Shattered (10 page)

It was so irritating, all this ridiculous secrecy. “What's the big deal?” I said, frustrated. “Like I really care about where you or Jude came from.”

That smile was playing on his lips again. “Could've fooled me.”

“You don't want to talk about it, don't. Whatever. I just don't get the big deal about saying what happened.”

“Like what happened with Auden?” he said.

I froze. We stared at each other, and it was clear Riley knew he'd won, but it wasn't a Jude-like smirk on his face, acknowledging the inevitability of his triumph. It was just something patient and watchful.

“Chocolate,” I said finally, turning the clock back to an easier question. “I miss that. And running.”

“You didn't get enough of that just now?” he said lightly.

“Not the same.”

“If you say so. What else?”

Walker's lips—anyone's lips. The pleasure-pain of fingers tickling down my spine. Chillers, about a half hour into the dose, when everything made sense and nothing mattered. Crying. Boring Thursday night dinners, mocking my mother, preening under my father's praise.

Yelling at Zo.

“No,” I said. “Your turn.”

“Fine. Sweat.” He laughed. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“You're going to have to clarify: Is this ‘the look' you claim I always give you, or some new look? It's hard to keep track.”

“The look that says you think it's weird.”

“You miss sweat? That
is
weird,” I agreed. “But there's no look.”

It wasn't that weird. I was a runner. Had been a runner. I understood about sweat.

“And burgers,” he added. “A night on the roof with a perfectly grilled soy burger—”

“Soy?”
I wrinkled my nose. “If it's not beef, it's not a burger.”

“I wouldn't know.” His voice was frosty.

Right, because once they'd stopped mass-producing beef, there wasn't enough to go around. I'd done it again: forgotten the obvious. Who I was. Who he'd been. I vowed to myself that I wouldn't do it again.

“Would you go back?” I asked. The forbidden question. But the rules didn't apply here.

He stretched his arms behind his head, grasping the trunk he was leaning against as if he wanted to uproot the tree. “I don't ask myself that.”

“I don't believe you,” I said. “You weren't like them. You were whole. Healthy. You had a
life
.”

“Like you?” he said. “Before whatever happened, happened?”

“Before my
accident
,” I said loudly. One of us wasn't afraid to say it out loud. “And yes, like me.”

“I wasn't like you.”

“Why not?”

“You think you deserved it?” he asked. “Your accident? This?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, maybe I did.” Riley stood up and walked a few trees away, then sat down again. Close enough that we could still see each other, far enough that there would be no more talk. So we watched each other, and we watched the clouds drift across the wine red sky, and we waited for things to be safe.

“You sure?” I asked, hesitating over the link. The flexi ViM screen was only a few inches across with a strip on the back that adhered to the underside of my left arm. At its maximum length, which it was set at now, it fit perfectly in the stretch from my wrist to my elbow—but with slight pressure it would compress to a palm-size screen I could wrap around my wrist or slip into my pocket. The image quality wasn't great, but I didn't need a hi-res reminder of the death we'd escaped.

“Not really,” Riley said as my finger hovered over the screen. It was set to link in whenever I swiped a Z across its face—after managing the first two slashes, I'd frozen before the third. It was Riley's fault. I'd spent two days chafing at his paranoia, and now that—based on no evidence whatsoever aside from the fact that time had passed and we were still here—he had decided it was safe, I couldn't help feeling like linking in to the network would call the darkness down on us. Or at least the secops.

We didn't do anything wrong,
I reminded myself.

“It's time, Lia.” The rangers would eventually catch us in a sweep; the longer we waited, the more inevitable our discovery became.

We linked in.

The news zones were lit up with updates about reports of the bio-attack. We picked a zone at random, setting the vid filter for most watched.

42 dead, 231 injured,
the cap read.

Suspects at large.

Skinner slayings stun nation!
That one was in bold.

Riley played one of the vids, a grainy aerial shot from the eye in the sky, and there I was. Upright and still as three hundred people collapsed around me.

“Shut it off,” I said, my voice as cool and even as ever.

The skinner stands alone,
read the cap.

The me in the vid wasn't panicking, she wasn't kneeling down to help the victims, she wasn't doing anything but watching it all play out, calm as if she'd expected it.

Riley froze the vid. “You don't have to watch these,” he said. “I can fill you in later.”

Because he was strong and I was weak? No. “Just play the next one,” I ordered him. This one we watched all the way through. Along with the one after that.

We heard how the attackers had slipped past the security system, easily evading the biostat sensors, because, of course, they had no biostats. They'd released an aerated form of Naxophedrine into the air vents leading to the plaza. The toxin had been a favored weapon of choice back in the bad old days when you could barely walk down a city street without getting hit by, among other unpleasantries of modern life, shrapnel, radioactive dust, or weaponized squirrel flu—this before everyone wised up and
got the hell out of the cities. Naxo had been one of the milder weapons—usually aimed at creating mass chaos rather than perpetrating mass murder. Among its known effects: heart palpitations, seizure, lung paralysis. All temporary.

Usually.

Authorities concluded that the attackers must have used an enhanced or unusually concentrated version of the chemical. Whatever it was, it had killed forty-two people. And then the attackers, the skinners, had slipped out as easily as they'd slipped in. Just like us.

Recriminations flew, and the Brotherhood of Man was doing its best to fan the flames. An unthinkable tragedy, but an inevitable one, the Honored Rai Savona said, repeating himself in infinite variations. Lax security despite the thousands of skinners set loose on the country, determined to transform their existential threat into a flesh-and-blood one? It was a miracle, Savona said, that something like this hadn't happened sooner. And given the fact that the skinners could slip through a security web designed to snag organic terrorists—criminals with finger- and eyeprints, with DNA-laced epithelia, with bodies they could alter but never abandon—it would be a miracle if it didn't happen again.

Issuing his edict of I-told-you-so doom, Savona did his best not to smile.

We watched the aftermath of the attack: spidercrawlers trawling the scene, their metallic tentacles snapping pics, searching for hidden explosives and time-release toxins, scrabbling over
the bodies to triage the victims. And then the humans took over, alienlike figures, their faces distorted by thick biomasks, loading the wounded onto stretchers. We watched the secops swarm the atrium, stepping over and around the bodies that remained—intact bodies, healthy and whole, except for their pale skin, their open eyes blurry with blood.

We watched the attack from every angle, watched the orgs fall again and again, and each time, even though we knew what to expect, it came as a surprise—they were moving, they were laughing, they were fighting, and then they weren't anything.

We watched as the secops finally dealt with the dead. Shoved them into bags, zipped them up, dragged them out like trash. Watching it all play out on-screen made it less real and more real at the same time. It was no longer something that belonged to
us,
something chaotic and terrible and private. It was an
event
now, neat details packaged into a comprehensible narrative; it belonged to the world. It wasn't life—it was
news.

Riley paused over the next vid, which hadn't been posted until the day after the attack. “Maybe we've seen enough,” he said. Trying to protect me again? Not his job.

“Play it.”

The vid was grainy and without sound. The camera bounced around and for a few seconds, it was hard to make out anything but shadows and blobs of light. The lens focused, revealing a group of masked figures. The camera panned across their faces, each covered in black. Then zoomed in on a smashed console emblazoned with the biohazard symbol. A quick cut to a grate,
a hand holding an aerosol sprayer, a bluish mist drifting into an air duct.

A blur as the camera spun around, landing on the person holding it. She was the only one without a mask. Her face swam in and out of the frame as she set up the shot. Then she was clear, and she smiled.

A message from the mechs,
read the cap.

Riley reached for the screen. One swipe of his finger and the face would disappear. I grabbed his wrist, squeezed it. Didn't meet his eyes; didn't want to see them rest on my face, then dart back to the face on the screen, her face.

Our
face.

“You orgs want a war?” a murderer said in my voice. She smiled again, and it was my smile. “You got one.” An alarm sounded. Her smile grew. “You know what happens next.”

I did.

“I wasn't pretending to be human. I was over that.”

R
iley cut the link.

“That wasn't me,” I said.

“I know.”

“That
wasn't
me,” I said again.

He nodded. “I know.”

“But it wasn't—”

“Lia, stop.” He put his hands on my shoulders like he was holding me steady. Like I was shaking. Which I wasn't.
“I know,”
he said. Slow and firm. “It wasn't you, it couldn't have been. You were in the atrium when the alarm sounded. I saw you. Besides, other than her face . . .” He didn't have to say the obvious. She'd had shorter hair, different clothes—black from head to toe, a killer and a cliché. She'd stood differently,
moved differently. She was a physical copy, nothing more.

Riley was still holding on to me. I couldn't look at him. Instead, I linked in again, flipping through the vids until I found what I was looking for. It was cross-posted from the Brotherhood's zone. “I would never have expected
this
,” Auden said in response to tepid questioning from some unseen interviewer. “But that's exactly the point, isn't it? You never really
know
a skinner. You only see the self they want you to see.”

“Do you understand me?” Riley said, fingers tightening on my shoulders. “That. Wasn't. You.”

But it had my face. My voice. My smile. Auden believed it was me. Anyone watching, anyone I'd ever known, would think it was me.

My father would think it was me.

“Just stay calm,” Riley said, like he could see behind my steady gaze, steady hands, into the storm inside my head.

He cut the link again. “Take it nice and slow,” he said. Sounding like my old track coach when we'd pushed ourselves too hard for too long and needed something to lean on. Struggling to fill our lungs.

Breathe in, breathe out,
I thought, the hysteria creeping in again.
If only.

“None of this is your fault.” Riley leaned close, his voice warm and steady in my ear. “You didn't do this.”

“It wasn't me,” I said again after a long, silent moment, and this time I wasn't trying to convince him, or myself. It was just the only fact I had, a starting point.

“It wasn't you,” he said in the same tone, and I could tell he got it. Crisis averted. For the moment. “I know that. But no one else will.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Don't freak out,” he said.

“Sorry, but did you not see the same vid I saw?” I snapped. “Because this is me freaking out.”

“We have to voice Jude and—”

“And what?” I grabbed his arm as he was reaching for the ViM. “We leave him out of this.”

“He'll know what to do,” Riley said.

“Right. Because Jude always knows what to do.”

“This is not a joke,” he said in a low voice.

“You think I don't know that? Was that
your
face on the vid?”

He looked down at his arm, and I realized I was still holding on. I let go.

“Jude's the one who forced us to go to the corp-town,” I reminded him. Forced
me
, specifically. No one else would do.

“So?”

“So if someone's setting us up, it hasn't occurred to you that Jude—”

He stood up abruptly. “He wouldn't do that.”

“I'm not saying—”

“You better not. Or I'm out of here.”

“Fine. I don't think he would ever do something like that.” So I didn't want him to go; so I lied.

“Good. Because he wouldn't.” Riley kept his eyes fixed on a low-hanging branch. There were still enough leaves clinging to the trees to block out most of the dim sunlight. The first night had been hard, huddling in the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar chitterings and hoots of the Sanctuary's protected species, wondering if there were wolves or bears or some other fanged predator of an earlier age prowling for fresh blood. Nothing seemed quite as dire once the sun came up, but after two days trapped in the trees, all I wanted was some sunlight and an open sky.

“I just said that, didn't I?” Best friends was one thing, but it was like Riley thought if he said one bad thing about Jude—or let anyone else release a single criticism into the universe—he'd be struck by lightning.