Torn (Cold Awakening) (27 page)

I’d expected that our best exploring would be done that night, but at ten on the dot we were herded into our dark rooms. The door shut behind us, locking with a loud click.

“Sweet dreams, my heroes,” Quinn said. “Can’t wait to see who you save tomorrow.”

She could pretend she didn’t care, but I could tell that even Quinn was allowing herself a little hope. I wasn’t the only one who felt motion was better than standing still, even if you weren’t sure what you were hurtling toward. I spent the night awake, hoping that the darkness and the quiet would facilitate some kind of brilliant insight about how to sneak into the restricted zone. But my mind strayed—away from what I could do, toward what I should have done. If I’d broadcast what I knew to the network sooner, if I’d found a way to out BioMax
or stop the Brotherhood before any of this had ever happened, if all those months ago I’d let Auden kiss me and kissed him back, if I’d never gone to the waterfall and he’d never been hurt.

If Zo had been the one to get in the car that day.

It was getting easier and easier to dream without going to sleep.

Finally the lights flared; the alarm screamed; morning came. And with it a cardboard box of fresh uniforms. How thoughtful of them. I kicked it across the room, and cheap synthetic jumpsuits went flying—along with something else. Something that shouldn’t have been there at all. It clattered to the floor, blade gleaming under the fluorescents. Without hesitation, Jude snatched it off the ground and palmed it.

Ani and Quinn watched the door—if the cameras had caught our unexpected windfall and guards came blasting through, at least we’d be ready. Jude perched on his bed, slipped his hand beneath the pillow, and kept it there, drawing strength, I suspected, from the cool blade.

I knelt by the box. There was something taped into one corner: a slim plastic card. I tore off the tape and pulled it out, suspicions confirmed—it was a pass card, an exact replica of the ones the guards flashed as they slipped through their locked steel doors and into the forbidden zone.

I hid it as swiftly as Jude had hidden the knife, tracing my fingers across the smooth plastic.

Auden had come through for us after all.

I drew back my lips, feeling a sudden return to the days when every emotional response was a serious of careful decisions, a memorized series of muscles to be flexed and contracted.
This is a smile. This is happy.

I couldn’t say it out loud, it was too dangerous. But the words played in my head, deliriously certain.

I know what to do with the knife
.

“You’re not going alone.”

D
on’t move,” I whispered, holding the blade a few centimeters from his skin.

Jude lay perfectly still beneath me. “Do it already,” he hissed.

It was harder than I’d thought it would be. Not the mechanics of it—those were simple. We lay in the bed together. He was on his stomach, and I straddled him, knees tight around his hips. A blanket was draped over my head, blocking the cameras but allowing in enough light that I could see the curve of his neck and the tip of the knife. I pressed my thumb against the spot, a hard, raised ridge at the base of the neck. Easy enough to slide the blade into the skin, peel away the flesh, remove the chip. It had, at least, seemed easy when I came up with the idea.

“You want me to do you first?” Jude whispered, when I hesitated.

“No. I have this.”

He’d asked me to do it. Not Ani, not Quinn. He’d wanted the knife in my hands.

It would take no more than the flexing of a single muscle to drive the blade into his back, cut a vital conduit, carve out a life. In the new age of the virus there was only this one body, and Jude was offering his up to me.

I slid the knife across the hard ridge of skin, fast and sure. He gasped, but didn’t move. “Almost done,” I said. I pressed my thumb against the lump, massaging the chip out through the small incision. It slid into view, coated in a viscous green fluid. “Got it.”

He flipped himself over without warning, and suddenly we were face-to-face. His orange eyes glowed in the dim light.

“Your turn.”

I lay beside him and bent my head. Exposed my neck. Trusted him.

It only hurt for a minute. Then I was free.

“Screw you!” Ani shouted.

“No, screw
you
!” Quinn leaped at her, fingers curled into claws, and went straight for her eyes. At the last minute Ani hunched her shoulder and shoved it into Quinn’s chest. Quinn tumbled backward, and Ani dropped onto her. She seized a handful of hair and gave it a vicious tug. Quinn shrieked.

Jude and I backed away from the gathering crowd, as every guard in the atrium turned his attention to the warring ex-lovers. The fight had been my idea, a lesson learned from the vidlife ordeal. The spectacle of two girls rolling on the ground and squealing exerted a gross but undeniable pull: instant diversion.

Two of Quinn’s friends had taken temporary custody of our tracking chips. Which meant that if we timed our escape correctly, no one in front of the cameras or behind them would witness us inching backward, sliding along the wall until we reached a nearly hidden door, swiping a pass card across the ID panel, and slipping out of our world and into theirs.

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this bare limbo, like a holding cell: metal walls and floor that made it feel like we were in a giant tin can.

“What’s the plan, idiots? You going to stand there until you get caught?”

“Zo?”
I whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Um, saving you?” My sister dragged us a few feet down the corridor, then through an open door. She slammed it behind us, leaving us in total darkness. The space was large enough to fit the three of us, but only just. And something that felt suspiciously like a broom handle was poking into my lower back.

“Zo, did you just stuff us in a janitor’s closet?” I asked.

She snorted. “You really want to go with that as question number one?”

I cursed Auden. Of all the saviors to recruit, he chose my
sister
?

“You know what I’m still waiting for?” Zo asked.

“I’m guessing a thank-you.” Jude’s voice floated through the darkness. The closet was cramped enough that Zo’s arm was squashed against my side and Jude’s leg was pressed against my own.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Neither should you,” Zo said. “So I hope you figured out what you were supposed to do with the knife. Or we’re all screwed.”

“Auden sent you?” I was going to kill him.

“He didn’t have enough Brotherhood connections to get anyone in on that end,” she explained. “Fortunately, he had me.”

“Let me guess, you charmed your way in,” Jude said.

“You’re not the only one with BioMax friends in high places,” Zo said. “You know that guy Dad used to invite over for dinner, until he hit on Mom?”

“Tyson somebody?”

“Tyson Renzler. Let’s just say, apparently I take after Mom more than we thought.”

“Tell me you didn’t—”

“Ew! No!” She shoved me, hard. “But he’s had some creepy thing for me since I was fourteen. Always told me I should come to him if there was anything I needed—and made it
very
clear that he was perfectly okay keeping Dad in the dark. So here I am, folding towels, washing linens, and breaking you guys out. You mad?”

“Sort of mad.”

Sort of grateful.

“You knew I wouldn’t go back home,” Zo said.

“Told-you-sos later,” Jude said. “What do you know? What do we need to know?”

“Something’s happening on Sunday.” Zo affected a businesslike tone that I suspected she thought would make her sound older. “They’re all whining about not wanting to wait.”

“Wait for what?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something needs to happen on Sunday, and if it works, they can start phase three, but if it doesn’t happen, they’ll have to wait another month.”

“And phase three is … ?”

“I don’t know that either,” she admitted. “I poked around all I could without getting caught, but there’s nothing on file. And no one will tell me anything. That’s all I got.”

“Okay,” Jude said. “So we work backward. What’s phase two?”

“Getting us all in one place,” I guessed. “For whatever reason.”

“So we’re here. Now what?” Jude asked. “What else is back here? What are they all doing while they’re waiting around for phase three?”

“I don’t know … offices, security monitoring, that kind of thing.” Zo sighed, but at Jude’s urging she kept going, describing in detail everything that lay on the BioMax side of the wall. He stopped her when she got to the generator room that had been deemed off-limits to all personnel.

“Why would they need their own power generator?” Jude asked. “And why would it be off-limits?”

“Not to everyone,” Zo clarified. “I hung around for a while one afternoon, just to see what was going on. Some of the Brotherhood people definitely go in and out. They’re not wearing robes or anything, but I recognized them. From before, I mean.”

Jude leaned forward. “Does that mean you’ve seen inside? Even a glimpse?”

“Maybe. I guess. Just a bunch of equipment.”

“Was there a compression generator?”

“A what?”

They went back and forth, Jude spewing out technical terms, Zo trying to remember whether she’d seen a giant cylinder or a massive cube, and what kind of equipment had been carried in and out, and eventually I zoned out, trying to imagine why a spare portable power plant could be of any interest to anyone, much less any danger. Arguably, extra power indicated that they were looking out for us, ensuring that if anyone tampered with the main power supply, our bodies would continue to function. Without electricity we were nothing; we were little more than mute and lifeless dolls. Power was everything. The pulse guns had proved that. Too much power could be as dangerous as too little, shorting out our networks, leaving us temporarily useless.

I froze.

What would happen if they found a bigger gun, one that turned temporary to permanent? One that could target several mechs at once.

“It sounds like it could be an EMP bomb,” Jude said. “Set off a big enough electromagnetic pulse and—”

“Get rid of us all in one shot.” I hadn’t known such a thing existed.

“A big enough EMP blast wouldn’t just short-circuit us,” Jude said. “It would wipe us. Completely.”

“And the virus wiped the backups,” Zo said, sounding horrified.

“They’re not this stupid,” Jude murmured, thinking out loud. “I get wanting us out of the way so we can’t claim proprietary ownership over the AI tech; I get that they don’t want us making noise—but what’s the strategy? What’s the spin on pretending to save us, then turning around and wiping us out?”

“The Brotherhood!” I saw it all laid out now, the inevitable path, starting with the day we’d strolled into BioMax and set it in motion, so arrogant, so stupid, thinking we could talk a multibillion-dollar corp out of their multibillion-dollar profit. “Why do you think they’re here? BioMax lets them in, under the radar, then turns them into a scapegoat. They did it to Auden, and now …”

“They’re doing it to Savona?”

I could already see the press conferences Kiri would arrange, the note of sorrow in M. Poulet’s voice as he explained the tragedy, bemoaned how foolish he’d been to trust Savona, to close his eyes to the danger of the Brotherhood and their infiltrators. What a tragedy: a safe haven transformed into a mass grave.

We’d known we were going to have to get the mechs out;
now we knew we had less than a week in which to do it. And now we knew exactly how determined BioMax would be to stop us if we tried to leave. They wouldn’t care who got hurt. Probably the more the better, as far as they were concerned. For all we knew, an escape attempt could offer them the perfect pretense to unleash their doomsday plan early. Which meant we had to move fast—but carefully.

Jude and Zo started throwing out ideas, bad ones, apocalyptic scenarios cribbed from video games, with the mech hordes storming their guards, scaling the walls, breaking free, leaving bodies strewn in their wake.

“It’s easier than that,” I said, seeing what they couldn’t, because they hadn’t been there, in the last corp-town, when the sirens blared and the orgs toppled like dominos, leaving me and Riley on our feet, utterly alone. Jude had once argued that the orgs would be willing to let a thousand mechs die if it would save a single human life. What was I willing to do to save a thousand mechs?

“It’s like you always say, Jude. They’re orgs. They’re weak. We use that.” I waited for him to get there before I could say it, so it could be his idea, and his responsibility. But he didn’t. “We knock them out,” I added. “If we could get access to the ventilation system …”

“We walk out of here, no questions asked,” Jude said.

“Uh, except for the part where you have no way of doing it,” Zo pointed out. “Unless you happen to walk around with some kind of magic sleeping potion in case of emergencies.”

“No,” Jude said. “But I know a guy who does.”

“Great. You ‘know a guy.’” I said. “So we just sneak out of here, meet up with your ‘guy,’ somehow sneak back in, or hope they’re moronic enough let us walk through the door again, without searching us this time. Easy?”

“We could slip it to Zo,” Jude said. “She could get it into the vents.”

“He’s right, I could—”

“You could
not
. What happens when they find you passed out by the vent access port and realize what you did?”

“So, better idea.
He
slips the stuff into the vents,
you
get everyone out—and I make it all possible by meeting up with this ‘guy’ in the first place. Tell me how to find him.”

But I knew where she’d have to go to find him. The same place all Jude’s ‘guys’ were. The place you lived when you were the kind of ‘guy’ who dealt in illegal bioweapons and various other diversions of the delinquent class.

“Are you forgetting what Auden said? No one leaves here without permission, not mechs, not staff.”

“I’m not exactly staff so much as Tyson Renzler’s pet project,” Zo said. “If I want to leave, trust me, I can make it happen.”