Wired (Skinned, Book 3) (28 page)

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here were the ones who didn't care. Someone was trying to kill them; BioMax was trying to save them. It was simple as that.

At this point, trusting anyone was starting to seem impossibly stupid--and now I understood what Jude must have thought of me all those months, watching me on the vids, preaching trust and goodwill as I held hands with the enemy.

Once it had been made clear that the outside world--and its rules and freedoms--no longer existed for us, the intake process could begin in earnest.

They took our clothes.

They made us stand there together, twelve strangers, and strip ourselves bare while they watched. We tried to turn our backs to one another, tried to cover up with hands and crossed legs and awkward contortions, keeping our heads down, our eyes slitted, as the BioMax personnel circulated, searching us for "contraband," for anything that might challenge the safety of the safe haven: knives or ViMs or dreamers or bombs. I closed my eyes as the woman's meaty hands swept my body, and played the game I'd played too many times before, the familiar mantra:
This is just the body; this is not
me.
She can't touch me.

When her hands fell away and I opened my eyes again, I met Jude's gaze. Alone in the group he stood tall, head up, eyes open. When he saw me watching, his lips moved, and I imagined I could understand the words they formed, a message to me:

For Riley.

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* * *

They gave us clothes, freshly laundered, branded with the BioMax insignia. Beige and orange, nothing I would ever have voluntarily worn in public, but decisions like that were no longer voluntary. We'd been in BioMax's possession for less than a day, and it was already starting to feel inevitable, the outside world real enough but irrelevant. Every detail of Safe Haven was designed to remind us that this was our life now.
Temporary
, they said, again and again, to the outside world. But in here they hadn't said it once.

I knew we'd made the right decision, not bringing any kind of weapon--there was no way we would have made it through the intake process without getting it confiscated, and probably getting ourselves thrown out along with it. But I would have felt a lot better knowing that when I needed it, I had a way to fight back.

They gave us rooms, narrow steel cylinders with bare walls, four beds, and no storage space, which hardly mattered, since our belongings had been confiscated along with our clothes. (Say it with me now:
For our own protection.
) No light switches, because the lights were all programmed around the corp-town's three-shift working schedule. They would go on when it was deemed time for the workers in this wing to wake up, off again when the curfew hit and they obediently went to sleep. Alarms and strobes marked the beginning and end of each working shift. Small favors: At least they weren't putting us to work.

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They weren't requiring anything from us but our obedience--it was quickly becoming clear that there was nothing here to fill the day beyond following orders. It gave us plenty of time to weigh our options and argue about what to do next... . Which is why I was lying on the narrow bunk-bed cot, my face inches from the ceiling, trying to catch my reflection in the dull steel, when Quinn Sharpe--exactly as she had when I'd first seen her--poked her head into the doorway and woke us all the hell up.

"This is ... unexpected," she said, giving each of us a slow, careful once-over, her gaze finally settling on Ani.

I sat up. "We're here to--"

Quinn tapped her lips, then her ear, then pointed to the ceiling. Unmistakable code for
Shut up, they're listening.
And of course they would have cameras in the walls. Corp-town life was predicated on absolute compliance--one slip and, within minutes, you could find yourself shipped out to a city. But all-pervasive fear worked only if you had some way of enforcing 24/7 obedience.

Jude knitted his eyebrows together, frowning. "No VM either," he mumbled. "They must be jamming that, too." BioMax wasn't supposed to know about the Voice Mind Integrator that offered Jude and his hand-selected allies a means of silent communication--but apparently they'd figured it out.

"Unexpected or not," Quinn said, "I'm glad to see you."

"Feeling's not mutual," Ani mumbled.

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Ignoring her, Quinn came into the room and flung herself down on the empty bed. "I could use some new roommates anyway. Mine snore."

"Somehow I doubt that," I said.

Quinn rolled her eyes. "It's a metaphor."

Jude glanced at the ceiling. "What can you tell us?"

"First you," Quinn said. "What am I missing out there in the real world?"

Jude gave her the rundown of everything that had been happening in the days since she'd turned herself in to BioMax: the useless attempts to eliminate the virus, the increase in antiskinner attacks. And the whole time, as he struggled for coded ways to paint her a picture of what we were doing here, as if it weren't obvious, she watched Ani. I wondered whether she was using Jude's monologue as a stalling device, to cover for her inch-by-inch examination of her former no-strings-attached whatever, in hopes that the whatever would finally turn to face her, and maybe even forgive and forget.

That hope must have died, because eventually she dropped the act. "You're not even going to talk to me?" she asked Ani, crossing the room to sit down beside her. Ani immediately got up and walked to the opposite wall.

"Very mature." Quinn stood again too.

Ani looked wary, as if expecting Quinn to chase her from one side to the other. Wary but determined, like she was prepared to run.

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"So this is it?" Quinn said. "Silent treatment? It's going to get a little awkward around here if we're going to be roommates."

"We're not."

"She speaks!"

Watching them parry, I was again reminded of the day I'd met Quinn and how impossibly difficult it was to get her to shut up and go away when she'd decided you would be her newest plaything. Quinn was a girl accustomed to getting what she wanted.

"Go away, Quinn," said Ani.

"You forgive him, but not me?" Quinn said.

"Who said I forgive anyone?"

"Oh, grow up!" Quinn said. "So I did you, and then I did him. So fucking what?"

"
So what
is you promised you wouldn't."

Quinn laughed. "You're right. I broke my promise. And you got your friends kidnapped and tortured. So I can see why you still feel you have the moral high ground."

It was the thing none of us had dared say. Not Jude, because he was too busy trying to pretend it had never happened. Not me, because I'd spent enough time being a crappy friend.

Which must be why I lied. "Ani, she didn't mean it," I told her. "None of us think--"

"It's fine." Ani dipped her head. The fluorescent lights gave her indigo hair a midnight glow. "She can stay."

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I glared at Quinn. "You didn't have to say that."

"It was true," Quinn said.

"So what?"

"Enough," Jude said quietly. "We're wasting time with this crap."

"I said she can stay!" Ani said. "What else do you want from me?"

"Nothing," Jude assured her.

Quinn smiled then, in what could have been triumph or relief, and whatever hardness had been in her voice drained away. "Speak for yourself."

Quinn gave us the grand tour. There wasn't much to see. Corridors of bedrooms, all identical to our own. The central atrium with its sloping steel beams, which looked more like a factory than a "common space for relaxation and socialization." I hadn't been around this many mechs since the time I'd spent at Quinn's estate, but those days had been infused with a determined, sometimes manic joy--not happiness, per se, because certainly there wasn't an overabundance of that to go around. But there was a desperation to confirm we'd made the right choices, and to prove to ourselves that we were living the best of all possible lives. Hence the dancing and the screwing, the cliff-jumping, the sky-diving, the wild parties and the zoned-out dreamers and the couples who lost themselves in the wilds of each other. Call it mandatory fun.

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The one mandatory element this resettlement zone was lacking.

Another difference between this and the estate: the presence of orgs, uniformed "volunteers" and "helpers" who wandered through our ranks with glazed expressions and recognizable bulges beneath their jackets: the pulse gun, which discharged an electric pulse that could cut down a mech at twenty feet, frying his neural matrix for at least an hour--and that was assuming the charge was set on low and nothing went wrong. Of course they weren't there to shoot us. They were just there to watch. For our own protection.

According to Quinn, speaking in a low voice and veiled terms, the footage that BioMax had been airing to the viewing public had all been shot in the first few days, a suitable advertisement for idyllic corp living. Once the cameras shut down, so did the dome, locking the mechs indoors. Then came the confiscations of clothing, ViMs, all other belongings, the jammed network and VM signals. Communications to the outside were monitored, so if you wanted to tell your parents what a wonderful time you were having at Camp BioMax, you were free to do so. Anything with more detail or more accuracy was promptly censored. For our own protection.

It obviously wouldn't be necessary to persuade the mechs that they needed to leave. So the real issue was persuading BioMax to let us.

"I get why you came back," Quinn told Jude. "And I'm

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not surprised your little lapdog followed along--no offense," she added quickly, before I could bare my teeth. "But I'd have thought you would be smarter," she said to Ani.

"I thought the same about you," Ani said. "Guess I was wrong."

"So you've come to rescue the fair maiden from the tower?"

There was a pause. "And what if I did?"

Another pause, longer this time, like that wasn't the answer Quinn had been expecting. "Then I hope you really like towers. Because you're going to be stuck in this one for a long time."

None of us was ready to admit she was right. There was no denying the fact that we were stuck behind locked doors, without any contact to the world beyond the steel dome, but it's not like we'd expected to walk into paradise. Much less that we'd be able to just walk right out again. We would find a way.

BioMax staff were positioned at strategic points throughout the atrium, but they periodically disappeared through locked doors into some hidden portion of the dome to which we were denied access. It seemed likely that was where we would find our answers, and maybe even unrestricted access to the network that would let us document the conditions here. For whatever reason, BioMax clearly cared about persuading the world that they had our best interests at heart--which indicated that our best interests lay in revealing their lies. We

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could have used someone on the inside. But if Auden had been true to his word and snuck someone onto the staff, someone inclined to help us, he wasn't making his presence known. We were on our own, and breaking an electronic lock and slipping into a forbidden zone without getting noticed by the cameras or the orgs was going to take more than luck and desperation. When the lights went out at the end of that first day, we'd yet to muster anything.

I'd expected that our best exploring would be done that night, but at ten on the dot we were herded into our dark rooms. The door shut behind us, locking with a loud click.

"Sweet dreams, my heroes," Quinn said. "Can't wait to see who you save tomorrow."

She could pretend she didn't care, but I could tell that even Quinn was allowing herself a little hope. I wasn't the only one who felt motion was better than standing still, even if you weren't sure what you were hurtling toward. I spent the night awake, hoping that the darkness and the quiet would facilitate some kind of brilliant insight about how to sneak into the restricted zone. But my mind strayed--away from what I could do, toward what I should have done. If I'd broadcast what I knew to the network sooner, if I'd found a way to out BioMax or stop the Brotherhood before any of this had ever happened, if all those months ago I'd let Auden kiss me and kissed him back, if I'd never gone to the waterfall and he'd never been hurt.

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If Zo had been the one to get in the car that day.

It was getting easier and easier to dream without going to sleep.

Finally the lights flared; the alarm screamed; morning came. And with it a cardboard box of fresh uniforms. How thoughtful of them. I kicked it across the room, and cheap synthetic jumpsuits went flying--along with something else. Something that shouldn't have been there at all. It clattered to the floor, blade gleaming under the fluorescents. Without hesitation, Jude snatched it off the ground and palmed it.

Ani and Quinn watched the door--if the cameras had caught our unexpected windfall and guards came blasting through, at least we'd be ready. Jude perched on his bed, slipped his hand beneath the pillow, and kept it there, drawing strength, I suspected, from the cool blade.

I knelt by the box. There was something taped into one corner: a slim plastic card. I tore off the tape and pulled it out, suspicions confirmed--it was a pass card, an exact replica of the ones the guards flashed as they slipped through their locked steel doors and into the forbidden zone.

I hid it as swiftly as Jude had hidden the knife, tracing my fingers across the smooth plastic.

Auden had come through for us after all.

I drew back my lips, feeling a sudden return to the days when every emotional response was a serious of careful