Frozen

8. SOBERED UP

It began Monday at six a.m., when the bed whispered me awake—or would have if an inner alert hadn’t already forced my eyes open and my brain back to full-scale conscious dread. It began as I picked through a stack of clothes in disgust, rejecting favorites—the mood dress useless, its temperature-activated swooshes and swirls requiring fluctuations in body temperature, which themselves required an actual body; the sonicsilk with its harmonic rippling just another reminder of the music I’d lost; the LBD, a linked-in black dress whose net-knit flared neon with every voice or text, too sensational; the soundproofed hoodie functional and cozy but not sensational enough, blah and gray, like I planned to fade into the background, scenery instead of the star—and finally being forced to resort to jeans and an old print-shirt that snatched random phrases from the network and scrolled them across the fabric. The look had been very hot, and then quickly very not, but it had settled into a neutral acceptability, and it was the best I could do.

It began—my official return to school and an officially normal life—with breakfast, another meal I could no longer eat. Or maybe with the sound of the car door slamming shut, Zo and me tucked inside, or with the hills giving way to a long, flat stretch of familiar green, the castle of brick and stone rising above the horizon.

In that old, normal life, it began after every break—whether two days or two months—with a squeal in stereo, Cass and Terra catching sight of me, fashionably late, pulling into the lot. It began with a rocket-launched embrace, arms locked, shoulders encircled, styles critiqued, stories spilled, all, it seemed, released in a single, shared breath. This time I had no stories, at least none I was willing to share. This time nothing was normal. But as the car pulled into the lot, I saw them bounce off the steps in front of the school. I opened the door and heard the squeal.

It begins now.

The first thing that registered were their clothes. Loose, ill-fitting, dull-colors, Cass in a T-shirt with a printed, unchanging slogan, Terra in jeans that sagged on her ass and a black shirt too loose and too worn, without any visible tech, like something you’d find in a city, or from one of those thrift zones Zo was always haunting for new retro rags.

The second thing: “Zo Zo!”

That was Cass’s squeal, Cass’s wide grin—and then she saw me, and both of them faded away.

She’d cut her black hair short and spiky, cropping it with a dusting of pink. “Lia?” Cass narrowed her eyes as if squinting would squeeze my features back to their familiar shape—or maybe block them out altogether. “Is that… you?”

“It’s me.” I didn’t dare try a smile. “In the flesh.”

No one laughed. Terra looked sick. She hip-bumped Zo.

“Zo Zo, why didn’t you tell us that your sister was coming back today?” she asked with a determined perk. “We would have… done something special. To celebrate.”

Terra’s hair was the same, but she was actually—it didn’t seem possible—wearing lipstick. And some kind of purple glitter above her eyes. Which didn’t make sense, because no one wore makeup anymore, except the wrinkled poor who couldn’t afford gen-tech or lift-tucks, and trashy retro slummers who thought it was cool to pretend they fit in to the first group. Oh, and seniles, who didn’t count, since they didn’t even know what year it was and so couldn’t be expected to remember that makeup had gone out with TVs and artificial preservatives. Why spend all that credit on the perfect face if any random could match the effect with a black marker and some pinkish paint? Zo was wearing lipstick too, of course, but that was nothing new.

“I asked, uh, Zo Zo”—I shot Zo a look. She ignored it—“not to say anything.” A lie. Like I could ever have imagined Zo talking to my friends. “Don’t blame her.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Cass chirped. “You’re back!”

“Tell us everything,” Terra said. “Everything.”

“Zo Zo wouldn’t spill,” Cass said, thwapping Zo’s shoulder. “No matter how many times we asked. And, of course, someone has been totally zoned out forever.”

“Yeah…” I didn’t want to explain how I’d been lurking on the network in stealth mode, peeking over everyone’s shoulders, or why I hadn’t texted anyone back. Especially not with Zo—excuse me, Zo Zo—standing right there, listening to every word. “Sorry about that. I had a lot to, you know, deal with. For a while.”

“We can imagine,” Cass said.

“No, we can’t.” Terra sounded pissed. “Because we don’t know anything.”

“But we want to.” Cass touched my shoulder. “We do.”

Zo flicked a finger across her inner wrist, and the small screen she’d temp-adhered flashed twice. “Time, ladies.”

“Oh!” Cass blushed. “Right. We’re late. So, info dump later? Lunch?”

“Uh, sure—Wait, no, it’s Monday.” When it came to ruling the pack, lunch was key, but that was Tuesday through Friday. Mondays belonged to Walker. That had always been the deal, from the beginning.

“You and Walker?” Terra asked. “You mean he didn’t—”

“Walker will deal,” Cass cut in.

He didn’t what? I thought. But didn’t ask.

“It’ll be fine,” Cass said. “Trust me. Lunch.”

“Lunch,” I agreed. Walker could wait. “But where are you going?”

“Too complicated.” Cass giggled as Terra tugged her away. “Later. Lunch.”

“Right. Later. Lunch.” I grabbed Zo before she could follow them. “So?”

She shook me off. “So what?”

“So since when do you steal my best friends?”

She smirked. “Maybe they stole me.”

“And where are you all going?”

“They’re your best friends. Shouldn’t you already know?”

“You know I haven’t talked to them in months,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Zo!”

“I’m late.” She spun away, pausing only to shoot back the last word. “And at school it’s Zoie. Or Zo Zo.”

I was used to people watching me. I just wasn’t used to them gawking, then twisting away as soon as I caught them at it. The hallways were the worst. Conversation died as soon as I got close—sometimes tapering off, like a seeping wound that finally, as the heart stops pumping, runs out of blood, and sometimes cut off in its prime, a gunshot victim dropped by eight grams of lead. I knew the conversations that reached a violent, abrupt end were the ones about me, the machine roaming the halls claiming to be Lia Kahn. The other ones—the stumbling, mumbling trailings off into awkward silence—were just the result of nobody knowing what to say. That was at least better than the randoms who came up to me all day knowing exactly what to say, and this—no matter which words they used to disguise it—boiled down to “smile for the camera” as they aimed their ViMs at my face, zooming in for a close-up, pumping me for details they could post on their zone or a local stalker site and turn us both into fame whores.

I didn’t smile.

In class, even the teachers stared, not like they had much else to do beyond babysit us while we got our real education from the network. Which meant I watched my ViM screen while the rest of them watched me. The only relief came in biotech, usually the worst of all possible evils, but hidden behind the thick plastic face mask, hunched over my splicing kit, I could almost pass for normal.

Walker didn’t respond to my text about lunch, and when I showed up in the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. So I sat with the usual suspects—plus Zo—at the usual table in the front of the room, where everyone could look as much as they wanted. Surrounded by my friends, it was almost possible to pretend they were staring for the old reasons, wondering what we had that they didn’t, where they’d gone wrong between then—the half-remembered, better-forgotten days of all-men-are-created-equal playdates and birthday parties when no one cared how loud you were, how rude you were, how ugly you were, how stupid you were, how lame you were, because we were all too young and so too dumb to notice—and now, when how you looked and how you talked mattered as much as it should.

The Helmsley School was built three hundred years ago, for people who were almost as rich as we were, and the cafeteria, with its wood panels, floor-to-ceiling windows, and scalloped ceiling, was a suitably regal match for the exterior, all stone columns and brick arches. Thanks to the population crash and the upswing in linked ed, only half the tables were filled, but any group larger than three is enough for an us/them divide. After all, that was—as we’d learned in kindergarten—the key to civilization and the survival of the species. Finite supply plus infinite demand equaled conflict, battle, nature red in tooth and claw; bloody struggle for turf, status, sex equaled survival of the fittest. And we were the fittest.

Staying at the top meant defying expectations and reversing the norm, because there was nothing exclusive about acting like everyone else. Which meant that if the rest of the school was gaping at my new face and freakish body, my friends, not to mention the people I counted as friends by virtue of social proximity, would ignore the obvious, forgo the questions, and act as if they ate with a skinner every day—as, from now on, they would. Except for the fact that the skinner wasn’t eating.

Which wasn’t as awkward as the fact that my sister was. And was doing so at my table.

Or the fact that everyone else was tricked out in retro slum gear, just like her. I was the only person wearing anything with visible tech—the only person at the table, at least. I was dressed exactly like everyone else in the room. Normal.

But the clothes didn’t explain why everything felt so wrong. You didn’t claw your way to the top of the pyramid without knowing how to read people. You needed a radar, something to sense the smallest of fluctuations in the social field. You needed the skills to know, even with your eyes closed and your ears plugged, who was scheming, who was suffering, who was gaining on you, who was on the way out. If you couldn’t figure out that last one, chances are, it was you.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you could learn. You either had it or you didn’t.

Except it turned out there was a third option: You had it, and then you lost it.

Part of it was them. No one could act normal, not while I was in the room.

Part of it was me.

The things I used to know about people, the things I understood… It wasn’t a rational thing. It was just something I felt, like the way I could feel when someone was watching me.

I couldn’t do that anymore either.

I felt like I’d gone blind.

It didn’t help that I barely knew half the people at the table, especially the two grunters pawing Cass and Terra—the reason, I quickly found out, they’d run off so quickly that morning. New season, new boys.

No sign of Walker.

No one asked me where he was.

Bliss had picked that day’s b-mod, which meant—big surprise—everyone was blissed out. Everyone except me, since b-mods wouldn’t do much for someone without brain chemicals to modify. I’d half expected them to opt for some retro drugs to match the retro clothes. Some of Zo’s dozers, maybe, or even something alcohol based, like in the bad old days of hangovers and beer bellies. But no matter how in retro was, it couldn’t offer anything that would kick in immediately and wear off by the end of the period. Advantage: b-mods. As far as I was concerned, bliss mods were bad enough when I was on them too, always leaving a weird moody aftertaste, like crashing after a sugar high. Staying cold sober while the rest of them blissed up? Infinitely worse.

“So do you have, like, superpowers?” That was Cass’s mouth breather. It was worse when guys giggled. That just wasn’t natural. “Are you an evil crime fighter now?” Cass glared at him, smacking his hand away when he tried to squeeze my bicep.

Terra tugged at my print-shirt. “You got a uniform on under here? For your secret identity?”

Zo blew out a laugh. It was the first time since the accident that I’d seen her with a real smile. “I’m the superhero.” She narrowed her eyes at Cass. “The power to wither with a single glare.”

Cass clutched at her chest. “You got me!” She toppled over, tumbling into me. “Oh. Sorry.” She sprang up, posture straight, arms assembled in her lap, a careful four or five inches away from mine. No one spoke.

“Apparently I have the power of awkwardness,” I joked. Awkwardly. “Lia Kahn, super-buzz-killer.”

No one laughed.

Terra’s boy—Axe or Jax or something; it wasn’t clear and since no one else seemed to care, I didn’t either—grunted something about his balls itching, and how he’d prefer the power to scratch them without anyone seeing. Cass elbowed her guy, who was busy making an adjustment of his own. “How about you try that power sometime.” She pulled his hand out of his lap—and didn’t let go.

“Power,” the guy repeated. “Pow-er. Weird word. Word weeeeiiiird.” He wrapped his hairy arms around Cass, who dissolved into a shivering mass of giggles.

The bliss mod was kicking it up.

“What if we only walk in wouble-woo words,” Bliss suggested, laughing.

Zo shrugged and flashed a sly smile. “Whatever works.”

“Why?” Terra asked.

“Why wot!” her boy crowed.

“Where’s Walker?” Bliss said, in a way that made me wonder if the whole w thing hadn’t just been a convenient way of getting around to the question, except that Bliss wasn’t smart enough to formulate such a plan, even when off the drugs.

“Walker’s waiting,” Cass said, and the others nodded, as if that made any sense.

“Wise Walker.”

“Or Walker’s whizzing!”

“What would Walker want?”

“Who would Walker want?” Bliss again.

“Walker wonders what’s worse, waiting or wanting or wussing,” Zo said in the tone of someone who knows she’s won a game. Everyone else nodded at wordwise Zo Zo. Hail to the chief.

I stood up. “See you guys later.”

“Wait!” Cass cackled. “We… uh, w—” The letter almost foiled her. Then, at the last minute, “We want Wia!”

Bliss pointed at me. “Whiner.” Then giggled and shook her head. “Whatever.”

Everyone lifted a glass, toasted. “Whatever!”

So I ditched the table and the cafeteria, and spent the rest of lunch outside, where I could be alone because it was too cold, at least too cold for anyone warm-blooded enough to care. Those of us running on battery power, on the other hand, could sit under a tree, wait for the bell, ignore the wind and the frost, because none of it—none of it—mattered.

Whatever.

That was the first day. And the next few weren’t any better. My social life was hemorrhaging. And time, contrary to popular opinion, did not heal the wound. I retrofitted my wardrobe; I stuck it out through one lunch after another, b-mod haze and all. I did not ask Zo how she’d managed to weasel her way into every corner of my life or what had happened to her own life and the randoms she used to know and love. I didn’t ask Zo much of anything. We shared a house, shared a lunch table, a set of friends, even—despite a lack of permission and my conviction that I was probably risking infestation from whatever hardy insects had survived all those decades in someone’s moldy attic—her clothes. But we didn’t talk. Which was fine with me.

I didn’t talk to Cass or Terra, either, not about anything that mattered. And when I asked them about Zo… The first time we were alone, there it was, flat out: Since when don’t we hate my sister? The conversation didn’t get very far.

“After, you know, what happened,” Cass stammered. “We were…”

“Upset,” Terra said. “And worried about her.”

“About you too, of course.”

“But you weren’t here.”

“And you weren’t linked in.”

I waited for them to say they were just being nice—out of character, maybe, but not out of the realm of possibility. That Zo had been so distraught by “what happened” that they’d needed to comfort her, to include her, what any friends would do for a suffering little sister. They didn’t.

“So no one knew what was going on with you…”

“And Zo just…”

“Surprised us,” Cass said.

“She’s different now,” Terra said.

I wasn’t buying it. “Seems the same to me.” Even though that wasn’t quite true either.

Cass looked away. “Maybe that’s because you’re different too.”

After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore.

Walker and I, on the other hand, did nothing but talk. Which wasn’t exactly our strong suit. I didn’t see him at school, not for days. That was no accident. He was avoiding me, and for a while, I let him. I wasn’t stupid. It’s not like I expected we’d just keep going like nothing had happened. Not right away, at least. He was weirded out, so for a few days, I let him hide. But I knew Walker, and I knew what he needed, even if he didn’t. He needed me.

I staked out his car. He emerged from the building surrounded by people—girls, to be specific, but there was nothing new about that. Walker was that type; he got off on it. But that was fine, because he always ended up with me. As he did this time. The girls spotted me before he did, and faded away.

I watched him walk. It was more of a lope, arms swinging wide, legs sucking up pavement. Walker had never asked me out, not in any kind of sweaty-palmed, bumbling, would-you-like-to-whatever kind of thing, not that anyone did that, but if someone were going to, it wouldn’t be Walker. When it happened, it had happened fast and unmemorably, as if all along both of us had known we would eventually end up together. There had been yet another party, yet another buzz. There had been a late-night, early-morning haze, a group of us sprawled on someone’s floor, heads on stomachs, legs tangled, fingers absent-mindedly intertwined, lids dropping shut until only two of us were awake, and while I hadn’t been waiting up for him and he hadn’t been waiting up for me, it seemed like we had. Like the whole night—the party, the group, everything—had been expressly designed to deliver us to this point, to an empty patch of carpet shadowed by the couch, to his arm oh-so-casually sprawled across my thigh, to whatever would happen when he slid toward me and I rolled to face him and our bodies ate up the space between. By which I mean, I had known him forever, but I had never wanted him—until that night, when I suddenly did. He was the one who acted. Brushed my hair out of my face. Kissed me, sleepy-eyed and loose-lipped, soft, and then, like we’d waited too long, even though we hadn’t waited at all, hard. Afterward, when it was already obvious that this wasn’t just another night, that this was a beginning of something, he pretended that he’d been planning it for a while, secretly pining and plotting. He wasn’t lying, not to me, at least. I knew he believed it. But I also knew it had been the same for him as it was for me: lying there, fighting sleep without knowing why, knowing there was a reason to stay awake, something that needed doing, and then, somehow, just knowing.

And doing.

“You’re avoiding me,” I said, leaning against the hood of the car.

He shook his head no.

I shook my head yes.

He shrugged. “Been busy.”

“You’re never busy,” I said.

“Things change.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

“Walker, I…”

“What?”

I let myself sink back against the car. It was a thing; it had no choice but to hold me up. “It’s been a long week, that’s all.”

“You want to… talk about it?”

“Not really.” And I wasn’t even saying that because I knew he wanted me to, although he clearly did. Mostly I just wanted him to kiss me again, for real this time. But what was I supposed to do. Ask?

“So… you want to get something to eat?”

I just looked at him.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

“No problem.” He would learn; we would adjust.

“You want to come over, play some Akira?” he said.

We’d been into the game for months, although he liked it more than I did, especially since he spent most of his play on hunting ghosts in Akira’s craggy moonscape, and zooming down the canyons and slithering through the worm-ridden tunnels always made me a little motion sick. Not that queasiness was much of a problem anymore, but boredom was. Generally after twenty minutes or so of busting virtual creepy crawlies while Walker flirted with slutty snake-women, their naked chests covered with shimmering scales and their users probably a thousand miles away, looking for a quick and easy love-link, I was ready for a nap. Or at least, I was ready to lie down. Usually, with the right combination of sulk and seduction, with Walker on top of me. And maybe that was the point.

“Sure.”

And soon, side by side on his couch, goggled up and strapped in, we disappeared into the world of the game, his av and mine creeping down haunted hallways, hand in hand, touching without feeling, reality forgotten, or at least irrelevant, which was enough.

It was enough until it wasn’t anymore, and then I slipped out of the game and back into the world. He stayed in, twitching, ducking his head, clutching the air, and grabbing for invisible demons, a careful space between us. I could have touched him then. He was too lost in the virtual universe to notice a hand on his leg, his lower back, his face. I’d done it before, more than once, making a game of it; how far could I go before calling him back to the surface, how deep had he sunk, how quickly could I reel him back in. But I didn’t touch him, just waited for him to tire of the game, and when he did, I went home.

“No,” the coach said when I finally found the courage to ask her. “I’m sorry, Lia. I wish I could, but… no.”

“I know I’m out of shape, but I can get up to speed. I know I can.”

“It’s not that.” She was slim and blond, and I wondered, as I often did, why she’d chosen coaching as her hobby instead of teaching or crafts. Something cozy and indoors, like most in her position, afraid of leathering their skin under the open sky. I got that she had to do something. It was a social imperative for the jobless rich, since the children of the wealthy weren’t going to raise themselves (nor, obviously, be raised by the parents of the poor), but why opt for something that required so much actual work?

I suspected it was because, like me, she loved to run. Missed it, missed the uniforms and the competitions and the trophies and even the outdoors. I could imagine myself doing the same thing—except, of course, that I was destined for productivity. Let my spouse, whoever he turned out to be, ply his hobbies. I’d been informed from day one—still in diapers, spitting and drooling—that I would have a career. Eventually.

In the meantime I would run.

“Did you give my spot away?” I asked, glancing over at the track. Zo was powering through her second mile. We had the same genetic advantages, I reminded myself. The same muscle tone, coordination, stamina—she’d just never bothered to use hers before. And meanwhile I’d used mine up.

“It’s not that, either.”

“What, then?”

“It’s…” She looked me up and down, then grimaced, like it was my fault for making her say it. “Lia, I can’t let you run with the team, not like this. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“What’s not fair?” I asked. “It’s not like I can run any faster.”

“I have no evidence of that,” she said. “As far as the league is concerned, you’d be running with an unfair advantage.”

That was almost funny. “Trust me, there’s no advantage.”

“It’s just not natural.”

I couldn’t believe it. More to the point, I couldn’t accept it. I needed to run. “Jay Chesin runs with a prosthetic leg—that’s not natural.”

“That’s different.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I caught her sagging a bit in relief, as if she’d spent the whole conversation waiting—in vain—for me to blink.

“What about the Ana League? I’d run with them if I had to.” As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t real running, not if you were chemically amping your strength and speed. I knew I’d never be able to keep up if I ran natural, but much as I loved my trophies, I didn’t need to win. I needed to run.

The coach shook her head again. “They won’t let you run either.”

“But they’re anabolic,” I said. Paused, reminded myself not to whine. Be calm. Be rational. Be irrefutable. “It’s a whole league for people who don’t play fair. How can I be against the rules if there are no rules?”

“There are rules,” she said, mouthing the official party line, even though everyone knew the Ana League was anything goes. “They wouldn’t let you drive a car to the finish line… and they won’t let you run. Not like this.”

“But—”

“Lia, be realistic,” she snapped. “You don’t breathe. You don’t get tired. For all anyone knows, you can run as fast as you want, as far as you want. Slotting you in would make a mockery of the whole race. Do you really want to ruin things for everyone else?”

I didn’t care about everyone else. And until recently I’d never needed to pretend I did. When you’re winning, no one expects you to care. They only expect you to keep winning.

“I guess not,” I said.

“I really am sorry.” Like we could be friends again, now that I’d let her pretend she was doing the right thing.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.” She looked like she wanted to say no.

“Is it actually written in the rules somewhere that…” I still didn’t know what to call the thing I’d become. “… people in my situation aren’t eligible?”

The coach hesitated. “This particular… situation hasn’t come up before. Not in this league.”

“So you’re just assuming, then.”

“What are you getting at?”

“If the league didn’t care—if I got my father to talk to someone and made it okay—would you want me back on the team?” I could have done it. I knew it, and she knew it. It’s not about the money, my father always said. These days everyone has money. It’s about the power. And he had that, too.

But that wasn’t the question. I wasn’t asking if I could bully my way back onto the team. I was asking whether she wanted me to.

This time she didn’t hesitate at all. “No.”

Friday morning was Persuasive Speech, a weekly dose of posture, comportment, and projection techniques intended to smooth our eventual rise into the ranks of social and political prominence. The road to power may have been paved with lies, but according to Persuasive Speech guru M. Stafford, said lies had to be carefully candy coated with a paper-thin layer of truth. Or at least, the appearance of truth.

M. Stafford, of course, rarely told us anything we didn’t already know.

Of all the useless classes the Helmsley School offered—and there was little else on the menu—none was more useless than Persuasive Speech. M. Stafford was big into tedious presentations on even more tedious current events, which didn’t persuade us of anything except that we’d made an enormous mistake signing up for the class in the first place. A mistake, at least, for anyone who’d been expecting to learn something. For those of us expecting an easy A and plenty of time to lounge in the back of the room, linked in and zoned out while M. Stafford carefully ignored her snoozing audience, it fulfilled our every need.

So, all good. Except that while I’d been out “uh, sick”—that was M. Stafford’s feeble euphemism—Becca Mai had transferred into the class, and M. Stafford had given my seat away. Which meant that Becca sat in back with Cass and Terra and Bliss while I was stuck at a broken desk in the front row, wobbling on the loose leg every time I shifted my weight and trying to pretend that Auden Heller wasn’t aiming his creepy stare squarely in my direction.

I was—well, “sure” would be the wrong word, but let’s say “willing to accept the possibility”—that Auden didn’t intend to be creepy. He’d never been particularly creepy before. But then, he’d never been much of anything, except different, and not in the right way. Those glasses, for one thing. No one needed glasses anymore. At least, no one who could afford the fix, and no one without enough credit for that would have been allowed within fifty miles of the Helmsley School. There were net-linked glasses, of course, but those hadn’t been popular since we were kids. Now anyone who wanted that kind of access (and that kind of headache) could just pop in a lens while everyone else went back to screens and keyboards. The only reason to wear glasses now—especially glasses without tech—was to look different. It was the same with his watch. They didn’t even make watches anymore. FlexiViMs you could wrap around your wrist, or tattoo onto your forearm? Yes. But all the watch did was tell time, and—as I’d discovered one day a few years ago when one of Walker’s idiot friends snagged the watch to see if it would make Auden cry—it didn’t even do that right. A couple of miniature sticks swept out circle after circle, and you had to calculate the angles to even know the hour. And, yes, I was smart enough to figure it out, but why bother to do a math problem every time you want to know what time it is, when you can just get your ViM to flash the info and then move on with your life?

We’d been assigned to deliver a five-minute speech on a current issue that we felt strongly about. “We” didn’t include “me.” I’d been excused by virtue of my “uh, extended illness.” I wondered how M. Stafford would, if pressed, describe my sickly condition. Did she consider death, in my case, to be a fatal disease?

Auden went first, stammering his way through some lunatic theory that the government could solve the energy crisis whenever it wanted, but preferred using the power shortage to control the cities and the poor, oppressed masses who lived there. He didn’t explain where he thought all this magical energy was going to come from, or why, if the masses were so sad and oppressed, they never did anything about it. Everyone knew you could work your way out of the city if you wanted, and not just to a corp-town—although even that was better since you were guaranteed power and med-tech—but to a real life. If they didn’t want to bother, how was that our problem?

Auden’s conspiracy theories never came with much evidence or follow-through. I suspected he just liked getting a rise out of people with his flashy, if stupid, claims: The corps are secretly running the country! The Disneypocalypse was an inside job! The organic farmers poisoned the corn crop and pinned it on the terrorists to scare people away from mass production! B-mods are the opium of the masses! Apparently, if they made good slogans, they didn’t have to make good sense.

Next up, Sarit Rifkin, whose speech on the importance of eating more red meat didn’t include the fact that her family owned the county’s only cattle farm and reaped credit for every steak sold. Cass detailed the criteria she used to select new shoes. Fox T. spewed five minutes of crap about his favorite tactics for racking up Akira kills. Fox J.—also known as Red-tailed Fox, less because of his long auburn ponytail than because of the time he and Becca started making out in her father’s kitchen and Fox planted his ass on the stove, apparently so engrossed in the hot and heavy that it took him a full minute to realize the stove was on—got in about half a minute of arguing that chest lift-tucks should be mandatory for everyone overage and under a C cup before M. Stafford cut him off.

That was when Bliss, with her Fox-approved D cups, took the podium. She stood there for a long moment without speaking.

M. Stafford had the kind of voice you might use to talk to a mental patient, slow and measured and just a little too understanding. “Go on, Bliss.”

Bliss shifted her weight. “I’m not sure I should.”

“Are you sure you want to pass the class?”

Bliss reddened. Then glared at me, like she was daring me to blame her for going forward. “I wrote this last week,” she said defensively. “Before I knew that—” She stopped. “I wrote this last week.”

“Then you should be tired of waiting to deliver it,” M. Stafford said. “Go on, we won’t bite.”

Bliss Tanzen did bite, I happened to know—courtesy of Walker, who had been out with her a few times before trading up.

She cleared her throat. “A mechanical copy, no matter how detailed or exact, can never be anything more than an artificial replica of human life.”

I sat very still, face blank.

“It is for this reason that I argue that recipients of the download procedure should not be afforded the same rights and privileges of human citizens of society.”

I looked up, just for a second, long enough to note that everyone was staring at me, including M. Stafford. Everyone, with two exceptions: Bliss had her eyes fixed on her clunky speech. Auden had his eyes fixed on Bliss.

“You don’t have to believe in something called a soul”—someone in back snickered at the word—“to believe that a person can’t just be copied into a computer. They call it a copy because that’s what it is—not the real thing. Just a computer that’s been programmed to act that way.”

M. Stafford wasn’t going to stop her, I realized. Nor were Cass or Terra or anyone else. And I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. Four more minutes, I told myself. Just tune her out and, when it’s over, move on.

“Skinners can talk,” Bliss said. Fox J.’s use of the term “tits” had been deemed too offensive for our sensitive ears, but apparently “skinner” was just fine. “But so can my refrigerator, if it thinks I need more iron in my diet. Skinners can move, but so can my car, if I tell it where to go. My refrigerator doesn’t get to vote, and my car doesn’t get to use my credit to buy itself a new paint job.”

“She’s not a car!” Auden said loudly.

I wanted to slink down in my seat—slink under my seat. But I stayed still.

“No interruptions,” M. Stafford snapped. “We allowed you the privilege of speaking your mind; please respect your classmates enough to do the same.”

“My mind isn’t filled with ignorant trash,” Auden said. “And what about respecting Lia?”

I wanted to strangle him.

“You can stay silent or you can go,” M. Stafford said.

Auden went.

M. Stafford looked at me, her face unreadable. “Anyone else?”

I wasn’t sure if it was an offer or a warning. Either way, I ignored it. And when Bliss continued, I ignored her too.

When class finally ended, I stayed in my seat long enough to let everyone else drift out of the room. Then I waited just a moment longer, preparing myself for the inevitable onslaught of pity that would hit once I stepped into the hallway, Cass and Terra and random clingers assuring me that I shouldn’t listen, that Bliss was a moron, that she was just jealous, that they were here if I needed to talk—which I did not. Nor did I need anyone’s pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I had been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.

But the hallway was empty. Only one person waited for me, rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, his fist clenched around the ugly green bag he always carried.

“You okay?” Auden asked.

I walked right past him, down the hall, around the corner, all the way to the door that let out into the parking lot, where I could find the car and ride away. Let Zo figure out her own way home.

He followed. “She was wrong, you know.”

I put my hand on the door, but didn’t open it. I wasn’t against ditching school, not in principle, at least, but I also wasn’t about to let Bliss Tanzen drive me out.

“She shouldn’t have said those things,” he went on.

“It was an assignment,” I said, my back to him, undecided. Outside meant blissful escape; inside meant more pretending, smiling dumbly as if I didn’t hear the whispers that followed me everywhere. Inside meant going to lunch, facing Bliss and everyone who’d heard her. Everyone who’d sat quietly and listened. But outside meant running away, and I couldn’t do that.

I wasn’t the type.

“She was wrong,” Auden said in a pained voice. “About the download, about you not being—”

I finally faced him. “First of all, she wasn’t talking about me,” I snapped. “ You were the one who brought me into it, and second of all, thanks very much for that. You think I don’t know she was wrong? You think I need someone like you telling me who I am? And now, like I didn’t have enough problems, the whole school probably thinks we’re—” Rude enough, I told myself, and stopped.

“We’re what?”

“Nothing.”

“Friends?” He spat out a bitter laugh, his face twisting beneath his stupid black glasses. “Don’t worry. No one would think that.” His black hair was short, almost buzzed, and his nose was crooked. Someone had done a really bad job selecting for him, I thought. It was one thing to sacrifice looks for athletic ability or freakish intelligence or artistic aptitude—everyone was, of course, only allowed to be so special and no more—but I happened to know he didn’t have any of those things, or at least, not enough of them to justify his face. If I’d just seen him on the street somewhere, I’m not saying I would have assumed he was poor, but I wouldn’t have assumed he was one of us.

And maybe that was his real problem: Credit or not, he wasn’t.

“I’m not worried,” I said. “And even if I was, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“If I were you, I’d focus on helping yourself. You need it more than I do.”

“Meaning what?”

“Just look at you.” The clothes: wrong. The face: wrong. The attitude: wrong. The tattered green bag that looked like something my grandmother would carry around: weird and wrong. “It’s like you’re not even trying.”

“Trying to what?”

“Trying to be normal!” I lost it. “Look what you’ve got—and you’re wasting it!”

A scowl flashed across his face, then disappeared just as quickly. “What I’ve got?” He raised his eyebrows. “You mean like a flesh-and-blood body? A ‘normal’ brain?”

“That is not what I said.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be normal,” he said calmly. “Maybe it’s okay that you’re not.”

“Who said I’m not?”

He just looked at me, like it was obvious, like I was stupid for even asking such a question when I was standing there forming a response with a brain that ran off the same wireless power grid as the school trash compactor.

“Why am I even talking to you?” I said, disgusted.

“You tell me.”

“It was a rhetorical question.” I brushed past him. He didn’t flinch as our arms grazed against each other. “Just don’t bother ‘helping’ again.”

“Don’t worry.”

I didn’t ditch school. I went back to class, kept my head down, paid attention. I went to lunch, ready to face Bliss, whether it meant an apology or a fight. But she wasn’t there. Nor was Cass or Terra or their new boy toys or Zo or Walker. Becca, who would probably have spent the whole meal babbling about some species of frog she was intent on rescuing from extinction, wasn’t there either. I found out later that they’d all cut out, grabbed lunch at Cass’s place, and gotten an early start on the weekend partying. “I know we told you,” Cass said later when I finally tracked her down. “You must have forgot.”

Auden ate at an empty table tucked into a corner, half hidden behind a thick wooden pillar. I could feel him watching me.

I didn’t eat, of course. But I took a tray of food and sat in the usual spot, alone.

It was the best meal I’d had all week.