“I need to tell you some things,” I said, before I could think better of it.
“There’s more? What’s left for them to do?”
“Not them. Me.”
The worst part? That didn’t surprise him either.
“It’s about that night at the temple,” I said. “There are some things that … you don’t know.” So easy to phrase it that way, passive and blameless. “Things you don’t know” as opposed to “things I didn’t tell you.”
We still sat cross-legged, facing each other. His hands rested on his ankles, and my hands rested on his. They were my safety line, my barometer. If I could hold on to them, I could hold on to him. If not …
I kept going. Eventually, I hoped, gravity would take over, dragging us down to the truth even if I changed my mind mid-fall and tried to pull us up again.
“I lied. About what happened. When I said the secops came before we signaled them—that we had no choice. That’s not how it was.” Keep talking. The faster I talked, the sooner it would end. “Auden found us, and I had to stop him from getting into the building, but then Jude wanted to use him as a hostage, and then—” It hadn’t been like this, one simple moment following another, cause and effect. It had been a fractured collage, and now, after so many months trying to forget, it was just a fog.
“Then what?” He spoke for the first time.
“Things got crazy. Jude was going to shoot Auden, so you … you had to stop him. Remember? You weren’t going to let anyone get hurt. So you …” I had told myself, all this time, that I was protecting him from the guilt. I was lying for him. But when had I ever been that altruistic?
“I what?”
“You shot him. With one of those pulse guns. And he passed out.” I wondered what it must be like to hear your life told to you like a story that had happened to someone else. To hear that you’d done things that you knew, deep down, you would never do. “But Auden had already alerted the Brotherhood, and then it was …” I shook my head. “Hell. We hid out inside the lab, and the Brotherhood was outside, and we didn’t have any choice.”
“So we called in the secops,” Riley said.
“Yeah. And we told them … if they came, if they rescued us and stopped the explosion and the Brotherhood, they could take Jude.” That wasn’t exactly right; it wasn’t how it had been. Saying it like that made it sound like a trade, like we’d given him up. “We didn’t have a choice.”
“We could have blown the place up,” Riley said. “With us inside.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“But you were too scared,” Riley said. “Right?”
I’d never admitted it to him. “It doesn’t matter now. We didn’t do it. We both agreed.”
“And then Jude blew the place anyway. With me inside.”
We were no longer holding hands.
“This is why I didn’t want you to know,” I said quickly. “I thought it would be easier—”
“On who?”
I deserved that.
“How do I know this is true?” he asked stiffly.
“It’s true.”
“How do I know?” he said again.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “We didn’t have a choice.”
“For all I know, you’re lying now, and what you said before was true. Or none of it’s true. Anything could be true. I’m supposed to trust you?”
I reached for him, but he knocked my hand away, hard.
“I’m sorry!”
“It’s not that you lied, again,” he said, frost in his voice. “It’s what you lied about.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to know—”
“The truth? Those were my memories, my life. Who gave you permission to screw with that? Do you know what it’s like, not remembering? Like a big, black nothing. You were supposed to fill it. I trusted you.” He screwed up his face, like he would have spit on me, if only he could. “I let you tell me what was real. I believed you. I gave you that. And you shit all over it.”
I didn’t mean to hurt you—my father’s lame words, on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them.
“I made a mistake.”
This time he caught my hand in mid-reach, his fingers steel around my wrist. “Don’t touch me,” he said, and let go. “You could tell me anything,” he continued. “And I’d have to believe you, right? Maybe you set up Jude. Or both of us, for all I know. Maybe you were working with BioMax the whole time.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“They’re your partners, right? Your allies in the cause?”
My words; his bullets. He was better at this than I would have expected.
And I wasn’t allowed to fight back.
“Jude warned me.” He shook his head, furious. “He warned me not to trust you.”
“We both agreed,” I said, getting desperate. I had to make him understand. “You wanted to stop Jude from hurting anyone. No matter what we had to do.”
He wasn’t listening. And part of me understood that the denials didn’t matter, because he didn’t really believe I was conspiring against him. It was the lying he couldn’t forgive. And I couldn’t deny I’d done that.
“Funny,” he said. “All that time you hated Jude, tried to turn me against him, and now he’s your new best friend. Maybe that was the plan? Get me out of the way?”
“You know that’s ridiculous.”
“So explain why you lie to me, and trust him.”
“I don’t! I mean, I do. Trust you. Not him. He’s nothing.”
Riley laughed. “Or maybe you’re lying again. Maybe while you’ve been screwing with me, you’ve been fucking him.”
It was the ugliest thing he’d ever said to me.
He didn’t mean it, I told myself.
He didn’t.
“Well? You want to deny it?”
“You really want to have this conversation?” I said, patience fraying. “With your ex-girlfriend camping out at the foot of your bed?”
“So we’re both liars,” he said. “I feel so much better now.”
I decided not to think too hard about that one, and trust that he meant he’d lied about her being there, not about why.
“We can start over,” I said. “No lies. You know everything now.”
He stood up. I was losing him.
“You honestly expect me to believe anything you say?”
Maybe I should have begged. Dropped to my knees. Clung to him. I didn’t expect it to work, but maybe I should have tried.
I didn’t.
We stood there, side by side, watching the water. I waited for him to walk away from me, and wondered how long it would take me to walk home from here. The thought reminded me that I didn’t have a home anymore; I only had Riley’s bed, and probably I didn’t have that anymore either.
“Riley, I—”
“Don’t.”
Minutes, hours, I don’t know. Mech bodies don’t get tired; mech legs don’t buckle. We could have stood there forever, as if rusted in place. A monument to something dead.
Finally: “I know you didn’t mean it.”
For a second I let myself hope. But even the anger was better than what was left in its wake. A vacuum. Every word clear, measured—empty.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he added.
“It has to.”
“It doesn’t.” He finally turned to me. Riley’s eyes were deep brown, not the slate gray they’d been when I first knew him. BioMax had done their best to match the new color to the photo I’d given them, but I couldn’t imagine that any org would have eyes like this. And certainly no org had the pinprick of amber at the center of the pupil. Like a keyhole. I watched his eyes and imagined I could see something there that said this wasn’t over, no matter what he wanted me to believe.
But I was done seeing what I wanted to see.
“It’s too hard,” Riley said.
“It” meant “us.”
“So that’s it? Becau
se it’s too much work?” I shook my head. No. No. No. “That’s supposed to be my thing, remember? I run away when things get tough. You stay. I’m the one who likes it easy, who gets everything handed to me—that’s what you think, right? You’re hard, you’re strong, I’m weak. So now who’s weak?”
“I’m not weak,” Riley said. “I’m tired.”
“Of me?” I asked. My voice sounded small, and I hated it.
“Of this.”
“Of us.”
“Come here,” he said, and opened his arms to me.
I wish I could say I turned my back on him. Not because I hated him or because he was wrong, but because it was my turn to be hard. Pride, dignity—invisible things, imaginary things, like the self, like the soul. They distort reality; they get in the way. But they still matter.
I stepped into his arms. I wished I could breathe in the scent of him, that his skin was warm and his chest rose and fell beneath his shirt.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, I thought. We were supposed to be a fairy tale. A cliché of a love story, the princess and the rogue, the lady and the tramp. We had died and come back to life; we were copies who’d found reality in each other. We were machines who’d found love. The circumstances were extraordinary. How could the end be so damn ordinary?
Just another breakup.
Just another broken heart.
If I really wanted him, I would find a way to fix it, I thought.
If I really wanted him, I wouldn’t have driven him away.
But as usual I didn’t know what I wanted. Other than his arms around me.
I wanted that, but not enough to hold on when he let go. Imaginary dignity, maybe. But it was real the way we stood there, alone together, nothing left to say. It was real when we walked to the car in step, side by side, not touching, and drove away, mature, grown-up. Separate.
This is really happening, I thought. This is how it ends. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything.
Mechs don’t cry.
And there was nothing else left.
PAYBACK
“He likes to pretend he’s strong.”
So we were civilized about it. No tantrums. No shouting. No one threw anyone else’s clothes out the window. We simply went back to Riley’s place, and—because Zo and I didn’t really have anywhere else to go, and because I could tell Riley had no stomach for throwing us out—we lived like we’d been living before. Except that I spent nights in the bed and Riley stayed on a chair by the door. Sari and Zo kept a wary eye on both of us. I hadn’t told Zo exactly what happened, only that Riley and I were done, and that I was fine, he was fine, everything was fine. I didn’t know what he’d told Sari. That wasn’t my business anymore.
How mature of us, I thought as we sat silently in the apartment, watching the orgs eat, or brainstorming with Jude to figure out what to do next. How civilized.
That was civilization, apparently. Playing the part, wearing the smile, keeping your mouth shut. Centuries built on etiquette and deception. You hurt an animal, it hurt you back—no thought, no hesitation, just a snarling beast, a rabid lunge, a bite. We were better than that. We nursed our wounds, circled each other, waited for something to change.
“No reason we can’t be friends,” Riley had said before we stepped back into the apartment that first time, so different from when we’d left.
I had nodded; I had agreed. And, granted, it had been a while since I’d had a friend. Maybe this was what it was like.
We were arguing for the fifth day in a row. We, the three of us—Jude, Riley, and me. Three dysfunctional musketeers. The apartment had become our war room. We’d been going round in circles for too long—as Jude pointed out, it seemed only likely that BioMax had recorded our intrusion, that they knew what we knew. The longer we waited, the more time they would have to take care of the problem.
But if they knew, why hadn’t they already done something to stop us?
Jude wanted to go to the network. Reveal the truth to the masses—though even he had to admit that the masses seemed unlikely to stand behind us, not when BioMax could promise them AI tech beyond their wildest dreams and, with it, luxury, plenitude, security. “It’s not even hurting us,” Jude said. “Not really.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding me? You didn’t see—”
“That’s what they’ll say,” Jude cut in. “And if it’s not hurting us, what do they care? What do they care either way?”
“We can’t go public,” Riley said. “Once we do that, we’ve got nothing left.” He didn’t look at Jude. If he was carrying any guilt for what had happened at the temple, he didn’t show it. If anything Jude was the one who looked guilty. I wondered what Riley had told him about me—and whether they’d talked about all the things he no longer remembered. But I wasn’t allowed to ask Riley, and I wasn’t about to ask Jude. “Secrets are power. You don’t just give them away.” Now he did look at Jude—and at me. “I say we go to BioMax. Tell them what we know, and what we want.”
Jude perked up. “Blackmail?”
“Reciprocation,” I said. Call-me-Ben’s term for it.
“BioMax owns us,” Jude said. “We piss them off, that could be it. No more repairs, no more replacement bodies …”
“Scared?” Riley sounded scornful. “Since when are you afraid to die?”
“I’m just laying out the facts,” Jude said.
“Sure.”
“For blackmail to work, you need leverage,” Jude said.
“We’ve got files, pics, what else could we need?” Riley asked.
“If we know the public won’t care, don’t you think they know it?”
“Then why keep it a secret in the first place?”
“I’m not saying they want it public,” Jude said. “I’m just suggesting they have a contingency plan. We don’t.”
“Exactly.” Riley turned to me. “We have no other plan. You want to go to the secops? To the government?” He laughed at his own joke, like there was anyone who wasn’t under the thumb of BioMax or one of its allies. “You want to go to the Brotherhood?”
“Lia? What do you think?” That was Jude asking, uncharacteristically. And Riley watching, waiting for me to choose the wrong side.
“I think … it could work.” Lie. BioMax was too big, we were too small, and walking into the lion’s den, showing our hand, seemed insane. But I didn’t have a better idea. And I didn’t want to argue.
“Two against one,” Jude said. “Guess that’s the plan.”
Unless he’d made a miraculous conversion to the democratic process, Jude going along with this meant he believed it was the best way to go—or else he was giving Riley his way as a gift, because for some inexplicable reason he felt indebted. The last time Jude had let loyalty and guilt guide his instincts, Ani had led us straight into an ambush.
“Guess that’s the plan,” I repeated.
Because, all other things aside, I wanted it to work.
I voiced Kiri, requesting the meeting. I said I had something important to discuss, that she should bring call-me-Ben, call-me-Ben’s boss, anyone who had decision-making power at the corp. Anyone who wasn’t my father. Kiri agreed to set it up, and I cut the link, wondering if she knew.
I spent the morning before the meeting at the waterfall. It should have been a toxic zone for me, but somehow that day with Riley had purged it of the past, and it was just a waterfall again. I sat on the edge of a wide, flat rock, dangling my feet in the water and shrouding myself in the thunder of the falls, white noise that drowned my capacity for rational thought. I burrowed into myself—or maybe it was the opposite; maybe I was climbing out of my skin. Fusing somehow with the rock and the trees and the open sky. Time ticked by, and I let myself forget what I was waiting for. Until it arrived.
Zo insisted on accompanying me to the corp headquarters—to wait outside, she said, just in case. I let her. When we arrived, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who’d brought moral support. Ril
ey was already there—with Sari. I gave him a thin smile and ignored the barnacle. Zo followed suit. But Jude, when he showed up a few minutes later, took a different tack. “What’s with the skank?”
She had an arm around Riley but kept her eyes on me, smiling, and I knew the pose was for my benefit. He’s mine now, that arm said. He may not know it yet, but I do, and now you do.
“She’ll wait outside,” Riley said.
Jude scowled. “She doesn’t belong here.”
“You want to kick out the orgs, why don’t you start with her?” Riley nodded at Zo.
“It’s not because she’s an org,” Jude said. “And you know it.”
“I brought her. She stays.” Riley leaned in and whispered something in her ear.
Was he doing it to hurt me? The thought was nearly unbearable. But not as bad as the alternative. That he’d brought her because he wanted her here. “Let’s go,” I said.
Sari gave him a quick hug, and a kiss on the cheek. “For luck,” she chirped.
Zo caught my eye and blew me a kiss. “For luck,” she said, a drop too sweetly.
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving Zo out here alone with Sari. My little sister could fend for herself.
I’d been in the conference room before, the one reserved for very rare face-to-face meetings of the top BioMax executives and their favorite cronies. And I had met M. Poulet before, the chief operating officer, the highest ranking BioMax figure willing to show his face to the public, though it was a poorly kept secret that every corp kept its ultimate rulers hidden. For our purposes Poulet was BioMax, and despite the fact that he was built like a walrus, with a mustache to match, I’d never seen anyone face him with anything less than poorly disguised terror. Jude, Riley, and I sat on one side of the long table; Kiri, call-me-Ben, and M. Poulet sat on the other. Three of us—three of them. It didn’t feel like an even match.
“Here’s what we know,” I began. It had been surprisingly easy to convince Jude that I should be the one to speak. No doubt because I’d make a convenient scapegoat when we failed. I doubted any of us had much hope that this was going to work. But I didn’t let it show.