Crashed (8 page)

"Like what happened with Auden?" he said.

I froze. We stared at each other, and it was clear Riley knew he'd won, but it wasn't a Jude-like smirk on his face, acknowledging the inevitability of his triumph. It was just something patient and watchful.

"Chocolate," I said finally, turning the clock back to an easier question. "I miss that. And running."

"You didn't get enough of that just now?" he said lightly.

"Not the same."

"If you say so. What else?"

Walker's lips--anyone's lips. The pleasure-pain of fingers tickling down my spine. Chillers, about a half hour into the dose, when everything made sense and nothing mattered. Crying. Boring Thursday night dinners, mocking my mother, preening under my father's praise.

Yelling at Zo.

"No," I said. "Your turn."

"Fine. Sweat." He laughed. "Stop looking at me like that."

"You're going to have to clarify: Is this 'the look' you claim I always give you, or some new look? It's hard to keep track."

"The look that says you think it's weird."

"You miss sweat? That
is
weird," I agreed. "But there's no look."

It wasn't that weird. I was a runner. Had been a runner. I understood about sweat.

"And burgers," he added. "A night on the roof with a perfectly grilled soy burger--"

"Soy?"
I wrinkled my nose. "If it's not beef, it's not a burger."

"I wouldn't know." His voice was frosty.

Right, because once they'd stopped mass-producing beef, there wasn't enough to go around. I'd done it again: forgotten the obvious. Who I was. Who he'd been. I vowed to myself that I wouldn't do it again.

"Would you go back?" I asked. The forbidden question. But the rules didn't apply here.

He stretched his arms behind his head, grasping the trunk he was leaning against as if he wanted to uproot the tree. "I don't ask myself that."

"I don't believe you," I said. "You weren't like them. You were whole. Healthy. You had a
life
."

"Like you?" he said. "Before whatever happened, happened?"

"Before my
accident
," I said loudly. One of us wasn't afraid to say it out loud. "And yes, like me."

"I wasn't like you."

"Why not?"

"You think you deserved it?" he asked. "Your accident? This?"

"Of course not!"

"Well, maybe I did." Riley stood up and walked a few trees away, then sat down again. Close enough that we could still see each other, far enough that there would be no more talk. So we watched each other, and we watched the clouds drift across the wine red sky, and we waited for things to be safe.

"You sure?" I asked, hesitating over the link. The flexi ViM screen was only a few inches across with a strip on the back that adhered to the underside of my left arm. At its maximum length, which it was set at now, it fit perfectly in the stretch from my wrist to my elbow--but with slight pressure it would compress to a palm-size screen I could wrap around my wrist or slip into my pocket. The image quality wasn't great, but I didn't need a hi-res reminder of the death we'd escaped.

"Not really," Riley said as my finger hovered over the screen. It was set to link in whenever I swiped a Z across its face--after managing the first two slashes, I'd frozen before the third. It was Riley's fault. I'd spent two days chafing at his paranoia, and now that--based on no evidence whatsoever aside from the fact that time had passed and we were still here--he had decided it was safe, I couldn't help feeling like linking in to the network would call the darkness down on us. Or at least the secops.

We didn't do anything wrong,
I reminded myself.

"It's time, Lia." The rangers would eventually catch us in a sweep; the longer we waited, the more inevitable our discovery became.

We linked in.

The news zones were lit up with updates about reports of the bio-attack. We picked a zone at random, setting the vid filter for most watched.

42 dead
,
231 injured,
the cap read.

Suspects at large.

Skinner slayings stun nation!
That one was in bold.

Riley played one of the vids, a grainy aerial shot from the eye in the sky, and there I was. Upright and still as three hundred people collapsed around me.

"Shut it off," I said, my voice as cool and even as ever.

The skinner stands alone,
read the cap.

The me in the vid wasn't panicking, she wasn't kneeling down to help the victims, she wasn't doing anything but watching it all play out, calm as if she'd expected it.

Riley froze the vid. "You don't have to watch these," he said. "I can fill you in later."

Because he was strong and I was weak? No. "Just play the next one," I ordered him. This one we watched all the way through. Along with the one after that.

We heard how the attackers had slipped past the security system, easily evading the biostat sensors, because, of course, they had no biostats. They'd released an aerated form of Naxophedrine into the air vents leading to the plaza. The toxin had been a favored weapon of choice back in the bad old days when you could barely walk down a city street without getting hit by, among other unpleasantries of modern life, shrapnel, radioactive dust, or weaponized squirrel flu--this before everyone wised up and got the hell out of the cities. Naxo had been one of the milder weapons--usually aimed at creating mass chaos rather than perpetrating mass murder. Among its known effects: heart palpitations, seizure, lung paralysis. All temporary.

Usually.

Authorities concluded that the attackers must have used an enhanced or unusually concentrated version of the chemical. Whatever it was, it had killed forty-two people. And then the attackers, the skinners, had slipped out as easily as they'd slipped in. Just like us.

Recriminations flew, and the Brotherhood of Man was doing its best to fan the flames. An unthinkable tragedy, but an inevitable one, the Honored Rai Savona said, repeating himself in infinite variations. Lax security despite the thousands of skinners set loose on the country, determined to transform their existential threat into a flesh-and-blood one? It was a miracle, Savona said, that something like this hadn't happened sooner. And given the fact that the skinners could slip through a security web designed to snag organic terrorists--criminals with finger- and eyeprints, with DNA-laced epithelia, with bodies they could alter but never abandon--it would be a miracle if it didn't happen again.

Issuing his edict of I-told-you-so doom, Savona did his best not to smile.

We watched the aftermath of the attack: spidercrawlers trawling the scene, their metallic tentacles snapping pics, searching for hidden explosives and time-release toxins, scrabbling over the bodies to triage the victims. And then the humans took over, alienlike figures, their faces distorted by thick biomasks, loading the wounded onto stretchers. We watched the secops swarm the atrium, stepping over and around the bodies that remained--intact bodies, healthy and whole, except for their pale skin, their open eyes blurry with blood.

We watched the attack from every angle, watched the orgs fall again and again, and each time, even though we knew what to expect, it came as a surprise--they were moving, they were laughing, they were fighting, and then they weren't anything.

We watched as the secops finally dealt with the dead. Shoved them into bags, zipped them up, dragged them out like trash. Watching it all play out on-screen made it less real and more real at the same time. It was no longer something that belonged to
us,
something chaotic and terrible and private. It was an
event
now, neat details packaged into a comprehensible narrative; it belonged to the world. It wasn't life--it was
news.

Riley paused over the next vid, which hadn't been posted until the day after the attack. "Maybe we've seen enough," he said. Trying to protect me again? Not his job.

"Play it."

The vid was grainy and without sound. The camera bounced around and for a few seconds, it was hard to make out anything but shadows and blobs of light. The lens focused, revealing a group of masked figures. The camera panned across their faces, each covered in black. Then zoomed in on a smashed console emblazoned with the biohazard symbol. A quick cut to a grate, a hand holding an aerosol sprayer, a bluish mist drifting into an air duct.

A blur as the camera spun around, landing on the person holding it. She was the only one with a mask. Her face swam in and out of the frame as she set up the shot. Then she was clear, and she smiled.

A message from the mechs,
read the cap.

Riley reached for the screen. One swipe of his finger and the face would disappear. I grabbed his wrist, squeezed it. Didn't meet his eyes; didn't want to see them rest on my face, then dart back to the face on the screen, her face.

Our
face.

"You orgs want a war?" a murderer said in my voice. She smiled again, and it was my smile. "You got one." An alarm sounded. Her smile grew. "You know what happens next."

I did.

CITY LIGHTS

"I wasn't pretending to be human. I was over that."

Riley cut the link.

"That wasn't me," I said.

"I know."

"That
wasn't
me," I said again.

He nodded. "I know."

"But it wasn't--"

"Lia, stop." He put his hands on my shoulders like he was holding me steady. Like I was shaking. Which I wasn't.
"I know,"
he said. Slow and firm. "It wasn't you, it couldn't have been. You were in the atrium when the alarm sounded. I saw you. Besides, other than her face . . ." He didn't have to say the obvious. She'd had shorter hair, different clothes--black from head to toe, a killer and a cliche. She'd stood differently, moved differently. She was a physical copy, nothing more.

Riley was still holding on to me. I couldn't look at him. Instead, I linked in again, flipping through the vids until I found what I was looking for. It was cross-posted from the Brotherhood's zone. "I would never have expected
this
," Auden said in response to tepid questioning from some unseen interviewer. "But that's exactly the point, isn't it? You never really
know
a skinner. You only see the self they want you to see."

"Do you understand me?" Riley said, fingers tightening on my shoulders. "That. Wasn't. You."

But it had my face. My voice. My smile. Auden believed it was me. Anyone watching, anyone I'd ever known, would think it was me.

My father would think it was me.

"Just stay calm," Riley said, like he could see behind my steady gaze, steady hands, into the storm inside my head.

He cut the link again. "Take it nice and slow," he said. Sounding like my old track coach when we'd pushed ourselves too hard for too long and needed something to lean on. Struggling to fill our lungs.

Breathe in, breathe out,
I thought, the hysteria creeping in again.
If only.

"None of this is your fault." Riley leaned close, his voice warm and steady in my ear. "You didn't do this."

"It wasn't me," I said again after a long, silent moment, and this time I wasn't trying to convince him, or myself. It was just the only fact I had, a starting point.

"It wasn't you," he said in the same tone, and I could tell he got it. Crisis averted. For the moment. "I know that. But no one else will."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Don't freak out," he said.

"Sorry, but did you not see the same vid I saw?" I snapped. "Because this is me freaking out."

"We have to voice Jude and--"

"And what?" I grabbed his arm as he was reaching for the ViM. "We leave him out of this."

"He'll know what to do," Riley said.

"Right. Because Jude always knows what to do."

"This is not a joke," he said in a low voice.

"You think I don't know that? Was that
your
face on the vid?"

He looked down at his arm, and I realized I was still holding on. I let go.

"Jude's the one who forced us to go to the corp-town," I reminded him. Forced
me
, specifically. No one else would do.

"So?"

"So if someone's setting us up, it hasn't occurred to you that Jude--"

He stood up abruptly. "He wouldn't do that."

"I'm not saying--"

"You better not. Or I'm out of here."

"Fine. I don't think he would ever do something like that." So I didn't want him to go; so I lied.

"Good. Because he wouldn't." Riley kept his eyes fixed on a low-hanging branch. There were still enough leaves clinging to the trees to block out most of the dim sunlight. The first night had been hard, huddling in the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar chitterings and hoots of the Sanctuary's protected species, wondering if there were wolves or bears or some other fanged predator of an earlier age prowling for fresh blood. Nothing seemed quite as dire once the sun came up, but after two days trapped in the trees, all I wanted was some sunlight and an open sky.

"I just said that, didn't I?" Best friends was one thing, but it was like Riley thought if he said one bad thing about Jude--or let anyone else release a single criticism into the universe--he'd be struck by lightning.

Jude's not God,
I wanted to remind Riley.

But not as much as I wanted not to be left alone.

"The point is we shouldn't bring anyone else into this," I said. Thinking: Jude sent us to Synapsis Corp. Sent
me
. To meet a mysterious contact who never showed up. Thinking you'd have to be a moron not to wonder. Or an acolyte, blinded by faith. Same difference. "You said yourself, they could track us through the network--and now we know they're looking for us." Looking for
me.
"If we get in touch with Jude, we'd only make him look guilty. Bring down the secops on everyone."

"I don't know . . ."

"It's my life, right?" I said. Only one mech had turned her face to the camera. A few shots had caught Riley running away, but he'd been the smart one, covering his face with his shirt. No one was looking for him. "If we're going to take a risk, it should be my decision."

"And you don't trust him," Riley said sourly.

"Right now I don't trust anyone."

"Including me." It wasn't a question.

He's Jude's best friend
, I thought.
Riley would do anything for him.
But not this.

I had no way of knowing; I knew. He'd stepped over the bodies with me. He'd been there. And he was here now. Probably I should have suspected him. But I didn't want to.

"If you're out to get me, you're not doing a very good job of it," I pointed out, only partly for his benefit. "And you're already stuck with what happened. Jude isn't."

Riley dropped down to the ground again, looking a little lost. "You're right. Just us, then."

I didn't want to say it. The old Lia Kahn would never have said it. But she was dead. "They're looking for me, not you."

"So far," he said darkly.

"I mean, this doesn't have to be your problem."

"You want me to go?" he asked.

I hesitated. Then shook my head. "But you can. If you want."

He hesitated too, longer than I had."I'm in this."

"But you don't have to be."

"Yes. I do."

* * *

We needed somewhere that no one would bother to look for us, where no one bothered to look at all. "I know a place," Riley said, "but . . ."

There were plenty of buts.

But I haven't been back since the download.

But it's not safe.

But I don't know if you can handle it.

"I can handle anything," I told him.

It's not that I convinced him.

It's just that we couldn't come up with a better option. So we went with the last resort.

Riley's city was a day's walk--a day and a half by back roads, which was how we went. We walked through the night, navigating by the dim glow of our ViM screens and occasionally switching to infrared. We reached the city's crumbling edge just as the sun was peeking through the jagged skyline. I'd been there before, but only at night, when the dead buildings were just ragged shadows, the city people all hidden away, in bed or in shadow. At night, the sky's dim red glow gave the place a weird dignity. Maybe it was the illusion that the city wasn't dead after all but just a sleeping monster that would wake when the lights switched on.

Now that the lights were on, it was easy to see that the monster wasn't sleeping; it was dead. Unlike most of the cities on the eastern seaboard, this one was still habitable, but just barely. The streets were paved with rubble and dogshit, lined with broken cars so old they still ran on gasoline (or would have, if they ran at all). Small clumps of orgs--their teeth rotting, their faces pockmarked, their insides and outsides racing each other toward decay--gathered in burnt-out buildings with broken windows, staring slack jawed at vids playing across giant screens. None of them noticed us as we passed.

"The vids play all day," Riley explained. "When you're a kid, you're supposed to watch the ed ones, learn to read and all that. After, you can do whatever you want. But there's nothing else to do."

There was no wireless web of energy here, which meant no one had ViMs to watch the vids of their own choosing. It also meant our mechanical bodies would be powering themselves on stored energy, good enough to last three days, four if we pushed it. Riley was convinced that would be enough. And if it wasn't, we could always sneak back to the Sanctuary for a quick recharge. There was no network either, at least no wireless access--they jammed the signal in the cities. Instead, communal ViMs let residents link into the network for a few minutes each day. According to Riley, most never bothered.

"How did you
live
here?" I asked as Riley led us down widening streets. The squat, brick structures gradually gave way to cement monoliths, their faces the color of ash.

"What was the other option?" He slowed down, his eyes tracking the broken windows we passed. Once he knelt to pluck a glittering scrap of metal from a small pile of trash. He held it out to me, proud of the find. "A real coin," he said. "You can find them all over if you know what you're looking for."

"So?" I didn't need him playing tour guide. "It's not like they have any value anymore."

He slipped it into his pocket. "Maybe not to you."

Shadows flickered behind the glass. I turned my face to the ground. We'd agreed we shouldn't bother trying to disguise ourselves--no disguise would hide what we were. Even if my picture hadn't been all over the vids, two mechs traipsing through a city was a dead giveaway we were doing something we shouldn't. Riley had claimed it didn't matter. "There's no law in the city, not really. You just do what you can until someone stops you." Meaning no law but the unspoken kind, expressed only in the native language you absorbed growing up in the city, in favors and blackmail and protection money, in the unforgiving thresher of Darwinian selection. You either figured out how to survive, or you went extinct.

"What are we waiting for?" I asked now as we passed building after building, all of them identical except for the designs sprayed in black and gold across their faces. Sensing our presence, the graffiti rippled and swirled, occasionally emitting a piercing blast of noise, the artist's primal scream embedded in the electropaint. "Can't we just pick one and get off the street?"

Riley shook his head. "Even in a city, everything belongs to someone."

He stopped suddenly in front of a building capped by two forty-story towers, its doors scarred by deep fissures running diagonally across their length as if giant claws had sliced through the metal. A thick layer of grime had turned the facade a dark, earthy brown. The windows at street level were all boarded up, but through the cracks I could see figures moving around inside.

"There are
people
in there," I hissed as Riley started toward the door.

"Yeah?"

"
Yeah,
well, shouldn't we go back the way we came? What about all those empty houses?"

"You don't get it," Riley said.

"So explain it to me."

"Now?"

I crossed my arms. "Now or never."

So he did. Some of the buildings we'd passed probably were empty, he explained, but in the city, empty was death, home to roving bands of the desperate and hungry, as bestial as the outside authorities made them out to be. We couldn't be killed, but we could still be attacked, robbed, dismembered . . . he left the rest to my imagination. There was safety in numbers as long as you chose the right numbers. Which was why most of the city crowded into the skyscrapers at its center, seizing a place as either protector or protected. Every gang had its own territory, some owning whole towers, others sharing space in a precarious balance of power, as in this building,
Riley's
building, where west and east towers coexisted as uneasy allies and occasional combatants.

We entered the lobby, a long, narrow space with ceilings that towered three stories over our heads. At ground level, the windows were boarded up with jagged-edged wooden boards. But above, a latticework of steel beams and broken glass let in the light and--judging from the puddles, the rust, and the mold--the elements. Facing the entrance, a sleek wall of black marble rose from floor to ceiling, small holes smashed into it at regular intervals like hand- and footholds for a mountain climber. And at the point where the marble met the ceiling: the climber himself, hanging from a narrow cable, his long rifle aimed out at the street. There was a matching sniper at the other end of the lobby--one to guard the west tower, I decided, the other to guard the east. On the ground, two clumps of sentries mirrored the division, each protecting the entrance to one of the towers, all with their weapons trained on us.

Riley had called them "sentries," but they were children, alongside a few decrepit and aged men and women. All carrying guns, all settled into wheelchairs or leaning on crutches and canes.

"Not enough power to run an elevator,"
Riley VM'd.
"So either you climb the stairs . . ."

Or you didn't.

Apparently, in a tower everyone had some job to do, even the ones forced to stay on the ground.

"Which floor did you live on?"
I asked him as if I could somehow gauge where he'd fit into the vertical hierarchy.

"The ground," Riley murmured aloud. "With them."

"But--" I stopped myself. Of course. Jude had stayed on the ground; Riley had stayed with Jude. "You sure about this?" I asked, nodding toward the nearest weapon--too near for my taste.

"Ground level's neutral territory," Riley said. "Just keep your mouth shut."

I bristled at both the implication and the tone. But I did as I was told.

Riley strode up to one of the younger boys guarding the west tower. The kid sat malnourished and one-legged in a rusted wheelchair, a long, black gun laid across his lap.
"Skinners?"
he said, fingers rigid on the arms of the chair. "You don't belong here." One hand dropped casually, almost as an afterthought, onto the handle of his gun.