Torn (Cold Awakening) (22 page)

Jude’s chair clattered to the floor. He was on his feet, fists clenched, and then he was out of the room, his footsteps echoing down the hall.

“Where’s he going?” Ben looked bewildered.

I didn’t bother to answer. “Come on,” I ordered Zo. She didn’t ask questions, just ran after me as I ran after Jude.

Because I knew where he was going. I’d made the same connection. Someone Riley trusted, even if no one else did.

Sari.

We caught him before he had time to drive away, and threw ourselves into the car before he could lock the door.

“Get out,” he said.

“I’m coming with you,” I told him.

He didn’t argue.

I didn’t ask where he was taking us. I assumed he knew exactly where to find her. As Jude was so quick to boast, he knew things. The car turned in a familiar direction, and I curled up with my back to Zo and my forehead against the window. Whatever she did, I couldn’t see, didn’t care. I didn’t understand why she was still there, following us from one nightmare to the next, why suddenly every time I turned, Zo was there, the hole I’d finally gotten used to suddenly filled. Like she could wake up one day and decide to be my sister again. Suddenly I hated her, for being able to come back, disappear and resurface and disappear again, whenever she chose, when Riley never would again.

Zo had barely known Riley, and for most of the time she’d known him, she’d hated him, just for being a mech. She’d been part of the Brotherhood, even if she’d helped us in the end. Was that supposed to absolve her? Was I supposed to forget?

The anger came out of nowhere, so strong that I had to wrap my hands around the seat belt to keep them from wrapping around her throat—and then it drained away, as quickly as it arrived. I felt nothing.

The city rose before us, jagged knives stabbing the gray sky. Jude stopped the car long before we got anywhere near the dying towers. Instead he guided us into the dribbling remnants where the city faded into the wilderness, a kingdom of low, crumbling stone buildings, their roofs sagging or caved in.

“She’s here,” Jude said.

She could have been anywhere. “How do you know?”

“I know.” Jude stopped the car in front of a three-story house that looked no different from any of the others, except for the red streaks of graffiti smeared across the stone like it had been marked in blood. “Rats always go back to the nest.”

Zo’s eyes bugged as she took in the burned-out cars and broken windows, the clumps of orgs with rotting teeth, rotting skin, rotting faces gathered around fires that stank of rubber and dogshit. I realized this was her first time. The stories had haunted our childhood, tales of men like animals, prowling the streets, blood smeared across their faces like warrior tattoos, long nails sharpened like knives, bodies writhing in the gutters, screwing or dying or both at once. For Zo, as it had been for me, the city was a nightmare land, a monster in a bedtime story, the beast that would swallow you whole if you ventured too close. And this decrepit corner of hell was, according to Riley, the worst of the worst: a lawless no-man’s-land of the lost and abandoned, the castoffs in a
city of castaways, the lowest of human refuse—and the animals who preyed on them.
All the lies they told you about the city,
Riley had said.
That’s where they come true
.

“You can stay here,” I told Zo.

“By myself?”

I had visions of returning to a car set ablaze, or graffitied and crushed, or returning to find the car gone altogether, and Zo—

I didn’t let myself imagine any further.

She drew back her shoulders and opened the door. “I’m not scared,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I should never have brought her here
.

Jude didn’t wait for us to gather our nerve. He had already started toward the house. I could drag Zo back into the car and drive away, taking her somewhere safe. I could protect her, like I hadn’t protected Riley.

Or I could follow Jude.

“Let’s go,” Zo said again. I let her make the choice for me. She took off after Jude, and I followed, leaving the car and any thoughts of refuge behind.

The house looked worse inside than it did out. There was no furniture, no light, no visible features but a gaping, splintered hole in the center of the room where the floor had given way. Sari crouched in the far corner, tucked into a blanket, watching the door as if she’d been waiting for us.

She flew to her feet. “I didn’t do anything.” As she spoke, she backed away, pressing herself against the wall. Jude advanced slowly.

“What did you do to him?”

“You deaf?
Nothing.
”

“Then why run?” His eyes lit on the pile of clothes and electronics she’d snatched from Riley’s place.

Sari stepped between us and the treasure hoard. “So?” she spit out. “They don’t need it. They’ve got plenty of credit; let them buy another set of speakers.”

“Are we supposed to buy another Riley?” I asked.

She didn’t bother to look at me. “What’s the bitch talking about?”

“Riley’s dead.” Jude flattened her to the wall, one hand pinning her wrist, the other at her throat. Zo sucked in a sharp breath, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t, it didn’t matter. I felt like I was watching them on-screen, with no choice but to wait patiently and see how things turned out.

Sari shook her head. “Fuck you.”

“You killed him.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

“You’re machines,” Sari said. “You can’t die.”

He grimaced. “Surprised me, too.”

She hit at him with her free arm, but Jude grabbed it. Her wrists were narrow, and he was able to hold them both with one hand. His fingers tightened around her throat.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Good.”

Zo leaned into me. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

I ignored her, like Jude ignored Sari’s struggling. “What did
you do to him?” he said, his voice deadened. He was staring past her, into the wall. Like he was the machine she expected, mindlessly pursuing his mission directive.

“Nothing!” Sari shouted. “She said nothing would happen to him.”

Jude threw her to the ground. “Who said!”

“Stop it!” Zo screamed.

Jude knelt over Sari, pinning her down. “Shut her up or get her out of here,” he said quietly. “Or I will.”

I still couldn’t move. Zo shut herself up.

Sari wasn’t fighting anymore. She lay on the ground, eyes closed. “He’s not really dead, is he?”

“Tell me who.”

“Just some lady. She gave me something to stick in that thing he used for backing up.”

“She walked up to you one day and
gave
it to you?”

“She paid me, okay?” Sari snarled. “She had credit and I needed credit, and that’s it. She told me it wouldn’t hurt him. She said you couldn’t get hurt.”

“She lied.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know?”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Tell me
something
!” Jude drove a fist into the rotting floorboards.

“I think she was one of those Brotherhood freaks, okay? She had one of those robes and everything.”

Jude slapped her.

“What the hell—?”

“You killed him!” Jude roared.

Absolute control demands absolute release; that’s what Jude had always preached. There were no middle grounds, no compromises, only two opposing states, and a lightning trigger between one and the other. He was always in control, every action deliberate, every decision considered. For Jude, even letting go was a willful choice, a verdict delivered after evaluation of all the options; even that was purposeful.

This wasn’t.

Zo’s nails dug into my arm. It meant
do something
, it meant
stop him
, it meant
fix this
. Or I could stand there and watch Sari die.

“Please,” Sari whimpered.

There was no one to stop him, no one to punish him. It was the city: no rules, no consequences. And if there were no consequences, it was almost like it hadn’t happened.

No one would miss her,
I thought.

Riley had been her only ally—and she’d erased him.

I’m a machine,
I thought, as Jude raised a fist, this one not aimed at the innocent floorboards, but at her face, her soft, pliable, breakable org face, the one that was so good at lying and pretending to be someone else, someone good.
I have no soul; that’s what they say.

All I had to do was not act. No one would ever know, except the three of us.

“Stop.” I didn’t know I was going to say it until the word was out of my mouth. “Jude, don’t.”

He didn’t let her go. But his fist dropped to his side.

“She killed him,” Jude said.

I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to send me flying across the room. But he didn’t move. Neither did Sari, still prone beneath him, waiting for me to decide her fate. I hoped she didn’t think I was doing this for her.

I hoped she knew I wanted her to die.

“Don’t do this,” I said.

“I have to.”

“This isn’t you.”

At that he did shrug me off, weakly, and it was unconvincing enough that I tried again, but he grabbed my arm, squeezing tight. “You don’t know everything about me.”

“He did.”

“Shut up.”

“Riley told me, that night before the temple, that you couldn’t do … this.”

“He wouldn’t have said that.”

“He did.”

“I can do this,” Jude said. “For him.”

“This wouldn’t be for him.”

I felt dirty, invoking him like that. Dirty or not, it worked.

Jude stood up.

Sari didn’t wait around for him to change his mind. She streaked past us like a feral cat, disappearing into the shadows. Long, silent seconds passed.

Jude’s shoulders slouched. His head lolled on his neck. His arms hung limp at his sides. For the first time it was easy to picture him as he’d been before the download: slumped in a chair, body defeated. Except that in the one pic I’d seen from that time, his eyes had still been alive—something in him had been fighting,
strong
. Unbowed by its prison of atrophied muscles and sagging flesh. Now, when I tipped his head up and forced him to see me, those eyes were dead.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.

I didn’t say anything.

“I hate you,” he said.

I put my arms around him, and he let me, and, dry-eyed and heartless and mechanical, we held each other up.

So what do you do?

What do you do when there’s nothing to do next? When it’s over, when whatever rage and panic drove you from one moment to the next disappears, and there’s no more
must do this
,
must go there
,
must stop him
,
must save him
? When you can’t let the day end, because today was the last day you saw him, the last day you heard his voice, the last day he knew?
Today
, when the sun came up, when you opened your eyes, he was still in the world; today is still a world he knew, and so is still a world you
understand.
Today
he’s still an
is
, his loss something still happening, an unfolding event, a sentence with a question mark; today there’s still a
what happens next
.

What do you do when today ends and you know tomorrow will open on a world in which he’s dead? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until he’s a thing that once happened, a thing you used to know.

People use words like “unthinkable.” But what do you do when the unthinkable happens, and refusing to believe it won’t bring him back?

How can anything seem unthinkable anymore, when you’re a machine, a living impossibility, a stack of memories in a head-shaped box, when you, the real you, died almost two years ago, just like he did?

How could you be stupid enough to forget that the unthinkable happens all the time?

Happens to you.

Which is why you should know exactly what to do: what you always do, what you have to do. Nothing. Because reality doesn’t need your permission to exist; tomorrow doesn’t need your approval to dawn. You go home, to a place that was never your home, with a sister who by her own choice is no longer your sister and a brother whose shared grief makes him family in a way that shared skin, shared circuitry, shared manufacturer never could. You go home and you lie in a bed that used to be his and you think about uploading the way he uploaded, following his lead, wherever it takes you. You think
that if you really loved him, you wouldn’t hesitate; you would want his infection burning through your artificial veins.

You would, but you don’t, and so you close your eyes and are grateful that you don’t have to try to sleep with memories of his face burning the insides of your lids, that you don’t have to bury your face in a pillow so the others don’t hear you sob and scream, that your hands are still and unshaken. You’re grateful, for once, that your body can’t feel, that the truth stays lodged in your mind, where it can’t hurt, that you can close your eyes and shift your consciousness in that familiar, deeply inhuman way, flicking an internal switch. It’s not like falling asleep, fading away. It’s like one moment you’re awake and in agony and wondering how long it will be before you forget the sound of his voice.

And the next moment—

You’re gone.

When I woke up the next morning, Riley was still dead.

Zo was curled up next to me in bed, her eyes slitted and fixed on Jude. I suspected he had been up all night. Maybe watching me, to make sure I followed through on my promise not to upload a backup, just in case Riley’s wasn’t an isolated case. Or he just hadn’t been able to face the end of the day. Riley’s last day.

He sat with his back to the wall, eyes open but darting sightlessly back and forth. It was the telltale flicker of his long lashes that gave it away: He was linked into the network, staring at us
but seeing his zone or a vidlife or, for all I knew, the president’s latest sex vid. Anything to keep the world away.

I poked Zo. “I know you’re awake.”