Wired (Skinned, Book 3) (32 page)

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ones that stored brains ready for stripping and dehumanizing, for loading into BioMax's "intelligent machines." And one of the file names was circled, a meaningless string of numbers. I knew, from our BioMax break-in, that the lobotomized brain patterns were stored by ID number rather than name. This one was 248713, and there was a second file marked 248713b. But it was the original that was circled in red, with Ben's handwriting beneath it:
intact.

I handed the page to Jude. After all this time, it still seemed strange that my hands weren't trembling. Because my brain felt like it was vibrating inside my head, bouncing off the inner walls of my skull in sync with the seconds ticking by, time running out. "Tell me if that means what I think it means," I said, and watched him run his eyes down the page, tried to mark the exact moment he saw what I'd seen, and understood.

He saw it. Then he said what I couldn't, because I was afraid to believe it.

"Ben gave you this?" he asked.

"He said ... he said, 'This is where you'll find him.'"

"Riley," Jude said. "They stored a copy of him."

The paper floated to the floor, and Jude looked down at his hands, as if his fingers had acted on their own accord. He didn't move to pick it up; he didn't move at all. "He's still out there, somewhere."

I nodded.

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Somewhere a circuit board, an electronic file, bits and bytes, somewhere ones and zeros, flipped in a precise order, the billions and trillions of quantum qubits that made a life, trapped inside a computer, trapped underground, trapped.

But alive.

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RIGHTEOUS It wasn't the most promising of revolutionary cabals.

We couldn't save him.

Not yet.

Riley was the one variable in all of this that wasn't teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Safe--or relatively so, in a database, free-floating in the ether--Riley could wait. I didn't want to let myself believe it was true, because if Ben was lying, if I let myself hope and then had to lose him all over again ...

But once the idea was in my head, I couldn't get rid of it. The idea of Riley being gone forever had been the impossibility; this last-minute reprieve felt inevitable. His death had never been real.

This had to be.

"You think he's aware?" I said. "His mind's all there. How do we know he's not trapped in there, afraid and alone? How do we know it doesn't hurt?"

"It doesn't," Jude said. "He's not."

"But how do we
know
?"

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"We have to believe it," Jude said, sounding like a deranged Faither. "Because if we don't ..."

Then we wouldn't be able to leave him there.
For just a little longer,
I promised him.
Until we fix everything.

Like there was much chance of that happening while we were locked up in my bedroom behind bulletproof windows and network jammers. If my mother didn't want us out, we weren't getting out. My father had spent years turning the Kahn house into a fortress. I'd always taken his word for our security and its necessity, never worrying that the barbarians would break down the gates, never chafing against his boundaries from my side of the wall. I'd been the good girl, and good girls didn't know how to break out of bedroom prisons.

They left that to bratty little sisters.

I pounded my fists against the door, again and again, harder each time, knowing that my mother would lose any game of wills she tried to play, because she was only human, and I was not. I could bang on that door for the rest of eternity.

It took less than an hour to wear her down.

"I'm not letting you out," she said, from the other side of the steel door. "This is for your own good."

"I know. I was just thinking, maybe if you let me get in touch with--"

"We don't need any more of your helpful little mech friends

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swarming around here," she said. "I think one is enough, don't you?"

Jude, who was trying to break through the window despite my assurances it was virtually impossible, stopped his useless tinkering long enough to give the door a dirty look.

"It's not that." I rested my weight against the door, letting my forehead kiss the cool steel. When was the last time my mother had come up to my bedroom? When I was seven? Eight, maybe? However old I was before I'd gotten "too old" for bedtime stories and tucking in.
Stop babying her,
my father had said, and then I'd jumped on board with
I'm no baby,
and my mother had blushed, and that had been it: no more night-lights, no more stories, no more sweet-dreams kisses. My bedroom became my property, and I got my bedtime stories off the network; my mother retreated to the estate's other wing. "I'm thinking about Zo."

"What about her?" came the slow, careful response from the other side of the door.

"I'm worried about her."

"Have you talked to her?" she asked.

"No. Have you?"

No answer.

"If she knew that I was here, maybe she would ... you know."

"
Forgive
me?" My mother's voice twisted on the word. Proving again, she was no fool.

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"She doesn't have to forgive you," I said. "She just has to come home. And maybe she will, if she thinks I was willing to."

"Why would you want her to think that?"

Good question. "It's not safe for her out there on her own," I said.

"What are you doing?" Jude whispered. I waved him off. My house, my mother, my sister: my game.

"But it's safe for
you
?" my mother said.

"I'm different," I said. "Zo's still a kid. And besides, I'm stuck here, right? So maybe something good can come out of it. Maybe if Zo knew the truth about you, if you gave her a chance to know what was actually going on--"

"I stayed with your father," she said. "That's what's going on. I let him do whatever he wanted. No one's wrong about that. It's just the truth."

"It's not the whole truth. She deserves to know that."

There was a long pause. "I'll think about it," she said.

I wasn't ready for her to leave. "Mom."

She didn't say anything. For all I knew, she was already gone. I didn't know her anymore; I didn't know what to expect.

"Thanks," I said finally. I meant it to help the lie.

Or maybe I just meant it.

There was another eternal pause. Then, "For what?"

"For trying."

* * *

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It was past midnight when the door eased open. "Shut up and let's go," Zo hissed, before Jude could open his big mouth and wake the house.

She brandished a slim silver cylinder that I assumed she'd used to pick the electronic lock. "You are
so
lucky you're not an only child," she whispered, as we crept out of the bedroom and down the hall toward Zo's old room.

"And
you
are so lucky that Mom still knocks herself out on chillers every night, or your big, clomping feet would get us both thrown back into Kahn jail."

She grinned. "You're welcome."

Zo's bedroom was better equipped for a breakout than mine. "Nothing I haven't done before," she whispered, grabbing a compressible wire ladder from under her mattress and hooking it to the window frame. She swept out a gallant hand. "Ladies first."

It had been a strange year. But there'd been nothing stranger than scaling the side of my own house, dim moonglow lighting the ladder rungs as I climbed, hand over hand, three stories down. Feeling like a criminal, stealing into the night with the Kahn family valuables, and our father might have pointed out that was exactly what I was doing--
my most valuable possessions,
he called us when we were little, and I'd taken it as a compliment, proud to be valued more highly than the new car. His to protect; his to destroy. Mine to creep through the darkness, following Zo as she darted

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in and out of the motion detectors' sweep, avoided the cameras, deactivated the electronic gate, led us to freedom--freedom in the form of a beat-up two-door Chevrelle, Auden at the wheel.

"How'd you know?" Jude asked, as we piled into the car.

"Got the call from Mommy dearest." Zo snorted. "Like I was supposed to believe Lia came crawling home, and wanted me for one big family reunion? Big sis is stupid--"

I jabbed her in the side.

"--but not that stupid," Zo allowed, grinning at me. "And clearly, you're lucky to have such a proficient juvenile delinquent for a sister."

"Yeah. I guess I am."

We holed up in Riley's place, memories of him everywhere, looking for a way to fix what we'd all helped to break. Zo wanted to sneak back into the corp-town, bust everyone out. Auden wanted to go public, turn himself in to the authorities--turn himself into a martyr, if it would help, or a devil, if that would help more. And Jude was characteristically silent about what he actually wanted, uncharacteristically silent about everything.

But Zo couldn't risk showing her face at the corp-town again, not with our mother on a rampage and Zo's presumably suspicious disappearance timed with our own. Quinn and Ani had their own share of the toxin. We had to trust

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them to figure out something to do with it. Auden's plan was just as craptastic, relying as it did on mythical
authorities
of an objective nature unaffiliated with any of the corps, unswayed by power and credit we didn't have. Given that all of the secops were owned by one corp or another, that BioMax was in business with all of them, and that the Justice Department--the only arm of the government not officially licensed out to private enterprise--was also the one that hated mechs the most, we had a better chance of tracking down a unicorn. Turn himself in and he'd promptly disappear, only to resurface once BioMax and the Brotherhood had done whatever they planned to do and were ready to parade their scapegoat for public shaming.

We'd dropped what we knew and what we suspected about Safe Haven onto the network, posting it to every zone we could--knowing that most would get purged by BioMax and the rest would likely be lost in the noise, seeming no more or less credible than any of the other rumors flying about the skinner plague, as it was being called. Some probably even believed us--not just the crackpots who matched our claims with conspiracies of their own, but the occasional sane, sober observers who were inclined to suspect the corps were up to no good. Some wished us well, some even raised a little online ruckus, but none was in a position to help.

We were on our own. Two machines. Two orgs. Four teenagers with no power and no plan. At least Auden was on the

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run from nefarious cult leaders and corporate overlords. As opposed to me, hiding out from my mother.

It wasn't the most promising of revolutionary cabals.

"We can't do anything about what's going to happen inside Safe Haven," I said. "But we can stop phase three. Or at least we can try."

"We can't stop it if we don't even know what it is," Jude said, sounding defeated.

"Whatever it is, it's happening on that server ship on Sunday," I said.

"You
think
," Jude said.

Zo and Auden agreed that it was the only thing that made sense with what little else we knew. The once-a-month window had given it away. "If we can get on board with Ben's team, we can figure out what they're doing," I said. "We can stop them."

"Great," Jude said sourly. "So all we need to do--assuming your
blind hunch
is right--is sneak on board a high-security facility floating in a secret location in the middle of the Atlantic and stop a team of determined and presumably armed genocidal maniacs from completing their nebulous mission. Brilliant plan."

"Glad you agree."

Jude was, of course, right. The plan--or, rather, ambiguous idea completely lacking in practical execution--wasn't brilliant so much as insane. Especially the part that involved

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us getting ourselves onto a server ship without anyone noticing and, more to the point, without getting tossed overboard. The network servers were overseen by a private consortium of tech and security corps, its operations designed for maximal transparency (for those whose job it was to watch) and maximal secrecy (for the rest of us unwashed masses). They floated on massive ocean freighters, each the length of several football fields, shadowing the coastline, their endless rows of whirring machines processing the data of millions while armed guards--or armed machines, or, for all any of us knew, armed armadillos, or some deadly combination of all three--patrolled the corridors, sworn to protect the network with their lives. Ships set out once a month with reinforcements, repairs, representatives from any corp who needed to address problems with their dedicated servers--ships that plotted a top-secret course radioed to the captain on a special frequency only once the boat had X-rayed and analyzed every single thing, animate or in-, to come aboard.

The server farms were governed by no law but the law of expediency. Its servants followed a prime directive, to the exclusion of all else: Protect the servers. Protect the mindless hordes who trusted every piece of their lives to the security of the floating machines. Trusted not just their zones, their relationships and memories, but their jobs, their life savings, their lives--whenever they trusted their automated cars or their high-speed elevators or the biofilters that kept their air