  "That I'm trying to help. Some of us--most of us--mean well, Lia. We've always been on your side." He handed me a folded-up printout. "When the time is right, this is where you'll find him."

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  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "You'll see."

  Curiosity overpowering judgment, I started to unfold the paper, but he stopped my hands. "Wait until you're inside," he said, glancing again at my mother. "You might want to keep this one to yourself."

  "Lia." My mother pointed to the front door. The guard stood at the ready.

  "Maybe don't be so hard on her," Ben said.

  "Seriously? You want to give me advice on being a good daughter now?"

  "You don't have kids," he said. "If you did ..."

  There was nothing I hated more than the familiar you haven't been there, so you can't really understand crap. Which I was about to point out to him, when I noticed how distant he looked, and wondered if he was thinking of his own kid, the girl about Zo's age, who, I gathered, hated him about as much as I did.

  I decided to let it pass.

  "Can I go now?"

  "Right. Of course." Ben put out his hand for me to shake, then dropped it after a few seconds when I didn't move. "I'm sorry," he said.

  "Why? According to you, you didn't do anything."

  "That doesn't mean I'm not sorry," he said. "I hope someday you'll understand that."

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  Here's what Ben would never understand: When I woke up in the hospital that wasn't a hospital, facing the doctor that wasn't a doctor, unable to speak, unable to move, the mirror reflecting a fright show with dead eyes and exposed skull, he'd been the one to tell me the truth of what I was, and he'd been the one to roll me into that silvery morgue to see my hollow, ruined body, the body he'd taken away. Whatever happened next, whatever role he had or hadn't played in setting up the car accident, in lobotomizing our stored neural patterns, in manipulating and lying and plotting a mechanical genocide, it would never matter. He was the face of what I had become, the face of BioMax, the face of death. You don't try to understand the Grim Reaper; you don't forgive.

  You turn your back on him--knowing there's nothing left he can do to you--and go inside.

  It was strange to be back in the house, my second homecoming in six months, and like last time, much as I wanted the house to feel like a prison, it felt like home. The same overwrought antiques, the same stiff chairs and couches that screamed Don't sit on me! lest some disastrous spillage occur. The same virgin-white rug that had never felt the touch of a shoe. The only difference: my father, slumped on the gray love seat, his head down but eyes unmistakably fixed on th
e door, my father, who was always in motion, consumed with impossibly important business, planted there like a piece of furniture, posture sagging and defeated. My father, around

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  whom the world turned, sitting on the sidelines, making no move to interfere or even react to my arrival; my mother barely acknowledging his presence. I was almost sorry I hadn't been around to watch him adjust to his new domestic reality. I suspected he was wondering if, back when he'd had a choice, he should have just opted for prison. Losing a daughter was one thing. Being bossed around by my mother? For him that would surely be intolerable.

  My mother and the guard flanked me on either side as we trooped up the stairs.

  "Lia." I thought I heard my father's voice trailing behind me, but it could have been my imagination, and I didn't look back.

  "This is for your own good," my mother said. "You'll thank me some day."

  "Been reading from the parental-cliché handbook again?"

  "Put her in there," she told the guard, gesturing to my room. Jude was already inside.

  "You can't make me want to be your daughter," I told her. "You know that. You can keep me prisoner here as long as you want. It isn't going to change anything."

  "You are my daughter," she said, cold and calm. "Whether you want to be or not. So consider yourself grounded."

  She brushed her lips against my cheek, lightly enough that I barely felt them, quickly enough that by the time I thought to push her away, she was gone. The guard shoved me into my bedroom, then switched the room into lockdown mode,

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  sealing us in. The setting had come standard with our security system--drop-down bulletproof shutters over the windows, network jammers, electronic locks, all designed to turn your average everyday bedroom into a prison. Designed for keeping burglars out--used most often, in our house at least, for keeping unruly daughters in. Zo had lived half her life in lockdown mode, but it was a new one for me. Still, I'd heard Zo complain enough to know that throwing my weight against the door or clumsily trying to pick the lock with a paper clip wasn't exactly going to cut it.

  Predictably, Jude had his head buried in one of my drawers, but at least he wasn't pawing through my underwear. "Find anything you like?" I asked.

  "Nothing that's going to get us out of here," he said, rapping a fist against the window shutter.