Crashed (9 page)

"Let 'em stay," gargled an older man leaning on a crutch. "We can have some fun."

"Shut it, Ches," Riley snapped. When he spoke to the boy, his voice was gentler. "It's me, Jay," he said. "Riley."

"Yeah, right. Prove it."

"Fine." Riley slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out the crushed coin he'd found, then tossed it to the kid. "For your collection."

The boy's eyes widened. With a furtive glance at his fellow sentries, he shoved the coin into his pocket. Then, never taking his eyes off Riley, scrawled something onto a piece of paper and shoved it into a long tube that ran up the side of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling. The page whooshed away.

"Pneumatic tubes,"
Riley VM'd.
"Works on compressed air. Best way to stay in touch without power."

"Since when do you know how to write?" he asked the kid.

The boy scowled and hocked out a mouthful of thick, yellowish saliva. "Gray made me. New rule. Reading too."

Riley grinned. "Since when does Gray make anyone do anything?"

"Things change," the kid said without matching his smile. "You should know."

The response arrived a few moments later. The boy retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from the tube, read it over slowly, his lips moving as he pieced the letters together into words. Then he nodded. "Fifteenth floor," he told Riley. "They're waiting for you."

Riley gave him a half shrug, half nod, then pulled me past the group of guards toward the stairs.

"Hey, Riley!" the kid called after us. "So what's it like, anyway?"

"Quieter," Riley called back, and then the stairwell door closed behind us and we were on our way up.

"Quieter?" I repeated as we climbed the steep, narrow flights, stepping over piles of garbage. The stairwell was a windowless concrete chimney stretching endlessly above us and echoing with the clatter of pounding feet.

"What'd you want me to say?" Riley took the stairs two at a time, keeping me at his back. "That while he's stuck in shit for the rest of his life, I'm rich and safe and never hungry?"

"Just wondering what you meant," I said. "Quieter."

"There's always people around in a city," Riley said. And as if to illustrate his point, a crowd of slummers pushed past us on the stairs without pausing, their pupils wide and faces streaming with sweat, telltale signs of a shocker trip. They probably hadn't even seen us. "Nowhere belongs to just you."

The door marked
15
released us into a long, gray hallway lined with doors, windows at either end letting in little light. Three orgs were waiting for us, their limbs bundled tight into thick sweaters, their breath fogging in the chill air. The two guys were a couple years older than me, while the girl looked about my age.

"It's hotter than I thought it would be," the shorter of the two guys said, looking me up and down, his ratface scrunched like he was trying to pick up my scent.

The other shoved an elbow into his gut. "So this is the guy claiming to be Riley? What's the game?"

The girl shook her head. "No game," she said, her eyes laser focused on his face. "It's him."

The taller one spat out a bitter laugh. "Says who?"

"Says me." The girl took a step toward him, then stopped with a foot of distance still between them. Riley stayed silent.

"How do you know?" the ratface asked.

"He voiced me a couple times. And sent some pics. After." The girl blushed and ran a hand through her spiky red hair. She was wearing makeup, I realized. A red smear across her lips and something sparkly over her lids--compensating for her lack of genetic perfection with a layer of paint. As if she could make herself pretty through sheer force of will. Add to that the baggy clothes, no tech anywhere in sight, just plain-print on the shirt and, from the look of it, shoes that didn't even conform to her feet. She looked like a total retro, which made sense, since the retro slummers my sister hung out with were just shoddy imitations. This girl was the original.
Zo will be glad to know she's doing it right,
I thought instinctively, before remembering that I wouldn't be telling Zo anything any time soon.

The taller guy scowled at her, and she blushed again, harder. Then she moved to his side, slipping an arm around his waist. Next to me, Riley stiffened.

"She right?" the guy asked Riley. "It's you?"

"Yeah, Gray," Riley said. "It's me."

"Prove it."

"You sure you want me to?" Riley asked. "Because I didn't think you'd want Mika and Sari to know about that time we were crashing at Bo's place and freaked out on shockers. What'd you declare yourself? Emperor of Piss and--"

"It's him," Gray said abruptly. Mika snickered. "Heard about your new look," he said to Riley. "But seeing it . . ." He shook his head. "Always had to be different, didn't you?"

The girl, Sari, kept her arm around Gray but pulled her body slightly away from him--it was subtle, probably too subtle for any idiot guy to notice, but I did. It was a move I'd pulled myself, one that said to anyone watching,
I'm with him . . . unless you've got a better offer?
"I think what Gray means to say is that he's glad you're not dead." She drove a steel-tipped boot into Gray's ankle. "Right, Gray?"

"Right, baby," he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her into him again. Maybe he wasn't such an idiot after all. "Didn't think you'd be back," he said to Riley. "After you and Jude disappeared, we all--"

"You knew Jude?" I asked.

Gray jerked his head toward me. "Who's this one?"

"A friend," Riley said. I noticed he was keeping his eyes on Mika. Worried about what he'd do next, I wondered, or just trying not to watch Gray pawing his old girlfriend?

"Right." Gray sneered at me. "Didn't know you had a thing for blondes."

"Maybe it's true what they say," Mika said. "I hear skinners--"

"Mechs,"
I corrected him. It shouldn't have mattered-- sticks and stones and all that--but it did. Words counted.

"'Skinner' works for me," Mika said. "Computer brain shoved into some fake skin, walking around like you're a real person, stealing the identity of some dead guy--or girl, in your case. I assume."

"I didn't steal anything." Orgs just didn't get how something could be true and not true at the same time. In every way that mattered, I was the same Lia Kahn as I'd always been; in every way that mattered, I was completely different.

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

"Whatever," Riley said. "It doesn't matter. We need your help."

"Figures that's why you're back," Gray said. "You and Jude score big, and you disappear, but now that you
need
something--"

"You know why I stayed away," Riley said in a low voice.

Gray cocked his head at me. "But
she
doesn't, does she?"

Great. More secrets. "Why--"

"Lia." Riley shook his head at me, slightly. As if he was in charge of whether and when I shut up.

"Why'd he stay away?" I asked Gray.

He shrugged. "Ask him. Besides, doesn't really fit in anymore, does he, looking like
that
."

Riley hugged his arms across his chest like he was trying to cover as much of his skin as he could. Like he was ashamed. In the corp-town, he'd stared down all the whisperers and gapers, silently daring them to do their worst. But here he slumped and covered up, looking like he wished he could rip the syn-flesh off his body, strip by pale pink strip.

"We just need to crash here for a while," Riley said. For the first time, he met Sari's gaze. "Please."

"You're in trouble," Mika said. "We've got enough of that."

"And if Jude and me had said that last year, you'd be dead right now," Riley said. "You owe me."

"We owe
Jude
," Gray said. "Don't see him here." He grinned at me. "Unless he's feeling a little more
feminine
these days. That you in there, kid?"

"Let us stay here, keep it quiet, and you and Jude'll be even," Riley said. "You know I speak for him."

Sari gave him a shy smile, then perched on her tiptoes to whisper something in Gray's ear. His eyebrows knit together in a ragged V, but then he nodded. "Fine. Sixteenth floor, unit six, vacant for emergencies. It's yours. But only for a few days."

"You're fucking kidding," Mika spat.

"I'm fucking serious," Gray said. Ratface shut up.

Riley held out a hand to shake, but Gray didn't move. After a moment, Riley dropped his arm. "Thanks," he said.

"Nothing personal," Gray said. "I get that you're still the same guy, somewhere in there, but . . . you know."

"Yeah, nothing personal." Riley jerked his head at me. "Come on, let's go."

"Just for a few days," Mika reminded us as we tromped behind him up the decaying stairs.

"Yeah, then what?" I muttered.

"Can't hide forever," Riley said. "We deal with this, then we can go."

"Home?"

"Wherever."

We trekked up to the sixteenth floor, where we got a room of our own. A room with three blank beige walls and a pool of piss on the floor. A fourth wall of cracked windows cast the room in dying light, enough to see the film of grit coating the rickety table and chairs.

Foregoing the broken furniture, Riley slumped on the floor with his back to the wall and his feet a few inches from the urine. I found a place on the other side of the room. Mika reappeared a moment later and tossed us a wad of clothing. "Gray said you'd want it," he growled before slamming the door shut behind him.

A grimy pair of pants had landed nearest me. I nudged it with my foot, half expecting a cockroach to crawl out from beneath. "We want
these
?"

Riley was already scooping up the jeans and a black rag that might once have been a shirt. "We don't want to be wearing what we wore in the vids," he said. "Just in case."

"Plausible deniability," I said, flashing on the image that bothered me the most, my still, upright form at the center of those sprawling bodies, the only vertical in a horizontal world. "Got it." I lifted the gray pants between two fingers, glad I couldn't smell them, trying not to wonder what had caused the rust brown stain spread down the right leg. The T-shirt was of indeterminate color, the bastard child of mold and puke.

Riley turned his back on me, slipping out of his old shirt and into the new one in one smooth, swift motion, revealing only a glimpse of the skin underneath. Bodies were bodies, Jude always said. Shame was an org thing, a pointless leftover from the Garden of Eden. But I turned away as Riley went to work on the jeans. If he was so repulsed by the sight of me, I wasn't about to watch him. Besides, taut abs, bare ass, whatever. It was nothing I hadn't seen before. Instead, I focused on my own city gear. The pants were baggy, at least two sizes too big, but they knotted at the front, and I cinched them as tight as they'd go. The threadbare shirt was probably see-through, and I imagined I could feel a colony of insects swarming across my skin, burrowing deep into their new nest.

Regretfully, I dropped my own clothes on the floor, aiming squarely for the pool of urine, knowing it was the only way I wouldn't be tempted to put them on again. Riley still had his back to me, waiting.

"A true gentleman," I teased. "Unless you snuck a peek while my back was turned?"

"I wouldn't do that," he snapped, like he couldn't imagine why anyone would want to.

"Fine. You can turn around now," I said. "Your eyes are safe from the hideousness of my bare skin."

"That's not-- I wasn't--"

It wasn't like him to stammer. I let the awkward moment drag on as his gaze strayed involuntarily down my body. Then I put him out of his misery. "What now?"

"We wait till dark," Riley said. "Then we get on the network and see what we can figure out."

"But what about--"

"Doesn't matter if they track us to the city," Riley said. "We're protected here. Someone comes for us, there are warning systems in place."

"
Gray's
systems." Like I was going to trust my life to a total stranger.

Like I hadn't already.

Riley nodded. "I'll link in from a public zone."

"If it's that easy, why wait?" I didn't ask exactly what he expected to do once we
got
on the network, since the options--voice Jude, watch and rewatch the vids of the attack, give myself up--were all varying degrees of useless. But even a bad plan was better than no plan. I pulled out my ViM.

"You crazy?" he snapped. "Put that away."

I was tired of him treating me like a defective. Was it my fault I hadn't grown up in his precious little concrete hell? "What'd I do now?"

Riley rolled his eyes. "Signal's jammed here, remember? And you don't show off what you've got, unless you want someone to grab it."

Someone
, like the trigger-happy losers he'd chosen to entrust with our lives. "Nice friends you've got."

"Who said they were friends?"

I slammed my head back against the wall. Hard. "Great. Just great. So who the hell are they?"

"Some guys who owe me," Riley said. "Around here, that's what you get."

"So Jude's just some guy who owes you?"

Riley looked down. "That's different."

"And Sari?"

He curled his fingers into a fist and ground his knuckles against his lips. "What about her?"

I allowed myself a small smile. We were back in my territory now. "You tell me." Not that I cared about what Riley was or wasn't doing with some random slum case, but--aside from the not insignificant satisfaction to be gained from getting the prince of silent sulking to actually reveal a byte of information--I was bored. "I didn't know you kept in touch with any of your old . . . not-friends."

"Why would you know?"

"Does Jude know?" I asked. "Doesn't seem like he'd approve."

"You think I need his approval?"

"You're the one who nods along to whatever the hell comes out of his mouth," I said.

"Maybe I'm loyal."

"And that means never questioning anything?"

"Not the big things," Riley said.