Shattered (21 page)

He is not your friend.

“What are we really doing here, Jude?” I asked. “What's the point of all this? What do you
want
?”

“At least you're finally starting to ask the right questions.” And he turned his back on me and went inside.

I told Riley that night. We sat in my bedroom with the door closed, both of us on the floor, our backs propped against the wall, our knees drawn to our chests, a foot of space between us.

He didn't react when I told him what had happened to Mika and Sari, at least what little I knew. And he didn't react when I told him about the trackers. He didn't say anything until I told him that Jude had known all along.

“He must have a good reason,” he said then.

I almost laughed. “Why? Because he's
Jude
, giver of all knowledge and wisdom, keeper of the peace?”

“Because he's Jude,” Riley said, and he wasn't joking. “I trust him. I wish you did. Maybe then we wouldn't have . . .”

“You blame me.” I shouldn't have been surprised. And I shouldn't have cared so much. “I made you take me to the city. I didn't let you voice Jude. I screwed everything up. Is that about right?”

Riley looked down. He crushed his hands into fists, then brought them together, knuckle to knuckle. “I screwed up,” he growled. “I shouldn't have taken you there.”

“You didn't have a choice.”

“They wanted a trade,” he said. “You for Jude. And for me.”

“I know that,” I said. “You want to tell me why?”

“Wynn thinks we owe him something.”

“What?” I figured I deserved to know.

“A life,” he said. “Among other things. It doesn't matter. I'm sorry you got involved.”

“And when they took me, you went to Jude.”

He nodded. “Jude freaked. He swore we'd find you. But by the time we did . . .”

“Secops showed up,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Except it was all a lie,” I pointed out. Couldn't he see? “If he's tracking us, he knew where I was the whole time. Just like always.”

Riley didn't answer. He tilted his head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. “Never thought I'd be living in a place like this,” he said.

“Did you hear what I said? Jude
lied
to you.” I wanted to shake him. “He was probably going to let me rot there.”

Riley shook his head. “We were going to get you out. He would have done anything.”

“So he told you.”

“And I trust him.”

“Even though he sent us to that corp-town? Come on, you're telling me that you don't even suspect, just a little, that—”

Riley stood up. “Jude wouldn't do that. Not to me.”

“And not to the orgs,” I prompted him. “You know, the ones who died. You forgot to say he wouldn't have hurt them. Doesn't have it in him or something like that.”

“Why are you here?” Riley asked.

“What? I live here.”

“But why? If you think Jude could do something like that.”

“I'm not here because of him,” I snapped. And maybe, deep down, I didn't believe Jude was capable of something so terrible; maybe I wanted to believe in him as much as anyone else. Or I just needed an excuse to stay, because I had nowhere else to go. “He's watching all of us,” I said finally. “Maybe I just think someone should be watching him.”

“You don't know him,” Riley said, and he was already at the door, leaving me. “I do.”

“Are you sure?” But I said it under my breath. Quietly, so it belonged to me.

Riley hesitated in the doorway, drumming his fingers against the frame. It was strange—I wouldn't have thought
him the type to emulate org shifts and twitches, pretending that his body was anything other than what it was. But there he was, playing out a pantomime of org fidgeting. Jude had encouraged us to embrace our body's natural stillness, its dissociation from feverish thoughts, yet another way to maintain control, another point scored in our game against the orgs. I'd bought it; Riley apparently hadn't. “You okay?” he finally asked.

I thought about my father then, the tightened line of his lips holding back a tidal wave. I'd never thought about what it must have been like to live behind his colorless expression. Caged by self-control, and in that cage, with him, my body after the accident, ravaged first by fire then by BioMax, my body now, the one he'd purchased, the one he'd willed into existence, the mistake.

In that cage, with me: my reflection in his eyes. And their eyes, the eyes of the dead, bloody and sightless. Auden's eyes, staring into a camera, staring out at me, believing I could do anything after what I'd done to him. Mika's eyes, shut tight, as we stepped over him, another body in another hall.

I could lock it all away. Even if it meant locking myself in with it.

I almost broke.

But I remembered that Riley wasn't my friend. That I didn't have those anymore.

“I'm fine,” I said.

“Because if you're not—”

“I'm fine.” I was intact and unharmed; I wasn't going to jail. I wasn't going anywhere. “I'll be fine.”

“That's good,” he said, like he meant it.

“What about you?” I suddenly thought to ask.

“Fine,” he said.

And hope springs eternal, right? Maybe we would be.

“And I was nothing.”

T
hings got back to normal.

Nothing got back to normal.

Normal: Long days without much to fill them. Watching Ani hang all over Quinn, watching Quinn hang all over everyone else. Talking about nothing. Scaling buildings and jumping off cliffs, trying to feel.

Not normal: Ariana Croft, a girl with a stranger's name and my face, arrested for the corp-town attack. My face all over the vids, panic evident in wide-eyed protestations of innocence. The looks I was getting from the other mechs, the same kind of peripheral gaping I'd endured at school right after the downloads, randoms passing me in the hall, pretending to fix their eyes on the ground when really they were soaking me
in, absorbing every inch of the freakitude so they could report back to their friends. Now Jude and Riley were the only ones who didn't watch me like they were half expecting me to strike again. Jude because he never looked at me at all unless he had to. Riley because his look was different.
Waiting for me to break,
I thought more than once, catching his eye just before he turned away.
Not going to happen.

In the not-normal column: not backing up my memories, not once since the attack. Because backing them up would make them permanent—as permanent as I was, at least, which was extremely. If I kept them where they were, trapped in my head, no backup, no record anywhere but in me, then there was always a chance they could disappear. One day, I would wake up in a fresh body, with a fresh mind, one that didn't know how blank eyes could get, or how quickly skin paled when blood pooled, still and lifeless in the veins.

It was a game I'd played before, toying with the idea of forgetting, wiping out a moment like it didn't exist.

Normal: I still wasn't going to do it. My body—Lia Kahn's body—was gone, which meant the only thing left of her, of me, was my mind. And sometimes it seemed like that was nothing more than a long skein of memories. I wasn't about to start unraveling the thread, throwing pieces of myself in the trash. I didn't know where the memories ended and I—whatever
I
existed without all the things that had happened to me—began.

Normal: I was still afraid.

I couldn't stop watching the vids of the attack.

I did it alone, in my room, staring at the screen on the wall, playing and replaying the same shots. I saw it from every angle, in color, in infrared, in black and white. Over and over again, I watched myself in the center of the atrium, standing still, bodies dropping all around me. I watched the girl who looked like me pump the Naxophedrine into the air-circulation system. And smile.

And then, when that got old, the images so familiar that they left me numb, I moved on. I pumped Ariana Croft's zone, just before they slapped a priv-lock on it. I dipped into her friends' zones, but none of them had spoken to her since the download, so they only had stories about a girl who didn't exist anymore. There were plenty of pics showing what she'd looked like before, curly brown hair, violet lenses in her deep-set eyes, a little chunky but in such a way that you knew she was doing it on purpose to seem voluptuous. Totally artificial—a girl with that kind of credit and those kinds of friends wouldn't leave anything to chance. She'd go in for lipo once a week and make sure they left
just
enough fat behind to seem authentic. An extremely noncasual casual oversight, like a carefully tousled mess of hair or a faceful of haven't-bothered-to-shave scruff. But it wasn't sexy, just sad, like a wispy moustache that looked more like a smudge of dirt than a handlebar of hair.

Not that it would have mattered, once she got sick. I even looked up the disease, some kind of bizarre immune-system disorder that couldn't be screened out and couldn't be treated. None of the zones had any pics of that. But I knew it would have
made her sick and fragile and, even without the weekly lipos, skinny. Without the download, it would have made her dead.

None of it told me anything, except that this girl wasn't me.

But maybe that was the one thing I needed to know.

There was no chance that BioMax had illegally downloaded a copy of my brain into another body, that the second, secret Lia Kahn had gone insane, taken on a new name, a new persona, and decided to kill a bunch of people she'd never met before. No chance whatsoever.

But it didn't hurt to confirm that Ariana Croft was a real person. A damaged whackjob, maybe, but not me. Even if she looked like me.

Our bodies were just things, right? My body was one thing. Her body, despite the choppy haircut and bad dye job (violet with green streaks), was another. Sometimes I ripped my eyes from the vids and stared down at myself, feeling as disconnected as I had those first few days after the download, untethered from legs, arms, skin, fingers, all of it seeming to belong to someone else. Sometimes I reminded myself that even if there had been no Ariana Croft (which there was), if someone at BioMax had figured out a way around all the safeguards (which they couldn't), and for some nefarious purpose had created another Lia Kahn in body
and
mind, it still wouldn't be me. It would have just been a copy, and by definition, a copy wasn't the same as the original.

Except that I wasn't the original either.

Except that if my brain and body were destroyed, my
backed-up memories would be downloaded into a new brain. Another copy. And it would feel like me. It would
be
me. That was the whole secret to mech immortality, right? When is a copy not a copy? Not much of a riddle, because the answer is obvious: when it's identical to the original.

Maybe. But I didn't trust the logic enough to test it. I could ditch this body for a new one with a new face. This me could die, and an identical copy would live. Same difference, right? Except I was afraid it wasn't.

I was afraid.

These were the kinds of things I tried not to think about when I wasn't busy trying not to think about dead people. Or trying not to think about my father. Or call-me-Ben's daily, and increasingly threatening, reminders of our “deal,” which for all I knew was moot now that I was no longer under suspicion—but to believe that would have meant ignoring the fact that there were more shadowy, faceless mechs in that vid, attackers still to be caught. Thanks to the corp-town attack, we were
all
under suspicion, every mech. All of us with no fingerprints and no biostats—and according to Rai Savona and his little puppet Auden, no souls, which meant no moral compass or internal censor and thus nothing to stop us from wreaking havoc, sowing chaos by some kind of infernally programmed design, or just destroying everything around us by virtue of our very nature. I tried not to think about Auden too, telling myself that it could have been worse, whatever he'd turned into—whatever bitter, twisted dupe
I'd
turned him into—at least he'd lived. But that thought
brought me right back to dead people and sent me straight back to the vids, and the whole thing started all over again.

It was like a cut on my lip that I couldn't help worrying with my tongue. Knowing that I should let it alone, knowing better, but so hyperaware of it every time I spoke, every time I moistened my lips, every time I was sitting around and my mind wandered, just for a moment, away from the constant litany of
Don't do that
, and without intent or even awareness, my tongue slipped back into place, exploring the crevices of the wound until the pain woke me up.

I could have stopped myself. Every morning and every night I looked at the small pile of dreamers I'd hoarded, sitting just beside my bed. I'd gotten them from Sloane, and I knew she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. I'd met Sloane before either of us came to live at Jude's estate—in fact, I was the one who'd brought her here, who'd convinced her that this, not another boyfriend, not another pointless suicide attempt, was the answer she'd been seeking. She'd spent the last several years, before and after her download, researching methods of escape.

Thanks to Jude—which meant thanks to me—she'd discovered a new one.

These weren't the puny hour-long dreamers that barely topped the buzz of an intense b-mod. These were industrial-strength dreamers, good for days, even weeks, of blissful mental absence. A nice long vacation from everything.

I kept them by my bed as a test. Every time I passed them by I knew I was stronger than that. I wasn't
that kind of mech. They sat there for days, one week, two, and I kept passing the test, passing them by.