Crashed

  I did.

  CITY LIGHTS

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

  Riley 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.

  Jude’s not God, I wanted to remind Riley.

  But not as much as I wanted not to be left alone.

  “The point is we shouldn’t bring anyone else into this,” I said. Thinking: Jude sent us to Synapsis Corp. Sent me. To meet a mysterious contact who never showed up. Thinking you’d have to be a moron not to wonder. Or an acolyte, blinded by faith. Same difference. “You said yourself, they could track us through the network—and now we know they’re looking for us.” Looking for me. “If we get in touch with Jude, we’d only make him look guilty. Bring down the secops on everyone.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “It’s my life, right?” I said. Only one mech had turned her face to the camera. A few shots had caught Riley running away, but he’d been the smart one, covering his face with his shirt. No one was looking for him. “If we’re going to take a risk, it should be my decision.”

  “And you don’t trust him,” Riley said sourly.

  “Right now I don’t trust anyone.”

  “Including me.” It wasn’t a question.

  He’s Jude’s best friend, I thought. Riley would do anything for him. But not this.

  I had no way of knowing; I knew. He’d stepped over the bodies with me. He’d been there. And he was here now. Probably I should have suspected him. But I didn’t want to.

  “If you’re out to get me, you’re not doing a very good job of it,” I pointed out, only partly for his benefit. “And you’re already stuck with what happened. Jude isn’t.”

  Riley dropped down to the ground again, looking a little lost. “You’re right. Just us, then.”

  I didn’t want to say it. The old Lia Kahn would never have said it. But she was dead. “They’re looking for me, not you.”

  “So far,” he said darkly.

  “I mean, this doesn’t have to be your problem.”

  “You want me to go?” he asked.

  I hesitated. Then shook my head. “But you can. If you want.”

  He hesitated too, longer than I had.“I’m in this.”

  “But you don’t have to be.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  • • •

  We needed somewhere that no one would bother to look for us, where no one bothered to look at all. “I know a place,” Riley said, “but . . .”

  There were plenty of buts.

  But I haven’t been back since the download.

  But it’s not safe.

  But I don’t know if you can handle it.

  “I can handle anything,” I told him.

  It’s not that I convinced him.

  It’s just that we couldn’t come up with a better option. So we went with the last resort.

  Riley’s city was a day’s walk—a day and a half by back roads, which was how we went. We walked through the night, navigating by the dim glow of our ViM screens and occasionally switching to infrared. We reached the city’s crumbling edge just as the sun was peeking through the jagged skyline. I’d been there before, but only at night, when the dead buildings were just ragged shadows, the city people all hidden away, in bed or in shadow. At night, the sky’s dim red glow gave the place a weird dignity. Maybe it was the illusion that the city wasn’t dead after all but just a sleeping monster that would wake when the lights switched on.

  Now that the lights were on, it was easy to see that the monster wasn’t sleeping; it was dead. Unlike most of the cities on the eastern seaboard, this one was still habitable, but just barely. The streets were paved with rubble and dogshit, lined with broken cars so old they still ran on gasoline (or would have, if they ran at all). Small clumps of orgs—their teeth rottin
g, their faces pockmarked, their insides and outsides racing each other toward decay—gathered in burnt-out buildings with broken windows, staring slack jawed at vids playing across giant screens. None of them noticed us as we passed.

  “The vids play all day,” Riley explained. “When you’re a kid, you’re supposed to watch the ed ones, learn to read and all that. After, you can do whatever you want. But there’s nothing else to do.”

  There was no wireless web of energy here, which meant no one had ViMs to watch the vids of their own choosing. It also meant our mechanical bodies would be powering themselves on stored energy, good enough to last three days, four if we pushed it. Riley was convinced that would be enough. And if it wasn’t, we could always sneak back to the Sanctuary for a quick recharge. There was no network either, at least no wireless access—they jammed the signal in the cities. Instead, communal ViMs let residents link into the network for a few minutes each day. According to Riley, most never bothered.

  “How did you live here?” I asked as Riley led us down widening streets. The squat, brick structures gradually gave way to cement monoliths, their faces the color of ash.

  “What was the other option?” He slowed down, his eyes tracking the broken windows we passed. Once he knelt to pluck a glittering scrap of metal from a small pile of trash. He held it out to me, proud of the find. “A real coin,” he said. “You can find them all over if you know what you’re looking for.”

  “So?” I didn’t need him playing tour guide. “It’s not like they have any value anymore.”

  He slipped it into his pocket. “Maybe not to you.”

  Shadows flickered behind the glass. I turned my face to the ground. We’d agreed we shouldn’t bother trying to disguise ourselves—no disguise would hide what we were. Even if my picture hadn’t been all over the vids, two mechs traipsing through a city was a dead giveaway we were doing something we shouldn’t. Riley had claimed it didn’t matter. “There’s no law in the city, not really. You just do what you can until someone stops you.” Meaning no law but the unspoken kind, expressed only in the native language you absorbed growing up in the city, in favors and blackmail and protection money, in the unforgiving thresher of Darwinian selection. You either figured out how to survive, or you went extinct.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked now as we passed building after building, all of them identical except for the designs sprayed in black and gold across their faces. Sensing our presence, the graffiti rippled and swirled, occasionally emitting a piercing blast of noise, the artist’s primal scream embedded in the electropaint. “Can’t we just pick one and get off the street?”

  Riley shook his head. “Even in a city, everything belongs to someone.”

  He stopped suddenly in front of a building capped by two forty-story towers, its doors scarred by deep fissures running diagonally across their length as if giant claws had sliced through the metal. A thick layer of grime had turned the facade a dark, earthy brown. The windows at street level were all boarded up, but through the cracks I could see figures moving around inside.

  “There are people in there,” I hissed as Riley started toward the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, well, shouldn’t we go back the way we came? What about all those empty houses?”

  “You don’t get it,” Riley said.

  “So explain it to me.”

  “Now?”

  I crossed my arms. “Now or never.”

  So he did. Some of the buildings we’d passed probably were empty, he explained, but in the city, empty was death, home to roving bands of the desperate and hungry, as bestial as the outside authorities made them out to be. We couldn’t be killed, but we could still be attacked, robbed, dismembered . . . he left the rest to my imagination. There was safety in numbers as long as you chose the right numbers. Which was why most of the city crowded into the skyscrapers at its center, seizing a place as either protector or protected. Every gang had its own territory, some owning whole towers, others sharing space in a precarious balance of power, as in this building, Riley’s building, where west and east towers coexisted as uneasy allies and occasional combatants.

  We entered the lobby, a long, narrow space with ceilings that towered three stories over our heads. At ground level, the windows were boarded up with jagged-edged wooden boards. But above, a latticework of steel beams and broken glass let in the light and—judging from the puddles, the rust, and the mold—the elements. Facing the entrance, a sleek wall of black marble rose from floor to ceiling, small holes smashed into it at regular intervals like hand- and footholds for a mountain climber. And at the point where the marble met the ceiling: the climber himself, hanging from a narrow cable, his long rifle aimed out at the street. There was a matching sniper at the other end of the lobby—one to guard the west tower, I decided, the other to guard the east. On the ground, two clumps of sentries mirrored the division, each protecting the entrance to one of the towers, all with their weapons trained on us.

  Riley had called them “sentries,” but they were children, alongside a few decrepit and aged men and women. All carrying guns, all settled into wheelchairs or leaning on crutches and canes.

  “Not enough power to run an elevator,”Riley VM’d. “So either you climb the stairs . . .”

  Or you didn’t.

  Apparently, in a tower everyone had some job to do, even the ones forced to stay on the ground.

  “Which floor did you live on?”I asked him as if I could somehow gauge where he’d fit into the vertical hierarchy.

  “The ground,” Riley murmured aloud. “With them.”

  “But—” I stopped myself. Of course. Jude had stayed on the ground; Riley had stayed with Jude. “You sure about this?” I asked, nodding toward the nearest weapon—too near for my taste.

  “Ground level’s neutral territory,” Riley said. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

  I bristled at both the implication and the tone. But I did as I was told.

  Riley strode up to one of the younger boys guarding the west tower. The kid sat malnourished and one-legged in a rusted wheelchair, a long, black gun laid across his lap. “Skinners?” he said, fingers rigid on the arms of the chair. “You don’t belong here.” One hand dropped casually, almost as an afterthought, onto the handle of his gun.

  “Let ‘em stay,” gargled an older man leaning on a crutch. “We can have some fun.”

  “Shut it, Ches,” Riley snapped. When he spoke to the boy, his voice was gentler. “It’s me, Jay,” he said. “Riley.”

  “Yeah, right. Prove it.”

  “Fine.” Riley slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out the crushed coin he’d found, then tossed it to the kid. “For your collection.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. With a furtive glance at his fellow sentries, he shoved the coin into his pocket. Then, never taking his eyes off Riley, scrawled something onto a piece of paper and shoved it into a long tube that ran up the side of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling. The page whooshed away.

  “Pneumatic tubes,”Riley VM’d. “Works on compressed air. Best way to stay in touch without power.”

  “Since when do you know how to write?” he asked the kid.

  The boy scowled and hocked out a mouthful of thick, yellowish saliva. “Gray made me. New rule. Reading too.”

  Riley grinned. “Since when does Gray make anyone do anything?”

  “Things change,” the kid said without matching his smile. “You should know.”

  The response arrived a few moments later. The boy retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from the tube, read it over slowly, his lips moving as he pieced the letters together into words. Then he nodded. “Fifteenth floor,” he told Riley. “They’re waiting for you.”

  Riley gave him a half shrug, half nod, then pulled me past the group of guards toward the stairs.

  “Hey, Riley!” the kid called after us. “So what’s it like, anyway?”

  “Quieter,” Riley called back, and then the sta
irwell door closed behind us and we were on our way up.

  “Quieter?” I repeated as we climbed the steep, narrow flights, stepping over piles of garbage. The stairwell was a windowless concrete chimney stretching endlessly above us and echoing with the clatter of pounding feet.

  “What’d you want me to say?” Riley took the stairs two at a time, keeping me at his back. “That while he’s stuck in shit for the rest of his life, I’m rich and safe and never hungry?”

  “Just wondering what you meant,” I said. “Quieter.”

  “There’s always people around in a city,” Riley said. And as if to illustrate his point, a crowd of slummers pushed past us on the stairs without pausing, their pupils wide and faces streaming with sweat, telltale signs of a shocker trip. They probably hadn’t even seen us. “Nowhere belongs to just you.”

  The door marked 15 released us into a long, gray hallway lined with doors, windows at either end letting in little light. Three orgs were waiting for us, their limbs bundled tight into thick sweaters, their breath fogging in the chill air. The two guys were a couple years older than me, while the girl looked about my age.

  “It’s hotter than I thought it would be,” the shorter of the two guys said, looking me up and down, his ratface scrunched like he was trying to pick up my scent.

  The other shoved an elbow into his gut. “So this is the guy claiming to be Riley? What’s the game?”

  The girl shook her head. “No game,” she said, her eyes laser focused on his face. “It’s him.”

  The taller one spat out a bitter laugh. “Says who?”

  “Says me.” The girl took a step toward him, then stopped with a foot of distance still between them. Riley stayed silent.

  “How do you know?” the ratface asked.

  “He voiced me a couple times. And sent some pics. After.” The girl blushed and ran a hand through her spiky red hair. She was wearing makeup, I realized. A red smear across her lips and something sparkly over her lids—compensating for her lack of genetic perfection with a layer of paint. As if she could make herself pretty through sheer force of will. Add to that the baggy clothes, no tech anywhere in sight, just plain-print on the shirt and, from the look of it, shoes that didn’t even conform to her feet. She looked like a total retro, which made sense, since the retro slummers my sister hung out with were just shoddy imitations. This girl was the original. Zo will be glad to know she’s doing it right, I thought instinctively, before remembering that I wouldn’t be telling Zo anything any time soon.