Crashed

  “Yeah.” Riley looked down at his hands, still hidden in the leaves. “Some of them, at least. I don’t know.”

  Some of them what? Died, or lived?

  “I never—” I stopped, about to say I’d never seen a dead body, but that was wishful thinking. I’d seen my own, burned and broken, brain scooped out for slicing and dicing and scanning.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sometimes it was useful being a mech, staying blank and keeping things inside. The problem came when you wanted to get them out. If I’d been trembling, if I’d been sweating or pale and cold or shivering uncontrollably, if I’d puked until there was nothing left but bile, if I’d felt anything in my body, then maybe my brain could have taken a break. Of course, if I was in a position to do any of those things, I wouldn’t have been sitting in the dark, rain beginning to patter against the leaves. I probably would have been dead.

  Riley wouldn’t let me link in to the network. “They could use it to track us.”

  “We don’t even know if ‘they’ are looking for us,” I argued. “And even if they are, you can’t track people through the network.”

  He gave me a weird look. “Who told you that?”

  “No one had to tell me. Everyone just knows.”

  “You want to link in, you do it somewhere else,” he said. “Away from me.”

  I didn’t want to go anywhere. “How long you think we need to wait?”

  “Couple days maybe. To be safe.”

  “Here?”

  He almost smiled. “You got somewhere to be?”

  Nowhere to be, no need to eat or sleep, nothing to do except find a way to stop seeing what I’d seen. And I had to admit, he’d picked a good hiding spot. All Sanctuaries had periodic ranger sweeps to make sure the orgs stayed out, but the odds of anyone finding us in the next day or two were pretty minuscule.

  “You can shut down if you want,” Riley suggested. “I’ll keep watch.”

  And lie there unconscious, trusting him to make decisions for the both of us? “I don’t think so.”

  He tipped his head up, as if there were anything to see but dead branches. “Whatever.”

  We sat there silently for a while. I almost laughed, remembering how much I’d dreaded having to spend a few hours in a car with him. Now here we were, playing at being alone in the world. But I didn’t laugh—thinking I’d been right not wanting to come.

  Weird how tiny, stupid decisions make all the difference.

  “You want to talk about it?” Riley said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You know. What happened.”

  Now I did laugh.

  “What?” he asked, looking almost hurt.

  “Since when do you want to talk?” I asked, still laughing, but only in my head, where I couldn’t stop. This is hysteria, I thought, my mental voice wracked with giggles, my body still and calm. Riley rested a hand on my upper arm, like he knew, and somehow it quieted the noise. He pulled his hand away.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to talk,” he said. “I asked if you wanted to.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But not about that.”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me something,” I ordered him. It felt good to boss a guy around. Normal, almost.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.”

  He looked more blank than usual.

  “Like, tell me how you did that back there with the door,” I suggested. I didn’t particularly care, but it was something to say.

  “I used to do a lot of that stuff,” he said. “It came in handy.”

  I didn’t have to ask him when. It was the same nebulous before we all had and never talked about. Jude’s law. And Jude knows best, right?

  “Okay, but how did you do it? Who taught you?”

  He shrugged. “I just figured it out.”

  “Fine.” I crossed my arms. “Great.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why do you always look at me like that?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m saying something wrong. Usually when I’m not even saying anything.”

  “You’re never saying anything,” I pointed out.

  “I am right now,” he said. “You’ve still got the look.”

  “Maybe because you’re still not actually saying anything. Not really.”

  “You’re strange,” he said. “Anyone ever told you that?”

  “Not really, no,” I said coolly. Strange meant not fitting in; I defined in. “I saw a pic of you,” I added, turning it back on him. “You and Jude and Ani. From before.”

  Jude had freaked out when he’d heard that, when I threw in his face that I knew what he’d been, before. Riley didn’t react.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said tonelessly.

  “Less than two years. Not so long.”

  “Long enough.”

  “So you and Jude, you were friends?” I asked, even though that much I knew. “Before?”

  Riley smiled, a real smile, one of the first I could remember seeing on him. Sometimes, with mechs, a smile could transform the face into something even less human—the expression somehow incongruous on the synthetic lips, a quaint and unsettling party trick, like a dog propped at the dinner table with a fork and spoon. But Riley’s smile was natural enough, and it made the rest of him seem more real. “You know Jude hates talking about the past.”

  I glanced over my shoulder as if making sure. “Yeah, Jude’s definitely not here,” I said. “So?”

  “So nice try,” he said, then grimaced like he couldn’t stand not to answer. “But yeah, we were. Best friends.”

  “Funny that he didn’t ditch you along with the rest of his past,” I said. “All part of embracing our bright new mech future, right?”

  But Jude’s friendship with Riley apparently fit into the same category as our org names, one of the few things we weren’t obligated to dump in the garbage as a testament to our new lives. In its own way, continuity was as important as discontinuity, Jude maintained. The radical break from our past, from our old families and old values, could only have meaning if we kept some core piece of ourselves intact—and then, of course, there was the small practical matter that keeping at least a tenuous grasp on our old identities was necessary if we wanted access to our zones and credit. And so the past was irrelevant . . . except when it suited him. When he needed it to pay the bills or to guarantee loyalty. Or to throw it in my face, remind me how I’d ended up with him and why. That was the thing about Jude. He spoke with conviction, but sometimes the distinctions he drew seemed arbitrary, invented ad hoc to serve his own purposes. Then he turned preference into principle, and his particular conveniences became our general rule.

  Though Jude would just say I wasn’t seeing the big picture, and that’s why I needed him.

  I gathered Riley would agree. He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t buy it. That we’re all better off now.”

  “So what if I don’t?”

  “Let me guess . . .” He tapped a finger against his lips as if he were choosing his words carefully, but the pause was too studied to be natural. He knew exactly what he wanted to say. “You go along with it, and you don’t talk about what you miss, because no one else seems to miss anything, and you figure that’s the way to go. It works for them, so it should work for you. Or it will. Till then, you keep your mouth shut.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Because that was less of an admission than How’d you know?

  He didn’t bother to answer either question. “Ever think they don’t miss anything because they don’t have anything to miss?”

  “Well, obviously,” I spit out. And at the beginning, I’d taken refuge in that. I wasn’t like you, I’d told Quinn. I was whole. “I’m not saying I don’t have anything to miss, I’m just saying it’s pointless. It’s better to just forget.”

  “That doesn’t make i
t easy,” he said.

  It was getting dark. And probably colder too, but temperature wasn’t something I noticed anymore. I registered it—or, at least, the body registered it—but I didn’t even feel it in the dim, distant way that I “felt” the ground was soft and wet, the bark rough against my back. It was a fact, an irrelevant one I’d learned to dismiss.

  “In the pic, you were . . . you looked healthy,” I said, not really expecting him to do much more than nod. He did. “But I thought all the volunteers—” I cut off the word. “The early test subjects,” I corrected myself. “I thought you were all . . .”

  “Defective?” he asked wryly. “Injured or diseased, without any options? Desperate?” He pressed his lips together in a thin, tight line. “Some of us had options,” he said after a moment. “Just not good ones.”

  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 explosi
ves 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 with 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.”