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 plainprint 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.
The taller guy scowled at her, and she blushed again, harder. Then she moved to his side, slipping an arm around his waist. Next to me, Riley stiffened.
“She right?” the guy asked Riley. “It’s you?”
“Yeah, Gray,” Riley said. “It’s me.”
“Prove it.”
“You sure you want me to?” Riley asked. “Because I didn’t think you’d want Mika and Sari to know about that time we were crashing at Bo’s place and freaked out on shockers. What’d you declare yourself? Emperor of Piss and—”
“It’s him,” Gray said abruptly. Mika snickered. “Heard about your new look,” he said to Riley. “But seeing it . . .” He shook his head. “Always had to be different, didn’t you?”
The girl, Sari, kept her arm around Gray but pulled her body slightly away from him—it was subtle, probably too subtle for any idiot guy to notice, but I did. It was a move I’d pulled myself, one that said to anyone watching, I’m with him . . . unless you’ve got a better offer? “I think what Gray means to say is that he’s glad you’re not dead.” She drove a steel-tipped boot into Gray’s ankle. “Right, Gray?”
“Right, baby,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her into him again. Maybe he wasn’t such an idiot after all. “Didn’t think you’d be back,” he said to Riley. “After you and Jude disappeared, we all—”
“You knew Jude?” I asked.
Gray jerked his head toward me. “Who’s this one?”
“A friend,” Riley said. I noticed he was keeping his eyes on Mika. Worried about what he’d do next, I wondered, or just trying not to watch Gray pawing his old girlfriend?
“Right.” Gray sneered at me. “Didn’t know you had a thing for blondes.”
“Maybe it’s true what they say,” Mika said. “I hear skinners—”
“Mechs,” I corrected him. It shouldn’t have mattered—sticks and stones and all that—but it did. Words counted.
“‘Skinner’ works for me,” Mika said. “Computer brain shoved into some fake skin, walking around like you’re a real person, stealing the identity of some dead guy—or girl, in your case. I assume.”
“I didn’t steal anything.” Orgs just didn’t get how something could be true and not true at the same time. In every way that mattered, I was the same Lia Kahn as I’d always been; in every way that mattered, I was completely different.
But I wasn’t pretending to be human. I was over that.
“Whatever,” Riley said. “It doesn’t matter. We need your help.”
“Figures that’s why you’re back,” Gray said. “You and Jude score big, and you disappear, but now that you need something—”
“You know why I stayed away,” Riley said in a low voice.
Gray cocked his head at me. “But she doesn’t, does she?”
Great. More secrets. “Why—”
“Lia.” Riley shook his head at me, slightly. As if he was in charge of whether and when I shut up.
“Why’d he stay away?” I asked Gray.
He shrugged. “Ask him. Besides, doesn’t really fit in anymore, does he, looking like that.”
Riley hugged his arms across his chest like he was trying to cover as much of his skin as he could. Like he was ashamed. In the corp-town, he’d stared down all the whisperers and gapers, silently daring them to do their worst. But here he slumped and covered up, looking like he wished he could rip the synflesh off his body, strip by pale pink strip.
“We just need to crash here for a while,” Riley said. For the first time, he met Sari’s gaze. “Please.”
“You’re in trouble,” Mika said. “We’ve got enough of that.”
“And if Jude and me had said that last year, you’d be dead right now,” Riley said. “You owe me.”
“We owe Jude,” Gray said. “Don’t see him here.” He grinned at me. “Unless he’s feeling a little more feminine these days. That you in there, kid?”
“Let us stay here, keep it quiet, and you and Jude’ll be even,” Riley said. “You know I speak for him.”
Sari gave him a shy smile, then perched on her tiptoes to whisper something in Gray’s ear. His eyebrows knit together in a ragged V, but then he nodded. “Fine. Sixteenth floor, unit six, vacant for emergencies. It’s yours. But only for a few days.”
“You’re fucking kidding,” Mika spat.
“I’m fucking serious,” Gray said. Ratface shut up.
Riley held out a hand to shake, but Gray didn’t move. After a moment, Riley dropped his arm. “Thanks,” he said.
“Nothing personal,” Gray said. “I get that you’re still the same guy, somewhere in there, but . . . you know.”
“Yeah, nothing personal.” Riley jerked his head at me. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Just for a few days,” Mika reminded us as we tromped behind him up the decaying stairs.
“Yeah, then what?” I muttered.
“Can’t hide forever,” Riley said. “We deal with this, then we can go.”
“Home?”
“Wherever.”
We trekked up to the sixteenth floor, where we got a room of our own. A room with three blank beige walls and a pool of piss on the floor. A fourth wall of cracked windows cast the room in dying light, enough to see the film of grit coating the rickety table and chairs.
Foregoing the broken furniture, Riley slumped on the floor with his back to the wall and his feet a few inches from the urine. I found a place on the other side of the room. Mika reappeared a moment later and tossed us a wad of clothing. “Gray said you’d want it,” he growled before slamming the door shut behind him.
A grimy pair of pants had landed nearest me. I nudged it with my foot, half expecting a cockroach to crawl out from beneath. “We want these?”
Riley was already scooping up the jeans and a black rag that might once have been a shirt. “We don’t want to be wearing what we wore in the vids,” he said. “Just in case.”
“Plausible deniability,” I said, flashing on the image that bothered me the most, my still, upright form at the center of those sprawling bodies, the only vertical in a horizontal world. “Got it.” I lifted the gray pants between two fingers, glad I couldn’t smell them, trying not to wonder what had caused the rust brown stain spread down the right leg. The T-shirt was of
indeterminate color, the bastard child of mold and puke.
Riley turned his back on me, slipping out of his old shirt and into the new one in one smooth, swift motion, revealing only a glimpse of the skin underneath. Bodies were bodies, Jude always said. Shame was an org thing, a pointless leftover from the Garden of Eden. But I turned away as Riley went to work on the jeans. If he was so repulsed by the sight of me, I wasn’t about to watch him. Besides, taut abs, bare ass, whatever. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Instead, I focused on my own city gear. The pants were baggy, at least two sizes too big, but they knotted at the front, and I cinched them as tight as they’d go. The threadbare shirt was probably see-through, and I imagined I could feel a colony of insects swarming across my skin, burrowing deep into their new nest.
Regretfully, I dropped my own clothes on the floor, aiming squarely for the pool of urine, knowing it was the only way I wouldn’t be tempted to put them on again. Riley still had his back to me, waiting.
“A true gentleman,” I teased. “Unless you snuck a peek while my back was turned?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he snapped, like he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to.
“Fine. You can turn around now,” I said. “Your eyes are safe from the hideousness of my bare skin.”
“That’s not—I wasn’t—”
It wasn’t like him to stammer. I let the awkward moment drag on as his gaze strayed involuntarily down my body. Then I put him out of his misery. “What now?”
“We wait till dark,” Riley said. “Then we get on the network and see what we can figure out.”
“But what about—”
“Doesn’t matter if they track us to the city,” Riley said. “We’re protected here. Someone comes for us, there are warning systems in place.”
“Gray’s systems.” Like I was going to trust my life to a total stranger.
Like I hadn’t already.
Riley nodded. “I’ll link in from a public zone.”
“If it’s that easy, why wait?” I didn’t ask exactly what he expected to do once we got on the network, since the options—voice Jude, watch and rewatch the vids of the attack, give myself up—were all varying degrees of useless. But even a bad plan was better than no plan. I pulled out my ViM.
“You crazy?” he snapped. “Put that away.”
I was tired of him treating me like a defective. Was it my fault I hadn’t grown up in his precious little concrete hell? “What’d I do now?”
Riley rolled his eyes. “Signal’s jammed here, remember? And you don’t show off what you’ve got, unless you want someone to grab it.”
Someone, like the trigger-happy losers he’d chosen to entrust with our lives. “Nice friends you’ve got.”
“Who said they were friends?”
I slammed my head back against the wall. Hard. “Great. Just great. So who the hell are they?”
“Some guys who owe me,” Riley said. “Around here, that’s what you get.”
“So Jude’s just some guy who owes you?”
Riley looked down. “That’s different.”
“And Sari?”
He curled his fingers into a fist and ground his knuckles against his lips. “What about her?”
I allowed myself a small smile. We were back in my territory now. “You tell me.” Not that I cared about what Riley was or wasn’t doing with some random slum case, but—aside from the not insignificant satisfaction to be gained from getting the prince of silent sulking to actually reveal a byte of information—I was bored. “I didn’t know you kept in touch with any of your old . . . not-friends.”
“Why would you know?”
“Does Jude know?” I asked. “Doesn’t seem like he’d approve.”
“You think I need his approval?”
“You’re the one who nods along to whatever the hell comes out of his mouth,” I said.
“Maybe I’m loyal.”
“And that means never questioning anything?”
“Not the big things,” Riley said.
“That’s not loyalty, it’s blind faith.”
He just shrugged. “Says you.”
We’d gotten way off topic, and I suddenly wondered whether Riley was smarter than I’d given him credit for, steering me away. “So you miss it here?”
He swept his arms out before him, showing off the peeling, stained walls, the yellow puddle. “What’s not to miss?”
“I’m serious,” I said. “You could have come back after the download.”
“Thought you said you were serious,” Riley said, cracking a half smile. “And even if I’d wanted to . . .” He shook his head, turning his left hand over as if examining its smooth surface, free of identifying creases and whorls. “Wouldn’t have worked.”
“Just because you’re a mech?”
“Partly.”
“What if Jude had wanted to move back?”
Riley paused. “He didn’t.”
Before I could explain the meaning of a hypothetical, the door opened. I froze, but Riley leaped to his feet, assuming a fight stance, knees bent, fists drawn.
“Am I interrupting something?” Sari asked, stepping into our cozy little hideaway.
It took a moment for Riley to drop his fists.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice gruffer than the one I was used to.
“Honestly?” Sari took a few steps toward him. He backed against the wall. “Just to get a good look.”
“You got one,” he said.
“Also this.” Before he could react, she’d crossed the room and her arms were around him, her cheek pressed to his chest. He hesitated, and then his arms crept around her. His eyes met mine, over her shoulder, then closed.
It wasn’t an easily categorizable hug. There was no sex in it, barely even a spark, but there was still something about it that made me feel like I should leave the room, leave them alone.
Then she let go and slapped him across the face.
“Did that hurt?” she asked.
He shook his head. She slapped him again—or tried to, but he caught her wrist just in time. She twisted away from him.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
“You tell me,” she shot back. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m right here.”
“Before!” She took a couple deep breaths. “You stop voicing me. Or answering any of my texts. You totally disappear! So you tell me: What the hell?”
“Sari, come on.”
“You never came back.” She looked up at him, eyes clear and dry, mouth pinched to a point. This was a girl who didn’t cry. “Two years, and you never came back—until one day you just show up again? With her?”
“You know why I couldn’t come back,” he said.
“Even if you wanted to, right?” Sari snapped. “But you didn’t. Why would you? Better life, better girls, better everything, right?”
“Nothing’s better,” Riley growled. “And I’m not the only one with a new life. Since when are you and Gray so tight?”
“It’s not like that,” she said, the lie so obvious on her face that she must have intended it to be. She wanted him to know the truth behind the denial—to hurt him. I had to admire how well she played the game.
“So tell me how it is,” Riley said.
Her eyes narrowed; her voice tightened. “Like you care.”
“Since when do I ask, if I don’t care?”
She reached out her hand again, and Riley moved to intercept it. She gave her head a quick, sharp shake. He dropped his arm. Sari touched his face lightly. Her fingers flickered across his cheek, his chin, the bridge of his nose. “It’s really you?” she asked, peering into his eyes like there’d be some leftover in there, something familiar tying him to the face she’d known. A waste of time. But that was the thing about orgs. If they couldn’t touch it, see it, hear it, they concluded it didn’t exist.
Riley closed his hands around hers, removed them from his face. They stood that way, connec
ted, for a long moment, then separated. I couldn’t tell who’d let go first.
“What do you want, Sari?”
She hesitated. The iron expression wobbled. Then stiffened again as she made her decision. “Just to talk. Like we used to.”
Riley looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he nodded. “Yeah. That’d be good.”
Sari shot me a nasty look. I couldn’t blame her. “Not here,” she said. “Not in front of her.”
“She’s okay,” Riley said.
“I don’t know her.”
“I do.” Riley said.
Do you? I thought, skeptical.
But Sari was convinced. She glanced back and forth between us. “Yeah. Obviously. But I don’t, and I don’t want her listening.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “It’s fine.”
Sari snorted. “Where you gonna go?”
“She’s right,” Riley said. “It’s not safe.”
He was doing it again, acting like I was some fragile blossom needing protection from the elements. And not even in a marginally flattering, she’s-such-a-beautiful-flower kind of way. More in the I-don’t-want-to-clean-up-the-inevitable-mess kind of way. On the other hand, as far as I could tell, this claustrophobic, stained, piss-ridden room was a pretty good stand-in for the city at large. And I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. “Fine.”
“You want me to go?” he asked, like he’d asked in the woods.
He’ll come back, I told myself, and I nodded. Just like last time, he looked hesitant.
Unlike last time, he went.
“That was quick,” I said, irritated by my relief as the door swung open. Only a few minutes had passed. “I figured you two would—”
I jumped to my feet as Mika and two other guys I didn’t recognize—big guys—stepped into the room, shutting the door behind them. Knees bent, fists clenched, I thought, trying to imitate Riley’s instinctive don’t-mess-with-me pose. The look on their faces suggested I wasn’t doing it quite right.
“Didn’t realize I was having company,” I said brightly. “You should have told me you were stopping by, I would have cleaned the place up.”
One of the musclemen paled as he looked me up and down. “You didn’t say it was going to be one of them.”