“Wait your turn!” Zo responded every once in a while, the you impatient bitch implied. I could only hope she was leaning against the door, scrolling through her zone or playing a quick round of Akira. Partly because it was Zo’s style, and I liked watching Sari scowl. Mostly because I was afraid the other option was that my sister was curled up on the bathroom floor, crying.
And if she stayed in there much longer, I was going to have to bust open the door and find out.
But the door swung open, and Zo emerged, dry-eyed. Silent and sullen, which was par for the course. And it’s not like I could do anything about it here, in an apartment so small and so crowded that every time Sari crossed the room, she found a new excuse to rest her hands on Riley’s waist or his shoulder or the curve of his lower back, gently guiding him in one direction or another, slipping past, her chest brushing his arm or her hair whipping across his face. Not that I was watching.
“Zo and I are going out,” I said.
“Good,” Sari said, at the same moment Riley said, “Where?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Anarchy,” Zo suggested.
I looked at her in surprise. There was no way she could know how often Riley and I went there—except, I reminded myself, Zo had always known that kind of thing, back when she’d cared enough to pay attention, listening at walls and peering around doorways like charting every peak and valley of my romantic interludes was mandatory preparation for her own. “Anarchy,” I repeated.
“I can meet you there later, if you want,” Riley said.
I looked at Zo, who shrugged, beyond caring.
“Just you,” I told him.
Sari rolled her eyes.
“Walk us out, Sari,” I said. “Let’s chat.”
Riley looked alarmed. “Lia—”
“My pleasure,” Sari said. She followed us out the door.
I stopped just on the other side of it. “I’ll be watching you,” I warned her, inwardly wincing at how cheesy, clichéd, and—more to the point—useless the words sounded. It was like I was still stuck in the vidlife, acting out the part of jealous girlfriend, reading from a script.
“Whatever.”
“He may trust you, but I don’t,” I warned her.
“And I care?”
This was pointless.
“Come on, Zo,” I said. “We’re wasting time.”
We were halfway to the car when Sari called after me. “Hey! Skinner!”
I turned back. She was playing her fingers with calculated idleness along her collarbone, the hollow of her neck, the bare skin disappearing beneath the low-cut V of her shirt. Reminding me of everything she had to offer. Warm flesh, a beating heart. “He should trust me,” she said. “But you’re right. You shouldn’t.”
“Huh.” Zo raised her eyebrows as we got into the car. “So that’s your boy-toy’s ex? At least his taste is improving.”
I waited for the punch line, but it never came.
“This place is insane,” Zo said, as we settled onto the bench that Riley and I usually claimed. A few feet a way a horde of kids in buffer gear were improvising a game of human bumper cars.
“You get used to it.”
“I hope not.” She grinned, as three nudists rolled by on retro skates, all of them tethered together by a flowered cord woven through their hair. “I like it.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah, I can see why. Hard to feel like a freak when you’re surrounded by total—” She stopped. Maybe because she saw the look on my face. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I meant—”
“I got it,” I said. “I’m a freak. You’ve made that clear.”
“I never said that.”
“You might as well have.”
“All I meant was that I get why you like it here,” Zo said softly. “It’s like you can disappear. Everyone’s putting on a show … but it feels like no one is watching.”
She did get it.
“I never asked you,” she went on. “What it was like.”
I didn’t have to ask her for an antecedent. “It” was everything. “It” was all the things that would have happened to her, if I hadn’t gotten into the car.
Could have been her, could have been her, should have been her.
If it was playing on a nonstop loop in my head, I could probably count on it playing in hers.
“Did it hurt?” she added.
“The accident did,” I said. “But I don’t really remember that.” I lied so easily. “Afterward, after the download? No. Not much hurts. Not physically.”
“But you can still … things can hurt, right?”
I nodded, hoping she wouldn’t push further, that I wouldn’t have to explain how feeling pain was preferable to feeling nothing.
“And it feels like … I mean, you think you’re Lia—”
“I am Lia.” It came out louder than I’d intended.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t agree, either, but it was a start.
Zo sagged on the bench. “So, what, am I supposed to hate you now? Or are you supposed to hate me?”
“I think we’re supposed to hate him,” I said. It wasn’t an answer, but it was easier.
She cleared her throat and looked away. “That Sari’s a total bitch, huh?”
Apparently, we were done talking about our father. “Seems that way,” I said.
“So … what are we going to do?”
“About Sari?” I asked, surprised that she considered it a joint problem. “I’m not sure there’s anything to do except—”
“No. About him.”
Tell her; don’t tell her.
I looked at her, trying to gauge possible reactions to the plan I’d put together. Figure out whether she could be trusted, and whether this—action, revenge—was what she needed rather than something else, something harder. Maybe I should force her to talk.
Or maybe I should just feed her another chiller.
How was I supposed to know?
It had been a long time since I’d known anything about Zo, at least anything that mattered. It wasn’t the download—although the whole stealing my friends and sleeping with my boyfriend thing hadn’t exactly brought us together. But when was the last time we’d talked, just the two of us, not fighting, not swapping stories about the latest indignity our mother had visited on us in public or sniping about whose turn it was to deal with the dishes, but talked about something that actually mattered?
I couldn’t remember.
“We’ll figure it out,” I told her, and put a hand on her shoulder, feeling awkward. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he tried to comfort me, with those halting, calculated gestures of fatherhood. “You’re not alone in this.”
She shrugged me off. “I’m always alone.” Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “Get me. Like some kind of twelve-year-old weeper sulking in her room and writing bad poetry. Forget it.”
“Zo—”
She stood abruptly. “I’m going for a walk. Check out the freaks.”
“I can—”
“No, you can’t. You stay; I’ll go. I know where to find you,” she said.
I didn’t follow her.
Zo was still gone when Riley finally showed. Which worked out nicely, because I needed an objective opinion on whether to loop Zo in on the plan.
“I want to break into BioMax’s system, find out what else they’re hiding, and use it to destroy them,” I said.
Riley raised his eyebrows. “Simple as that?”
“I didn’t say it would be easy—”
“Try impossible.”
“—but we know what they did to me. We know what they did to you. Who knows what else they’re hiding? And if Jude’s deal with Aikida is legit, and we can get the download tech for ourselves, we won’t need BioMax anymore. We won’t need anyone.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I didn’t like his tone. But maybe he just
needed some time to adjust. Riley was cautious by nature, but he always did the right thing in the end. So I pressed on.
“What do you think—should I tell Zo, or not?”
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“Really? You don’t think she deserves the chance to—”
“I mean you shouldn’t do it,” Riley said. “Forget about BioMax, forget about revenge, don’t do anything until you’ve calmed down.”
“What are you talking about?” I stood up. It was one thing to be cautious; it was another to suggest that I was being reckless. “I’m calm.”
He just looked at me.
“This is a good plan,” I said.
“This is Jude’s plan,” he pointed out.
“Since when is that not a selling point for you?”
“Since when is it one for you?”
“Which part of ‘BioMax blackmailed my father into murdering me’ did you not understand?”
Yes, Jude was the one who’d led me to the secret—and yes, I’d reacted exactly as he’d expected, and was now stepping up to do his dirty work, just as he’d planned. Did knowing I was being manipulated make me any less of a sucker? I chose to believe it did. And maybe that was only because I’d been used by one person or another for so long that I could no longer tell the difference. But it didn’t matter. The enemy of my enemy was my friend, right? And, even if it was only thanks to Jude’s transparent scheming, I now knew the truth. BioMax was my enemy.
“Can’t you get what you need off your father’s zone?” Riley asked.
“Not enough.” Inside that corp there were names, there were dates, there were documents. Incontrovertible proof of what they’d done to me. And, while I was at it, what they’d done to Jude, to Riley, to Ani, the truth about their “volunteers” program, the useful citizens drafted into their experiments, sacrificed to their higher cause. Also: Getting to my father’s zone meant going back to my father’s house. I wouldn’t. “After everything they’ve done to you? You should want this.”
“What they did to me,” he echoed. “That didn’t matter so much, before.”
When I was working with them, he meant. Ignoring their crimes for the greater good, because they weren’t crimes against me. “I was wrong.”
“But you’re so sure you’re right now?”
“Are you defending them?”
“I just think you should slow down,” he said. “Think.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re going to tell me that I’m being reckless, given what you’ve got sleeping on your floor right now?”
“That’s different.”
“Right. Because it’s you,” I said. “Because I’m supposed to trust your judgment, but you can’t trust mine.”
“Lia, come on.”
“No! I won’t ‘come on’!”
“Stop shouting.”
“I’m not shouting!”
I was shouting.
“Fine,” I said. “So I’m mad. Congratulations, you figured me out.”
“You’re not mad at me.”
“No kidding.”
He took my hand and pressed my palm between his. “I love you,” he said.
It was the first time.
That wasn’t how I wanted it, like blackmail. Words to shut me up.
But I wanted it.
“You believe me?” he added.
I nodded.
I love you, too. I hadn’t said it either. And I didn’t want to say it now. Not so close to the lie he was about to make me tell.
“I’m worried,” he said. “You get that?”
I nodded again, then raised my head and met his gaze. That was how you lied, if you wanted it to work. Head on. Fearless. I knew what was coming.
“Promise me you’ll wait,” he said. “Think about what you’re doing. When you’re ready, I’ll be there. I’m with you. You believe me?” he asked again. I nodded. “So promise me?”
I didn’t cross my fingers. I didn’t try to avoid the question or offer a nonanswer that, in retrospect, could technically be considered some flavor of true. No excuses, no escape. I lied.
“I promise.” And then, because I hadn’t said it and the silence was hanging there, growing between us, because I needed a truth to cancel out the lie, because it was true: “I love you, too.”
He kissed my forehead, and then I tipped my face up and he kissed me for real, his eyes tightly shut.
He loved me, and I loved him, but he left when I told him I needed to be alone, and as soon as he was out of sight, I linked into the network.
And then I voiced Jude.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
“I didn’t ask to be saved.”
The coordinates Jude sent took me deeper into Anarchy than I’d ever been before. I texted Zo that I’d meet her back at Riley’s, then wove my way through the manicured gardens into a deserted area of densely overgrown brush. Cloudy water from a sewage pipe trickled into a runoff creek, and after staring blankly at it for a moment, I realized it was probably the closest thing the park had to a waterfall. Coincidence, or Jude’s twisted sense of humor?
It took him two hours to arrive, which gave me plenty of time to do all that thinking Riley had urged me to do. I finished even more certain than when I’d started. This was the right thing to do. For me, and for all the mechs. Not to mention for my father.
I couldn’t go to the authorities, not with what I had. There were no authorities anymore, not objective ones, at least. The secops were all owned by one corp or another—and my father was on half of their boards. The rest of the BioMax execs probably had the other half covered. I needed something splashier than what I had, something that could tear the whole corp apart and take my father down with it. I needed to dredge up the corp’s deepest, darkest secrets—and then sell them to the highest bidder. No “authorities” were going to give me justice. That was something I’d get for myself.
“I’m in,” I said, as soon as Jude appeared from behind the trees. “But I have some conditions.”
Jude laced his hands together behind his head and leaned against a tree. “Let me guess—you’ll help me find the download specs if I help you find the dirt on dear old Dad.”
“Where did you get the flash drive?”
“Aikida,” Jude said. It was rare for him to give up information so lightly, without demanding something—even if it was just abject supplication—in return. “They’ve been keeping tabs on the BioMax crew for quite a while.”
“Is there more?”
He shook his head. “You’ve got everything I’ve got.”
“Then how did you know about my father?”
“I’m a good guesser. I take it I was right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Sure you don’t want to take some time and think about it?” he asked. “Wait until you calm down?”
His emphasis tipped me off. “You talked to Riley.”
“He wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t drag you into my—how did he phrase it?—‘insane delusions.’ Which is a little redundant, if you ask me, but I assume you’ll agree that language has never really been his strong suit.”
He’s only trying to help, I told myself. He loves me. But this wasn’t the way to do it.
“What did you tell him?”
Jude shrugged. “What he wanted to hear. That I understood. That I would never pressure you into anything. That I’ll stay away until you’re feeling more like yourself—and if you come to me, I’ll walk away.”
“You lied?”
“I lied.”
My surprise must have shown on my face. Jude had always made one thing clear: His bond with Riley was inviolate.
“I don’t see why he should get to make decisions for you when he’s doing such a crap job of running his own life,” he added.
“He is not.”
“Oh, so you approve of his sweet little houseguest?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Right, because you’re not brain-
dead.”
It was a relief to know I wasn’t the only one who saw Sari as a threat, but I wasn’t about to let him think this meant we’d forged some kind of alliance, the two of us against Riley. There was no line between us; there was no triangle. There was me-and-Riley, and then, outside of that, irrelevant to that, there was Jude. “Riley trusts her.”
“Riley has a blind spot when it comes to pretty girls,” Jude said. “Maybe you’ve noticed.”
That fell under the category of Not Going to Dignify with a Response.
“What?” he said.
I smiled sweetly. “Trying to remember how I ever found you tolerable.”
He shrugged. “Crisis makes for strange bedfellows.”
“Never. In a million years—”
“It’s an expression!” He held up his arms in surrender. “So much for the education of society’s future elite.”
“I know it’s an expression,” I snapped. “I’m just beginning to reevaluate whether I even want to be your metaphorical bedfellow.”
“Your choice,” Jude said. “Unlike some people, I get that.”
“So do I.” Zo’s voice floated from beyond the bushes. She stepped into the clearing. “Or don’t I get a vote?”
“What are you doing here?” As if I even had to ask. It was a shame that all spying these days was done by machines, because back in the dark old days of international intelligence agencies and invisible agents slipping through the shadows, Zo would have been a world champion.
“I heard you talking to Riley,” Zo admitted.
“That tends to happen when you’re hiding under a bench.”
“Behind a tree,” she corrected me. “The point is, I heard you.”
“And then you followed me.”
“It’s a good plan,” she said. “I knew you were lying about not going through with it.”
“I guess little sister knows you better than Prince Charming,” Jude said. He held out a hand to Zo, then raised hers to his lips with elaborate chivalry. “So this is the famous Kahn Junior. Enchanté.”
“And this is the famous Jude. Huh. I thought you’d be taller.” She extricated her hand, which flew immediately to her tangle of hair and tucked the unruly strands behind her left ear. I groaned. This was Zo’s version of blushing. She probably didn’t even notice she was doing it. But—I could see it in his eyes—Jude did.