Shattered

13. BODY TO BODY

By the time we slipped into the auditorium, Savona and Auden had already taken the stage. Several hundred people crowded into the wide, windowless space, crushed against one another in their desperation to get closer to their heroes. Auden’s face beamed down at us from giant screens lining the walls. His face, ten feet high, every scar magnified. It was easy, it was nothing, to have a scar brushed away, but Auden had left his intact, thick, pale worms of white crawling across his cracked lips and crooked nose. He looked different than before—not just paler and thinner but almost like a stranger, his nose jutting at a sharper angle, his chin flatter, and I remembered the patchwork of bandages across his face the last time I’d seen him in person and wondered how much of him had been rewired and rebuilt.

His eyes sparkled, pools of black at their center flooding out the green, as if he stared out at a darkened room. Or as if he was zoned. It felt like he was watching me.

But when I turned away from the screens, forced myself to look at the real Auden, a tiny figure on the distant stage, it was obvious he couldn’t have seen me in the crowd. From where I stood, I could barely pick out the familiar features of his face or the cane he leaned on for balance—there was no way he could look into the sea of bobbing heads and pick out my hood-rimmed face in the crowd.

“They don’t understand,” he was saying, alone under a spotlight. Savona stood off to the side, hands folded, nodding with approval. They wore identical iridescent suits that rippled in shimmering rainbow, like light on an oil slick. “Those who stay comfortably at home, watching us on the vids. They think it’s all the same. But is it the same?”

“No!” the crowd shouted, barely waiting for the question. They were well-rehearsed.

“No,” Auden said again, as quiet and calm as the crowd was manic. “We meet here, we come together in person, body to body, to affirm our own humanity. To remind ourselves that being human is about more than the ability to watch a vid, to make a speech, to communicate, to think. Are we just minds, disconnected islands of cognition, connected only by an electronic web?”

“No!” came the enthusiastic response.

“Mind is inseparable from body,” Auden said. “When one hurts…” He paused, and the giant screens overhead showed him brushing two fingers against a jagged scar on his neck. “The other screams in pain.” He shook his head. “We don’t live in our minds. We live in our bodies. There is no mind without body, no body without mind. Life is born in their merger. A mind shoved into a machine is—”

“Still a machine!” the crowd screamed. “Still a machine!” I glanced at Ani, who was dutifully mouthing the words. But I couldn’t fit my lips around them.

“Dead,” Auden said. “Dead thoughts in a dead body, imitating life. But we know life,” he said. “Life infuses the heart, the liver, the arms and…” He paused again, looking down at the cane. “Legs.” Auden limped forward to the edge of the stage, peering intently out at the audience. The room fell silent. “The skinners wear a mask,” he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. “They hide among us. They clothe themselves as human—clothe themselves in human skin, identities stripped from the dead. They prey on the confusion of the grieving.” He clapped a fist over his chest in an unmistakable gesture of self-flagellation. “They prey on the sympathies of the weak.”

“You’re not weak!” someone behind us shouted.

“This is new,” Ani whispered to me. “Usually it’s just the same old stuff—I’ve never heard this before.”

Auden shook his head. “But I was weak, friend.”

Friend? It wasn’t just what he was saying, it was the words themselves—it didn’t even sound like Auden, not the one I’d known. What did they do to you? I thought.

What did I do to you?

“I believed that because it spoke like something human, because it appeared to act like something human, it was something human. And why not? In that life, before, I lived a life of the mind. I worshipped at the altar of rational thought. I told myself I believed only in what I could see, what I could touch—all the while ignoring the reality of what my senses were telling me. What did I really believe in? An imaginary entity, the mind, the self, as if that was something that could exist outside of the brain. As if it was possible to distill an identity from electrical impulses, suck them out of a skull, dump them into a computer. I told myself I was a rationalist, that the Faithers believed in a fairy tale.”

There was a bit of uncomfortable mumbling in the crowd, as if they weren’t sure whether they were supposed to cheer or boo.

“But I was the one trapped in the fairy tale,” Auden continued. “I was under a spell. And just like in a fairy tale, it took a kiss from a princess to wake me up.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that his eyes were resting on me.

“The skinner breathed its dead breath into my body. It gave me life, though it had none of its own to give. And despite everything else, I’m grateful to it for that.”

Now the crowd didn’t hesitate. The booing and cursing drowned him out for several moments. But then Auden raised his hand, and they fell silent.

“I am grateful,” he said. “Because when I opened my eyes, when I felt the pain of being trapped forever in this broken body, I knew the truth. That humanity doesn’t live in the mind. That I am my mind and my body. And no matter what the skinner says, no matter how good a show it puts on, this is the one truth the skinner cannot hide. They can lie—their bodies can’t.”

Savona joined Auden at center stage, basking in the applause. It was easier when he began to speak. I could ignore his words, the same old Faither bullshit about how only God could create life, about how skinners were abominations, how creating more of them would drive society to its knees, and on and on—it didn’t penetrate. I’d heard it all before, empty logic resting on the existence of some ludicrous invisible eye in the sky. It was easier because it wasn’t Auden.

At Savona’s command the screens overhead began streaming images from the corp-town attack, but even that was easier than listening to Auden. Ani was rapt, but I just looked away. Into the crowd, careful not to meet anyone’s eye but helpless not to search their faces, wondering what had drawn them here. What it was about their lives that hating me would remedy.

I didn’t find answers. Instead I found too much to recognize, fuel for paranoid imagination. A dusty blond head peeking over the crowd became Zo; a squarish face covered in brown scruff glanced at me with eyes I could imagine bleeding on the floor of Synapsis Corp-Town; a dead girl with pink hair clutched her dead mother’s hand. They couldn’t be here; none of them could. I wouldn’t give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some disease—the aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guilt—I couldn’t erase their impossible faces.

So I shut my lids and shut them out.

“We can’t forget!” Savona was shouting. “We can’t be lulled into a false sense of security by their assurances that this will never happen again. This will happen again! And again! And again! Unless we stop them. Unless we send the message, loud and clear, to each and every skinner. That you are not one of us!”

Ani nudged me, and I opened my eyes again, fixing on Savona, ignoring the crowd.

“Today, together, we forge a new beginning!” he ranted. “Your presence here is a promise. Standing here today we enter into a bond with our neighbors, with our Brothers. We cele-brate our humanity!”

Auden leaned forward to whisper something in Savona’s ear. He nodded. “This is no metaphor, friends. No empty words. We are more than words, remember. More than mind. We are alive, mind and body, and we embrace that fact, as we embrace one another. So go ahead!” he shouted. “Embrace your Brother, embrace your Sister, celebrate the bond we forge together!”

The people around us shifted uncomfortably.

“What’s he talking about?” I murmured to Ani.

She shook her head. “Don’t know. He’s never done this before.”

“I mean it!” Savona cried. “The network has torn us so far from one another, turning us into a sterile community of words and thoughts. Fight back. Here, now, fight back. Affirm your existence, the fact that you are here, not just in spirit, not just in mind, but in body. You are alive, you are human, as are we all. Embrace it!”

Tentatively at first, then enthusiastically, the audience turned in on itself, stranger greeting stranger, shaking hands, hugging, as Ani and I shrank toward each other, searching for an escape before someone could touch us. But there was no safe path through the crowd. The orgs closed in.

“Don’t be shy, honey.” A woman with a round, pockmarked face opened her bulging arms and swept me into them.

I felt her muscles stiffen.

Her body pull away.

Saw her eyes sweep me up and down.

Heard her scream.

“Skinner!”

And then it was chaos. A hand yanked the hood off my face. More hands tore at my shirt, pulled me away from Ani, into a teeming mass of writhing limbs, twisted faces. And the chant, Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! shaking the room. Gobs of spit splattered against my face.

“You’re lucky you’re a girl,” a man snarled, his fingers clamped down on the back of my neck, his thick, calloused lips peeled back from rotting teeth.

“It’s not a girl,” the woman beside him snapped. And to prove the point, she drove her fist into my stomach. It didn’t hurt, but I doubled over with the impact. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me down to my knees. Behind me, someone grabbed my shoulders, held me down. I could fight back against one, against three, but not against hundreds, and I imagined myself on the ground, trampled by the herd, feet grinding my body into the floor, like my feet had stomped the corp-town bodies, and wondered if it was what I deserved.

“Stop.” Auden’s voice, amplified and quiet at the same time, somehow cutting through the storm.

At his command, the grip on my shoulders relaxed. I shrugged it off and stumbled to my feet as the crowd dropped back a few steps. A circle of empty space formed around us. Ani sat on the ground, looking dazed, her hoodie torn. Someone had ripped a small patch of blue hair out of her head. Up onstage, Auden nodded with approval. I wondered what would have happened if he’d been closer. If he’d known it was me down here, probably he’d have been happy enough to watch the crowd tear me apart.

“Let them through,” Auden commanded, and his followers fell back, opening a pathway between us and the door. Several of them spit as we passed.

Just outside the auditorium, a man greeted us, draped in an iridescent robe that shimmered like Auden’s suit. He took my arm, like a gentleman, only his grip was steel. His other hand clamped down on Ani’s bicep. “I think it’s best that you come with me,” he said.

I wrenched my arm away. “Best for who?”

“Maybe we should just go with him,” Ani said, shooting a nervous glance at the door separating us from the angry crowd.

“What do you want?” I asked the man. “We weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s a public event, right?”

“I want nothing,” he said with a weirdly serene smile. “I’m just a messenger.”

“Oh yeah? For who?”

But even as I was asking, I knew. Who else?

“For Brother Auden and Brother Savona,” he said, face lighting up at their names. “They would like to speak with you.”

“Then they can come to us,” I said, though of course they couldn’t, because that’s not how this kind of game was played.

“Brother Auden has a message for you,” the man said. His hair was blonder than mine, almost white against his ruddy face. It fell in long, wispy strands across his eyes, which had a strange, faraway look, like he was peering through me into the distance at his divine reward. “He says, ‘It’s time we talk. Unless you want to run away again, Lia.’”

“He said that?” I asked. Stalling. “Lia?” So he knew it was me. Not just some anonymous skinner.

Lia Kahn. The one responsible.

The man nodded. “Ready?”

No.

The office was sparse, with little more than a desk and an oversize ViM screen plastered on one wall. The opposite wall was a touch screen, scattered with notes and scrawlings—but it went blank a moment after we stepped into the room. The desk looked almost antique, left over from the days when they installed screens and network links into the surface of dead wood rather than just building the whole desk as an integrated ViM that knew what you wanted nearly before you’d figured it out yourself. My father had one just like it—he claimed the solidity appealed to him, the permanence, but I think it was just that he didn’t like his desk talking back to him. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Rai Savona felt the same way.

He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.

Savona cleared his throat. “Since you’ve intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for.”

“Funny how you call me Lia when you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think that’s who I am,” I said, grateful for a voice that didn’t shake. “Or do you call your toaster by name too?”

“Consider it a courtesy,” Savona said. “An undeserved one.”

“You look better than you look on the vids,” I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I’d said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.

“Some things are necessary,” he said.

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. “You make yourself look weaker?” I asked incredulously. “For effect?”

Auden pulled himself up straighter, his expression grimly proud. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Savona bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. “He’s not as weak as he was the day you abandoned him,” he said, placing a supportive hand on Auden’s shoulder. Auden shrugged him off. “But the damage you caused is permanent. Damage to his spine, his organs, his life expectancy—”

“It was an accident,” Ani said.

I said nothing.

“But you made him stronger too,” Savona said. “You showed him the way.”

“Then why can’t he speak for himself?” I snapped. “Or is he too drugged up and brainwashed to even know I’m here?”

Auden raised his head. His eyes were paler in person, his pupils still too large. “The only drugs I’m on are for the pain.”

He raised a hand to his face, then abruptly dropped it, as if trying to adjust glasses that he’d just remembered were no longer there. Suddenly the last six months dropped away and I was back in his hospital room, standing by his bed, begging him to forgive me, because if he did—if he had—none of it would have happened, I would be home and we would be together, whole and healed, and everything else would be background noise. Something to watch on the vids, and then shut off when it got old.

“What do you want?” he asked flatly.

“Just to talk. You and me. Can’t we just go somewhere? Away from…” I glanced at Savona.

Auden shook his head.

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” Savona murmured in honeyed tones.

“No,” Auden said sharply. “Not going to happen.” Savona nodded. I recognized that nod. It was the same one that Jude got from his mechs when he issued one of his edicts. It was a pledge of obedience. Savona was letting Auden believe he was in charge.

Or Auden really was.

As Auden took a few steps, it became clear that the weakened martyr onstage was less of an illusion than he would have liked to think. Slowly, with one foot dragging slightly behind the other, he lurched around the side of the desk. His gait was awkward and spasmodic, almost like mine when I’d first learned to walk in the new body. I tried not to imagine the electrical impulses shooting through his spinal cord, stimulating dead nerves to life, one painful step at a time. He sank into the desk chair with a soft sigh of relief and rested his arms on a stack of papers. It took me until that moment to realize this was his office not Savona’s. Whatever Auden was, he wasn’t zoned and he wasn’t a puppet.

“I don’t know your name,” he said, looking at Ani for the first time.

She looked at me, like I was supposed to give her the answer. Or maybe just permission. “Ani,” she finally said.

He nodded. “Ani. You’ve been visiting us for the last few weeks.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

Auden held up a hand to stop her. “It’s fine. But there’s no need for all this sneaking around. The Temple of Man is a public space. We’re here to help anyone who needs us.”

“Really?” I snarled. “Even us world-destroying soulless monsters? Tell me something—if your God’s so impressive and all-powerful, how come he can’t give a soul to a machine? He can do anything, just not that?”

“He’s not my God,” Auden said, and I felt at least a shadow of relief that however far gone he was, he hadn’t plunged all the way off the cliff. But then he kept going. “He’s just God.” He shot a quick glance at Savona, who nodded in approval.

“He can do anything He so chooses, as you astutely point out,” Savona put in. “He could have created a universe where gravity is repulsive or men walk on their hands or giant lizards rule the Earth. But he didn’t. He created this universe and does honor to us by His choice. He chose to endow humans—only humans—with a soul, to make us rulers in His earthly kingdom. And much as you might enjoy indulging your what-ifs and could-have-beens, this is our reality, yours as much as mine. The sooner you face that, the easier it will be for you.”

Shades of Jude, I thought. Funny how eager some people were to accuse you of denying the truth—especially when “the truth” was one they’d invented.

“You really believe this crap?” I asked Auden. “What happened to science? Logic? The power of empiricism, all that?”

“Logic and empiricism dictate that the ability to mimic self-awareness doesn’t establish the existence of an inner life. Human consciousness transcends computation.” He didn’t even look at me. “You’re not to blame for what you are,” he told Ani. “You don’t understand, which must be difficult. And when you’re ready, we’re here to help. Bring your friends, if you’d like. We have nothing to hide.”

“What makes you think we need your help?” I asked. “Or anyone’s?”

“Not we,” Auden said. “Just her. She’s welcome here whenever she likes. You’re not. Ever.”

“Because I know who you really are,” I told him. “And it’s not this.”

“Tell yourself whatever you want.” It was like nothing I said touched him. No emotion, no hesitation, nothing. “But you’re leaving and you’re not coming back.” He pressed a button on his desk console and spoke past us to an unseen minion. “Can you please escort our visitors out of the building?”

“And what if we don’t want to go?” I asked.

I wanted to go.

“This will be easier on everyone if you just go quietly,” Savona said. “Especially you, Lia.”

The door opened behind us. “Let’s go,” said Auden’s faithful minion, her voice sickeningly familiar.

I curled my hands into fists, grinding my nails into the synflesh of my palms, a helpful reminder. I am a machine. I am in control. Nothing can hurt me.

Then I turned around to face my sister.

We didn’t speak. Not as she led us out of Auden’s office and through the corridors bustling with robed ex-Faithers, or Brothers, or whatever they called themselves, and not when she took us on an unnecessary detour through a wide hangar in which orderly lines of city poor waited patiently for handouts of bread and plankton soup, all in the shadow of a rusted airplane, its windows shattered and its fuselage layered with years of graffiti and rust.

Not until we passed through the final door and were released into open air. I stopped, staring down Zo in her shimmering robe, her blond hair nearly as short as Ani’s and just as spiky, her face painted not with the retro makeup she used to favor but with a delicate silver temp tattoo on her left cheek, the same stylized double helix that the Brotherhood of Man had emblazoned across its zone, its Temple, and apparently, its servants. “What the hell, Zo?”

“Hello to you too, sis.” She smiled, and not her patented screw-you smile. Not even the fake, brittle grimace that she’d shot in my direction for the first few weeks after the download, before we’d declared open war. This was something different, the same creepily serene look as on the faces of all the robed figures we’d passed in the halls. “Long time, no see.”

“So I’m your sister again all of a sudden?” What would she need with a sister, now that she had her Brothers?

Her face melted into a sympathetic frown, equally unsettling. “You believe you are,” she said. “The Brotherhood has helped me see that’s not your fault. You can’t be blamed for the delusions of your programming.”

“Delusions. Right.”

Ani clamped a hand over my forearm. “Let’s just go.”

I shook my head. “What if I said you’re right?” I asked Zo. “That I’m not the same person?”

“You’re not a person at all,” Zo said calmly. “I can’t fault you for believing you are. But I can help you see the truth.”

“How, by sleeping with my boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t your boyfriend!” she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. When she spoke again, the calm was back. “That was wrong,” she said. “I thought I was protecting Lia. But—” She swallowed hard. “Lia’s dead. I can’t protect her anymore. I see that now.”

Lia’s dead. The words didn’t sting like they once had. But it wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it—blank. Impersonal. Like she really believed I was nothing to her.

“So you don’t hate me anymore.”

“I don’t feel anything about you,” Zo said. “You’re a machine.”

“Right. You don’t hate me. You’ve just decided to devote your life to the Brotherhood, which, big coincidence, wants to wipe mechs off the face of the Earth.”

“You never bother to listen to anyone but yourself, do you?” she said with a flash of the old Zo. “No one wants to do anything to you. We just want them to stop making more of you. So that no more families get destroyed.”

Like ours, she didn’t say. Because she didn’t have to.

“We broke up, you know,” Zo said suddenly. “Me and Walker.”

“How would I know?”

“Well we did.” A giggle slipped out. “He’s insanely boring.”

She had a point.

“I really don’t care, Zo. I’m over it.”

“I heard,” she snapped. “Mechs are too superior to worry about us pathetic little orgs, right? Too special? You must be a natural.”

“I think this is pathetic, Zo,” I said, not sure whether I meant the Brotherhood or our conversation. “But not because I’m a mech.”

She twisted the fabric of the robe around her index finger, a nervous habit left over from when we were kids. “So you’re not even going to ask about them?” Zo said, a little of the old bitterness bleeding through around her edges.

“Who?”

She rolled her eyes. “Mom. Dad.”

Your mom and dad, I would have said. Except I wanted to know. “How are they?”

“Like you care,” she said.

“I do.”

“That’s why it’s been six months and no one’s heard from you.”

So she didn’t know I’d seen our father.

A herd of Brothers swept past us, piling onto a blue bus marked elixir corp-town. There was a fleet of buses just like it, each bus with a different corp logo on it, each presumably awaiting a shipment of corp-towners returning home with full stomachs and plenty of ammunition for their antiskinner campaign.

“Just tell me,” I snapped.

“How do you think they are? Their precious little baby disappeared.”

“So? Now they can lavish all their attention on their other precious baby.”

She snorted. “Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of love to go around these days.”

“Meaning?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. None of my business. Not my family. I forgot.”

“What family?” she asked. “Mom’s so zoned out that half the time she barely remembers her own name, much less that she has a kid and husband. Not that her husband’s ever home. Or speaks to either of us when he is.” She smeared her hand across her forehead, like she was rubbing away thoughts the Brotherhood didn’t permit. “It’s too late for us,” she said with a new lilt to her voice. “But at least I can help others.”

“Savona tell you that?” I asked sourly.

“Actually, it was Brother Auden.”

“So I’m not your sister, but suddenly he’s your brother?”

“He’s my friend,” she said.

“And you just love stealing my friends, don’t you?”

“I didn’t have to steal him,” Zo said. “He came to me. Said you ran away from him, just like you ran away from us. Explained how we’re better off.”

“We should go,” Ani urged again, tugging at my arm.

“Thanks for the cat,” I told Zo as a good-bye.

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

“Whatever.”

Ani caught my eye with a silent question—Stay or go? I didn’t hesitate.

Go.

We walked away—but Zo’s voice stopped us after a few steps.

“Is he doing okay?” Zo asked. “You know. The cat.”

“He’s fine,” I told her.

She paused. Then, so softly I almost didn’t hear: “He missed you.”

“Yeah.” I kept my back to her. “I missed him too.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Ani on the ride home, before she could say anything.

Her smile contained far more pity than I would have liked. “I wasn’t even going to try.”

I pretended to link in to the net, just so I wouldn’t have to look at her. But really I was staring past the screen, out the window, counting the mile markers as they streamed by.

Mile by mile, the car brought us home.

The entryway was one of the oldest parts of the mansion and came outfitted with two elaborate crystal chandeliers whose bulbs had apparently been burned out for several decades. Despite the high ceilings and ten-foot windows, the place always felt oppressive to me. Maybe it was the dark mahogany walls or the pillars that sprouted every few feet or the velvet couch inset into the fireplace that inevitably housed some mech or another in the throes of a dreamer fit—but even on a good day, something about the room screamed, Get out while you still can. And this had not been a good day.

“Don’t,” Ani said when I began to head upstairs to my room, to blissful, silent solitude.

“I’m not going back to the dreamers,” I said, like it was any of her business if I did.

“It’s not that,” she said, even though it obviously was. “Just… don’t you think we should find Jude? Tell him what happened while it’s still fresh?”

“If this is your attempt to keep me from crawling off to sulk, it’s a pretty pathetic one,” I said.

She grinned. “I have no shame. Not if it works…. So?”

“So…” I sighed. “Someone should get what they want today. Why not you?”

We found Jude the first place we looked. The vidroom. The door was half open. We both heard the moans and sighs at the same moment. Ani shot me an unusually mischievous glance. “We should probably let him have his privacy, but… who knows what’s going on in there. He could be hurt or something.”

“It does sound pretty dire,” I said, grinning. She was going above and beyond to perk me up. Mission accomplished. “What if it’s an emergency?”

“Excellent point,” Ani said. “We’re just doing what any good friends would do.”

She swung open the door.

Jude lay on the couch, his chest bare, on top of a girl with long, black hair, her shirt tangled in her arms as she tried to wriggle out of it. He pulled the fabric out of her hands and yanked it over her head, laughing as it caught briefly on her earring and she smacked his hand away. She was facing away from the door, so we saw only her long, slender neck, exposed when she leaned forward to press her lips to Jude’s chest. He wrapped his arms around her narrow waist, mechanical muscles bulging beneath synthetic skin.

I couldn’t look away.

I no longer hated the sight of my own body, not the way I once had, but I couldn’t imagine reveling in it, not like the two of them, much less exposing it to someone else, pressing skin against skin. The memory of that night with Walker was too fresh—I would never let anyone else look at me the way he had, touch me like I was diseased.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could see Jude’s, his closed eyes, his faint smile as her hair tickled his cheek. And then his eyes opened—and met mine. He grabbed her roughly and flipped her off the sofa, and I recognized her cry of complaint at the same time I recognized her face. At the same time I heard the small, sad sound escape Ani. It was the whimper of a wounded animal who’d given up the fight.

“You promised,” she whispered. Her hand closed over the pendant around her neck. The warm blue glow lit up her pale skin.

Jude leaped off the couch, nearly landing on Quinn. She just glared at him and proceeded to slowly, calmly pull her shirt back on. “I changed my mind,” she said.

Jude rushed the doorway, chest still bare, hair rumpled, eyes wild. “Ani, look—”

Ani slammed the door in his face.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told me.

“I wasn’t even going to try,” I said with a small, hopeful smile. But she just turned away from me and walked briskly down the hall, neck stiff, head erect, arms tight against her sides.

I didn’t try to follow her. I didn’t try anything.

But I should have.