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"Except we don't know that Savona's lying just because you feel it. There's a little difference between a fact and a wish."
"So you're saying you think Auden's behind this?" I asked him.
"Honestly?" Jude paused. "I don't think that twonk could plan a picnic, much less a genocide."
"So--"
"So who cares? Either Savona's telling one lie, or he's telling a bunch of them. It's beside the point."
He was right. The point was someone trying to kill us. BioMax, according to the private messages it had sent out to its mech mailing list, was working to "contain" the problem and "strongly suggested" that all download recipients report to a facility they'd designated as Safe Haven, to protect us from org violence and any further attacks while we were in such a "vulnerable state."
A state no more vulnerable than any orgs on any given day, but somehow it felt like walking around with a knife at our throats. Because what if this was just phase one? Org viruses mutated; maybe this one would, too. Maybe in its next variation it would kill us where we stood. We drew power from a wireless grid--if they could hack the servers, no reason to think they couldn't hack the grid, too. Poison us from afar. They'd wiped out our backups--wasn't the obvious next step to eliminate us once and for all? I didn't see how any Safe Haven could keep us safe from that.
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HIDDEN
Maybe this would finally make us even.
Two of us had nowhere to go--nowhere safe, at least. But one of us did. So I decided to start with her, the one person I could help, or at least protect. The one part of this situation I could control: Zo. I sat her down on Riley's couch, but I stayed on my feet. It was better to say this from above, to loom. Jude sat at the narrow kitchen table on the other side of the room, plainly watching--but without ejecting him from the apartment, this was as much distance from him as I was going to get.
"I think you should go back home," I told Zo.
Then, reconsidering my tone and the presumed response, I said it again, and this time it wasn't a suggestion. "You should go home."
"The hell I should."
"I know you don't want to--"
"Not. Going. To. There's a difference. Never speaking to either of those assholes again. Never setting foot in that house."
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"Zo, I know that's how you feel now."
"You sound like him," she said.
It was a low blow.
"It's safer there," I told her.
"Then you should go."
"Zo, come on, I can't just hide out and wait for this to go away."
"Because suddenly you're this brave, conquering hero? Since when do you care about anything but whether your microskirt matches your boots?"
"You don't know me anymore," I said, coldly. "And that was your choice. So you don't get to have an opinion on what I care about."
"I'm sorry," she said. "You want me to say it again? I'm sorry. I'm sorry!" she shouted. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!"
"Stop it!"
"Then you stop," she shot back. "Stop throwing all that crap in my face every time we disagree about something. So I screwed up. Fine. Like you've never done that. Like you're perfect."
"I never said I was perfect."
"You didn't have to say it."
"And you didn't have to say you hated me," I reminded her, "and that I wasn't your sister, and that you wished I was dead. But you did. All of it."
"And I fucked your boyfriend. Don't forget about that one."
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Jude couldn't stop himself. "Did she just say--"
"Shut up."
Wonder of wonders, he did.
"That doesn't matter anymore," I told Zo. "I don't care about him. Or any of that."
"Well, maybe there are things I don't care about anymore either. Maybe there are some things I thought that ... I don't think anymore. Things I said ..."
"I told you, it doesn't matter."
"You say that, but you still won't trust me."
"It's not about that," I said. "I want you to be safe."
"Since when?"
"Since always."
She snorted. "Like you cared about that when I was helping you sneak into the temple. Or hack Dad's files or crash BioMax. You wanted me along because I was useful, and now suddenly I'm not? This has nothing to do with me being some weak little girl that needs your protecting. You're not that dumb."
Except that I was. Zo was right. Things were no more dangerous--for her, at least--than they'd ever been. And before, I hadn't hesitated to let her help, no matter the risks. Her life, her call. But now ...
I could have put it on Riley, on the fact that now I understood how things could go wrong and people could disappear. But that was more a reminder than a news flash. It wasn't that I suddenly understood that I could lose Zo; it was that I suddenly
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couldn't stand the prospect. Somehow she had become my sister again. My little sister. Which meant, somehow, she'd become my responsibility.
Obviously, I couldn't tell her that.
"It's because you're a mech and I'm an org, right?" Zo said flatly. "All that bullshit about how we're all the same, all those speeches you gave, it was all crap, right? In the end you draw a line: you on one side, me on the other."
And because it would be easier than convincing her she needed protection--because it would be easier than telling her the truth--I let her believe it. She proved me right by doing what I needed her to do. She left.
"Didn't see that coming," Jude said, once she was gone.
I joined him at the table, slumping down in the second chair. It was missing a leg, and wobbled precariously as I sat down. Perfect, I thought, bitter and exhausted. Even the furniture had an opinion on my life. Though for the metaphor to really work, the chair would have to dump me on my ass just when I'd finally let myself relax. I was sure that could be arranged.
"Kind of harsh, don't you think?" Jude added.
"Like you don't believe all that, us and them."
"You don't."
"Are we done talking about my sister?"
Jude raised his hands in surrender: Done.
Good.
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"So what now?" I said. "We obviously can't trust BioMax--we can't let anyone trust BioMax. But that's not exactly an action plan."
"They're right about one thing," he said. "It's going to be open season on mechs, and without the backups, dead is dead. We have to get somewhere safe."
"Safe Haven?" I said, incredulous. "You're joking."
"It's not the only option. Let's not forget, while some of us were busy dancing on BioMax's string, others of us were planning ahead." He smiled for the first time since Riley. "'Some of us' equals you, in case you didn't catch that. 'Others of us' would be me."
"As far as I can tell, all you did was hole up in a filthy, irradiated dead zone--" I stopped, suddenly understanding what he was getting at. "You're not serious."
His smile widened.
"It's been the plan all along," I realized. "You're probably glad to finally have an excuse."
The smile vanished. "I didn't want it to happen. I knew it would happen. There's a difference."
"So you want us to run and hide."
"You have a better idea?"
"There's got to be something better than holing up like refugees--like animals--in some kind of toxic waste dump."
"Not all of us grew up like you did," he snarled. "For some of us it would practically be luxury."
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"Don't give me that city-rat crap," I warned him. "This isn't about me being spoiled. It's about this not being a solution."
"It's a first step," he admitted.
"It's a crappy one."
"And your brilliant plan is ... ?"
I didn't want to hide. I wanted to stay, to fight. I wanted to avenge Riley and destroy BioMax and the Brotherhood and make the world, this world, safe for mechs. As Jude would have pointed out, if I
'd been foolish enough to say it out loud, it was a pretty speech.
But it wasn't much of a plan.
"BioMax would still be in control," I pointed out. "If anything happened to us and we needed new bodies--"
"New bodies are useless without uploaded memories to download," Jude reminded me. "Which makes BioMax useless too."
"So walk me through this. We collect all the mechs, lead them into their new toxic paradise, and ... what? Set you up as emperor? Build you a throne?"
Jude slammed his hand against the table. "This isn't a joke."
"No, it's a power trip."
"Why do you always have to make everything about me?" Jude asked.
"I thought I always made everything about me," I said. "Isn't that what you're always telling me?"
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"I never meant--"
"You've made it pretty clear you think I'm spoiled and naive and all-around useless."
"Right." Jude snorted. "That's why I always come to you first. That's why we're figuring this out together. That's why I listen to all your bullshit. Because I think you're useless and don't care what you have to say. You really know everything, don't you?"
"I know I'm only here because you don't have anyone else willing to listen to your bullshit."
"Maybe you're right!" he shouted. "I don't have anyone else!"
We both stopped.
And I could only assume we both thought of him.
Riley.
"Sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have shouted."
And I shouldn't have picked a fight, just because I was upset about Zo and frightened about the virus and angry about Riley and angry, angry, so unbearably angry that I didn't know what to do except spew it all over anyone unfortunate enough to get close. And all I had left on that front was Jude.
I couldn't apologize. But: "You're right. The dead zone is a good option. For now."
He looked surprised, but he didn't gloat. Like he said, he didn't have anyone else either.
So we sat there calmly and cobbled together some kind of
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plan--or at least a first step. We would release what we knew about BioMax, publicly on the network, and privately to all the mechs we could find; we'd do everything we could to persuade them to reject the corp's Safe Haven in favor of our own. Then, somehow, we'd figure out what to do next.
As Jude worried through the logistics of releasing the dead-zone coordinates to the mechs without revealing them to BioMax--though the whole beauty of the location was its inhospitableness to orgs, making secrecy a bonus rather than a necessity--I watched the door, half expecting Zo to burst through with a last word. I was no longer sure I'd done the right thing, sending her away. Even if I had, was it the right thing for her, to keep her safe, or the right thing for me, to give me one less person to worry about, one less person to lose? If things had gone differently, if she'd been the mech and I'd been the org, she never would have sent me home. Though if it had been me, I might have gone without a fight.
I might have gone back to our parents, even after everything that had happened. But not Zo. So where would she go?
And why hadn't I thought about any of this when I was throwing her out?
"She'll be fine," Jude said softly, as if I'd spoken aloud.
"She always is."
He reached across the table, like he was going to put his hand over mine, but stopped a few inches short. "Just like her sister."
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* * *
For a long time Jude had hoarded his secret that BioMax could track the movement of every mech, just as he'd kept to himself the knowledge of how to disable those trackers. Saving it for a rainy day, he'd promised--the someday when BioMax would be desperate to know where we were, and we'd be equally desperate to hide. Now the monsoon had arrived. He disabled the trackers remotely, and just like that, we were all free. We contacted all the mechs we knew, had them pass the word to everyone they knew, and mech by mech we tried to talk them out of BioMax's Safe Haven and into ours.
Sloane, Brahm, familiar faces from the past agreed without question and headed for the dead zone, bringing handfuls of friends, sometimes mechs they'd picked up along the way, hesitant to trust anyone but desperate to be told what to do. The early arrivals took charge, setting up systems for intake and inventory, helping new mechs feel at home--and helping us figure out how many were left to save. It would have been easier to do in person, and I could tell Jude was tempted, but I insisted on staying at Riley's. He stayed with me.
We broadcast what we knew about BioMax--and, true to their word, BioMax wiped it from the network as soon as we'd posted it. Though it probably wouldn't have mattered--the zones were flooded with unsubstantiated rumors. Suddenly every nutcase with a keyboard had some crucial
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information about our fates--and much of it came with evidence as persuasive as ours, because what could be easier than creating fake photos, fake documentation to substantiate fake stories? The only authority was the wisdom of the crowd--the more popular the zone, the more appealing its story, the more believable it appeared. There was more than enough noise to drown out the truth. All we could do was keep screaming and hope someone heard.
We persuaded forty or fifty by word of mouth, the mechs we knew convincing the ones they knew. But BioMax, judging from its reports, got at least a hundred, and as reports of anti-mech violence grew, more were coming in every day.
We couldn't save everyone.
Quinn wouldn't take my calls, and as soon as she heard Jude's voice, she cut the link. We heard she went straight to BioMax after that, playing the good girl just to spite us, I supposed, since it certainly wasn't in her nature.
Ani was nowhere to be found; she'd even erased her zone. No one I'd ever known had taken such a drastic move--it was like erasing your own existence. But Ani was used to being invisible. For all we knew, she was sitting by Savona's side again, egging him on--or maybe at Safe Haven, having discovered that the virus didn't discriminate between self-hating mechs and the rest of us.
I tried not to think about the other option, the most obvious excuse for her silence. Every day the news zones added
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new names to their list of the Erased. Ani's was never on it. But you couldn't make the list unless you'd left someone behind to notice you were gone.
No one at BioMax was taking my calls, not even call-me-Ben. All I got were automated responses offering me coordinates to Safe Haven, urging me to be smart and let them protect me, as if those two options weren't mutually exclusive. Jude was losing patience, as was I, but we were pulling in opposite directions. He wanted to join the mechs in the dead zone--start fresh, he called it. I called it running away.
We argued, a lot. There was too much time, too much anger not to. There was too much shuttling back and forth between one dead end and another, making half-aborted plans, trying and failing and trying again even more uselessly the next time around, too much threatening, too much second-guessing, too much staring aimlessly into space trying to make the pieces fit together, searching for the fault line, the one perfect place to exert pressure that would make our enemies collapse in on themselves, that would right our world. There was too much of everything, except action, except answers. And, of course, except tears. We weren't built for that.
"And what about the mechs at Safe Haven?" I asked, during one of our many arguments. "What happens to them?"
"They get what they get for trusting BioMax."
But he didn't mean it, because one day passed, and another, and he didn't leave. I must not have meant it either, because I
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stayed too. Even when it became clear that we'd convinced all the mechs we were going to, and that the virus wasn't going anywhere. Safe Haven was bursting at the seams. Even then I stayed and argued with Jude, let him talk me to a stalemate. I knew what we had to do. I was just afraid to do it.
We were still arguing when my ViM buzzed with an incoming vid call from
the second-to-last person I'd expected to hear from. The last was my sister, who was ignoring all my messages, including the ones pleading with her to just let me know where she was, and that it was somewhere safe.
The second-to-last was Ani.
When I saw who it was, I relayed it to our wall screen, so Jude could see her too--and she could see Jude. I'd been more worried about her than I'd let myself realize, but now that she'd actually surfaced, I could barely look at her. I had no interest in facing her alone.
"Ani. Hey. You look ... good," Jude said haltingly. And she did, better at least than she had the last time I'd seen her.
She waved joylessly. "Yeah, I can walk and talk and everything. Just like a real girl."
"Ani--"
"I need to talk to you, Lia," she cut in. "Not him."
"Too bad," I said. "He stays."
Even if he looked like he wanted to disappear.
"I'm sorry about Riley," she told me.
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They'd reported his name on all the news vids: "the first victim." He was famous.
It had been two weeks, and I still didn't know what to say. "Thank you"? "I'm sorry, too"? "How can you be sorry when you barely knew him?" Or, in Ani's case, "How can you be sorry when you screwed him over and then left him behind?"
"What do you want?" I asked. "Delivering a message on behalf of your pious Brothers and Sisters?"
"If I had known what they were going to do--"
I laughed--a twisted, angry sound, like metal on metal. "You would've stopped them? Have you forgotten that you helped them? How do you think they figured out how to do this in the first place? By poking around in your brain. Because you volunteered. You didn't think we deserved to exist. So congratulations, you must be so proud of Riley. Doing us all proud by getting erased."
Ani looked like I had struck her. "You know what he means to me," she said, in a low, angry voice.
"Meant to you. Past tense."
Giving up on me, she turned to Jude. Desperate times. "I never wanted this to happen."
"I know."
"You always said if I needed something from you ..."
"Anything," Jude said.
I knew what he was thinking. I could hear it in his voice. Ani wasn't Riley, but she was as close as he was going to get.