Frozen

16. IN THE DARK

“What’s this for?” Auden asked when I gave him the box wrapped in silver foil. He’d been avoiding me for days, but I finally cornered him at lunch. He’d found himself another secluded corner to hide in, far away from mine.

“I just wanted to,” I said, feeling a little awkward. I couldn’t say I was sorry, not really, because then we would have had to get into what I was sorry for. And neither of us wanted to touch that because we both knew: I was sorry for not wanting him the way he wanted me. But that meant I couldn’t tell him the other part of the truth, that I needed him. It didn’t matter if he was an org and I was a mech; it didn’t matter what Jude thought. Jude who was like me, but didn’t understand me at all. Who knew nothing.

Auden opened the box. He pulled out a gray bag with a smart-strap that would heat up whenever a new message came in. The front flap had a full-size screen and the back doubled as a pocket and a keyboard, perfect—as the pop-up had said—for the stylish guy who needs to link on the go. Not that Auden was stylish, or did much of anything on the go, but it looked good. Definitely better than the ragged green sack he toted around everywhere. I might not have been cool anymore, but my taste still was.

He looked confused.

“Thought you could use a new one,” I said.

Auden didn’t take it out of the box. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I wanted to,” I said again.

“Really, you shouldn’t have.” He sighed, and finally picked up the bag, flipping it open and glancing inside before placing it back in the box. He didn’t even notice the smart-strap, much less the board and the screen. “But thanks, I guess.”

It looked like the symbolic approach wasn’t working. Did he not get that I was trying to spare him even more embarrassment? Shouldn’t he be grateful?

Especially since, when you think about it, he was the one who should have been apologizing. I wasn’t the one making unreasonable demands or throwing a temper tantrum when I didn’t get what I wanted.

But I’d lost the moral high ground when I’d given in to Jude. Even if Auden didn’t know—could never know—I knew.

“I’m sorry about before,” I said. If he really wanted to talk about it, then fine. We’d talk.

“You don’t have to—”

“I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said.

“No, I’m glad you did.” Lie. “We should be honest with each other.” Lie number two. “And what I said? About wishing I could go back to the way things were before? I can’t… I can’t take that back. But, Auden, you have to know, you’re the only good thing that’s happened to me since the accident. The only thing.” Truth.

Except for yesterday, some rebellious part of my brain pointed out. Except for Jude. Except for what he did. And what he gave me. But that was nothing. That was already forgotten.

Lie number three.

“You don’t have to say that,” Auden said.

“I do.” I smiled nervously. “Are we okay? I really need us to be okay.”

“Me too,” he said, and gave me a tight hug.

Now or never, I decided. “So, now that we’re friends again… any chance you want to do me a favor?”

Auden let go, laughing. “Now I get it. That wasn’t a gift, it was a bribe.”

“No! Well… maybe a little.”

He sighed. “What do you need?”

“Jude and the rest of them are going out again tonight.” I winced at the expression on his face, stranded somewhere between suspicion and disgust. “I want to go. I thought maybe you’d come with me.”

“Back to the waterfall? Are you crazy?”

I shook my head. “They’re doing something else tonight. I don’t know what. It’s some kind of big secret.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time: Are you crazy?”

“You’re the one who talked me into going last time,” I pointed out. “Remember all that stuff about facing up to my fears, meeting people who were like me and could understand what I’m going through?”

“Remember how it turned out that Jude was an asshole and all his little followers were daredevil nut jobs who thought killing themselves might be a fun way to pass the time?”

“They weren’t trying to kill themselves,” I said.

“They were doing a pretty good imitation of it.”

“Auden, you know it’s different for us.”

“Us? Since when—”

“You know what I mean,” I snapped. “It wasn’t that dangerous. They were just having fun.”

“Exactly. What kind of person thinks that’s fun?” He scowled. “A seriously messed-up person. Or a person who can’t think for himself.”

“Or maybe a person who’s not a person at all. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“No!” Auden sighed. “You know I don’t think that way about you. I just don’t get why you’d want to go back. What’s the point?”

I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go back.

It wasn’t because I wanted another dose of whatever Jude had to give me. I’d promised myself it wasn’t because of that.

“They’re trying to test their limits,” I told him, “and to explore the possibilities of this thing. To enjoy it a little. Is that so bad?”

“When did you start talking like that?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t know. Like him.”

“Look, if you don’t want to go with me, I’ll go by myself,” I said, annoyed. “No big deal.”

“It is a big deal,” he said. “Whatever they’re doing, I’m sure it’ll be dangerous. And stupid. I’m not letting you go by yourself.”

“I don’t need you to protect me,” I said, even though that’s exactly what I’d asked of him—and I’d asked knowing he would never be able to say no.

“Too bad. That’s what you’ve got.”

“What’s the point?” Auden asked.

“Because we can,” Jude said. “Because why not?”

Auden pulled me away from the group. He was still carrying his hideous green bag. “This is a bad idea.”

“You’re the one always talking about the people stuck living in the cities,” I said. “Don’t you actually want to see one?”

“Not like this,” he mumbled. “Not by ourselves. At night.” But I knew I had him.

There were ten of us, including me and Auden. Again, no one had wanted him to come along, but I’d insisted, and Jude had gone along with it. As before, everyone else went along with Jude.

“You can leave, if you want,” I offered, and I was almost hoping he would take me up on it. I wanted him there, I did. But even I knew he didn’t belong.

Auden shook his head. “You know the city people; they hate mechs more than anyone,” he said. “Most of them die before they hit forty, and you’re going to live forever. You really think that’s a good combination?”

“I think Lia trusts me,” Jude said, appearing behind us and resting his hand on my shoulder. I shook it off. “Maybe you should give her a little more credit.”

I glared at him. “Don’t touch me.”

He just smiled. “I’ll give you two a minute,” he said. “We’re leaving in five. Stay or go.”

Once he was gone, Auden gave me a weird look. “What was that?”

“What?”

“The two of you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He headed back toward the group of mechs waiting for their field trip to begin. “Let’s just go.”

We took two cars. Jude and Auden sat in the front seat of ours, not talking. I squeezed into the back with Quinn and some guy whose name I didn’t hear the first time—and didn’t get much chance to ask a second time, since he spent most of the ride with his tongue down Quinn’s throat. I looked out the window.

The skyline carved dark, jagged chunks out of the sky. The car sped along swooping bands of concrete, a purposeless, unending sculpture of roads that dipped over and under one another, splitting, merging, crisscrossing; so much space and all of it empty. Even without the curfew no one would be stupid enough to enter a city at night. And no one who lived there had a car. That would have guzzled too much fuel; that would have made it too easy to get out.

We parked on a narrow street. Without a word Quinn and the other mech began collecting armfuls of debris from the gutter while Jude pulled a stained beige tarp from the trunk and draped it over the car. The gutter trash went on top.

“Best way to keep it safe,” Jude explained. Across the street the passengers of the second car were doing the same.

It was eerily quiet. The dark buildings shot up on all sides, and I reminded myself that at least some of them were full of people, staying warm, staying dry, staying off the streets after curfew. But everything was so still and empty, it was hard to imagine that anyone was alive here. The group moved stealthily, stepping lightly, staying clustered in a pack. Only Auden breathed.

“What now?” I whispered.

“We look around,” Jude said. “And we try not to get caught.”

Caught by who? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t really want an answer.

This city had been lucky. No major bombings, so no radioactive debris. Too far east for the Water Wars, too far north for the flooding. They’d gotten hit by the Comstock flu strain, but no worse than any of the other population centers, and in the last bio-attack, before the cities cleared out for good, they’d lost less than a million.

They’d been lucky.

Not lucky enough for anyone to stay, at least voluntarily, but that much was true for all the cities. Who would be crazy enough to stick around an energy-poor, germ-ridden death trap if they had enough credit to get the hell out?

We wandered down the broad, empty avenues, flashlight beams playing across the pavement. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where the lights went off two hours after sunset, where you could only link in once a day if you were lucky enough to find a screen that worked, where the punishment for energy theft was death.

I couldn’t.

There wasn’t enough to go around, I reminded myself. Of anything. There wasn’t enough energy for everyone to stay wired all day, every day. There wasn’t enough fuel or enough road for everyone to own cars. There weren’t enough cows—at least not enough free-range, grass-fed cows, now that you weren’t allowed to raise anything else—for everyone to eat meat. There wasn’t enough space for everyone to have a kid. Either we would all have to suffer—or some would have to sacrifice.

I was just glad it was them and not me.

I was also glad my power cells were fully loaded. There was no wireless web of energy here, and if something happened, if I somehow got left behind, there would be nowhere to recharge. After a few days I would just… fade out.

“Those used to light up,” Auden whispered in my ear, pointing at the thick, empty screens papered across almost every building. “Like giant pop-ups. Telling people what to buy.”

“What a waste of energy,” I whispered back. Maybe these people deserved to live in the dark.

Our feet crunched with every step. Crushed glass, I decided, as we passed broken window after broken window. Everything here was broken.

I wanted to go home.

A distant howl cut through the silence.

“What was that?” I whispered, freezing in place.

“Just a dog.” Jude didn’t bother to whisper. “Fighting it out for who gets to run the place. Like the rats and the roaches haven’t already won.” He turned sharply to the right, leading us down another wide avenue, its gutters flowing with trash. Auden was breathing shallowly and, for the first time, it occurred to me how the place must stink, with its mounds of garbage heaped on urine-stained pavement. “This way.”

Two blocks later we heard the scream. High-pitched, piercing, it went on and on and—it stopped. It didn’t fade away. It just stopped.

That was no dog.

We went deeper into the city, and I tried not to wonder how we would find our way out.

Jude stopped short in front of a building so tall it blotted out most of the sky. “Last stop for orgs,” he said, staring at Auden.

Auden glared back. “Meaning?”

“Building’s locked down, and all those biosensors…” Jude smirked. “You don’t want to start panting and get us caught, now do you?”

“I’m supposed to wait out here while you… do what, exactly?”

“Just taking a look around. We’ll be back before you get too scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Auden said fiercely.

Jude shrugged. “Great. Then you don’t mind if we—”

“You’re not going with them?” Auden half-said, half-asked, grabbing my arm.

I paused. “I don’t have to. I can wait down here with you… if you want.” I knew I should stay.

But I didn’t want to.

“No.” Auden closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. So you should do it. All the way.”

Jude chuckled softly. “Funny, she never struck me as an all-the-way kind of girl.”

I ignored him.

“You sure?” I asked Auden.

“Yeah. Go.” He gave me a weak smile. “Be careful.”

“You too.”

Jude and one of the other guys, the tall, brooding one named Riley, bashed open one of the doors, and we crept inside. It was even darker in there, a broad space smudged with shadows. A screen glinted in the beam of someone’s flashlight, and then another and another. This is where the city people came to link in, I realized. It explained why the building was locked down. It didn’t explain what we were doing there.

Jude led us to a bank of elevators, and we waited as Riley pried open a control panel and dug his hands into the mess of wiring.

“Isn’t the electricity shut off?” I asked.

“They keep it running low-level in this building,” Jude said. “For the hardware. Easy to tap into if you know what you’re doing.”

“And he knows what he’s doing?” I said, nodding toward Riley.

“He knows a lot of things. You don’t hear any alarms going, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Thank Riley.”

A few seconds later the elevator doors popped open. The group stepped on, but when I tried to follow, Jude held me back. “We’ll take the next one,” he said.

Before I could argue, the doors shut, and we were alone.

“What do you want?” I said.

“What do you want?”

Another set of doors opened, and we stepped into the small space. Together. The doors shut behind us, and the elevator whooshed up the shaft. Jude turned to face me, backing me into a corner.

“Touch me and I’ll kill you,” I hissed.

He just laughed. “A, you’ve really got to train yourself to stop thinking in outdated terms, like life and death, and B, I have zero interest in touching you. Not at the moment, at least.”

I promised myself I had no interest in touching him, either. “So what the hell is this about?”

He pressed his hands flat against the elevator walls, one on either side of me, locking my body between his arms. “I thought you might have some questions. About your little… experience by the waterfall.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He smirked. “I think you do. And I think you loved it. I think you came back for more.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Better be careful.” It sounded more like a threat than a warning. “Don’t want to end up lost inside your own head. Better to get your thrills out here, in the real world.”

“Is that what we’re supposed to be doing, wandering around this trash heap of a city?” I asked. “Am I being thrilled? I hadn’t noticed.”

Jude dropped his arms. “That’s how you want to play it? Fine.”

The elevator swept up and up.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

He didn’t bother asking what. “As human as possible,” he said bitterly. “That’s the BioMax party line. But it doesn’t mean they don’t have the technology to make us different. To make us better. They just don’t want to give it to us. Not officially, at least.”

“Make us better? How’s some crazy intense b-mod trip supposed to make me better?”

He raised his eyebrows, and I realized that now there was no denying it. I’d uploaded the program, and he knew it.

“There’s more where that came from,” he said. “But only if you’re willing to look.”

The doors opened. We were on the roof. Three dark silhouettes tiptoed along a railing at the far edge, wobbling in the wind. There was plenty of wind, ninety-eight stories up.

“They’re not jumping,” I whispered in horror. “Tell me they’re not jumping.”

“No, we’re not jumping,” Jude said. “Just playing around. Admiring the view. Enjoy.” And he slipped into the shadows.

I circled the roof, weaving through abandoned solar arrays and broken satellite dishes. The world above was no less shattered than the world below. The three mechs on the railing swung themselves over the thin metal barrier and began scaling it from the outside. I passed Quinn in a dark corner, wrapped around the guy whose name I would probably never know. Riley and Jude argued against the skyline. I veered in the opposite direction and found myself standing next to Ani, her blue hair black in the darkness. She’d folded herself over the railing, elbows propped on the metal, eyes fixed on the dead buildings that stretched beneath us. My eyes had adjusted to the night enough to pick out a few of the closest ones, but beyond that, there was nothing but a field of shadow.

“Hey,” she said, without turning her face away from the nonview.

“Hey.”

“So, what do you think?”

I shrugged. “Not much to see.”

“I mean about the whole thing,” she said. “Tonight.”

I shrugged again. “Seems like a lot of effort just to go somewhere we’re not supposed to be. What’s the point?”

“Jude says there doesn’t always need to be a point. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.” Ani glanced over my shoulder. I turned to see Quinn and the guy, still going at it. “See? Fun.”

“Maybe it’s none of my business, but… that doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“I guess I just thought you and Quinn were…”

“We are. Sometimes.” She smiled faintly. “But this is all new for her. She wants to… you know. Play.”

“And that’s okay with you?”

“Jude says we have to learn not to lay claims on one another anymore,” she said. “He says monogamy’s impractical if you’re planning to live forever.”

“Seems like Jude says a lot.”

Ani beamed. “He’s amazing.”

“And you always listen?”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

“What?”

“Where we come from. Where he comes from.”

“So tell me.”

“How do you think he knows his way around here so well?” she asked.

I hadn’t really thought about it.

“He used to live here,” Ani said. “Before.”

“Really?” I leaned forward. I’d never met anyone who had actually lived in a city. “I mean, I knew he was…” I wasn’t sure which word would make me sound least like a spoiled rich girl. Everyone knew that the first mechs had been volunteers from the cities and the corp-towns. What everyone also knew, although no one said it, was that you’d be crazy to volunteer for something like that unless you had no other choice. “Do you know what happened to him? Why he volunteered?”

Ani looked alarmed. “I’m not supposed to be talking about the past,” she said. “He’d kill me.”

“I thought we were supposed to forget about our mortal fears,” I teased. “Retrain ourselves to accept immortality. Isn’t that what ‘Jude says’?”

She shook her head, hard. “The past doesn’t matter,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s better forgotten.”

“Easy for some people,” I said quietly. “Not so much for others.”

Ani flopped forward against the railing again. “I don’t miss it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’d never go back.”

“Are you from around here too?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t pushing too hard. I didn’t want to scare her away.

“No. Farther west than that.” There was more than a little pain in her smile, but her voice stayed flat. “My parents are from Chicago.”

“Oh.” From Chicago, not in Chicago. No one lived in Chicago, not anymore. And most of the ones who’d lived there the day of the attack weren’t living, period. The initial blast had only taken out a couple hundred thousand, but then there had been the radioactive dust. And the radioactive water. And the radioactive food. A radioactive city, filled with radioactive people. Who had, pretty quickly and pretty gruesomely, started getting sick. I hadn’t seen the vids, but then, it wasn’t really necessary. In school they made us watch footage of Atlanta. And Orlando.

Once you’ve seen one ruined city, you’ve seen them all.

I didn’t know how to ask the obvious question, but it seemed rude not to try. “Are your parents, uh, are they… did they…”

“Still alive.” Ani’s mouth twisted. “At least, as far as I know. Which isn’t very far.”

“You’re not in touch?”

She shook her head.

“Is it because of… what happened to you?” I glanced down at her body, and she got the idea.

“I wish.” She hesitated. “How much do you know about the corp-towns?”

I shrugged. “Just that it’s a good place to live, if, you know, you need a job. And that if you live there, you get stuff you need.” Stuff like food, electricity, med-tech—stuff you wouldn’t get in a city. Not unless you stole it.

“You get it,” she agreed, “but only if you follow the rules.”

There was a code of good behavior, I knew that. But it made sense to me. If the corporation was running the town, supplying houses and schools and doctors and lights, didn’t they deserve to make the rules?

“And only if you’re willing to give other stuff away,” she continued.

“Like the voting thing?” I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.” Residents of corp-towns sold their vote to the corps. Seemed like more than a fair trade. Most people I knew weren’t planning to vote anyway. Who cared which b-mod-addict fame whore pretended to run the country next?

“Other things, too,” Ani said. “Things for the good of the community. Like minimizing medical costs.”

“Seems fair.”

She looked down. “When you’re from Chicago, having a kid is not a good way to minimize medical costs.”

“Oh.” You could take the people out of the radioactive city—but you couldn’t take the radioactivity out of the people.

“Yeah. Oh. They signed a contract. So when they decided to have me…”

“They got kicked out?”

“Not until I was born.” The pained smile was back again. “Then it was straight back to city living for them. And their adorable legless wonder.”

I forced myself not to look down at her long, slender legs. “You were born without…”

“Among other things.” Her grip tightened around the railing. “Radiation poisoning really spices up the genetic soup.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. So were they.” She shrugged. “After a few years they ditched me. Headed for the nearest corp-town, I guess.”

“And you never—”

“Ten years.” She shook her head. “Not one word. Guess they wanted to forget I ever happened.”

“I really am sorry,” I told her. It seemed like such a lame thing to say. “It must have been… hard for you. On your own.”

Ani shrugged, keeping her eyes fixed on the skyline. “There are places. For people like me. No doctors, of course. And not much food or… anything. But…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Anymore. Let’s just say that when they shipped me off for the download, I didn’t care what they were going to do to me. It couldn’t have been worse than where I was.”

“So how did you get to volunteer?”

She laughed. “Lia, what makes you think we volunteered?”

“I didn’t—I don’t know—that’s what they said. I believed it.” Which sounded totally feeble. But it was the truth.

“It doesn’t matter. Jude’s right. None of that matters now. We’re better off.”

She said it, but I couldn’t help thinking she wasn’t done talking. Not yet. If I could find the right question to ask. “Did you know him? Before?”

She hesitated. “Not in the place. No. But later, in the hospital. When they were doing all the tests, deciding which of us they wanted. Jude was there. Riley too. They were friends from before. And the three of us… It just worked, you know?” She pulled a nanoViM from her pocket and flicked the screen to life. “You want to see something?”

I nodded.

“You can’t tell them I showed you,” she said. “Ever.”

I nodded again.

In the picture, three teenagers grinned at the camera. Two sat side by side in wheelchairs, their cheeks sunken, their bodies withering away. The girl had no legs. The boy had all his limbs, but they were twisted and gnarled. Useless.

“Jude,” Ani said, tapping his hollowed face.

The guy standing behind looked like a giant next to their fragile, wasted bodies. “Riley?” I guessed. “He looks pretty healthy.”

She flicked off the screen. “He was.”

He was also black. As was the boy who had become Jude. The girl’s skin was lighter, more caramel than chocolate, but still radically darker than the body she wore now. Ani saw the question in my face.

“What? Did you think we were white?” she asked in disgust.

I guess I hadn’t thought at all. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they… I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t…”

“We were the first,” she said in a more bitter tone than I’d ever heard her use. “An experiment. So they used what they had, and what they had were standard-issue bodies for their standard-issue rich white clients. You get a new body, you get to customize. Us? We get something off the rack. We get this.” She looked down, now aiming the disgust at the body she’d been assigned. “You think I like this?” she asked. “You think I like the fact that my parents wouldn’t even recognize me, if they ever—” She choked it off. “Not like that’s going to happen.” She slipped the ViM into her pocket. “It doesn’t matter. Jude says that race is irrelevant, since it’s not like we even have skin anymore, not really. He says being a mech is like being part of a new race.” She lowered her voice. “But I know he hates it too.”

“And Riley?” I asked, thinking of the tall, silent boy who never seemed to smile.

Ani shrugged. “Who knows? Hard to tell what he’s thinking, right?”

“I guess.” I paused. “So, when you said he was healthy, before, did you mean—”

She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I guess it’s okay for you to know where I came from. I mean, that’s my business. But if you want to know about them, ask them.”

“Okay. I get it.” A lot of good it would do me, though. Jude had already made it clear he wasn’t in the question-answering business. At least not when it came to questions I actually wanted the answers to.

“I don’t even know much myself,” she said in a softer voice. “He’s serious about the whole forgetting-the-past thing. Even before the download, he and Riley didn’t talk about where they came from. Not ever.”

I thought about the picture, the boy’s body curled up in the wheelchair, his legs and arms strapped down, his neck looking too frail to support his head. And then I thought about Jude, passionate and proud. I thought about his firm grasp, and the way it had felt when his broad arms embraced me. “I guess I can maybe understand that.”

Ani gave me a shy smile that suddenly made her look about ten years old. “I’m glad you came up here, Lia. Alone, I mean.”

“Not like I had much of a choice. If Auden had set off the alarms—”

Ani laughed. “There are no alarms,” she said, like it should have been obvious. “Jude just said that.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, picturing Auden standing nervously on the curb in front of the building. Alone. Where I’d left him. “Why would he lie like that?”

“Don’t be mad,” she said quickly. “He just wanted you to see what it was like with us. You know. On your own.”

I turned to face the view again, resting my forearms on the railing, staring out and trying to imagine a city filled with lights. “It’s not so bad, I guess.”

I probably should have been mad.

But I wasn’t.

As we made our way back to the car, Auden and I hung behind the rest of the group.

“Have fun up there?” he asked, sounding a little sullen.

I shrugged. “It was okay.”

“Hope you two found some time to be alone together.”

“Us two?”

“You. Him.” He glared at Jude’s back.

I forced a laugh. “Don’t make me throw up.”

“You can’t,” Auden said flatly. “Remember?”

“Like I could forget.”

“You seem to have forgotten that he’s crazy. Dangerous.”

“You’ve got no reason to think that,” I said. “You’re just—” But that was a sentence that didn’t need finishing. “He’s not so bad.” I didn’t know why I was bothering to defend him.

No wonder Auden was freaked. I was a little freaked. But it didn’t mean something was going on. Just because I didn’t totally hate Jude, didn’t mean I—Well, it didn’t mean anything.

“You tell yourself that if it helps. If that makes it easier.”

So he was jealous, even though there was nothing to be jealous about—and even though he had no right to be. Auden didn’t own me. “Something you want to ask?”

“None of my business,” he said.

“Except you obviously think it is,” I pointed out. “Unless you’re still mad about what happened between the two of us.”

“You mean what didn’t happen.”

“So you are mad.”

“No.”

“Passive-aggressiveness is incredibly lame,” I said. “You do realize that, right?”

“How am I being passive-aggressive?”

I plucked at the fraying strap of his green bag. “What’d you do, throw the one I gave you in the trash? Light it on fire?”

“It’s new,” he said defensively. “I didn’t want to bring it tonight, mess it up.”

“Whatever. None of my business, right?”

“It was my mother’s,” he mumbled, so quietly that I thought I must have heard him wrong.

“What?”

“The bag.” He pressed it tighter to his body. “It was my mother’s.”

And I’d given him a bright, shiny new one, suggesting he throw the old one in the garbage, where it belonged. What a lovely gesture. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.” He stared hard at me. “We don’t have to talk about everything, do we?”

I looked away. No. We didn’t.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. The city was silent too, at least at first. And then I heard something. A scuffling, shuffling noise. Like careful footsteps, creeping behind us.

I didn’t say anything.

It was probably my imagination, just like the shadows flickering in every alley we passed. It was probably nothing.

Once we reached the cars, Jude loaded us all in—all except for a mech named Tak. I hadn’t talked to him much, partly because he scared me a little. It wasn’t so much the spikes around his neck or the patchy transparent casing on his face that revealed a layer of chunky wiring and circuitry. It was his eyes, which somehow looked even deader than mine. I told myself it was just a trick of the light.

Jude nodded at Tak. Ready? he mouthed.

Tak nodded back, and Jude tugged the tarp back across the car, leaving a corner of one of the windows unblocked. Then he jumped inside and slammed the door behind him. “Everyone scrunch down in your seats,” he ordered. “It’s safer.”

“But what about Tak?” I asked.

“Down,” Jude said. “You’ll see.”

I saw.

“I’m here, motherfuckers!” Tak screamed so loudly we could hear him through the thick windows. He stood in the middle of the empty street, as if waiting. “Come and get me!”

Nothing happened.

He screamed again and again until the words faded, replaced by an incoherent roar. And then, heeding his call, two figures emerged from the darkness, clothed in rags. One carried a knife. The other, a gun.

We couldn’t hear what the men said. But through our corner of window, we could see Tak laugh. The men advanced.

I grabbed Jude’s arm. “We have to do something!” I whispered, panicking.

“He can deal,” Jude said calmly. “Just watch.” And, like a coward, I did.

The man on the left raised his gun.

Tak laughed again. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “No matter how hard you try!” Then he raised his arms out to his sides. “I fucking dare you!”

The gunshot was like thunder.

The men ran away before Tak’s body hit the ground.

“Now!” Jude shouted. “Before the cops!”

As Auden and I clung to each other, Jude and Riley jumped out of the car, grabbed Tak’s body, and slung it into the back. Onto us. They piled into the car themselves, and suddenly we were speeding away.

“Awesome,” Tak gasped, his head in my lap. There was no blood, but the wound was oozing something green and viscous. I didn’t want it touching me.

“Hurts?” Jude asked, programming in a new set of coordinates as the city fell away behind us.

“Like fuck,” Tak said, thumping his shoulder where the bullet had slammed into him. “Gonna be a bitch to get this one out.”

“What the hell is going on?” I said. “You did that on purpose. You let them shoot you! We all could have been—”

“Killed?” Jude asked wryly.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Because you’re learning.” Jude twisted around in his seat to look at me. Me, not Auden, who had turned pale and was pressed up against the window, like he wanted to jump out of the car, speeding or not. “We all have our little daily pleasures,” he said. “Tak’s happens to be pain. Violence, too. And fear, of course.”

“Fuck fear,” Tak shot back. “Just a gun, right?”

Jude smiled. “But mostly pain. Or at least, a digital simulation of such. A quick trip to BioMax and he’ll be all better, won’t you?” He patted Tak on the shoulder; Tak screamed at the touch. “I would think you’d have a little more understanding now that you’ve seen for yourself how addictive this sort of thing can be.”

“It’s not the same and you know it!”

“What are you two talking about?” Auden asked, eyes wide.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just bullshit. His usual.”

“That’s right, look down on us, like we’re crazy, like you’re so different.” Jude sneered. “I hear the land of denial’s lovely this time of year.”

“It’s not so easy for some of us! Your life may have sucked, but mine didn’t. I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

“Like you know anything about my life.”

“I know tonight was a little trip home for you,” I spat out, so angry and freaked out that I forgot about the promise I’d made to Ani. “I know you probably like this better than your wheelchair.”

Jude hit manual override, and the car skidded to a stop. “Who told you?”

I was glad Ani wasn’t riding with us. “Nobody.”

“Get out.” Jude said quietly. “And take the org with you.”

“What?” We were in the middle of nowhere, a long, dark stretch of highway bounded by nothingness. “No way!”

“Get. Out.” Jude reached back and opened the door. “You love running away when things get intense, right? So let me help you. Run.”

I didn’t move.

“Now!”

The scream was pure rage. I leaped out of the car, letting Tak’s head slam against the seat. Auden jumped out behind me. The car sped away before the door was fully shut.

And then we were alone.

“Now what?” Auden asked. “We walk back from… wherever the hell we are?”

There was no way I was ready to tell my parents what I’d been doing—and I was guessing Auden didn’t want his father to find out either. There was one better option.

Which didn’t make it a good one.

I linked in to the network, trying to ignore Auden’s I-told-you-so glare.

Lucky us, she was there.

Lucky, right. Good thing I was getting used to redefining that concept on a daily basis.

“Zo?” I said, hating the words as they came out of my mouth. “I need a favor.”