Shattered

10. WATCHERS

I would have expected someone like call-me-Ben to drive a late-model Trivi or maybe even a Petra, one of those neutered bubble cars with a rotating cabin and a collapsible gel body—bland as his wardrobe, suitable for middle-aged trend chasers who preferred safety to style. But the car was a Taiko, black and practically dripping with credit, its bullet shape so streamlined that it was hard to imagine how a human form could fit inside. The wheels were hidden beneath the frame, so there was nothing to break the smooth, sleek line. I’d never seen one up close before, much less ridden inside, but I heard that with the right patch, you could override the velocity restrictions and push it to almost two hundred. Walker had always wanted one, and the fact that I knew anything about them at all was a testament to how crazy he’d been on the subject. You can’t tune out three years’ worth of obsession. (Trust me, I tried.)

The paint was supposedly some kind of special alloy that absorbed even infrared light—it looked like someone had carved a car-shaped hole in the universe and filled it with pure nothingness.

The door swung open. Ben was behind the wheel. I climbed into the backseat, hoping to endure the ride in silence. No such luck. He programmed the nav-unit for Quinn’s estate, then climbed in beside me. I stared out the window, watching my father’s figure recede into the distance.

“You’re welcome,” Ben said once we’d pulled out onto open road.

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“I noticed.”

I kept my eyes on the window. The land was flat here, sprawling green fields stretching toward the horizon. A herd of cows whizzed by in a spotted blur. The road wove through flower-dotted meadows; clumps of willow trees, their spindly, sagging branches kissing the road; acres of greening corn, bowing to the wind. Nowhere to hide, I thought, then wondered how long it would be before I stopped searching for safe harbors.

“No one gets something for nothing, Lia,” Ben said.

I faced him. Hard to believe I’d ever found this guy attractive. Not that his features were anything less than perfect—but there was a softness to them, a waxy, malleable quality, like he’d been molded in a factory, the simulacrum of a real live person. Everything about him looked artificial, from his sparkling brown eyes to his artfully tousled hair to his soft, full lips curving up in a sardonic smile. But: He can be as fake as he wants, and he’ll still be more real than me.

“You’re angry,” Ben said.

“You noticed.”

“That’s exactly why you weren’t informed about the tracking.”

“You mean spying.”

“I understand it displeases you. But it’s for your own protection.”

“I can take care of myself.”

He laughed softly. “Of course. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The car vibrated beneath us as we lurched off the highway onto a loose gravel road. “We’re going the wrong way.”

“Scenic route,” Ben said. “You and I have a lot to discuss.”

I thought about opening the door and throwing myself out of the car. It would have been a bit melodramatic, but melodrama seemed appropriate. We couldn’t have been going more than fifty or sixty miles an hour—it would be a bumpy landing, but I’d had those before. Thick skin, strong bones, titanium skull, just a few of the benefits of being a mech.

But if call-me-Ben wanted me, he would always know exactly where to find me.

Another of the benefits of being a mech, apparently.

“The doors are locked,” Ben said.

“No problem.” I gave him a placid smile. “I’m getting used to being a prisoner.”

“You’re not a prisoner, Lia.” Ben sighed and leaned back in his seat. He laced his fingers together, inverted his hands, palms facing out, then stretched his arms with a satisfied groan. “You’re just possibly the solution to a sticky little problem we’ve been having.”

“I doubt that. What do you want?”

“Your friend Jude,” Ben said.

I don’t have friends, I was about to say, then stopped myself. Friends were for orgs, just like family. I didn’t know what Jude was to me—an ally, a protector, an antagonist—none of the old categories fit. He was simply like me.

I smirked at Ben. “Last I checked, he’s not mine to give.”

“I want the name of his BioMax contact.” Ben’s voice was steely.

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

“Let me tell you what I know, Lia.” His features were still just as soft, but his voice, his eyes, were hard. “I know Jude has an inside source at BioMax. That he’s stealing information and technology. I also know that Jude was supposed to meet his contact at Synapsis Corp-Town this week, but he sent you instead. For the first time. And just as you arrive…” Ben shook his head. “That’s some seriously bad timing, don’t you think?”

No more secrets. That was all I could think. Not when they were watching.

“How do you know?” I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.

Ben made a sound like a buzzer. “Wrong question, Lia.”

I wanted him to stop saying my name. There was a little twist in his voice, a glint in his eye, each time he formed the syllables. Like the name was a secret between us. Like he was silently saying, We both know you’re not really Lia Kahn. But I’ll play along if you will.

I waited.

“Why didn’t he go himself?” Ben asked. “Why did he need you to go? What did he really want?”

I saw where he was going. I’d already gotten there myself. Jude was the one who’d sent me to BioMax, it followed he was the one most likely to have set me up. But he wasn’t the only one who’d known about the corp-town trip. Jude’s BioMax contact knew too. And he’d known enough not to show. Call-me-Ben wanted me to believe Jude had set me up—and so, for the first time, I started to think maybe he hadn’t.

“He must really scare you guys,” I said. “Afraid he’ll turn us against you?”

Ben arched an eyebrow. “‘You’ orgs?”

“‘You’ BioMax.” I was spinning through the possibilities as quickly as I could. BioMax knew where we were at all times—they had all they needed to set us up. But why go to the trouble and then whisk me away from the secops? Why do it in the first place?

He burst into laughter. “Lia, as far as I’m concerned, if Jude were who he claimed to be, he’d be a hero. Our BioMax clients need someone like him, to ease the transition into life postdownload.” His eyes were gleaming, his movements loose and free, as if some part of him usually tamped down was breaking out. “All that stuff about mechs being superior, about this technology being the dawn of a new era for humanity… if I didn’t believe that, why would I work for BioMax in the first place?”

“Great, so Jude’s a hero,” I said sourly. Maybe they were all working together. “Where’s the problem? You want me to arrange a meet-and-greet?”

“I said he would be a hero,” Ben reminded me. “If a tidy little confidence boost was all he was after. But it’s not.”

“How would you know?”

“Wrong question again,” Ben said with another buzzing noise. “What does this boy really want? Have you even bothered to ask? Or is it easier to just smile and nod and accept whatever he says as gospel?”

“You know me,” I said with as much fake sweetness as I could muster. “Always going with the flow.”

“You really think you’re all a bunch of rebels, don’t you?” he asked, sounding like he was trying not to laugh. “And what, exactly, are you rebelling against?”

“I don’t know,” I mused. “How about stalker corps that get off on spying on us?”

Nothing ruffled him. He just drummed his hands on the smoky glass of the window, adopting a philosopher’s tone. “‘Us.’ Interesting word, that. And who would ‘us’ be, in this scenario?” He ticked the options off on his fingers. “We’ve got Jude, who appears out of nowhere and charms himself into the heart of, among others, Quinn Sharpe, heir to one of the country’s largest fortunes. Not to mention Ty Marian, Anders Prix, Lara Pirendez—none of them in Sharpe territory, certainly, but not too shabby. Sloane Beignet—I’m told you were responsible for bringing her in. And then there’s Lia Kahn. Whose parents have yet to part with any of their credit—but, if and when they do, will, I’m sure, be donating to the cause.”

“What are you getting at?” I knew what he was getting at.

“I’m just wondering whether it’s a coincidence that so many of your friend Jude’s nearest and dearest acolytes are swimming in credit.”

“It’s no coincidence,” I snapped. “So we’re rich—so what?” Not wanting to admit that I’d had the same thought myself. But Quinn had donated her credit freely—they all had—so we could live as we wanted to live. Jude pays me back in other ways, she’d told me once. And not just me, all of us. It’s not like Jude reveled in the luxury—there seemed to be little that he actually wanted for himself. “The download costs. We’re all rich.”

“Not all of them,” Ben said pointedly. “At least, they didn’t used to be.”

“That’s really what you want to talk about?” I said. Daring him. “The ‘volunteers’?” He could hear it in my voice, that I knew better.

“You’re so quick to distrust BioMax,” he said smoothly, shifting gears. “And yet so quick to put your faith in someone like Jude. Do you know anything about this boy? Where he came from, who he was before the download?”

“It’s irrelevant,” I shot back. “None of us are the people we were before the download. Those people are dead.”

“Excuse my language, but: bullshit,” Ben said. “That’s a lie he needs you to believe, so you’ll walk away from the people who actually care about you. Like your family, Lia. Like your father.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but my father cares about Lia Kahn, his dead daughter. I’m just an electronic copy. You know it, I know it.”

“Does he.” Ben shut his eyes and tipped his head back against the seat. As if we were done and it was naptime.

Not that I wanted to hear more of his crap.

Still. “You don’t know anything about my father.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” He didn’t bother to open his eyes. Instead, he pulled out a tablet-size ViM, passed it to me. It was as black and sleek as the car, featureless but for the slim gray thumbprint in the left corner. No one needed that kind of security on their ViMs—that was the whole point of a ViM, that the data was stored on the network, not on the machine. Nonetheless, the screen stayed blank until Ben reached across me and pressed his thumb to the print. “A greatest-hits

selection for you.”

The vids were cued up on the BioMax zone, the picture blurry and amateurish, the cameras shaking. All featured my father facing down clusters of suited men and women, various corp logos hanging over their heads or stenciled onto the surface of the tables. My father, seemingly oblivious to the camera and the hostility of his audiences. “These are human beings,” he said in vid after vid. “Can’t you see that? People we know. People we care about.”

My father, for once asking rather than ordering, asking for understanding. For the download technology. For the mechs. For his daughter.

“These aren’t machines,” he said, “no matter what they look like. These are our children—my child.”

One-on-one in an ornate living room, pounding a delicate glass table so hard I expected it to shatter. “Would this be any less a table if it was made of wood? Of steel? We don’t define a thing by what it’s made of—we define a thing by what it does. A brain isn’t a brain because it’s a mess of cells and neurotransmitters and organic gunk. It’s a brain because it thinks. We’re all made out of nothing but stuff. Our stuff may bleed, but fundamentally? It’s still just matter in motion: an organic machine. And fundamentally, if you judge them by how they think, how they feel, how they act, they’re still human.”

Ben, his eyes still closed, permitted himself a small half smile. “He borrowed that one from me. Nice, isn’t it?”

“What is this?” I paused the final vid on a grainy shot of my father’s face. At the secops station he’d looked older than I remembered, but here he seemed young again, as if fresh off a lift-tuck, the fuzziness erasing the cracks carved into his face and the dark half moons under his eyes. The camera had somehow captured something that never escaped in real life—the anger hidden beneath the tight lips and the carefully modulated voice. In the frozen vid, his face was still perfectly composed. But his eyes looked wild. “Where’d you get this?”

“You think you’re the only one we keep an eye on?” Ben finally opened his eyes and looked at me. “What?” he said with palpably false surprise. “You didn’t know?”

I didn’t say anything.

Was it guilt? As far as I could tell, my father didn’t know the meaning of the word. Guilt required acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and in the world according to my father, everything he did was right, by definition.

Except for the choice to make me, I thought, not wanting to remember.

Remembering.

Forgive me, he’d begged. If I could do it again…

I would make the right choice this time.

He felt guilty that he’d unleashed me on the world and on his family—Lia Kahn’s family, forced to pretend that the dead had come back to life, that an electronic copy could ever replace the real thing.

And yet: “These are our children. My child.”

And yet my father didn’t lie.

Maybe he was lying to himself.

But what if he just believed it?

“Your father’s been running all over the country, trying to persuade his estimable peers to ease the path for download recipients,” Ben said. “He’s become quite the crusader for mech rights. All behind closed doors, of course.”

“Of course.” It wouldn’t do for a man of his stature to be zone-hopping like a Savona-style crackpot, spilling his guts to the masses. And my father had long made clear his belief that true power acted in silence and shadow.

“He wants you to come home,” Ben said.

If he wanted that, he would have made it happen. My father didn’t do subtle, and he didn’t do voluntary.

“What’s your point?” I asked, wondering if I should reconsider the whole jumping-out-of-the-car thing. But that would prove Ben right. Like I was someone who preferred not to ask questions because I was too weak to deal with the answers.

“I think you’re a little confused about who your real friends are,” Ben said.

“I’m not—”

“It’s understandable.” His drone was maddeningly calm. “You know, Lia, as an official BioMax rep, it’s policy to remain a watchful distance from all our clients, but…” He cleared his throat. “Did I ever tell you that you were my first?”

I shook my head. Thinking: Who cares?

“It was my job to help you and your family through the transition period, and I can’t help feeling as if I’ve failed you.” He pressed his fingertips together, then tapped them against each other, one by one. “I probably shouldn’t admit that. But I feel responsible for you, Lia. I worry.”

“Good show,” I said, giving him a slow clap. “Though next time, you might want to try a single tear rolling down your cheek. Much more effective.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re growing cynical in your old age.”

“Check the manual,” I said. “I don’t age.”

“Fine.” Ben leaned forward and keyed something into the nav-panel. “I’ll take you back. Obviously there’s no point in discussing this further.”

“You noticed.”

“Loyalty’s a tricky thing,” Ben said. “Just because you give it to someone doesn’t mean you get it back.”

“Funny, this feels like discussing.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Ben said. “You’ve made that clear. You’ll go back to the Sharpe estate. You’ll do your best to pretend the last several days never happened.”

As if I could.

“You’ll probably tell your friend Jude everything I’ve said here, just to prove to him how loyal you are. Or prove it to yourself. And then, once you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll get in touch with me and give me the name of Jude’s BioMax contact.”

“I think your fortune-telling skills are failing you,” I said. “Because there’s no way.” Not that I owed Jude anything. But I owed Ben even less.

“I’d prefer you do it because you want to,” Ben said. “I’d rather convince you that Jude’s not doing any of you favors by loading you up with untested tech.”

“Well, you can’t, and you shouldn’t—”

“I’d prefer to do it that way,” he said over me. “But since that’s not an option, we’ll resort to plan B. Reciprocation.”

“What the hell is that?”

Ben smiled. “You give me the name—and I keep quiet about your unfortunately timed presence at the Synapsis Corp-Town. I keep those records where they are. Buried. Simple reciprocity.”

“Blackmail.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Take a couple weeks to think about it. I’m a patient man.”

He reached forward and flicked a finger across the car’s control panel and—so smoothly it was almost imperceptible, we accelerated, the landscape bleeding past in a blur of color. Even at this speed, the car cornered tightly, veering back onto the highway, flying toward home.

We were running out of time, and he hadn’t told me the one thing I needed to know. I hated to ask him for anything. “So if you’re tracking us, you must know,” I said, so quietly he had to tip his head toward me to catch the words. “You know who else was at the corp-town. Who did it.”

“Who killed all those people, you mean? Who set you up?”

Assuming it wasn’t you, I thought. “If you know, how can you just… do nothing?”

Ben smiled thinly. “I know you were there, and I’m doing nothing about that,” he said.

“It’s not the same.”

“I already told you,” he said irritably. It was the first real emotion I’d seen from him the whole trip. At least, I assumed it was real. “It’s my job to protect you. All of you.”

“Then what the hell is the point of the tracking?” I countered. “You said it was to keep us out of trouble—what, that doesn’t include trying to kill hundreds of people?”

“You don’t think I’d do something if I could?” he shouted—then abruptly fell silent.

“Then do it,” I hissed. After everything I’d seen the last few days, I didn’t have any sympathy left. Certainly not for him.

He didn’t respond.

“You don’t know who it is, do you?” I said suddenly. Just guessing—but I saw on his face it was true. “Your precious spy gear crapped out on you.”

“No technology is foolproof,” he said steadily. “You’d do well to remember that.”

I didn’t bother to answer. He no longer had anything I needed. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

“A pleasure, as always,” Ben said as the car stopped at the southern boundary of Quinn’s estate. He reached across me to open the door. I jerked away just before his arm could brush my chest.

I got out of the car, resisting the temptation to slam the door on his fingertips.

“And remember, Lia.” He scratched the back of his head, letting his fingers rest on the spot where his skull met his neck, the spot where, somewhere inside my own head, a microscopic GPS chip was broadcasting my location to his bosses. And to my father. “We’ll be watching.”

I didn’t want to go back to the house. I wanted to stay there, in the green empty, the concrete strip of road to my left and the estate grounds to my right. I wanted to pretend that I was stranded on the side of the road, come from nowhere, with nowhere to go. No one waiting for me. No one watching me.

I hadn’t been this free since before the corp-town attack—free to wade through the overgrown grass, find the rambling path that would take me to the house, or to turn in the opposite direction, to the road, and start walking. Toward Lia Kahn’s home, Lia Kahn’s father, Lia Kahn’s past.

Or just walking toward nothing. Filling myself up with nothing, an emptiness that could blot out the faces of the dead, call-me-Ben’s voice, my father’s hands on my shoulders, his lips brushing against my hair.

I belong here, I thought, trying to convince myself to climb the grassy slope. I belong with them.

Jude was up there. Jude, who might have set all this in motion. And when I got to the house, he was waiting for me.

“Took you long enough,” he said, leaning against the doorframe of the main entrance. Even Jude looked small beside the columns of marble and steel.

“I’m fine, Jude,” I said with a sneer, trying to gauge something from his expression. But there was no guilt, no shame, only judgment. I couldn’t have been killed, so why was I making such a fuss? “Thanks so much for your concern.”

“They’re waiting for you inside,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your many friends and admirers,” he said, with a go-figure shrug.

“Riley?” I asked.

Jude nodded.

“Is he… okay?”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t.”

Jude grimaced. “He’s here, he’s fine. He’s inside with the rest. Seems everyone wants to know about your adventures.”

“But not you.”

“I know enough,” he said. “I’ve been watching the vids. It’s not pretty.”

“No,” I said. “But I guess mass murder usually isn’t.”

Jude shook his head, a look of impatience flashing across his face. “I don’t mean that. I mean that vid of you—”

“Not me!”

“Right. Whatever. That vid of someone who looks like you pumping poison into the system. The whole world thinks we just declared war on the orgs. It didn’t occur to you to voice me when any of this happened?”

“So that’s what you’re mad about. Can’t stand that we actually handled something without you.”

“Handled it.” Jude snorted. “Right. I’ve already talked to Riley. He wanted to come to me. You stopped him. You let him go back to that place alone. It didn’t occur to you I could have helped?”

“Could you have?” There was something strange about talking to Jude. The conversation felt familiar and profoundly alien all at once. It was the same disconnect that came from looking around at the place I’d been living in for the last six months. Like nothing was the same anymore. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he looked at me. Like he was staring at a two-dimensional copy of something he’d once cared about.

Jude smashed a fist into the doorframe. His face stayed calm. “Go ahead. Ask me.”

“What?”

“You know what.”

I was too tired for the game. I gave him what he wanted. “Did you set me up?” I asked flatly. “Did you kill all those people?”

He didn’t flinch. “You going to believe me if I say no?”

“Say it,” I suggested, “and we’ll find out.”

“If you think I could do something like that, I’m not going to waste my time convincing you otherwise,” he said.

“Not much of an answer.”

“Why even stay here if that’s what you think of me?” he asked. “Why don’t you just go?”

Go where? I thought. “Fine.” Calling his bluff. “I guess we’re done here. I’ll pack up and be out by morning.”

“Wait,” he said quietly. “Ask Riley.”

“Ask him what?”

Jude picked at a loose stone in the doorframe, scraping out the sediment between the stone and wood. He turned half away from me, his shoulders hunched, his head angled toward the door. “Ask him, and he’ll tell you I wouldn’t do this,” he said, careful to keep his eyes on the wall. “If you really think…”

I didn’t know what I thought anymore. “What am I supposed to think?”

He started to speak but choked off the words. Then he shook his head. “Think whatever the hell you want.”

“Jude—”

Suddenly, he whirled from the wall, facing me head-on. “I wasn’t the only one who knew you’d be at Synapsis.”

“What?”

It was like he was fighting a war with himself, the part that didn’t care what I thought battling the part that needed me to believe him.

“You think it had to be me, because I sent you there,” he said. “That I was the only one who knew. But I wasn’t.” He sounded like a child, denying that he’d thrown the ball, broken the window. I waited for him to blame it on his imaginary friend.

“Let me guess, I’m forgetting about your mysterious contact,” I said. “The reason for the whole stupid rendezvous.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Jude hesitated. He slipped down along the wall and perched on one of the stairs climbing up to the entrance. I stayed on my feet. “If I tell you something, will you swear to keep it to yourself?”

“I don’t make blind promises.” Not to you.

“BioMax is tracking us,” he said. “GPS. They know wherever we go.”

“You knew?”

“You knew?” He gaped at me. “How?”

“You’re the genius, right? Figure it out.” I was too angry to look at him. To think that he’d known all along and hadn’t told us? Hadn’t done anything?

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said.

“No, apparently you can’t tell anyone!” I yelled. “Because you’re on such a freaking power trip about being the all-knowing Jude! How dare you keep this a secret?”

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” he asked. “If people knew… well, look how you’re reacting. I didn’t want to start an unnecessary panic.”

“I’m having a little trouble with the ‘unnecessary’ part—they’re spying on us, Jude.” I started pacing back and forth, trying to force out some of the anger through motion, but it didn’t work like that, not in the mech body. My brain just kept whirring, furious at all of them.

Jude was still sitting down, sprawled almost casually against the stone stairs. “BioMax isn’t our enemy. Not yet at least.”

“You so sure about that? Or you think it was just a coinci-dence that the attack happened while we were at the corp-town? That your so-called source never showed up? Wake up, Jude. Either BioMax has something to do with this or…”

“Or I did,” he said sourly. “Back to that.”

“What the hell am I supposed to think? Especially when you’re telling me you trust them. Even after this?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” Jude said coldly. “You think you’re the only one who can do the math here? Are you really surprised? Did you believe all the BioMax crap, that they have our best interests at heart?”

“That’s exactly my point!”

“No! That’s exactly my point. If certain elements of BioMax were involved in this, all the more reason not to let them know we’re onto their tracking tech. Let them think we’re totally clueless. Let them expose themselves for what they really are.”

“And until then, what? We just sit around and wait?” I asked in disbelief. “How can you even stand it? Knowing—” I shuddered. “Knowing they’re watching you.”

He didn’t say anything. His gaze flicked away, just for a second, but it was long enough to reveal that there was something else. And I’d just hit on it.

Just like when I was in the car with call-me-Ben and he’d accidentally let slip that the trackers weren’t foolproof.

“But they’re not watching you, are they?” I said slowly, forcing myself not to yell.

He shrugged but couldn’t refrain from cracking a small, sharklike smile. He was actually proud.

“They think they are,” he said. Boasted. “Streaming live GPS, mapping my every move. And it’s all bullshit. I’ve been feeding them false data for months.”

“While you let the rest of us…” I stopped, searching for the words. I wanted to get this out right. No incoherent anger or misplaced betrayal, irrational reactions that he could brush off as weak and orglike. “You didn’t bother to tell any of us,” I said finally. “You let us hang and saved yourself.”

“Oh, please.” He rolled his eyes. “I see the time away hasn’t cured you of your inclination to melodrama. ‘Saved myself’? From what? As if they’ll be able to wring any dirty little secrets out of your location.” He shook his head. “Trust me, you’re not that interesting.” He rubbed his hands across his face, a neat little simulation of org exhaustion. “Yes, I can jam the tracking. And no, I’m not about to do it for everyone. It doesn’t occur to you that there may come a time when we can make the trackers work to our advantage? We don’t want them knowing we can screw with the data. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that you don’t put your cards on the table until you have to?”

I hated to admit it, but he was making sense. That was the problem with Jude—he always made sense. He was too good at rationalizing, turning his whims into logical inevitabilities.

“All I know is you pretended we were all in this together,” I said. “And then you did this, on your own.”

He’s not your friend. But that was Ben’s voice in my head. And beneath my anger, there was something else—maybe it was the fact that Jude had voluntarily revealed one of his precious secrets, one guaranteed to make me hate him. Or maybe it was the moment when, for just one second, the mask had fallen away, exposing his need. He needed me to believe him innocent. And I almost did.

“You think I don’t care about you? Them?” He swept his arms out to encompass the estate. Inexplicably, he was angry too—as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. “I’m doing this all for you!”

“Excuse me if I can’t quite see how you selling us out to BioMax is helping.”

“Because I’m taking care of it!” he shouted. “I make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t see. I know everything they know. Everything.”

There was a long silence as I processed what he’d said. And he realized what he’d revealed.

If it were anyone else, I would have said he looked almost afraid.

“You get the GPS feed?” This wasn’t anger. I’d moved beyond anger. The thought of Jude sitting in front of a screen, watching us drift through our lives, watching over us like the Faithers’ god, probably delusional enough to believe that he was sitting in judgment rather than violation? That was sickening.

“You’d rather they knew everything, and we know nothing?” he said defensively, his voice rising. “Someone has to watch our backs.”

“And you love it, don’t you?” I said coldly. “Watching.”

It was one thing to know that strangers at BioMax were watching over my shoulder—even call-me-Ben was nothing more than a pretty face with a boring name attached, paid to pretend he cared about where I went and what I did. As for my father, he’d always been a watcher, keeping tabs on everything, from the hours I put in at the track to the experimental error rate in my biotech homework. That’s what fathers did. They paid attention, even when they weren’t supposed to.

But Jude was supposed to be one of us.

I felt like he’d stripped off my clothes, exposed my naked body.

Except it was even worse. Because the body was just an object. Eventually it would break or break down, and so what? It would be interchangeable with whatever came next. Only our minds were inviolate—that’s what Jude had taught us, wasn’t it? The thing that separated us from the orgs, the thing that made us mechs, that made us special. We lived in our heads. Unlike the orgs, we didn’t fool ourselves into believing that our bodies mattered. Only our minds were alive, and they belonged to us.

But now Jude had reached his long fingers inside my head and carved out a space for himself. He’d crawled inside me, without my permission, without my knowledge.

And he’d watched.

There was nothing personal in a location, I reminded myself. GPS coordinates weren’t diary entries. They only told him where I was, not who, not why.

But it was my choice whether or not to tell him anything.

And he’d taken that away.

I didn’t run. I didn’t turn around, skid down the hill of green, back to the road to nowhere.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jude said. Nearly pleaded.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I can.” Even if it means mass panic? I thought. Even if Jude’s right and we might need this later, when it really counts?

“I’m not going to try to convince you I’m right—”

“Good.”

“I’m going to bribe you,” he said, regaining a little of his composure. “You keep your mouth shut, and I’ll jam your tracker too. I’ll feed BioMax a false stream—no one will know where you go, not BioMax. Not me.”

Not my father. Not anyone.

“And let everyone else keep getting spied on?” I asked. “Turn myself into as big a liar as you are?”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the plan. Or tell whoever the hell you want and spend the rest of your life with the fine folks of BioMax crawling up your ass, watching your every move.”

I wasn’t the same self-centered bitch I’d been before the download. But I guess I was close enough. “Okay,” I said finally. Hating myself.

At least he didn’t smile.

“You really think you’ll be able to keep this to yourself?” he said.

I nodded.

He rolled his eyes. “You’ll last five minutes. Tops. So here’s the deal: You’ve got such a burning need to spill your guts, spill to Riley. You two are so tight now, so into your little secrets. I’m sure he won’t mind keeping another one. Especially for me.”

“You’re so sure he’ll just do whatever you tell him?”

Jude didn’t answer; he didn’t have to.

“All that time we were in the city, you knew,” I realized. “And when those orgs grabbed me, you—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to ground myself in the present, to shut out the sickening sensation that I was still tied to a chair, waiting, just imagining that I’d escaped. “You claim we should have called for help, but you knew where we were the whole time—and you did nothing.”

Jude stood up, brushing the grime off his jeans, starting into the house. “Not all of us do everything we want, whenever we want.”

I recognized the insult. But there was something else buried in there too. I just didn’t get it. If he’d wanted to rescue me, what had stopped him?

What’s the difference? I thought, disgusted with myself for even entertaining the idea of Jude rescuing me like I was some helpless maiden waiting for her noble prince.

He is not your friend.

“What are we really doing here, Jude?” I asked. “What’s the point of all this? What do you want?”

“At least you’re finally starting to ask the right questions.” And he turned his back on me and went inside.

I told Riley that night. We sat in my bedroom with the door closed, both of us on the floor, our backs propped against the wall, our knees drawn to our chests, a foot of space between us.

He didn’t react when I told him what had happened to Mika and Sari, at least what little I knew. And he didn’t react when I told him about the trackers. He didn’t say anything until I told him that Jude had known all along.

“He must have a good reason,” he said then.

I almost laughed. “Why? Because he’s Jude, giver of all knowledge and wisdom, keeper of the peace?”

“Because he’s Jude,” Riley said, and he wasn’t joking. “I trust him. I wish you did. Maybe then we wouldn’t have…”

“You blame me.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. And I shouldn’t have cared so much. “I made you take me to the city. I didn’t let you voice Jude. I screwed everything up. Is that about right?”

Riley looked down. He crushed his hands into fists, then brought them together, knuckle to knuckle. “I screwed up,” he growled. “I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“They wanted a trade,” he said. “You for Jude. And for me.”

“I know that,” I said. “You want to tell me why?”

“Wynn thinks we owe him something.”

“What?” I figured I deserved to know.

“A life,” he said. “Among other things. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry you got involved.”

“And when they took me, you went to Jude.”

He nodded. “Jude freaked. He swore we’d find you. But by the time we did…”

“Secops showed up,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Except it was all a lie,” I pointed out. Couldn’t he see? “If he’s tracking us, he knew where I was the whole time. Just like always.”

Riley didn’t answer. He tilted his head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. “Never thought I’d be living in a place like this,” he said.

“Did you hear what I said? Jude lied to you.” I wanted to shake him. “He was probably going to let me rot there.”

Riley shook his head. “We were going to get you out. He would have done anything.”

“So he told you.”

“And I trust him.”

“Even though he sent us to that corp-town? Come on, you’re telling me that you don’t even suspect, just a little, that—”

Riley stood up. “Jude wouldn’t do that. Not to me.”

“And not to the orgs,” I prompted him. “You know, the ones who died. You forgot to say he wouldn’t have hurt them. Doesn’t have it in him or something like that.”

“Why are you here?” Riley asked.

“What? I live here.”

“But why? If you think Jude could do something like that.”

“I’m not here because of him,” I snapped. And maybe, deep down, I didn’t believe Jude was capable of something so terrible; maybe I wanted to believe in him as much as anyone else. Or I just needed an excuse to stay, because I had nowhere else to go. “He’s watching all of us,” I said finally. “Maybe I just think someone should be watching him.”

“You don’t know him,” Riley said, and he was already at the door, leaving me. “I do.”

“Are you sure?” But I said it under my breath. Quietly, so it belonged to me.

Riley hesitated in the doorway, drumming his fingers against the frame. It was strange—I wouldn’t have thought him the type to emulate org shifts and twitches, pretending that his body was anything other than what it was. But there he was, playing out a pantomime of org fidgeting. Jude had encouraged us to embrace our body’s natural stillness, its dissociation from feverish thoughts, yet another way to maintain control, another point scored in our game against the orgs. I’d bought it; Riley apparently hadn’t. “You okay?” he finally asked.

I thought about my father then, the tightened line of his lips holding back a tidal wave. I’d never thought about what it must have been like to live behind his colorless expression. Caged by self-control, and in that cage, with him, my body after the accident, ravaged first by fire then by BioMax, my body now, the one he’d purchased, the one he’d willed into existence, the mistake.

In that cage, with me: my reflection in his eyes. And their eyes, the eyes of the dead, bloody and sightless. Auden’s eyes, staring into a camera, staring out at me, believing I could do anything after what I’d done to him. Mika’s eyes, shut tight, as we stepped over him, another body in another hall.

I could lock it all away. Even if it meant locking myself in with it.

I almost broke.

But I remembered that Riley wasn’t my friend. That I didn’t have those anymore.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Because if you’re not—”

“I’m fine.” I was intact and unharmed; I wasn’t going to jail. I wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll be fine.”

“That’s good,” he said, like he meant it.

“What about you?” I suddenly thought to ask.

“Fine,” he said.

And hope springs eternal, right? Maybe we would be.