Skinned

  “And Riley?” I asked, thinking of the tall, silent boy who never seemed to smile.

  Ani shrugged. “Who knows? Hard to tell what he’s thinking, right?”

  “I guess.” I paused. “So, when you said he was healthy, before, did you mean—”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I guess it’s okay for you to know where I came from. I mean, that’s my business. But if you want to know about them, ask them.”

  “Okay. I get it.” A lot of good it would do me, though. Jude had already made it clear he wasn’t in the question-answering business. At least not when it came to questions I actually wanted the answers to.

  “I don’t even know much myself,” she said in a softer voice. “He’s serious about the whole forgetting-the-past thing. Even before the download, he and Riley didn’t talk about where they came from. Not ever.”

  I thought about the picture, the boy’s body curled up in the wheelchair, his legs and arms strapped down, his neck looking too frail to support his head. And then I thought about Jude, passionate and proud. I thought about his firm grasp, and the way it had felt when his broad arms embraced me. “I guess I can maybe understand that.”

  Ani gave me a shy smile that suddenly made her look about ten years old. “I’m glad you came up here, Lia. Alone, I mean.”

  “Not like I had much of a choice. If Auden had set off the alarms—”

  Ani laughed. “There are no alarms,” she said, like it should have been obvious. “Jude just said that.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked, picturing Auden standing nervously on the curb in front of the building. Alone. Where I’d left him. “Why would he lie like that?”

  “Don’t be mad,” she said quickly. “He just wanted you to see what it was like with us. You know. On your own.”

  I turned to face the view again, resting my forearms on the railing, staring out and trying to imagine a city filled with lights. “It’s not so bad, I guess.”

  I probably should have been mad.

  But I wasn’t.

  As we made our way back to the car, Auden and I hung behind the rest of the group.

  “Have fun up there?” he asked, sounding a little sullen.

  I shrugged. “It was okay.”

  “Hope you two found some time to be alone together.”

  “Us two?”

  “You. Him.” He glared at Jude’s back.

  I forced a laugh. “Don’t make me throw up.”

  “You can’t,” Auden said flatly. “Remember?”

  “Like I could forget.”

  “You seem to have forgotten that he’s crazy. Dangerous.”

  “You’ve got no reason to think that,” I said. “You’re just—” But that was a sentence that didn’t need finishing. “He’s not so bad.” I didn’t know why I was bothering to defend him.

  No wonder Auden was freaked. I was a little freaked. But it didn’t mean something was going on. Just because I didn’t totally hate Jude, didn’t mean I—Well, it didn’t mean anything.

  “You tell yourself that if it helps. If that makes it easier.”

  So he was jealous, even though there was nothing to be jealous about—and even though he had no right to be. Auden didn’t own me. “Something you want to ask?”

  “None of my business,” he said.

  “Except you obviously think it is,” I pointed out. “Unless you’re still mad about what happened between the two of us.”

  “You mean what didn’t happen.”

  “So you are mad.”

  “No.”

  “Passive-aggressiveness is incredibly lame,” I said. “You do realize that, right?”

  “How am I being passive-aggressive?”

  I plucked at the fraying strap of his green bag. “What’d you do, throw the one I gave you in the trash? Light it on fire?”

  “It’s new,” he said defensively. “I didn’t want to bring it tonight, mess it up.”

  “Whatever. None of my business, right?”

  “It was my mother’s,” he mumbled, so quietly that I thought I must have heard him wrong.

  “What?”

  “The bag.” He pressed it tighter to his body. “It was my mother’s.”

  And I’d given him a bright, shiny new one, suggesting he throw the old one in the garbage where it belonged. What a lovely gesture. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.” He stared hard at me. “We don’t have to talk about everything, do we?”

  I looked away. No. We didn’t.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence. The city was silent too, at least at first. And then I heard something. A scuffling, shuffling noise. Like careful footsteps, creeping behind us.

  I didn’t say anything.

  It was probably my imagination, just like the shadows flickering in every alley we passed. It was probably nothing.

  Once we reached the cars, Jude loaded us all in—all except for a mech named Tak. I hadn’t talked to him much, partly because he scared me a little. It wasn’t so much the spikes around his neck or the patchy transparent casing on his face that revealed a layer of chunky wiring and circuitry. It was his eyes, which somehow looked even deader than mine. I told myself it was just a trick of the light.

  Jude nodded at Tak. Ready? he mouthed.

  Tak nodded back, and Jude tugged the tarp back across the car, leaving a corner of one of the windows unblocked. Then he jumped inside and slammed the door behind him. “Everyone scrunch down in your seats,” he ordered. “It’s safer.”

  “But what about Tak?” I asked.

  “Down,” Jude said. “You’ll see.”

  I saw.

  “I’m here, motherfuckers!” Tak screamed so loudly we could hear him through the thick windows. He stood in the middle of the empty street, as if waiting. “Come and get me!”

  Nothing happened.

  He screamed again and again until the words faded, replaced by an incoherent roar. And then, heeding his call, two figures emerged from the darkness, clothed in rags. One carried a knife. The other, a gun.

  We couldn’t hear what the men said. But through our corner of window, we could see Tak laugh. The men advanced.

  I grabbed Jude’s arm. “We have to do something!” I whispered, panicking.

  “He can deal,” Jude said calmly. “Just watch.” And, like a coward, I did.

  The man on the left raised his gun.

  Tak laughed again. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “No matter how hard you try!” Then he raised his arms out to his sides. “I fucking dare you!”

  The gunshot was like thunder.

  The men ran away before Tak’s body hit the ground.

  “Now!” Jude shouted. “Before the cops!”

  As Auden and I clung to each other, Jude and Riley jumped out of the car, grabbed Tak’s body, and slung it into the back. Onto us. They piled into the car themselves, and suddenly we were speeding away.

  “Awesome,” Tak gasped, his head in my lap. There was no blood, but the wound was oozing something green and viscous. I didn’t want it touching me.

  “Hurts?” Jude asked, programming in a new set of coordinates as the city fell away behind us.

  “Like fuck,” Tak said, thumping his shoulder where the bullet had slammed into him. “Gonna be a bitch to get this one out.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I said. “You did that on purpose. You let them shoot you! We all could have been—”

  “Killed?” Jude asked wryly.

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “Because you’re learning.” Jude twisted around in his seat to look at me. Me, not Auden, who had turned pale and was pressed up against the window, like he wanted to jump out of the car, speeding or not. “We all have our little daily pleasures,” he said. “Tak’s happens to be pain. Violence, too. And fear, of course.”

  “Fuck fear,” Tak shot back. “Just a gun,
right?”

  Jude smiled. “But mostly pain. Or at least, a digital simulation of such. A quick trip to BioMax and he’ll be all better, won’t you?” He patted Tak on the shoulder; Tak screamed at the touch. “I would think you’d have a little more understanding now that you’ve seen for yourself how addictive this sort of thing can be.”

  “It’s not the same and you know it!”

  “What are you two talking about?” Auden asked, eyes wide.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just bullshit. His usual.”

  “That’s right, look down on us, like we’re crazy, like you’re so different.” Jude sneered. “I hear the land of denial’s lovely this time of year.”

  “It’s not so easy for some of us! Your life may have sucked, but mine didn’t. I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

  “Like you know anything about my life.”

  “I know tonight was a little trip home for you,” I spat out, so angry and freaked out that I forgot about the promise I’d made to Ani. “I know you probably like this better than your wheelchair.”

  Jude hit manual override, and the car skidded to a stop. “Who told you?”

  I was glad Ani wasn’t riding with us. “Nobody.”

  “Get out.” Jude said quietly. “And take the org with you.”

  “What?” We were in the middle of nowhere, a long, dark stretch of highway bounded by nothingness. “No way!”

  “Get. Out.” Jude reached back and opened the door. “You love running away when things get intense, right? So let me help you. Run.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Now!”

  The scream was pure rage. I leaped out of the car, letting Tak’s head slam against the seat. Auden jumped out behind me. The car sped away before the door was fully shut.

  And then we were alone.

  “Now what?” Auden asked. “We walk back from…wherever the hell we are?”

  There was no way I was ready to tell my parents what I’d been doing—and I was guessing Auden didn’t want his father to find out either. There was one better option.

  Which didn’t make it a good one.

  I linked in to the network, trying to ignore Auden’s I-told-you-so glare.

  Lucky us, she was there.

  Lucky, right. Good thing I was getting used to redefining that concept on a daily basis.

  “Zo?” I said, hating the words as they came out of my mouth. “I need a favor.”

  FORGIVENESS

  “She decided not to care.”

  Zo didn’t bother asking where we’d been or how we’d ended up stranded on the side of some deserted road. She stayed linked in for the duration of the ride, her eyes closed and her lips moving silently along with the lyrics only she could hear. Auden and I didn’t talk much either until we dropped him off at his place.

  I kept hearing it. Tak’s scream. The gunshot.

  I kept seeing him fall.

  I saw him fall to the concrete, as I’d seen the bodies fall into the waterfall—and then, suddenly, I got it.

  It was all the same.

  This night, this moment, this was the ugly truth that lay hidden behind the wild beauty of the falls, behind Jude’s pretty speeches. He had called me a coward, someone who couldn’t face the truth. So I forced myself to face this; I forced myself not to look away.

  This was the core of Jude and his friends. The core of what they did, who they were, what they wanted. A scream. A gunshot.

  A gun.

  Destruction and pain, in a place as broken as they were.

  This is what they sought out, these people I’d thought were like me; this is what they offered, when they invited me to belong.

  It wasn’t romantic. Whatever Jude said, it wasn’t bold, it wasn’t freeing.

  It was a raw, ugly need.

  And it was a need I finally understood.

  Or maybe Jude was right; maybe I always had.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as he was getting out of the car.

  He shook his head once. “Don’t be.”

  But from the way he said it, I guessed that meant I shouldn’t bother apologizing—not because it wasn’t necessary, but because it wasn’t enough.

  When we got home, Zo brushed past me into the house and went up to her room without a word, slamming the door behind her. I couldn’t believe she was acting like I’d done something to her when I knew, because they’d been live-casting it on their zones, that she’d spent most of the night with Walker.

  I should have just shut down for the night. And I tried. I uploaded the day’s memories. I pulled off the clothes covered in city grime and slipped into my favorite pair of thermo-sweats. I even lay down in bed. I could have shut my eyes and been out with a thought. That’s how it worked. None of that inefficient tossing and turning, trying to force your brain to slow down and your body to relax. I just decided how long I wanted to “sleep,” then told myself to shut down, the same way I told myself to walk or sit or scream. It was just another command, easy to issue, instantaneously carried out. But I wasn’t ready to let go of the night.

  Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the neat tunnel the bullet had made in Tak’s shoulder. I heard him scream; I saw him smile.

  No blood. No danger.

  Just the thrill of the moment. And the pain.

  And I wondered.

  I found a razor in a bunch of junk under the bathroom sink. Left over from the days when I had real skin that sprouted real hair. It was a little rusty, but still sharp.

  It wasn’t the same as what they did, I told myself. I wasn’t seeking pain in some sick attempt to make life more interesting. I wasn’t sick, not like they were. I wasn’t so numb that I needed a jolt of violence to wake up my brain. I wasn’t chasing a death that would forever be out of my reach.

  I was just curious.

  It was an experiment. Perfectly safe, perfectly normal. I just wanted to see what would hurt, and how much. I needed to see how far I could go.

  The blade pierced the skin.

  Although I knew better, I half expected beads of blood to bubble up along the cut. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. The razor had barely sliced through the surface layer. It was like cutting through leather, the blade leaving only a thin groove behind.

  And it hurt.

  But not much. My brain registered: pain. Like a flashing red light, a warning to stop. But I didn’t feel it, not really.

  The stronger the emotion, the more “real” it may seem.

  I bore down harder.

  Still nothing. Or at least, not much.

  In frustration, I raked the blade from my wrist to my elbow, hard, and gasped as the pain blazed through me. Finally.

  There was an echoing gasp from the doorway. I looked up to see Zo staring at me in horror.

  I jumped off the bed, pressing my arm awkwardly to my side to cover up the long gash. The razor clattered to the floor.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” I said.

  Yeah, right.

  She smirked. “Whatever.”

  “Seriously, you can’t tell,” I pleaded. Our mother would freak out. Our father would…I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

  “Why would I tell?” she said.

  “I wasn’t trying to…hurt myself, or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “I was just…It’s normal. What I was doing, it’s normal, it’s no big deal, so can we just—”

  “I don’t care,” Zo said, slowly and firmly. “How many times do I have to say it before you believe me? I don’t care what you do. I don’t care how big a freak you want to be. I. Don’t. Care.”

  She really didn’t. She couldn’t, or she wouldn’t act like this. She wouldn’t have stolen my friends, my boyfriend, my life. She wouldn’t glare at me like she wished I would disappear. Like she wished…

  “You wish I was dead, is that it?” I started toward her, and she backed away. “You probably think it’d be easier for everyone if I’d died in the accident, so you di
dn’t have to deal with me like this.”

  “Shut up,” she said quietly.

  “Nice comeback.” I couldn’t take it anymore, her smug, lying face pretending that I was nothing to her. Let her hate me, fine. At least then there’d be some kind of connection, some emotion. We’d still be sisters. “Why don’t you just say it? You wish I was dead.”

  “I don’t wish anything,” she insisted. “I don’t care what you are or what you do. I don’t care.”

  “Say it. Say it! You wish I was dead!”

  “You are dead!” she screamed. The mask didn’t just fall off her face. It disintegrated. Her lips trembled. Her eyes spurted tears. Her cheeks blazed red as the blood drained out of the rest of her face. She swallowed hard. “My sister is dead.”

  “Zo…” I crossed the room, tried to hug her, but she slipped out of my grasp. “No, Zoie, I’m not, it’s okay, I’m right here.”

  She turned away from me and crossed her arms, huddled into herself. “What you said before, about the accident? That it should have been me?” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “It should have been me.”

  “No. No, I should never have said that. I didn’t mean it.” But I had.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s true. I should have been in the car. I should be dead. But now—” She choked down a sob. “Now Lia’s dead, and it’s my fault.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Lia’s dead!” she shrieked, spinning to face me. “My sister is dead, and I basically killed her, and then this thing pretending to be Lia moves into her house, into her family, into her life, and I’m supposed to pretend that’s okay? It’s not bad enough that I have to live with what I did, with the fact that she—” Another sob. Another hard swallow. But when she spoke again, she was steadier. “I live with that. Every day. Every minute. And that I could handle. But seeing you…act like her, try to be her. Watching you take her place, like you ever could?” She shook her head, and continued in a cold hiss. “I hate you.”

  “Zo, don’t.”

  “You think I like it?” she asked, furious. “Wasting my time with those losers she called her friends? Joining the track team, being Daddy’s perfect little girl? You think I like screwing my sister’s boyfriend?”