“I didn’t know that.” I sat down across from him.
I’d come to accuse him. And it seemed fitting here, at the greenhouse, where Jude had once explained to me that when it came to hurting people, motives didn’t matter.
He looked past me, eyes flitting from plant to flower, settling on the windows. Cyclones of dust whirled in the pale beams of morning light. “This was her favorite part about being a mech,” he said. It didn’t feel like he was talking to me; it felt like he would be saying it if I were there or not. “No more sickness. No more death. As much credit as she could want. No more—” He shook his head, jaw clenched. “All the shit we got past, and this was still her favorite.”
“The greenhouse?”
“The flowers. Trees. All this nature crap. She never saw any of it before. The city’s all concrete. We used to laugh about it. How we never really got nature until we turned into machines.”
“She’s not dead, Jude.”
“What?” He looked at me, confused for a moment, as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“Ani,” I said. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. She’s not dead.”
“Might as well be.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Like you care.” Jude scooped up some loose soil by his feet, building it into a low mound. “You left her there.”
“You weren’t there,” I reminded him. Driving the knife in. “You don’t know what it was like. I couldn’t have gotten her out. Even if she’d wanted to come back.”
“I know you,” he said nastily. “Always looking for an excuse to give in. Run away.”
“Run away?” I spit the words out. “You’re the coward who didn’t go in the first place! No, too risky for you, so we should all suffer in your place. None of us should have been there that night, Jude. Not us, not Ani—and you knew it. You just didn’t want to believe it.”
“I wanted …” His voice drifted off.
“You wanted to pretend you didn’t hurt her, like it never happened!” I fired the words like bullets, knowing they couldn’t hurt him, nothing could hurt the mighty Jude. “You wanted to just pretend she was fine and everything was fine, and it wasn’t. It’s not!”
“Shut up!” he shouted. Startling us both. “You think I don’t know this is my fault?” His voice was ragged. “You think I need you to tell me that?”
“This is Ani’s fault,” I said quietly. It slipped out, not at all what I’d been intending to say. “She did this.”
“I did this,” Jude said. “Just me.” He cupped his hands, sweeping more soil into his pile, packing it hard, smoothing his mound into a tower. “She ever tell you how we met?”
I shook my head, not really expecting him to continue. But he did, like he talked about the past all the time. Like he didn’t care anymore.
“We were in there together for almost a month,” he said. “Me, Ani, a few others. They never told us what they were testing us for. Or why the ones who disappeared never came back. I was the only one who knew what we were doing there—”
“How?”
A ghost of the old cocky smile crossed his lips. “Knowing things is something of a hobby for me. I’m rather good at it,” he said. Not boasting, just stating a fact. “But the rest of them, no idea. You don’t tell the lab rats why you’re putting them through the maze, right?”
“I thought Riley knew too,” I said hesitantly, feeling like I was breaking Riley’s confidence by admitting what he’d said. “I thought you got him into the program?”
“He told you that?” Jude asked, surprised. “I didn’t think he’d … huh.”
“What?”
“He tell you the rest? About what he was doing there?”
“He got shot,” I said.
“Right, and …?”
“And what?”
Jude nodded with approval. “I didn’t think so.”
“What?”
“Ask your boyfriend,” he said. “If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”
But I wasn’t asking Riley much of anything at the moment. All I wanted was his arms around me, his voice in my ear, telling me—
Well, that was the problem. Riley would tell me it was going to be all right. That I’d done nothing wrong. That I couldn’t have stopped Ani, couldn’t have saved any of them. That we’d find a way.
He wouldn’t judge me, and he wouldn’t question me.
He wouldn’t guess that I had a secret from him, from everyone, that Savona had given me a piece of poisonous knowledge, forced me to swallow it. That everything I told him about that night was infected by the lie of what I couldn’t say.
So I avoided him.
And instead sought out Jude, who couldn’t judge me but also couldn’t trust me, because he knew better. We were both liars, both cowards, in our own way. The same.
He turned back to his small pile of dirt, reaching into one of the plant pots to scoop out a fresh supply. “Anyway, Riley wasn’t there, not at first. I got him in at the end, when it seemed like they had figured out what they were doing, and it was going to work. At the beginning, when they were still screwing around, throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick? I was on my own.”
“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 everything’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, w
ould 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 pulseguns 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.