Shattered

17. THE GUILTY ONES

If three people had broken into the Temple in the dead of night, with intent to vandalize a sacred space and plunder its sacred secrets, perhaps Savona would have been obligated to turn them over to the secops. But the trespassers were mechs—three of them, as it was announced in every vid, on every news zone, no mention of the one released or the one who chose to stay. And the secops wanted nothing to do with them. Savona was on his own. So were the mechs—they were his mechs now.

When it came to rights, we were in a liminal zone. No one’s property, not yet—but not quite our own, not anymore. Ani had chosen her team wisely: three mechs whose parents had given up on them, who had no remaining ties to the org world. No one to care if they disappeared. BioMax refused to get involved, given the “criminal nature” of the circumstances under which they’d been acquired.

Not taken, not kidnapped. Acquired.

Call-me-Ben wasn’t taking my calls.

And the network was wild with support for the Brotherhood of Man, horror at the narrowly averted attack. Three mechs surely headed toward a ventilation shaft or somewhere worse. Three mechs with deadly intent, headed off in the nick of time.

Three mechs, strapped to three tall, sturdy posts, made from freshly cut pine. Posts drilled into the stage at the front of the Temple’s largest auditorium. Directly behind the central podium. The perfect visual backdrop to the next Brotherhood rally.

Three mechs, their hands bound, their heads shaved, their mouths gagged, their eyes open.

Confirmation that the electric shock hadn’t completely shattered their systems. But who knew whether the shock had incapacitated them, fried the connections between the neural network and the body, leaving them trapped inside their own heads, plastoid lumps for the Brotherhood to pin up like ornaments. Or whether they’d been left broken inside, half there, half absent, damaged remnants of their old selves, gibbering wild-eyed nonsense, missing reason, missing themselves. What would it look like, madness in a mech?

“Here is our enemy,” Savona said, his back to his audience, to the cameras, preaching to his prisoners. “Crept into the very heart of our Temple, just as the skinners have wormed their way into the heart of society. Here is our enemy, the barbarians at our gates, just as the skinners will struggle to defeat our measures, the boundaries we draw for our own protection. Here is our enemy, and here they will stay, for them and for you. For your benefit, so you can look upon them and truly see. For their benefit, so they can understand their crime, their trespass. Not breaking into the Temple—the Temple is an open door to any in need. Any.” He paused there and I waited for the camera to pan across to her, as it often did—her blue-black hair peeking over the crowd—Savona’s prize mech, his pet mech, the one who’d seen the light. I should have been grateful that he so loved parading her across the vids—it was the only proof I had that my story was true, that I hadn’t led the others to the slaughter, struck my own deal with Savona and Auden to guarantee my escape. After all, I was the one that walked away, free and clear.

I should have been grateful, but I couldn’t stand to see her there, glowing under Savona’s warm approval. I couldn’t stand her expression, coldly serene, empty of doubt or regret. Empty.

But this time the camera didn’t move. It stayed on Savona, leaving the fourth mech, his mech, just another invisible face in the crowd. And I was relieved.

“They would trespass here,” Savona boomed. “Here, where they’re not wanted, as they don’t belong, trespass without a thought, because their very existence is a trespass upon humanity.”

He bowed his head and raised his arms out to his sides as if flourishing invisible wings. “We bear them no ill will. But we will hold them here, like this, until BioMax agrees to stop creating new skinners, until the government recognizes that those already built must not be allowed to maintain their stolen identities, living among us, carrying the names and faces of the dead. They will be a symbol, a reminder that our fight continues. And when we have achieved our goal, we will release them.” He raised his head then, staring up at the mechs dangling from their posts, unable to respond, unable to look away. “We will release you,” he said, like it was a solemn vow.

Then, for the first time, he faced his audience. “They may never understand,” he assured them. “They are machines, prisoners to their programming. We can’t let their confusion sway us. We can’t let their delusions fool us. We can’t rest until the skinners are forced to accept what you all know in your hearts. Men make machines. Objects. Complicated, remarkable, sometimes wondrous objects. But objects nonetheless. Only God can make a life.”

“You were supposed to be her best friend,” Quinn told me when she heard. “And you want to blame me? Where were you when all this was happening? Where were you?”

I hadn’t blamed her. Not out loud, at least.

Just told her what had happened, just the facts. Just what Ani had said and done.

Just that Ani had decided betrayal was what mechs did, so why shouldn’t she join the party.

“What makes you think I was her best friend?”

“She told me,” Quinn said.

She told me you actually cared about her, I thought. She was wrong about a lot.

But I didn’t say that. Didn’t ask how we could be best friends when I barely knew her. Or how anyone would want to be my best friend after seeing what had happened to the last one.

“You were supposed to look out for her,” Quinn said, angry as Quinn ever got.

And I didn’t say anything to that either. Because buried beneath all the reasons that she was wrong—I wasn’t Ani’s best friend, I wasn’t the one who’d broken my promises or broken her heart, I wasn’t under any obligations—she was also right. As right as Quinn ever got, at least.

I’d let her think she was my friend, I’d let her tell me things, secrets, let her listen to mine, asked about her like I cared, had cared, and maybe I’d let myself think we were friends too—and then I’d shut my eyes and looked away.

My fault, not my fault, all of our faults, no one’s fault. And then I linked into the network, saw those mechs, none of them friends, each of them one of us, and all I saw in that moment was that Ani was to blame for what Ani had done.

“Why’d you even do it?” I asked Quinn. “Just couldn’t stay away from Jude, even though you knew it was the one thing that would—” I shook my head. “That’s it, right? Nothing so sweet as forbidden fruit and all that?”

“What am I, a child?” Quinn snapped. “Or Jude’s some god of love I couldn’t resist? Please.”

“What’s the point, then? You just wanted to hurt her?”

“Maybe I don’t need a reason for what I do,” Quinn said. “I do what I want. Maybe that’s the point.”

I didn’t answer.

“You’ll never understand what it was like for me,” Quinn said. “Before the download.”

I wondered—was that what Jude heard when I talked, After everything I’ve lost, I deserve whatever I can get? Was that why he always threw them in my face, words like “spoiled” and “naive” and “childish”?

So you were a damaged orphan, strapped to a bed for fifteen years, trapped inside a wasted body, I wanted to say. So what?

We’re all damaged, I wanted to say. And we’re all here now. Stuck. It doesn’t mean we get to do whatever we want. Or hurt whoever we want.

But I didn’t.

I wanted to believe that she went to Jude not because she wanted him, not even because she chafed at anyone telling her what she could and couldn’t have, but because she didn’t want him, suddenly didn’t want anyone but Ani, and the idea of that, chaining herself to a person when she’d finally gotten free of her cage, losing the freedom to want what she was supposed to want, freaked her out so badly that she pounced on Jude, did it practically in public, did it and would have done it again and again until she got caught.

I wanted to believe that about her and pity her rather than blame her, but I couldn’t, not quite. And so instead of asking the question and getting the answer I didn’t want, I left.

After it happened, Jude took to sitting in the greenhouse, cross-legged on the floor beneath the tables bursting with purple and golden blossoms, hidden from the hothouse lights by the wide fronds of an anthurium plant overhanging its pot.

“She liked to come here,” Jude said, squinting up at me when I found him there. It was two days after the failed raid, and the glass building blazed in the sun. From his perch in the leaf-shaded dark, I must have been a silhouette to him, backlit by the light. “She’d just sit. Said it kept her calm.”

“I didn’t know that.” I sat down across from him.

I’d come to accuse him. And it seemed fitting here, at the greenhouse, where Jude had once explained to me that when it came to hurting people, motives didn’t matter.

He looked past me, eyes flitting from plant to flower, settling on the windows. Cyclones of dust whirled in the pale beams of morning light. “This was her favorite part about being a mech,” he said. It didn’t feel like he was talking to me; it felt like he would be saying it if I were there or not. “No more sickness. No more death. As much credit as she could want. No more—” He shook his head, jaw clenched. “All the shit we got past, and this was still her favorite.”

“The greenhouse?”

“The flowers. Trees. All this nature crap. She never saw any of it before. The city’s all concrete. We used to laugh about it. How we never really got nature until we turned into machines.”

“She’s not dead, Jude.”

“What?” He looked at me, confused for a moment, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“Ani,” I said. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. She’s not dead.”

“Might as well be.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Like you care.” Jude scooped up some loose soil by his feet, building it into a low mound. “You left her there.”

“You weren’t there,” I reminded him. Driving the knife in. “You don’t know what it was like. I couldn’t have gotten her out. Even if she’d wanted to come back.”

“I know you,” he said nastily. “Always looking for an excuse to give in. Run away.”

“Run away?” I spit the words out. “You’re the coward who didn’t go in the first place! No, too risky for you, so we should all suffer in your place. None of us should have been there that night, Jude. Not us, not Ani—and you knew it. You just didn’t want to believe it.”

“I wanted…” His voice drifted off.

“You wanted to pretend you didn’t hurt her, like it never happened!” I fired the words like bullets, knowing they couldn’t hurt him, nothing could hurt the mighty Jude. “You wanted to just pretend she was fine and everything was fine, and it wasn’t. It’s not!”

“Shut up!” he shouted. Startling us both. “You think I don’t know this is my fault?” His voice was ragged. “You think I need you to tell me that?”

“This is Ani’s fault,” I said quietly. It slipped out, not at all what I’d been intending to say. “She did this.”

“I did this,” Jude said. “Just me.” He cupped his hands, sweeping more soil into his pile, packing it hard, smoothing his mound into a tower. “She ever tell you how we met?”

I shook my head, not really expecting him to continue. But he did, like he talked about the past all the time. Like he didn’t care anymore.

“We were in there together for almost a month,” he said. “Me, Ani, a few others. They never told us what they were testing us for. Or why the ones who disappeared never came back. I was the only one who knew what we were doing there—”

“How?”

A ghost of the old cocky smile crossed his lips. “Knowing things is something of a hobby for me. I’m rather good at it,” he said. Not boasting, just stating a fact. “But the rest of them, no idea. You don’t tell the lab rats why you’re putting them through the maze, right?”

“I thought Riley knew too,” I said hesitantly, feeling like I was breaking Riley’s confidence by admitting what he’d said. “I thought you got him into the program?”

“He told you that?” Jude asked, surprised. “I didn’t think he’d… huh.”

“What?”

“He tell you the rest? About what he was doing there?”

“He got shot,” I said.

“Right, and…?”

“And what?”

Jude nodded with approval. “I didn’t think so.”

“What?”

“Ask your boyfriend,” he said. “If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

But I wasn’t asking Riley much of anything at the moment. All I wanted was his arms around me, his voice in my ear, telling me—

Well, that was the problem. Riley would tell me it was going to be all right. That I’d done nothing wrong. That I couldn’t have stopped Ani, couldn’t have saved any of them. That we’d find a way.

He wouldn’t judge me, and he wouldn’t question me.

He wouldn’t guess that I had a secret from him, from everyone, that Savona had given me a piece of poisonous knowledge, forced me to swallow it. That everything I told him about that night was infected by the lie of what I couldn’t say.

So I avoided him.

And instead sought out Jude, who couldn’t judge me but also couldn’t trust me, because he knew better. We were both liars, both cowards, in our own way. The same.

He turned back to his small pile of dirt, reaching into one of the plant pots to scoop out a fresh supply. “Anyway, Riley wasn’t there, not at first. I got him in at the end, when it seemed like they had figured out what they were doing, and it was going to work. At the beginning, when they were still screwing around, throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick? I was on my own.”

“With Ani.” I tried to picture it, the two of them with their old faces, their wheelchairs, two people who had nothing in common with the mechs I knew, and everything in common with each other.

“Yeah. She was from a different city, hung with a different crowd the first week we were in there. But most of them were gone after the first week anyway, so… anyway. There was this girl, Jeri. From the same city as Ani. And they were—I don’t know. I never knew if they were together, or what. But one day Jeri just wasn’t there anymore. And Ani—I’d seen her around by then, you know. There weren’t that many of us left, so you pretty much knew everyone. That day, she was just kind of empty. Like she was there, but not there anymore, you know? Nothing behind the eyes.”

“And you took pity on her? Decided you were going to rescue her from her misery?” I’d intended sarcasm, but it didn’t come out quite right.

He shook his head. “I was…” His face twisted. “Preoccupied. You’ve got to understand, these tests they were doing—we’re not talking your standard med-check. They had to figure out how our bodies worked, how our brains controlled our bodies. That’s medical research, right? You give a little electric shock to your lab rat’s brain, see which part of his body shuts off. You carve open your lab rat, see how things are working, play around a little, sew him back up, watch what happens.” He tapped his temple. “You know how they figured out how this stuff works? They study damage. Damaged brains, damaged bodies. Zap a lab rat in the right place, and it forgets how to run the maze—presto, you know where rat memory lives. You can build your rat brain piece by piece, just by taking his apart. Piece by piece. Ever think about that? That’s their model. Damage. So you tell me, what does that make us? How are we supposed to be normal, when everything they know, everything we’re based on, was wrong?”

We’re not supposed to be normal, I thought.

“Never thought about it before, did you?” he asked. “How they perfected it.”

“I…”

“Didn’t think so.” He shrugged. “They needed to figure out how we were put together, make sure they could replicate it. And they didn’t want anything that would corrupt the purity of their experimental results. Muddy the neurological waters. Things like anesthesia. Pain meds.”

“So they just…?”

Jude watched me, waiting for me to react. Not wincing at the memory, not inviting my pity, but not flinching from it.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Nothing new about pain,” Jude said flatly. “I got used to that a long time ago. But that day that Ani’s girlfriend disappeared, that was… a bad day. It was hard for me to, uh, get around back then.” He paused, as close as he’d ever come to acknowledging who he’d once been. “But that day, I couldn’t even—” He rested his palm on the top of his tower of soil. Then he bore down and crushed it flat. “It was a bad day. And she stayed there with me. Barely knew me, and still had that empty look, because by that point we knew when someone disappeared, they weren’t coming back, but she just ignored it, she got me through the night, fed me, kept me from—” He waved a hand, like he was brushing away the memory. “I don’t like being helpless,” he said. “I don’t believe in it.”

“But you let her help you.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “I looked out for her after that. Made sure they didn’t take her in for the download until they knew what they were doing. She thought she owed me. Thought she could trust me.”

I’d been trying to figure out why Ani hadn’t tried any harder to snare Jude in her trap. But maybe she’d known what I never would have guessed. That this—the powerlessness, the guilt, knowing that he could have, should have vetoed the raid, foreseen the trap, saved the day, knowing he had failed—this would be worse. Maybe she was right all along: She had known a part of him no one else was allowed to see.

“Why are you telling me this, Jude?”

“So you get it. You don’t have to tell me what I did.” He closed his eyes. “I know what I did.”

I didn’t ask him why he’d done it.

I touched his hand. He drew it away.

“Why don’t you come back inside with me,” I suggested. “We can figure out—”

“You go,” he said. “I’m sure Riley’s looking for you. He’s always looking for you.”

I wanted to tell him something true, to trade confidence for confidence, secret for secret. But I couldn’t tell him the real secret. Because Savona might have been telling the truth. He might have been ready to kill all those orgs. I cared enough to be afraid of him; afraid for them.

Jude might not.

“I got a message from my sister,” I said. A smaller, safer secret. “She says there’s something we need to know. She wants to help.”

“Right,” Jude said wryly. “And it was so important that she couldn’t just tell you? She had to send you a cryptic message and then, let me guess, have you meet her somewhere? Alone?”

“I think she means it,” I said.

He stood up abruptly, brushing the soil off his hands. “Of course that’s what you want to believe,” he snapped, and it was like the conversation had never happened, like I’d imagined everything. “But you can’t seriously be considering it. After everything that’s happened? After—” He chuckled harshly. Fakely. “You think you can trust anyone? You think you can trust an org?”

I stood up too. “She’s not just any org. She’s my sister.”

“She doesn’t think so,” he reminded me. “She thinks you’re a skinner who stole her sister’s identity. She thinks you’re the enemy. Maybe she’s right.”

“It’s easier for you to think that,” I shot back. “Like everything’s so simple, us versus them, orgs versus mechs.”

“You’re telling me it’s not? After seeing what Savona did to his prisoners? What the whole org world let him do? They think we’re things, Lia. Not people. Not sisters. Things. I don’t want it to be us against them. It just is. How many times does the truth need to bite you in the ass before you stop turning your back on it?”

“Ani’s a mech,” I said quietly. “It didn’t stop her from joining them. So maybe Zo…”

He choked out a pained laugh. “Are you kidding me? You warned me, Lia, remember? But I ignored you. I should have known—I knew—but I didn’t listen. And now—” He stiffened, drawing himself up, still and straight. “Do what you want. Believe what you want. Let me know how that works out for you.” Jude pushed past me, pausing for a moment as our shoulders met. “You had more to lose. I get it,” he said, flexing his arm, stretching his fingers wide, then curling them into a fist, staring at the muscles working as if he still couldn’t quite believe they responded to his command. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you lost it. I really thought you’d figured that out.” He let his arm drop, and his fingertips brushed mine. Then he was in motion again, past me, out of the greenhouse, and I was on my own.

He wasn’t the only one who’d thought I had figured that out.

I’d told myself that I wasn’t the same person anymore. That the old Lia Kahn didn’t matter. But if I really believed that, then I would have deleted Zo’s message from my zone and accepted that she wasn’t my sister, just an org related to the org I used to be.

I would have let it go.

We lay side by side in the grass, our hands linked, watching the clouds. They were always thicker in the afternoon, or maybe it just seemed that way on the rare days when the morning sun peeked through the cloud cover and gray gave way to blue—only to inevitably fade away again within hours, the dark chill of daily life returning.

“I don’t want you to go,” Riley said. He squeezed my hand.

I’d gone to Riley after Jude. I hadn’t told him what we’d said, hadn’t told him anything. I’d just sagged against him, let him hold me up. I let myself be weak. But that was temporary, and now it was done.

“I have to,” I said.

“If it’s a trap—”

“I have to know. And besides, what would be the point of a trap? They had me—they let me go. If Savona had wanted me…”

“Maybe it’s not Savona,” he said. “Maybe it’s just your sister. Or maybe it’s him.”

Riley didn’t like to say Auden’s name.

“I guess I’ll find out.”

“Then let me go with you,” he said, even though I’d already told him no, and told him again.

“I’m not leading you into a trap.”

“Maybe you don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said.

I let go of him and sat up, angry that he didn’t understand. “This is my stupid decision,” I said. “Not yours. I’m not going to let you pay for it. I’m not going to let you get hurt because I made the wrong choice.”

He sat up too, facing me, resolute. “I’m not going to let you get hurt, period. The last time I let you go to the Temple—”

“Let me? Since when do you let me do anything?”

“Since when do you? You can’t stop me from going with you.”

“And what happens if something goes wrong?” I shouted. “And you end up in that Temple, stapled to one of those posts. Just because you were stupidly trying to protect me? How am I supposed to live with that?”

Riley took my hand and pressed it against his chest. “Feel that?” he asked.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I tried to pull away. He held fast.

“Heartbeat.”

“Energy converters don’t beat,” I snapped.

“Exactly.” He let go. “And I’m not Auden.”

“Who’s talking about him?”

“The accident,” Riley said. “He was trying to protect you. He forgot that you were strong, and he was weak. I’m not weak.”

“I don’t want you there,” I lied. “And maybe I don’t want you here either. Not if you’re going to start telling me what I’m thinking, like everyone else.”

“Take me with you, or I’ll follow you. I don’t care what you tell me. That’s the way it is.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“We’ll find out.” He leaned forward, hands gentle on my face, and kissed me.

We spent the rest of the day there, in the grass, together, hands and lips and bodies searching for a way to feel, our clothes on, our touches confined, restrained, not wanting to find out what would happen if we pushed too far, if we tried to feel something our artificial receptors couldn’t convey, if we let ourselves remember what our bodies used to be.

Whenever we went flying, when I stood at the edge of the sky, beneath the fear of falling, of crashing, there was the taste of something else, the fear that nothing would happen, that I would feel nothing, that the rush of speed, the terror of gravity, would be such old news that the drop would offer no release. It happened eventually, it always happened. Everything we tried got tired, and we would move on to something else. The waterfall. The cliffs. The plane. Maybe even the dreamers. Eventually, perhaps, we would run out of ideas and options and be left with nothing to jolt us into a moment of genuine release. We would be dead inside, for real this time, machines from the inside out.

Usually, I would ignore my fear or use it to kindle the fire I needed, and the rush would hit the moment my feet left the solid ground of the plane and the wind carried me away.

But sometimes I decided not to jump.

Zo sent me the coordinates of a point on the southern perimeter of the Temple campus. It was on the opposite side of the grounds from the main building, but it still felt strange to be there, knowing that Sloane and the others were less than a mile away, waiting for us to save them. Stranger still: knowing what was nestled in the pocket of Riley’s bulky coat.

He’d insisted on bringing the gun.

I would never let him hurt my sister.

But if this was a trap, if she showed up with a horde of her newfound Brothers and Sisters, all of them armed with pulseguns and eager for two new prisoners, I couldn’t let them hurt Riley. Not when it was my fault he was here.

The gun was a good compromise, a way of ensuring that we kept a little power, no matter what. We wouldn’t use it. That was why he carried it, because he knew guns, he understood guns, and he knew that the safest way to use a gun was to make sure you never had to use it. We would all be safer this way, including Zo. That was Riley’s point, at least.

But I didn’t want him to bring it.

And I didn’t want to hear that he understood guns. Or know why.

“Didn’t think you’d show,” Zo said flatly when we joined her at the rendezvous point, just beyond the electrified border of the Temple grounds. It was just past midnight, but the main Temple blazed brightly on the horizon, and I realized the other night’s darkness must have been part of the plan. Make it look empty and abandoned, so that the foolish, trusting mechs would spring the trap without thinking twice.

And here I was again. “You said it was important.”

She glared at Riley. “I also said come alone.”

He reached out and took my hand. Zo nodded. “I should have figured.” She gave him a nasty smile. “Watch yourself,” she suggested. “Lia’s never without a guy for too long—but she’s also never with anyone for very long.”

“You say that like you believe I’m Lia,” I pointed out.

“No,” she said. “Like you believe you’re Lia. Same nasty habits.”

“Why are we here, Zo?” Obviously not for hugs and warm reminiscences of our halcyon youth.

She jerked her head at a flat, domed building just beyond an outcrop of trees. A smattering of rusty, broken machinery marked it as some kind of industrial space, one that seemed likely to have been abandoned long ago.

“They do it out here, away from the central areas,” she said. “They don’t want anyone to know.”

“Know what?”

She didn’t answer. Just crept silently toward the building, gesturing for us to follow. At the electrified zone, she held out her hand, waiting. I watched her face as our fingers touched, but it remained blank, no disgust, no curiosity, nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched.

With Riley’s hand firmly gripped in my own, we made it through the invisible fence. She took us on a circuitous route through the industrial zone, skirting motion detectors and, at one point, yanking us back into a shadow just as a floodlight swept across the pavement. Zo nodded to the source of the light, a bulky pillar stretching up from a nearby building, rotating slowly, painting a wide arc with its blinding beam. “AI targeters up there,” she whispered. “Coded to face recognition. If the light hits you and you’re here without authorization…”

The use of deadly force was strictly prohibited in private security—which everyone knew meant it was tacitly allowed if the “private” in “private security” privately paid enough credit to make it worth someone’s while to look the other way. Still, if Savona was risking it at the Temple, it must have meant he was protecting something big. I could see from the intent expression on Riley’s face and from the way his eyes darted wildly across the landscape that he was constructing a mental inventory of the threats and weaknesses, like he already knew we’d be coming back—on our own.

Creeping slowly, in fits and starts, Zo led us to the edge of the large domed building—judging from the retractable front wall of frosted glass and the decaying, wingless fuselage parked outside, it must have been a hangar for private planes. The glass was too thick to see through, but there were a couple broken panes near ground level. “Just don’t let them catch you spying on them,” Zo suggested, nestling herself in the shadow of one of the old planes.

I hesitated. If we went for the windows, we’d be in plain sight, target practice for anyone who happened to walk by—or anyone who spotted us from within.

“You came all this way,” Zo whispered loudly. “You want to puss out now?”

So Riley and I knelt on the cement, peeking through the broken pane. We watched silently, ready to run. But there was only a handful of orgs inside, and none of them seemed likely to notice us. They were a little busy.

Bustling back and forth through a room stuffed with equipment—and at the center, four pallets with four bodies stretched across them, nude, motionless, the skin on their bare skulls stripped, exposing the wiring within. Wiring that was connected to machines, piping data to oversize monitors. Four mechs, and even though the telltale blue hair was gone and we were too far to see her face, I knew. Ani, I mouthed, and Riley nodded, his fingers tightening around the sill.

And hovering at her side, anxiously watching the man whose hand was shoved in her skull: the Honored Rai Savona.

We watched for long minutes, as if time was going to give us some glimmer of understanding. But it didn’t, and eventually Zo released a long, low whistle. Time to go.

“They cart them back to the Temple every morning,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “For the vids. Then back here every night. If it helps, I’m pretty sure the skinners have no idea what’s happening. I saw them up close once—they’re long gone. Totally checked out.”

It didn’t help.

I wanted to charge through the glass and throw them all over my shoulder, carrying them to safety. It was a fantasy. But maybe that made sense: This was a nightmare. “What the hell is he doing?”

“He’s trying to figure out a way to kill them,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “All of you.”

“Not possible,” Riley said. “Not for long, at least. Our minds are backed up.”

“Savona turned on her,” I said, barely listening to the two of them, still seeing the mechs laid bare on those gurneys. Remembering what Jude had said about lab rats. “She threw herself away for him, and he did that to her.”

“What? Your former friend, the Brotherhood’s newest recruit?” Zo shook her head. “Not exactly. She’s a volunteer. Savona talked her into offering herself up for ‘the Cause.’”

“Which is?” Riley prompted her.

“I repeat: He’s looking for a way to get rid of you, for good,” Zo said. “And he’s getting close.”

“And you’re helping him,” I said.

“Right. I’m helping him. By bringing you here.” Zo shook her head. “This isn’t what the Brotherhood’s supposed to be about. This isn’t why I joined.”

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised?” I asked incredulously. “The whole point of the Brotherhood is to get rid of the mechs.”

“No! We don’t want any more of them to be created. And we want to make sure the ones who still exist can’t hurt us. Restrictions. Sanctions. We don’t want to kill them.”

“You can’t kill a machine,” I reminded her. “You just shut it off. I’m not human, right? I’m not your sister. That’s what you said.”

“You’re not,” Zo said. “But…” She rubbed her hands furiously over her face. “I don’t know. You’re something, okay? You talk like her and you act like her and…” Zo sighed. “It’s just enough. Enough death. Enough.” Her voice hardened. “You should get out of here,” she said. “Before someone sees you.”

You don’t even see me, I thought.

“Come on.” Riley looped an arm around me, tugged me toward him. “Let’s go.”

“Auden doesn’t know,” Zo said suddenly. Awkwardly, with the same shamefaced half smile she used to flash on my birthday, when she would shove a gift in my face, then run away before I could open it.

“Know what?”

“What Savona’s doing. I’m not supposed to either. But Auden’s clueless. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks, Zo.” I wanted to hug her.

Not because of what she’d done tonight or what she’d just said or because when I had last hugged my father, I had let go too soon. Like I let go of everything too soon.

Because she was still my sister, even if I wasn’t hers.

Because she still didn’t want me. But she wanted me to live.