Shattered

14. SKIN TO SKIN

When you don’t eat, you don’t exercise, you don’t work, and you don’t have to slog through school, there’s no obvious start to the morning. Sometimes, especially when you can go back to “sleep” simply by instructing your brain and body to shut down, there’s no obvious reason to start at all.

Which is why I figured I might not see Ani for another day or two. But instead she showed up at my door just as the sky was pinking up.

She didn’t come all the way inside, just leaned in the doorway. “About yesterday,” she said. “I just want to make sure you know it’s a nonissue.”

“If you want to talk…”

Ani flashed a bright, fake smile. “Nonissue means non-discussion.”

“Fine.” I decided not to point out that she was the one who’d come to me.

She traced her finger along the doorframe like she was examining it for cracks. “Interesting, isn’t it? That stuff Savona was saying about how we can’t be blamed for what we do, because we have no souls?”

“No one has a soul,” I pointed out. “Orgs or mechs. It’s a fictional concept. Like unicorns. Or zombies.”

“Right.” Ani choked out a bitter laugh. “Can’t imagine why anyone would believe in the walking dead.”

“We’re not dead.”

“We used to be.”

I tried to ignore the image that popped into my head, the gleaming morgue, the burned corpse with my face. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“Look, human morality comes from human mortality, right?”

“Says Savona.”

“Fine,” she granted me. “Says Savona. Life on Earth is unfair, but after you die, God punishes the evil and rewards the good.”

I grinned. “Soul is one thing, Ani. You want to start telling me you think there’s a God?”

“That’s not the point,” she snapped. I dropped the smile. “If people are good because they believe they’ll be rewarded after they die, that’s all that matters. So what does that say for skinners—”

“Mechs,” I corrected her.

“We don’t die,” she said. “So what do we have to be afraid of? What’s to stop us from doing whatever we want?”

“What’s to stop anyone?” I asked. “God doesn’t exist, heaven and hell are fictions, and only a few crazy Faithers still think otherwise. So under your theory, the whole world should be going crazy with bad people doing bad things.”

She just looked at me, like, Your point?

I thought of the corp-town attack. Of the reason the corp-town had biosensors to be hacked, all the attacks that had preceded it. The weapons ban. The prison ships that used to circle the continent, and the islands for the cases too hard-core for the ships, and the cities that had replaced them both, a useful repository for nearly anyone who colored outside the lines.

“And no one did anything wrong back when the God delusion was still going strong,” I said sarcastically, arguing with the voice in my head as much as with Ani. “You don’t need to believe in heaven to be good, just like you don’t need to believe in hell to know you don’t want to go there.”

Ani shrugged. “Jude’s the one always saying mechs play by different rules,” she pointed out. “Maybe things like loyalty, doing the right thing, keeping promises have nothing to do with us.”

Keeping promises. Now we were getting somewhere. “And none of this has anything to do with Jude and Quinn, right? Because you don’t want to talk about that.”

“Monogamy’s impractical when you’re going to live forever, right?” Ani forced a smile. “No big deal.”

I noticed she wasn’t wearing Quinn’s necklace anymore.

“Ani, look, maybe you should—” I broke off as my ViM pinged with a text from call-me-Ben.

Remember our deal. I don’t have forever.

“Lia, I should probably get out of here.”

“Wait, I really want to talk to you,” I said, keying in a response. Working on it. Need more time to get the info out of Jude. Ben had granted me two more weeks to produce the name, but now he was texting me at least twice a day with annoying reminders not to drop my end of the bargain. I was beginning to think that ferreting out his BioMax mole didn’t matter to him nearly as much as bending me to his will and forcing me to acknowledge, on a daily basis, that he was in charge.

“I’m out of here,” Ani said.

“Wait. Please.”

“Why?”

I could have told her about the deal with call-me-Ben. But that would mean making a decision. Because no matter how she felt about Jude now, she’d never let me betray him.

Not that I was planning to. But.

“You heard everything I said to Zo yesterday,” I said.

She nodded.

“So you know Zo started hooking up with my boyfriend. After the download.”

“I figured,” Ani said. “Sorry.”

“I saw them.” I could still picture the two of them, pressed up against the brick wall behind the school, skin to skin. I didn’t care anymore. Walker belonged to a different Lia, and she was gone. “That’s how I found out.”

“So what?” she asked, face twisted in sour anger. “What do you want from me? You tell your pathetic story, and I tell mine? Except that you saw mine, right? You know how it ends.”

“I just thought—”

“Sorry,” she said. Though she didn’t sound it. “But it’s different for you. That guy was your boyfriend. Zo was your sister.”

“Right, and Quinn is your—”

“Nothing,” Ani said. “No labels, no obligations.”

“And Jude is supposed to be your friend,” I reminded her. “Like a brother, you said.”

“Guess I was right,” Ani said. “Because look what your sister did to you.”

“Yeah, and it sucked. I just thought you’d want…”

“What?”

A long pause. “I don’t know,” I said feebly.

She smirked. “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.” She sounded like Jude.

We just watched each other for a moment, like animals gauging a potential predator, weighing the options: fight or flight. Riley chose for us. He appeared behind her, leaning over her shoulder into my room.

“You busy?” he asked. “I can come back.”

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Ani said at the same time. “Not busy.”

“We’re talking,” I said firmly.

“We’re done,” Ani said. “I should go, anyway. I’m late.”

“Go where?”

“Back to the Temple,” she said. “Savona sent me a message this morning, said he and Auden are willing to talk to me if I want to come in. This could be the way to end all this.”

“Then I’m going with you,” I said.

“He told me I should come alone.” Ani shifted her weight. “He said to remember what Auden said yesterday. About you not coming back.”

“I can go,” Riley said, looking uncomfortable. “Whatever you guys want—”

“I told you, we’re done,” Ani said, slipping past him. “I meant what I said, Lia. Everything’s fine.”

Riley glanced after her. “Doesn’t seem fine.”

“Tell me about it.”

He stepped out of the doorway, tipping his head in the direction Ani had disappeared. “You want to…?”

I shook my head. “You can’t force someone to feel better.”

Riley rubbed the back of his neck. “Then maybe I should get out of here.”

“Wait—Why? What’d I say?”

“Well, you didn’t ask me what I was doing here.”

“Okay… what are you doing here?”

He gave me an embarrassed grin that, for one strange second, made him look like a little kid. “Came to force you to feel better.”

“Exactly how is this supposed to cheer me up?” I asked when the car dumped us out at the Windows of Memory. We’d driven in silence, like the last road trip we’d taken together—and like the last time, Riley knew where we were going, while I was clueless. I wondered if he was trying as hard as I was not to think about the last time, and whether he was having any better luck.

“I thought you said you didn’t need cheering up,” he teased. “I thought nothing was wrong.”

“I didn’t say it was,” I corrected him. “But if I was upset about something, I don’t see how this is supposed to help.”

I’d been to the museum before on class trips. It was the closest dead zone to our school, and unlike most of the dead zones, it wasn’t toxic or radioactive, just uninhabitable. Unless you were a jellyfish.

When you’re ten years old, wandering through an underground aquarium whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the submerged ruins of a drowned city wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon, but there was a reason I’d never been back. It should have been creepy, staring into the blue depths at algae-covered buildings lit by the museum’s underwater floodlights, schools of jellyfish skittering through the wreckage of abandoned cars, but it was hard to get creeped out when you were safely behind reinforced glass, watching Zack Bana pretending to jerk off while the tour guide blathered something about early twenty-first-century traffic patterns.

“You’ll see,” Riley said, steering me away from the main entrance. Most of the museum was below sea level, but visitors entered through a shallow glass dome surrounded by seven glowing crystalline spires. One spire for every ten thousand deaths. A wide plaza stretched around the perimeter, dotted with memorial statues and plaques, wilted flowers and soggy notes cluttering their feet.

The plaza was on a hill overlooking the sea, and a tall barbed-wire fence discouraged anyone who might have ideas about testing the water. We walked along the fence until the museum shrank to doll size and the laughter of the tourists faded into the tide. After nearly a mile, the fence turned at an abrupt right angle. But instead of following it around, Riley took a flying leap and landed midway up the fence, dangling by his hands. His feet scrabbled for purchase, and a moment later, he found toeholds in the chain link. He grinned down at me. “Coming?”

I looked up dubiously at the coils of jagged wire running along the top, wondering if it was electrified.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“You’re joking, right?” I said, then began to climb. I scrambled to the top in seconds—and not that we were racing, but I made it there first. I closed my hand over the tangle of wire lining the edge, letting the barbs dig into my palm. “No pain, no gain,” I said, grinning, and vaulted over the top, letting myself drop the fifteen feet to the ground. My feet slammed into the grass. I let momentum carry me forward into an awkward somersault, feet over head and back to feet again, then stumbled forward and did a full face-plant, arms splayed, mouth in the dirt.

“Graceful,” Riley said, climbing safely down the other side and offering me a hand.

I spat out a mouthful of grass and climbed to my feet.

“You’ve got a little…” Riley gestured at my pants, the front of which were covered in a thick layer of reddish brown dirt.

“So?”

Riley raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t think you were the type, Lia Kahn.”

“What type?”

He shook his head. “Just come on.”

We skidded down the shallow grassy hill and found ourselves at the edge of the ocean. It was strange—in all the times I’d been to the Windows of Memory, I’d never actually been anywhere near the water. It had always looked pretty from atop the hill, the floating scum shimmering in the sunlight. But up close, it just looked like sludge.

Still, there was something about this place. The sky seemed bigger here—staring out at the horizon, it was easy to picture a time before the world was round, when the glassy sea stretched infinitely far and flat. The shore curved around, forming a narrow bay, and soon we were standing almost directly across from the Windows, too far to see anything but the glow of the crystal spires.

“Weird to think there’s a whole city under there,” I said, nodding at the water.

“Yeah.”

“Especially since it feels like—I don’t know. Like we’re at the edge of the world. Like there’s nothing left but us. You know?”

There was a long pause, and I suddenly felt like an idiot for saying anything at all. But then: “Yeah.”

It was something.

We fell into step together, our arms swinging in sync, our faces turned to the ocean, eyes slitted against the wind. It was peaceful, and not the kind of empty quiet that forced unwanted thoughts into my head. This quiet was full—of rustling grass, of wildflowers, their bright blues and purples suggesting fragrant perfumes I could no longer smell. Full of Riley, forging the way, his head bent, his gait rangy and loose, his facial muscles losing a little of their tightness with every step, something relaxed and almost happy creeping across his face.

But then he stopped. “Here’s good.”

“Good for what?”

“I borrowed a bathing suit from one of the other girls,” Riley said. “I hope that’s not weird—I didn’t want to ruin the surprise by—”

“The surprise is we’re swimming?” I asked.

He hesitated, noticing the anger in my voice.

“I don’t swim,” I said.

Everybody knew that.

“But you can,” Riley said.

“Yes.”

“So what’s the problem?” He tossed me a ball of material, a garish red suit that looked like something my grandmother would have worn back before they fixed the ozone. Rolled up in it was a small, slim lightstrip with a square of adhesive on the back. “Stick it on your forehead,” he advised. “It’s good for about an hour of light. We won’t be down longer than that.”

I hadn’t been in the water since that day Auden and I had raced back and forth in the frigid stream, shouting over the thunder of the waterfall. The day I’d been so oblivious that I hadn’t noticed how cold it was, how cold he was, hadn’t noticed anything until he’d drifted away from me… over the edge.

“I don’t swim,” I said again.

“This isn’t the same,” Riley said.

“Same as what?”

“Same as the waterfall.”

“I can see that,” I snapped. “This is sludge.” The waterfall, and the river feeding into it, were man-made, one of the nature preserves erected a couple decades ago to restore and replace the natural habitats killed off by water shortages, temperature change, and smoggy sky as viscous as soup. But there was nothing to be done about the oceans, especially the coastal regions clogged with remnants of drowned cities. The acidic water had killed off most of the fish, leaving behind only roving schools of jellyfish and a thick layer of blue and red algae, stretching toward the horizon. They called it the rise of the slime.

“This isn’t about the water,” Riley said. “It’s about what happened. Isn’t it.”

So that was the game. Find my weakness and bear down, watch how long it would take until I broke. No wonder he and Jude got along so well.

“It doesn’t matter what it’s about,” I said. “I’m not going in.”

“Scared?”

“You think you can trick me?” I had a weird, childish urge to shove him in the water and run away. “What, I’m going to say, ‘Who, me? I’m not scared. I’ll prove it to you!’ Like I’m some idiot ten-year-old?”

Jude would have struck back. Riley looked like I’d punched him. He sat down with his back to me, cross-legged in front of the still, dark water, playing his palms across the surface of the slime. It shimmered in the light, iridescent like the Brotherhood robes, colors shifting in the dim sun. “That’s not what I meant,” he said quietly. “I asked because I wanted to know.”

“Oh.”

I sat down next to him, not mad anymore. Still confused. “That’s none of your business.” But I didn’t say it meanly.

“I know.”

I cupped my hand and plunged it through the layer of algae, into the water. It was the same temperature as my body—or close enough that I couldn’t tell the difference. “I used to love to swim,” I admitted.

“It was an accident, you know,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“You only know the story he tells on the vids—”

“Jude told me what happened,” Riley said. I swore under my breath. So much for keeping my secrets. “And he told me it wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s not what he told me.”

Riley pounded a fist softly against the water. “That’s just Jude.”

Whatever that meant. “Why’d you bring me here?”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“But so what?” I asked. “Why try to cheer me up or whatever this is?”

I was starting to recognize the crooked smile, one side a little higher than the other, eyes wide. Innocent and knowing at the same time. “That’s none of your business.”

But he didn’t say it meanly.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.” I stood up, staring into the sludge. No reflections here. “But I’m not wearing the granny suit.”

It was nothing like the waterfall.

It was like nothing I’d ever experienced as a mech.

It was almost like being alive.

The water felt like nothing. But not the same way everything else felt like nothing, or slightly more than nothing. It was warm, almost body temperature. Even when I was alive, swimming through water like that had meant an absence of feeling, a feeling of absence, no sense of where my body left off and the water began. Buoyant, cutting effortlessly through the water, my body itself faded away.

When I was alive, swimming had been the inverse of running, and yet somehow the same. Running was all about the body, feeling every pound of the pavement, every screaming muscle, every pant, every gasp, running was my mind letting go, my body taking over, sensations flooding everything out, filling me up. Running, before the download, before it became a mechanical exercise in pumping limbs, had been like flying.

But swimming, the body disappeared. Swimming was silent and dark. Null. And somehow in the end, the same release, the same emptiness, this time filled up not with a rush of speed and adrenaline but of quiet. Swimming, before the download, had been like dreaming.

It still was.

Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought, cutting through the water, matching Riley stroke for stroke. It wasn’t just the same as before; it was better. Because this time, I didn’t have to rise above the surface to draw a breath. I didn’t have to ruin the silent still by blowing out bubbles or thrashing around with the last of my air. I could just swim and swim and swim. I could swim forever.

We were built to withstand pressure differentials, so there was nothing to stop us from diving deep, kicking slowly to propel ourselves toward the submerged city.

We played our lights across the algae encrusted buildings poking up like massive coral from the debris-covered seafloor, overturned cars mingling with toppled roofs, tangled masses of traffic signs, the corroded, severed head of a stone statue, strewn clothing billowing in the gentle current, broken glass diamond-bright in the lightstrips’ beams. The water had preserved the ruins, enough that it should have been easy to imagine them teeming with life, intact and unsubmerged. But it was too quiet, too still, the contours of its broken buildings fading into the darkness. Hard to imagine the city thriving, even without the rising waters; easy to imagine that decay was inevitable, built into its foundation.

Riley stayed away from the buildings, but I was curious. I drew close. He shook his head, jerking a thumb up, away. I ignored him and swam up the side of one of the tall, narrow buildings, pressing close to the windows, smearing my hand across the growth of algae. Riley tugged my arm, shaking his head wildly. His hair floated like stubby seaweed above his head. I pulled away, catching hold of the window frame, pulling myself toward it—and caught sight of the bodies within. Not skeletons—bodies. Bodies preserved, mummified by the sea, bodies with bloated, waxy skin, bobbing and shaking in a watery prison. Most of the city had been evacuated in time, but there had been plenty who refused to leave. The tour guides at the Windows of Memory always made that very clear—but none of the windows looked in on the results.

I let go. Let myself float.

Down, because there was no air left in my body.

And down farther, until I sank to the ground, a cement pavement almost completely covered in soft, mossy growth. Civilization reclaimed, permanently.

Riley kicked down to me, grabbing my shoulder, pointing his index finger up to where the sky should have been. Jellyfish darted away from our lightstrip beams, like the light would burn. I shook my head; he nodded. A silent fight, and a moment later, I let him win, launching myself off the ground, my body a rocket, arms straight up, legs straight down. It was a superhero pose, and soon we were flying again.

We stayed a safe distance this time, enough space between us and the dead city that it was just that, dead buildings, dead cars, dead iron and steel and brick. No dead people.

But this time, I didn’t forget they were there.

“I’m sorry,” Riley said when we finally came back to the surface. “I didn’t think—I didn’t want you to see that.”

I climbed out of the water, using the ugly bathing suit to pat myself dry. I’d gone swimming in my tank top and underwear. Still, Riley turned away until I was dry enough to put my clothes back on. I watched him climb back into his jeans, water still dripping down his bare chest.

“No, it’s okay. Actually—thank you,” I said. “For bringing me here. For making me—Why didn’t you tell me it would be like that?”

“Like what?”

“You know,” I said. “Like when we were alive. It felt the same as swimming always felt.”

He shrugged and started walking back. “I didn’t know. I never went swimming before the download.”

“How’s that even possible?”

He stopped and glared at me. “You’ve been to the city,” he said. “See any pools?”

I kept doing that. Forgetting we didn’t all come from the same place. Forgetting that it mattered.

“I just thought you’d like it,” he said, his expression softening.

“I did.”

He smiled.

“You come here a lot?” I asked as we began walking together along the shore. “It’s kind of a long way to go, just for a swim. Not to mention it’s kind of…”

“Depressing?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “I know it should be, but somehow it’s just—”

“Not,” he said with me. Our arms swung in time together, close enough that our sleeves brushed and, once, the backs of our hands. Like the water had loosened something in him, Riley talked. “It’s the first place that’s ever belonged to just me. It’s big here, you know? No walls. And even down there, under the water…” He knotted his hands together, then released them. “The city was never like that for me. Before. It’s quiet. Safe. Like you said. Being alone in the world. That’s why I come.” He glanced at me and risked a shy smile. “I never brought anyone here before.”

“Not even Jude?”

He shook his head.

I wanted to ask why. But I was starting to get a feel for Riley: He’d tell me when he wanted to. Until then, there was no point in asking. “So how long have you guys actually been friends?”

He looked like he’d never thought about it before. “He’s just always been there. Since we were kids.”

“But you guys are so different,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not so different. We come from the same place. That matters. When it’s hard…” He sloshed his foot through the sludge lapping at the shore. “You find out who you can count on.”

“So what were you like?” I asked. “Before.”

“Different.” He crossed his arms, brushed his hands up and down his biceps, rough, like he was trying to wipe off the skin. “You saw the pic. You know.”

Black instead of white; org instead of mech. “Your face was the same,” I said. “I mean, not—Obviously it’s not the same face. But something about the expression.” I had a sudden impulse to touch his face, to show him what I was talking about, the way his mouth set in a permanent frown, the way his lids hung heavy over his eyes, like he was half asleep, or like he just didn’t want to see. “Ani told me what happened to kids in her city, the ones who were… sick,” I said, thinking of predownload Jude, org Jude, trapped in his ruined org body, sunken cheeks and useless legs. “Was Jude…?”

Riley didn’t answer. He turned away from me, staring out at the ocean. It was gray in the dimming light, fading into the sky. “Jude wasn’t sick,” he said quietly, glancing over his shoulder as he always did when he neared the edges of Jude’s secrets. “He wasn’t born that way. It happened when we were six or seven. Older kids. They—” He walked faster, still watching the water. “I was there, but I wasn’t big enough to stop them. It just happened, and then it was over. He almost died.”

“You took care of him after that,” I guessed. “He needed you.”

Riley shook his head. “I needed him. He figured things out. He’s smart—”

“Not as smart as he thinks.”

“Smart enough,” Riley said. “He got us food, got us power. Kept us safe. I’m the one who screwed things up. And when I did…” He held his hand in front of his face, turning it over as if he’d never seen it before. Searching his fingertips like he was looking for imperfections. Or maybe for prints, the identifying whorls and eddies that mechs did without. “He figured out a way to fix that too.”

“He got you into the download program?” I said, disgusted. “Just so he wouldn’t have to go through it alone?”

“I got shot,” Riley said flatly. “And thanks to Jude, I got a choice. Death or…”

“This.”

“They didn’t tell me what I was choosing,” Riley said. “They didn’t tell me I’d be like this. Or that I’d look like this. They didn’t tell me I could never go home.”

“Why would you want to?”

Riley’s face was blank. “I don’t.”

We reached the fence and climbed over, carefully this time, returning to civilization. The crowds milling through the memorial plaza had mostly dispersed, but we still skirted the edges, keeping our faces averted from the orgs. I paused for a moment in front of a glass sculpture of an antelope, its antlers sparkling in the light like the memorial spires. The golden plaque stretched across its flank marked it as one of the Committee for Animal Remembrance and Education’s extinction tributes. At every testament to loss of human life, CARE erected one of its own statues, ever-present reminders that, as the plaque said, “In the midst of our human sorrow, let us never lose sight of the greater tragedy, the death of millions, innocent victims of civilization.” And then, as the list of extinguished species—the endless Latin names for bears and squirrels and deer and apes, even the ones who’d been repopulated in genetically modified form—scrolled across the LED screen, their final battle cry: As cities fall, may nature rise again.

There’d been riots, back when CARE had first started planting these things around dead zones like they were glad to see all those hundreds of thousands of humans knocked out of the way so the animals could return. But by now they were just background noise. It had been years since I’d actually stopped to read the list of names, to rest my hand against the cool glass head of a fantastical animal and wonder if it had been as beautiful in life as the sculptor had rendered it in death. That was the thing about the Windows of Memory, about all these memorials. They made death into something elegant and clean. Even—if you were stuck on a field trip—something boring. They cleared out the bodies, dumped them in another section of the underwater city, sanitized death to make it safe for the living.

“If mechs ever went extinct, you think someone would build one of these for us?” I asked Riley as we began walking again.

“You ask Jude, eventually we’ll be building one for them,” Riley said. I glanced up at his face, trying to figure out if he was joking. He caught my eye and held it. There was something too intense in his gaze, like he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to, and I wanted to look away. Which is why I didn’t.

Which is how I almost stepped on the baby.

I screamed.

“What?” Riley asked, alarmed.

“Nothing.” It’s not alive, I assured myself, picking up the wriggling, crying doll. Some new trend in realistic toys, though I didn’t know what kid would want to deal with a squalling infant that stared up at you with creepy blinking eyes, drooled yellowish saliva, and from the feel of the thing, wet its diaper.

“Some kid must have dropped it,” Riley said.

The baby’s flesh was soft and pliant, almost lifelike, just like ours. Maybe they’d used the same material.

I pictured Zo and me as little kids, playing house, Mommy and Daddy to a bedful of dolls less advanced but just as creepy as this one. And suddenly I wanted to throw the baby as far as I could.

It’s as close as I’ll ever get, I thought. Playing house. Mech mommy. Mech daddy. And our mech baby.

The doll dropped out of my hands. The impact bumped its screeching up another decibel. Somewhere nearby, a child’s piercing scream added to the fun. “You hurt her!” the kid shouted, running up to us on short, chubby legs. Brown pigtails flew out behind her. The Mickey T-shirt marked her as a student at one of the Disney elementaries. Surprising, since the doll was a generic. I’d always heard the Disney kids couldn’t play with anything but corp-approved toys.

Riley picked up the doll and offered it to her. “What’s your name?” he asked.

She burst into tears. Angry tears spurting out of swollen eyes, streaking down her bulging red cheeks. She squinched up her eyes and nose into a little old man face and began emitting a sirenlike wail, the noise cut short every few seconds as she drew in a loud, gasping breath, just enough air for another round.

We backed away. But not quickly enough to avoid the attack of Mama Bear.

“What’d you do to her?” The woman was just as chubby as her child. She snatched the girl’s hand, yanking her away from us.

“Nothing,” I stammered. “She just dropped her doll, and we—”

The woman grabbed the doll away from the kid, who started sobbing again. “Who knows what they did to it,” she snarled. “We’ll get you a new one.” She glared at us. “Skinners don’t belong here—this place already stinks of death. Or is that why you’re here? Come to laugh at our grief?”

I opened my mouth—nothing came out.

“Well?” she snapped, shaking the doll in my face. “Are you getting out of here, or should I call the secops?”

The thought of the secops was enough to get my voice working again. “Why don’t you shove that doll up your—”

“We’re leaving,” Riley said quickly, slipping his hand into mine.

Her eyes widened, and her face paled. I saw it: She’d recognized me from the vids. “You,” she said in a weak, shuddering voice. “It’s you!” That wasn’t so weak. I could tell she was gearing up for a scream.

“Now,” Riley hissed, pulling me away.

He didn’t let go of my hand until we reached the car.

“I feel sorry for that kid,” I said, reluctant to get in. Surely the woman wouldn’t go to all the trouble of calling the secops. And I refused to let her ruin the calm that had descended over the day. Besides, we’d parked far enough from the crowds that the lot felt empty. Riley was right, there was something about this place, the wide open space, the heavy sky… I wasn’t ready to leave.

“I almost feel sorrier for the mom,” Riley said. “Having to listen to that screeching all day.”

He was right. Getting stuck with a kid like that would be a nightmare. Any kid would be a nightmare—now, at least. But there was supposed to be a later. A later when we weren’t seventeen, when we would want all that crap. The screaming. The diapers. The kid.

We were supposed to grow up.

Riley leaned against the car, arms crossed. He tipped his head back, gazing up at the swirling clouds. It was clearer here, since the wind blew most of the crap inland, and I wondered if at night you might actually be able to see the moon. “I chose this,” he said wonderingly. “I chose to live like this.”

“You chose to live,” I corrected him. “Anyone would.” I joined him at the car, my back resting on the metal, our arms almost touching.

“Would you?” Riley asked. “If you could go back? If you’d had a choice?”

“I’d choose for the accident not to happen,” I said. “After that, there were no more choices.”

“Jude loves it. Being a mech.”

“You’re not Jude.”

“He hates talking about this stuff. Thinks we should forget all about it. That we’re lucky now.”

“You’re not him,” I said again.

“Yeah.” He turned to face me. “He’s right, though. It’s hard. Talking about it.” He shook his head. “So I just don’t. But you’re different. You get it, right? You miss it too, you know?”

No, I thought. Because that was the answer I gave everyone, including myself. “I miss home,” I admitted. “I miss who I used to be. I don’t…” But that was enough truth telling for the day. I couldn’t say it out loud. I don’t want to live like this.

I didn’t say it because there was no point. It didn’t matter what I wanted. This was reality. This was life.

“Thank you,” he said. “For not lying.” He leaned forward, raised his fingers to my jaw, grazing the skin midway between my cheek and chin. So lightly I could barely feel it. “It’s good talking to you. Like I can say anything.”

I should tell him about Ben, I thought. Riley would know what to do. Whether I should give call-me-Ben what he wanted, whether it my was job to keep Jude’s secrets.

I should tell him, because not telling him is a lie.

But telling him would be like telling Jude. Telling him meant no more choices.

Riley rested his other hand at my waist. Drew me toward him. “I don’t know who you used to be. But this version isn’t so bad.”

“Because you don’t know me.” But I let him hold on, and I let him believe. And when his fingers traced the line of my jaw, down my neck, I pressed my hand over his. Flesh to flesh.

“You don’t know me either,” he said.

His lips were soft and fit perfectly against mine, as I fit in his arms, huddled against his chest.

His lips were soft, and his kiss was soft, and if I didn’t feel it in my body, if it didn’t rip me open, leave me trembling, torn out of myself, if the sensors on my lips, my back, my chest, my fingertips registered the pressure of his skin, the temperature, and not the electric shock of raw desire, it didn’t matter.

Because we fit together. Because his lips were soft but his arms were strong and they held me up.

And when he let go, I held on, his hand in mine, our fingers linked. And I wasn’t alone.