Girl of Flesh and Metal

by Alicia Ellis

  “I don’t think he meant to. He lost his composure.”

  “Tell me what he said, word for word.”

  “He said, ‘I think these murders are exactly what we need.’”

  “Thank you, Lena. We’ll bring him in for more questioning.” Without another word, the call ended.

  Detective Garrett’s voice echoed in my head: Why would he confess? Adam had already been cleared, so why throw himself back on the mercy of law enforcement by saying too much? I didn’t understand it, but his words seemed more like those of a guilty man than an innocent one.

  Despite my doubts, my shoulders felt a hundred times lighter. I was not a murderer. Another block of my life fell back into place. I felt almost whole again, almost complete.

  The clock in my new car told me the school day had wrapped up, so I placed a second call.

  “Hey, Lena,” Hunter said when he answered. “How’s it going?”

  “Fantastic.” And I meant it. “I want to see you. Can I pick you up from school?”

  “Yeah, sure.” The pitch of his voice rose, the way it did when people smiled. “My mom dropped me off today, so I need a ride anyway.”

  “Great. I’ll be there in about twenty-five minutes.” I plucked one more gummy candy from my stash before returning the remainder to the glove compartment.

  When I arrived at the school parking lot, Hunter was sitting on the front steps, tapping the foot of his good leg in a steady rhythm. Grinning, he pushed himself to his feet. His gaze skimmed over the smooth curves and edges of my car.

  “Interesting choice.” He slid into the front seat and examined the dash, which had more manual controls than most other vehicles on the road.

  I hugged the steering wheel. “I love it, so no jokes. I come with a manual car now. Take it or leave it.”

  “If those are my options, then I definitely choose taking you.”

  “You mean it.”

  “Whatever.” He grinned and brushed his fingertips over my hand. Warm tingles shot up my arm.

  I let him chatter away for the first ten minutes of the drive, while I worked my way up to telling him about Adam. Finally, I braced myself for his lecture.

  “I went to see Adam Pollock today.”

  “What the hell, Lena?” He blew out a long breath. “Why would you visit that guy? He could have killed you.”

  “He didn’t. I’m fine, and I almost got a confession out of him.”

  “So you didn’t just go see a likely murderer. You went to see a one-hundred-percent, honest-to-God, actual murderer. I feel much less freaked out now. Thanks for that.”

  “You’re missing the point. I didn’t kill Harmony and Kevin. I have my life back. I don’t have to lie awake at night afraid I’m going to strangle someone in my sleep.”

  “I thought I convinced you it didn’t make sense for you to be the killer.”

  “You convinced me I wasn’t necessarily the best suspect. But now, I know. This is good news. I don’t want to fight about it. I want you to be happy for me.”

  “I already knew you weren’t a murderer, so this isn’t news at all.” The anger on his face melted into sympathy. “But I can be happy you got the peace of mind you wanted.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed at my mouth. “You’re making your thinking face.”

  I didn’t know whether it was a good thing or bad that he seemed to know me so well already. “Jackson’s awake,” I said.

  His smile turned stiff. “Did you guys work things out?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, I made it clear to him that he and I are over, but I’m not sure he accepted it.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Terrible. I’ve known him since forever. I hate the idea of us not being on the same page. I don’t want to hurt him. Even though we’re broken up, it feels wrong that I’ve been thinking about someone else.”

  “You better mean me.”

  I laughed, a full laugh that pushed yet another block of my scattered life back into place. “Yes, you.”

  He leaned back in his seat and examined my face. “Tell me about him.”

  “You don’t want to hear about Jackson. That would be weird.”

  “Yeah. But it’ll be weirder if you’re thinking about him every time we hang out. You clearly need to talk about him if you’re going to move on. And it’s in my best interest that you move on. So tell me about him.”

  I paused to sort my thoughts, put them into neat little piles that made some kind of sense. “I love him, but I’m not in love with him. All the greatest memories I have—he’s in them. The first time I rode a bike. My first kiss. My sweet-sixteen birthday party. All my first days of school. I don’t know how to separate him from my life. I don’t want to separate him. He knows what I’m thinking before I say it—sometimes even before I think it.”

  “So why aren’t you in love with him?”

  “How could I be?” I pictured him opening up his arm, just to watch it stitch back together again, and I shuddered. I could barely live with my own arm. The thought of living with Jackson and his gleeful adoration of his metal parts—I didn’t see how that could happen. “They ruined him and he loves it. We’re opposites.”

  “You mean the artificial intelligence?”

  I nodded.

  “Exactly what do you hate about it?”

  “It’s unnatural. It—”

  Hunter held up one hand to cut me off. “Forget everything Philip Pollock has ever said for a second. What do you hate about artificial intelligence?”

  I hesitated long enough to sort out my thoughts. I’d never taken the time separate my opinions from Pollock’s. There had been no reason to. “It scares me,” I said, after a while. “I want to feel like I have a special place in the world, as a human being. But if my brain can be duplicated by a machine, if I can be duplicated, maybe I’m not special. Maybe I’m nothing more than neurons firing.”

  “Hmm,” was all he said, gaze focused on the windshield in front of us.

  “What’s that mean?” Now that I’d bared my soul, I expected more than a one-syllable response.

  “They’re just pretending, you know.”

  I said nothing.

  “Everything artificial intelligence does,” he continued, “it’s been programmed to do it. It’s been programmed to learn. Sure, the programming is more complex, but at the end of the day, it’s not real thought. Can’t you decide that you’re special because you are, and refuse to let the existence of a machine that pretends to be intelligent change that?”

  At this point, I had little choice. “I’ll try.”

  “Okay, then back to Jackson. You broke up with him before the accident, so I assume his upgrades aren’t your only problem.”

  “We want different things. He looks at his parents and my parents, and he thinks their lives are perfect. He wants me to go to an Ivy League school and then take over CyberCorp, have three kids, and live in a house with a white picket fence.”

  “You don’t want that?”

  “I don’t know what my future looks like, but I know I don’t want it mapped out for me. I want adventure, and I damn sure don’t want to run CyberCorp. The whole world is an unknown, and I plan to see every bit of it.”

  I pulled the car into his driveway. But before he could reach for the door to get out, I grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled his face toward mine.

  Our lips met softly at first—a touch and release. It ended too quickly. He closed the space between our mouths again and, this time, covered my lips with his. We sank deeper into each other. The pressure of his lips was warm and soft. They moved against mine as if we fit together, belonged together.

  When he pulled away, I struggled to catch my breath. He’d torn all of mine away. For once, when my head spun, it wasn’t because of pain.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered.

  And when I crawl
ed into bed later that night, my head barely hurt at all. I looked forward to getting a good night’s rest for the first time in almost a week.

  27

  I awoke disoriented, a familiar sensation by now, followed by a feeling of dread. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be—in my room, tangled in lavender sheets. My eyes adjusted to the darkness as I spun a slow circle.

  The bed pushed against the far wall told me this was a bedroom. Judging from the size of the room, it was a rich house, but not mine.

  I didn’t have a window on that side of the room, and the closet and dresser were in the wrong spots.

  The longer I examined the place, the more that pile of blankets on the bed looked less like blankets and more like a sleeping person.

  Definitely not my room.

  I crept toward the bed. Left foot, right, left . . . right. The floor creaked and I froze, waiting for the person to wake and move. No movement. After a couple more steps, I stood over a girl.

  Dark hair flowed around the pillow, framing a pale face with huge eyes, wide open. The lips hung apart in a silent scream.

  Instinctively, I reached for her. My metal fingers shoved her shoulder, as if that might wake her. I gripped her shoulder and shook, and her head rolled to one side like a broken doll. She remained motionless, unblinking, staring at everything and seeing nothing.

  Debbie Carlyle was dead.

  And I’d killed her.

  All the air must have been sucked from the room, because I couldn’t breathe. Hot saliva filled my mouth, bringing with it the taste of my dinner.

  I stumbled away from the bed and kept going until my back slammed against a wall. I pressed against it, wishing I could disappear into it and reappear somewhere else, or not reappear at all.

  I wanted to fall to the floor and sob until morning came, sob until they found me, sob until my eyes stung and my lungs burst and they dragged me away to prison and stuck a needle in my arm. Because I should be dead.

  If I had done this, I should be dead too.

  But a small voice in my head yelled at me to move. Move. Move.

  The wall I’d fallen into turned out to be the bedroom door. I pressed my ear against it and listened for noises on the other side. Nothing. Apparently, I hadn’t tripped any alarms on the way in.

  In the hallway, a railing hung over a two-story foyer. It was as dark out here as it was in the bedroom. Lucky for me, the house remained deadly quiet. No one came to check on Debbie—which meant I’d managed to kill her without letting her scream.

  I should have felt grateful that the police weren’t here, and that Debbie’s mom wasn’t in the hall trying to protect her child. Instead, I felt horrible. I had snuffed out her life so quickly, so quietly, that she hadn’t made a sound.

  Melody was right.

  I was a monster.

  As I tiptoed down the stairs, I kept my weight to one side, where the steps would be strongest and less likely to creak. I arrived at the bottom without incident.

  A security panel hung on the wall beside the front door. The lit screen displayed the word DEACTIVATED in red letters. I would have bet it was activated when the Carlyles went to sleep earlier tonight.

  Under the red word, a rectangular area brightened into a keypad. The numbers glowed, so I knew they weren’t really there. They were virtual. I was seeing things on the EyeNet again. While I watched, six of the numbers turned from white to red in sequence: 9-4-2-1-7-1. I rubbed my eyes, and the number sequence repeated: 9-4-2-1-7-1.

  I typed the numbers. The security panel flashed bright blue and emitted a high-pitched beep. The sound startled something deep within my chest, and I fought to keep myself from screaming in surprise. Still, the house remained eerily still.

  The screen on the security panel switched from DEACTIVATED to ACTIVATED. ARMED. EXIT NOW.

  Obediently, I opened the door, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind me. My hands trembled, then my arms, and my entire body. Silent sobs ripped through me, and my body went limp on the doorstep. The hard ground caught me, and I curled into a ball.

  The small voice was still telling me to run, but I couldn’t. They would find me here, and I deserved to be found.

  When I squeezed my eyes shut, Debbie lay behind my eyelids, face pale and dead, eyes wide in terror. She’d seen me. What had she thought in those final seconds, being strangled by someone she knew?

  I opened my eyes in time to see a figure run toward me across the lawn. It was too dark, my head too cloudy, my vision too blurry through tears to make out the face.

  Rough hands yanked me to my feet and dragged me toward a nearby car. I didn’t struggle. I deserved anything that happened to me.

  I was inside the car before I realized it was Jackson.

  The car’s digital display spread a dim light through the interior. Jackson stared at me, eyes full of mixed confusion and concern.

  I swallowed my sobs and fought for control of the moment. “Let’s go,” I hissed at him.

  “What happened? You’re a mess.”

  “Drive!” I shouted. Tears streamed down my face, and I sucked in huge gulps of air. “Please.”

  He pulled the car away from the curb. Debbie and I lived in the same neighborhood, but Jackson took an indirect route around the outskirts of the subdivision.

  “Explain,” he said after he’d been driving for a few minutes and I stopped whimpering.

  “I don’t know how.” My voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “Try.”

  I couldn’t just tell him that I killed Debbie Carlyle. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t want this.

  “What were you doing in there?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the memories. But all I saw was Debbie lying there, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “Lena?”

  I knew I was supposed to respond, supposed to explain what I was doing there—or make up a lie. But fog filled my head. None of my thoughts settled long enough for me to voice them.

  Debbie lying dead. Adam supporting the murderer. Jackson sitting beside me. Hunter would be so disappointed in me—and I hated myself for even thinking of him right now. I needed to think about Debbie and her family. I had robbed them of a lifetime together.

  “Lena!” Jackson grabbed my face and turned it toward him. “What’s going on? What happened in there?”

  “I’ve been sleepwalking ever since I got the new arm,” I whispered.

  “So see a therapist,” he said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m trying to tell you. This is Debbie’s house. Tonight, I was sleepwalking. I woke up in her room. I had . . . I had already . . .” I glanced down at my hands.

  “Already what?” Frustration seeped into his voice.

  “I strangled her.”

  He stiffened.

  “I strangled her.” Now that I’d said it, I couldn’t unsay it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I strangled her. In my sleep.”

  “Stop saying that. People don’t commit murder in their sleep.”

  I stared at him, blinking. I knew I was supposed to respond, but my mind whirred in slow motion. A sob tightened my chest, and the pain doubled me over. Tears flooded down my cheeks, salty where they fell across my lips.

  Jackson shook me so hard my teeth clacked together. “Lena, listen to me. You didn’t do this. You can’t kill someone while sleepwalking.”

  My answer died in another fit of sobs. But I somehow willed myself to suck in deep, steadying breaths. In. Out. Speak. “Yes.” I blew out a long stream of air. “They do. Homicidal somnam—somnambulism. I looked it up.”

  Jackson stared at me, eyes narrowed. “When did you look it up?”

  “A few days ago. But I kept hoping it was someone else.”

  We sat in silence, both watching the wheel of the car turn on its own, thanks to auto-drive.

  I managed to control my tears, and now my chest felt hollow. Empty. All the energy had been
kicked out of me. Kicked out and stomped into a bloody pulp.

  “It’s a real thing,” I said, when the silence between Jackson and me had stretched too far. “Killing in your sleep, I mean. But usually the killer and the victim live in the same house. Sleepwalkers don’t break through security systems to find their victims. Their thinking isn’t that complex.”

  My new arm had to be involved somehow. The chip in my head was still connected to the network, and it had told me how to bypass security. I wouldn’t have been able to commit these murders without the help of my new hardware.

  CyberCorp did this to me. CyberCorp turned me into a killer.

  “Victims—as in more than one? Tell me you’re not talking about Harmony and Kevin.”

  I gave a slow nod. “The nights they were murdered, I was sleepwalking, but I woke up nowhere near their homes. I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t want to believe it.”

  The car pulled into my driveway and stopped. For the first time, it occurred to me that I didn’t know how Jackson had found me. “What were you doing at Debbie’s?” I asked him.

  “You weren’t answering my calls, and it’s Monday.”

  I was too numb to do anything except blink at him.

  “I climb through your window on Monday. Always. But since we broke up, I wasn’t sure. I parked my car a few houses over, like usual. And I was just standing outside your house like an idiot when you climbed out the window yourself.”

  “You followed me?”

  “Of course.” He said it so matter-of-factly, like following me was a normal thing to do. “Good thing too. We need to work this out.”

  “We don’t have to do anything.” My voice came out as barely a whisper. “Just me. I have to turn myself in.” I didn’t want to have this conversation anymore. I wanted to burrow under my covers and sleep, until I woke up tomorrow and discovered all of this was a nightmare. A figment of my imagination.

  “Let’s talk to your parents first. If the arm is bringing something out in your subconscious, they can figure out how to suppress it again, maybe even pay settlements to Harmony’s, Kevin’s, and Debbie’s families in return for confidentiality agreements.”