Wired (Skinned, Book 3) (30 page)

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* * *

Ani and Quinn helped spread the word to the rest of the mechs. It was a whisper campaign, notes scrawled in dust and wiped away, murmured in willing ears, even razored into flesh as our blade made the rounds. Word spread that it was time to get out, that staying here was death, that there would soon be a signal.

But there'd be no signal and no escape unless Zo came back with what we needed--and all the plotting and whispering and strategizing in the world wasn't enough to distract me from what would happen if she never came back at all. What had I done, sending her into the city? I could picture her stepping over steaming piles of garbage, pressing herself against peeling building fronts as packs of rats (both the rodent and human variety) skulked past. I could even picture her following Jude's directions to the towers themselves, decaying strongholds protected by legless and armless children who thought they were sentries, who hoisted machine guns nearly as tall as they were.

That's where my picture faded. Because I couldn't picture her getting in, and I couldn't picture her getting out again, and I didn't care how high the stakes were or how many of us would die if this didn't work--none of it was worth what I'd done, letting her believe she could do it on her own.

But two days later it appeared, buried beneath our morning

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supply of linens, two slim aerosol tubes of Amperin, and a note bearing only two words:

Your turn.

She was safe.

It was a matter of waiting. Zo still had the hard part--disabling the ventilation system security. She'd give us the signal if and when it worked. When it came, Jude and I would head for the vents while Ani and Quinn coordinated the rest of the mechs, alerting them that the time had come. She'd warned us it might take five minutes to get a clear shot at the computer system, or it might take hours. There was no way of knowing. And so we waited, keeping one eye on the giant screens overhanging the atrium. They broadcast messages to keep us calm, sanitized news of the outside world and assurances of how quickly our prison term would end. Soon, hopefully, they would go dark, just for a blink-and-you'd-miss-it moment, and that would be Zo. It felt strange to be sitting on a bench side by side with Jude, as if we were just two friends out for a day in the steel-encased park.
We're allies,
I thought.
Not friends. There's a difference.
Though it was becoming increasingly unclear exactly what it was.

"Can you believe your sister?" Jude said, lounging back on the bench, legs stretched wide.

"What?"

"Everything." Jude shook his head. "She's impressive."

"For an org, you mean."

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"For anyone."

I'd never known Jude to admit respect for an org, much less this kind of naked admiration. "Don't."

"What?" Voice oh so innocent.

"You know what."

"No ... apparently only one of us is a mind reader."

"Forget about Zo."

"Ah, sibling rivalry. Ugly, Lia. Doesn't become you."

"You're hilarious."

"And you're a joke. You really think I'd go after your sister?"

"It wasn't a suggestion."

He raised an eyebrow. "Jealous?"

"What? No!"

The self-satisfied smile appeared. "Jealous."

"You're disgusting."

"There's no shame in it--who wouldn't want this?" His hands did a little
eat your heart out
flourish over his body.

I grabbed his hand and bent it backward, several inches farther than it was supposed to go.

"Hey!"

"Ready to shut up?"

"Ready to let go?" He yanked his hand away before I could. Still stronger; always stronger. "I was teasing, psycho."

"I'm not joking about this, asshole."

"You really want to do this? Now?"

"Got nothing better to do."

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"Fine. No Zo. I swear."

"Whatever that's worth."

"Psycho
and
paranoid. Great."

"I'm not saying it again--"

"Listen to me," he said, suddenly serious. "I will never pursue your sister. With or without your permission. You know that. You know why."

"Actually, I don't." But I was starting to get a very bad feeling. There was only one reason he would stay away from someone temptingly off-limits, just because I'd asked him to, just because she was my sister. Either he was lying, or ...

"This is not going to happen," I said, suddenly aware of every inch of my body and its too-close proximity to his. "You. Me.
Never.
"

"I didn't say anything."

"Riley was your best friend!"

"You think I don't know that?"

"Never," I said again. "Even if I wanted it to. Which, to be clear, I don't."

"You think
I
do?" Jude said quietly. "It's the last thing I want."

"I hate you," I said, and in that moment, with a wave of revulsion and rage stronger than I'd felt for anyone, even Savona, it was true.

"You are so angry," he said.

"Your observational skills never cease to amaze me."

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"No," he said. "I mean you're
always
angry."

"Of course I am."

"So just tell me
why
."

I couldn't believe it. All this time I'd thought we understood each other. That there was one common bond tying us together, one empty space that both of us were trying desperately to fill, one white-hot fire of purpose and revenge driving us both. And now he was
confused
? "Why aren't
you
angry?" I said, only barely resisting the urge to shout. "He's dead! And no matter what we do, even if we fix everything and save everyone, he's still
dead
. And you just ..."

"What?"

"You accept it." I wanted to slap him.

Jude flinched like I had. The bright golden point flickered at the center of his pupils. "I'm angry."

"Not like I am."

"You want me to throw a tantrum? Will that convince you?"

"Joke about it," I said. "Pretend it's nothing. Whatever."

"Lia, look at me."

"I am looking at you." But I wasn't. I was looking at his forehead, and the silver lock of hair that kept slipping over his eyes. I was looking at his hands, slim fingers resting on the bench, unclenched and untroubled. I was looking at the door just over his shoulder, wondering what would happen when we broke through, if changing what came next would matter even

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though it couldn't change what had come before. I was looking anywhere but at him.

"I didn't get to say anything to him, before it happened." It was the first time I'd said it out loud. "I didn't get to tell him ... He thought I didn't care." I could still see myself in that parking lot, would always see myself, frozen, looking up at Riley, cartoon shock painted across my face. Looking at him and judging him and saying nothing. Letting him walk away.

"You're wrong."

"I should have gone with him," I said.

"Great idea," Jude said. "You could have both uploaded, and then you'd both be dead. Is that what you want?"

"It's what I should want."

Now it was Jude who looked away.

"Why did you?" he asked finally. "Let him leave."

"What do you mean?" But I knew what he meant.

"That day. If you wanted to stop him, why didn't you?"

He asked like he already knew the answer. That made one of us. But before I could come up with something, two BioMax goons appeared before us, jackets strategically swept back to reveal their holsters, refuting an argument we hadn't thought to make.

"I'm going to need you to come with us," one of them said.

"Kind of busy here," Jude said, looping an arm around me. His other hand crawled across my knee and up my thigh. "If you know what I mean ..."

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I forced a smile. "What he said," I told the guard. "Maybe you could come back later?"

"Now," said the talky one, while the other one rested a hand on the butt of his pulse gun.

Jude and I exchanged a look: Whatever this was, we were going to have to postpone the strike. Ani and Quinn had their eyes on us from across the room, and hopefully Zo was catching this on one of the monitors and would figure out she needed to wait. Assuming, of course, they hadn't caught Zo, too.

We followed the guards along the same path we'd mapped out for ourselves--through the locked door, down the corridor, coming nearer and nearer to the central vents.

I wondered if there was some way we could turn this to our advantage. I had the toxin on me--if we could distract the guards for a minute and slip away ... "Maybe if you told us exactly what the problem is?"

"No problem," the chatty one said. "Not anymore." He grabbed me, snatched my thrashing arms behind my back, looping them together with plastic twine. I screamed, and he shoved something thick and scratchy into my open mouth, then pulled a bag over my head. I was blind, mute, and bound, all in under ten seconds. And from the sound of things--an angry
oof
from the other guard, a scuffle, a muffled scream, then silence--things had gone about the same for Jude.

Meaty hands folded my knees to my chest, and I felt myself lifted off the ground for a moment, then gently placed

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back down.
Into
something, it turned out, because soon the ground lifted beneath me, like I'd been loaded into a giant sling, and, cradled in the darkness, we began to move. Going somewhere--wherever this guy wanted me to go.

So much for saving the day. But I wasn't thinking about the mechs we were leaving behind--I was thinking about myself.

I was afraid.

He can't hurt me,
I told myself, the familiar mantra kicking in, except now it was a lie, because now this body was all I had, and if he broke it, that was it. No more second chances. No more extra lives.

No more Lia.

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FOR YOUR PROTECTION

You don't try to understand the Grim Reaper; you don't forgive.

S
o this is how garbage feels,
I thought,
right before it gets dumped.

Scared. Hopeless. And very alone.

Would they leave me in a landfill? Toss me in a lake? Bury me so deep no one would hear me scream, which I would only be able to do once decades passed and the gag in my mouth decayed to dust? Or maybe they'd decided to get rid of me for good. A trash compactor would do the trick, though why grind up the body when it would be so easy to wipe the mind?

I wondered what it would be like to not exist. Maybe some part of me still would, deep in the bowels of BioMax, where for all I knew they'd lobotomized my stored neural patterns the way they had so many others, and some other, obediently simple-minded version of me was piloting war planes and enjoying target practice on guerrilla warriors.

This is what human garbage thinks about, on its way to

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the dump. Until the bag drops to the ground and hands reach in and pull it out.

Then all thinking stops, replaced with blind, animal panic.

Even when the garbage is a machine. Simulated emotion seems real enough when that emotion is stark terror, when every inch of you is singing out an alarm of
I don't want to die
.

They pulled out the gag, and the scream began again as if it had never stopped.

"Enough drama, we get it," a deeply familiar but somehow alien voice informed me. Alien because I'd never heard it sound like this: authoritative, impatient, absolutely certain.

Familiar because it belonged to my mother.

I was in a van, windowless and in motion, filled with people I would have preferred never to see again. Jude and I sat in the back, sandwiched between the two BioMax guards, who, as it turned out, didn't work for BioMax at all. They worked for my mother. Who sat in the front seat, shoulder to shoulder with call-me-Ben.

At least it looked like my mother, but my mother wasn't the type to hire armed guards, or to kidnap her own daughter, or to bark commands like "Shut him up"--when Jude's gag came out and then promptly went back in again until he'd promised to behave--and "Stop acting like a child." She'd always been the one who acted like a child, so easily persuaded by my father that whatever she'd done was wrong.

My mother didn't have steel in her voice.