Crashed (26 page)

"With Ani." I tried to picture it, the two of them with their old faces, their wheelchairs, two people who had nothing in common with the mechs I knew, and everything in common with each other.

"Yeah. She was from a different city, hung with a different crowd the first week we were in there. But most of them were gone after the first week anyway, so . . . anyway. There was this girl, Jeri. From the same city as Ani. And they were-- I don't know. I never knew if they were together, or what. But one day Jeri just wasn't there anymore. And Ani--I'd seen her around by then, you know. There weren't that many of us left, so you pretty much knew everyone. That day, she was just kind of empty. Like she was there, but not there anymore, you know? Nothing behind the eyes."

"And you took pity on her? Decided you were going to rescue her from her misery?" I'd intended sarcasm, but it didn't come out quite right.

He shook his head. "I was . . ." His face twisted. "Preoccupied. You've got to understand, these tests they were doing-- we're not talking your standard med-check. They had to figure out how our bodies worked, how our brains controlled our bodies. That's medical research, right? You give a little electric shock to your lab rat's brain, see which part of his body shuts off. You carve open your lab rat, see how things are working, play around a little, sew him back up, watch what happens." He tapped his temple. "You know how they figured out how this stuff works? They study damage. Damaged brains, damaged bodies. Zap a lab rat in the right place, and it forgets how to run the maze--presto, you know where rat memory lives. You can build your rat brain piece by piece, just by taking his apart. Piece by piece. Ever think about that? That's their model. Damage. So you tell me, what does that make us? How are we supposed to be
normal
, when everything they know, everything we're based on, was wrong?"

We're not supposed to be normal
, I thought.

"Never thought about it before, did you?" he asked. "How they perfected it."

"I . . ."

"Didn't think so." He shrugged. "They needed to figure out how we were put together, make sure they could replicate it. And they didn't want anything that would corrupt the purity of their experimental results. Muddy the neurological waters. Things like anesthesia. Pain meds."

"So they just . . . ?"

Jude watched me, waiting for me to react. Not wincing at the memory, not inviting my pity, but not flinching from it.

"I didn't know," I said.

"Nothing new about pain," Jude said flatly. "I got used to that a long time ago. But that day that Ani's girlfriend disappeared, that was . . . a bad day. It was hard for me to, uh, get around back then." He paused, as close as he'd ever come to acknowledging who he'd once been. "But that day, I couldn't even--" He rested his palm on the top of his tower of soil. Then he bore down and crushed it flat. "It was a bad day. And she stayed there with me. Barely knew me, and still had that empty look, because by that point we knew when someone disappeared, they weren't coming back, but she just ignored it, she got
me
through the night, fed me, kept me from--" He waved a hand, like he was brushing away the memory. "I don't like being helpless," he said. "I don't believe in it."

"But you let her help you."

It was as if he hadn't heard me. "I looked out for her after that. Made sure they didn't take her in for the download until they knew what they were doing. She thought
she
owed
me
. Thought she could trust me."

I'd been trying to figure out why Ani hadn't tried any harder to snare Jude in her trap. But maybe she'd known what I never would have guessed. That this--the powerlessness, the guilt, knowing that he could have, should have vetoed the raid, foreseen the trap, saved the day, knowing he had failed--this would be worse. Maybe she was right all along: She had known a part of him no one else was allowed to see.

"Why are you telling me this, Jude?"

"So you get it. You don't have to tell me what I did." He closed his eyes. "I know what I did."

I didn't ask him why he'd done it.

I touched his hand. He drew it away.

"Why don't you come back inside with me," I suggested. "We can figure out--"

"You go," he said. "I'm sure Riley's looking for you. He's always looking for you."

I wanted to tell him something true, to trade confidence for confidence, secret for secret. But I couldn't tell him the real secret. Because Savona might have been telling the truth. He might have been ready to kill all those orgs. I cared enough to be afraid of him; afraid for them.

Jude might not.

"I got a message from my sister," I said. A smaller, safer secret. "She says there's something we need to know. She wants to help."

"Right," Jude said wryly. "And it was so important that she couldn't just
tell
you? She had to send you a cryptic message and then, let me guess, have you meet her somewhere? Alone?"

"I think she means it," I said.

He stood up abruptly, brushing the soil off his hands. "Of course that's what you want to believe," he snapped, and it was like the conversation had never happened, like I'd imagined everything. "But you can't seriously be considering it. After everything that's happened? After--" He chuckled harshly. Fakely. "You think you can trust
anyone
? You think you can trust an
org
?"

I stood up too. "She's not just any org. She's my sister."

"
She
doesn't think so," he reminded me. "She thinks you're a skinner who stole her sister's identity. She thinks you're the enemy. Maybe she's right."

"It's easier for you to think that," I shot back. "Like every-thing's so simple, us versus them, orgs versus mechs."

"You're telling me it's not? After seeing what Savona did to his
prisoners
? What the whole org world
let
him do? They think we're
things
, Lia. Not people. Not sisters.
Things.
I don't
want
it to be us against them. It just is. How many times does the truth need to bite you in the ass before you stop turning your back on it?"

"Ani's a mech," I said quietly. "It didn't stop her from joining them. So maybe Zo . . ."

He choked out a pained laugh. "Are you
kidding
me? You warned me, Lia, remember? But I ignored you. I should have known--
I knew
--but I didn't listen. And now--" He stiffened, drawing himself up, still and straight. "Do what you want. Believe what you want. Let me know how that works out for you." Jude pushed past me, pausing for a moment as our shoulders met. "You had more to lose. I get it," he said, flexing his arm, stretching his fingers wide, then curling them into a fist, staring at the muscles working as if he still couldn't quite believe they responded to his command. "But that doesn't change the fact that you lost it. I really thought you'd figured that out." He let his arm drop, and his fingertips brushed mine. Then he was in motion again, past me, out of the greenhouse, and I was on my own.

He wasn't the only one who'd thought I had figured that out.

I'd told myself that I wasn't the same person anymore. That the old Lia Kahn didn't matter. But if I really believed that, then I would have deleted Zo's message from my zone and accepted that she wasn't my sister, just an org related to the org I used to be.

I would have let it go.

We lay side by side in the grass, our hands linked, watching the clouds. They were always thicker in the afternoon, or maybe it just seemed that way on the rare days when the morning sun peeked through the cloud cover and gray gave way to blue-- only to inevitably fade away again within hours, the dark chill of daily life returning.

"I don't want you to go," Riley said. He squeezed my hand.

I'd gone to Riley after Jude. I hadn't told him what we'd said, hadn't told him anything. I'd just sagged against him, let him hold me up. I let myself be weak. But that was temporary, and now it was done.

"I have to," I said.

"If it's a trap--"

"I have to know. And besides, what would be the point of a trap? They had me--they let me go. If Savona had wanted me . . ."

"Maybe it's not Savona," he said. "Maybe it's just your sister. Or maybe it's him."

Riley didn't like to say Auden's name.

"I guess I'll find out."

"Then let me go with you," he said, even though I'd already told him no, and told him again.

"I'm not leading you into a trap."

"Maybe you don't get to tell me what to do," he said.

I let go of him and sat up, angry that he didn't understand. "This is my stupid decision," I said. "Not yours. I'm not going to let you pay for it. I'm not going to let you get hurt because I made the wrong choice."

He sat up too, facing me, resolute. "I'm not going to let you get hurt, period. The last time I let you go to the Temple--"

"
Let
me? Since when do you
let
me do anything?"

"Since when do
you
? You can't stop me from going with you."

"And what happens if something goes wrong?" I shouted. "And you end up in that Temple, stapled to one of those posts. Just because you were stupidly trying to protect me? How am I supposed to live with that?"

Riley took my hand and pressed it against his chest. "Feel that?" he asked.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I tried to pull away. He held fast.

"Heartbeat."

"Energy converters don't beat," I snapped.

"Exactly." He let go. "And I'm not Auden."

"Who's talking about him?"

"The accident," Riley said. "He was trying to protect you. He forgot that you were strong, and he was weak. I'm not weak."

"I don't want you there," I lied. "And maybe I don't want you here either. Not if you're going to start telling me what I'm thinking, like everyone else."

"Take me with you, or I'll follow you. I don't care what you tell me. That's the way it is."

"I don't know what's going to happen," I said.

"We'll find out." He leaned forward, hands gentle on my face, and kissed me.

We spent the rest of the day there, in the grass, together, hands and lips and bodies searching for a way to feel, our clothes on, our touches confined, restrained, not wanting to find out what would happen if we pushed too far, if we tried to feel something our artificial receptors couldn't convey, if we let ourselves remember what our bodies used to be.

Whenever we went flying, when I stood at the edge of the sky, beneath the fear of falling, of crashing, there was the taste of something else, the fear that nothing would happen, that I would feel nothing, that the rush of speed, the terror of gravity, would be such old news that the drop would offer no release. It happened eventually, it always happened. Everything we tried got tired, and we would move on to something else. The waterfall. The cliffs. The plane. Maybe even the dreamers. Eventually, perhaps, we would run out of ideas and options and be left with nothing to jolt us into a moment of genuine release. We would be dead inside, for real this time, machines from the inside out.

Usually, I would ignore my fear or use it to kindle the fire I needed, and the rush would hit the moment my feet left the solid ground of the plane and the wind carried me away.

But sometimes I decided not to jump.

Zo sent me the coordinates of a point on the southern perimeter of the Temple campus. It was on the opposite side of the grounds from the main building, but it still felt strange to be there, knowing that Sloane and the others were less than a mile away, waiting for us to save them. Stranger still: knowing what was nestled in the pocket of Riley's bulky coat.

He'd insisted on bringing the gun.

I would never let him hurt my sister.

But if this was a trap, if she showed up with a horde of her newfound Brothers and Sisters, all of them armed with pulse-guns and eager for two new prisoners, I couldn't let them hurt Riley. Not when it was my fault he was here.

The gun was a good compromise, a way of ensuring that we kept a little power, no matter what. We wouldn't use it. That was why he carried it, because he knew guns, he understood guns, and he knew that the safest way to use a gun was to make sure you never had to use it. We would all be safer this way, including Zo. That was Riley's point, at least.

But I didn't want him to bring it.

And I didn't want to hear that he understood guns. Or know why.

"Didn't think you'd show," Zo said flatly when we joined her at the rendezvous point, just beyond the electrified border of the Temple grounds. It was just past midnight, but the main Temple blazed brightly on the horizon, and I realized the other night's darkness must have been part of the plan. Make it look empty and abandoned, so that the foolish, trusting mechs would spring the trap without thinking twice.

And here I was again. "You said it was important."

She glared at Riley. "I also said come alone."

He reached out and took my hand. Zo nodded. "I should have figured." She gave him a nasty smile. "Watch yourself," she suggested. "Lia's never without a guy for too long--but she's also never
with
anyone for very long."

"You say that like you believe I'm Lia," I pointed out.

"No," she said. "Like
you
believe you're Lia. Same nasty habits."

"Why are we here, Zo?" Obviously not for hugs and warm reminiscences of our halcyon youth.

She jerked her head at a flat, domed building just beyond an outcrop of trees. A smattering of rusty, broken machinery marked it as some kind of industrial space, one that seemed likely to have been abandoned long ago.

"They do it out here, away from the central areas," she said. "They don't want anyone to know."

"Know what?"

She didn't answer. Just crept silently toward the building, gesturing for us to follow. At the electrified zone, she held out her hand, waiting. I watched her face as our fingers touched, but it remained blank, no disgust, no curiosity, nothing. I couldn't remember the last time we'd touched.