Shattered

6. CITY LIGHTS

Riley cut the link.

“That wasn’t me,” I said.

“I know.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said again.

He nodded. “I know.”

“But it wasn’t—”

“Lia, stop.” He put his hands on my shoulders like he was holding me steady. Like I was shaking. Which I wasn’t. “I know,” he said. Slow and firm. “It wasn’t you, it couldn’t have been. You were in the atrium when the alarm sounded. I saw you. Besides, other than her face…” He didn’t have to say the obvious. She’d had shorter hair, different clothes—black from head to toe, a killer and a cliché. She’d stood differently, moved differently. She was a physical copy, nothing more.

Riley was still holding on to me. I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I linked in again, flipping through the vids until I found what I was looking for. It was cross-posted from the Brotherhood’s zone. “I would never have expected this,” Auden said in response to tepid questioning from some unseen interviewer. “But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? You never really know a skinner. You only see the self they want you to see.”

“Do you understand me?” Riley said, fingers tightening on my shoulders. “That. Wasn’t. You.”

But it had my face. My voice. My smile. Auden believed it was me. Anyone watching, anyone I’d ever known, would think it was me.

My father would think it was me.

“Just stay calm,” Riley said, like he could see behind my steady gaze, steady hands, into the storm inside my head.

He cut the link again. “Take it nice and slow,” he said. Sounding like my old track coach when we’d pushed ourselves too hard for too long and needed something to lean on. Struggling to fill our lungs.

Breathe in, breathe out, I thought, the hysteria creeping in again. If only.

“None of this is your fault.” Riley leaned close, his voice warm and steady in my ear. “You didn’t do this.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said again after a long, silent moment, and this time I wasn’t trying to convince him, or myself. It was just the only fact I had, a starting point.

“It wasn’t you,” he said in the same tone, and I could tell he got it. Crisis averted. For the moment. “I know that. But no one else will.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t freak out,” he said.

“Sorry, but did you not see the same vid I saw?” I snapped. “Because this is me freaking out.”

“We have to voice Jude and—”

“And what?” I grabbed his arm as he was reaching for the ViM. “We leave him out of this.”

“He’ll know what to do,” Riley said.

“Right. Because Jude always knows what to do.”

“This is not a joke,” he said in a low voice.

“You think I don’t know that? Was that your face on the vid?”

He looked down at his arm, and I realized I was still holding on. I let go.

“Jude’s the one who forced us to go to the corp-town,” I reminded him. Forced me, specifically. No one else would do.

“So?”

“So if someone’s setting us up, it hasn’t occurred to you that Jude—”

He stood up abruptly. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m not saying—”

“You better not. Or I’m out of here.”

“Fine. I don’t think he would ever do something like that.” So I didn’t want him to go; so I lied.

“Good. Because he wouldn’t.” Riley kept his eyes fixed on a low-hanging branch. There were still enough leaves clinging to the trees to block out most of the dim sunlight. The first night had been hard, huddling in the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar chitterings and hoots of the Sanctuary’s protected species, wondering if there were wolves or bears or some other fanged predator of an earlier age prowling for fresh blood. Nothing seemed quite as dire once the sun came up, but after two days trapped in the trees, all I wanted was some sunlight and an open sky.

“I just said that, didn’t I?” Best friends was one thing, but it was like Riley thought if he said one bad thing about Jude—or let anyone else release a single criticism into the universe—he’d be struck by lightning.

Jude’s not God, I wanted to remind Riley.

But not as much as I wanted not to be left alone.

“The point is we shouldn’t bring anyone else into this,” I said. Thinking: Jude sent us to Synapsis Corp. Sent me. To meet a mysterious contact who never showed up. Thinking you’d have to be a moron not to wonder. Or an acolyte, blinded by faith. Same difference. “You said yourself, they could track us through the network—and now we know they’re looking for us.” Looking for me. “If we get in touch with Jude, we’d only make him look guilty. Bring down the secops on everyone.”

“I don’t know…”

“It’s my life, right?” I said. Only one mech had turned her face to the camera. A few shots had caught Riley running away, but he’d been the smart one, covering his face with his shirt. No one was looking for him. “If we’re going to take a risk, it should be my decision.”

“And you don’t trust him,” Riley said sourly.

“Right now I don’t trust anyone.”

“Including me.” It wasn’t a question.

He’s Jude’s best friend, I thought. Riley would do anything for him. But not this.

I had no way of knowing; I knew. He’d stepped over the bodies with me. He’d been there. And he was here now. Probably I should have suspected him. But I didn’t want to.

“If you’re out to get me, you’re not doing a very good job of it,” I pointed out, only partly for his benefit. “And you’re already stuck with what happened. Jude isn’t.”

Riley dropped down to the ground again, looking a little lost. “You’re right. Just us, then.”

I didn’t want to say it. The old Lia Kahn would never have said it. But she was dead. “They’re looking for me, not you.”

“So far,” he said darkly.

“I mean, this doesn’t have to be your problem.”

“You want me to go?” he asked.

I hesitated. Then shook my head. “But you can. If you want.”

He hesitated too, longer than I had. “I’m in this.”

“But you don’t have to be.”

“Yes. I do.”

We needed somewhere that no one would bother to look for us, where no one bothered to look at all. “I know a place,” Riley said, “but…”

There were plenty of buts.

But I haven’t been back since the download.

But it’s not safe.

But I don’t know if you can handle it.

“I can handle anything,” I told him.

It’s not that I convinced him. It’s just that we couldn’t come up with a better option. So we went with the last resort.

Riley’s city was a day’s walk—a day and a half by back roads, which was how we went. We walked through the night, navigating by the dim glow of our ViM screens and occasionally switching to infrared. We reached the city’s crumbling edge just as the sun was peeking through the jagged skyline. I’d been there before, but only at night, when the dead buildings were just ragged shadows, the city people all hidden away, in bed or in shadow. At night, the sky’s dim red glow gave the place a weird dignity. Maybe it was the illusion that the city wasn’t dead after all but just a sleeping monster that would wake when the lights switched on.

Now that the lights were on, it was easy to see that the monster wasn’t sleeping; it was dead. Unlike most of the cities on the eastern seaboard, this one was still habitable, but just barely. The streets were paved with rubble and dogshit, lined with broken cars so old they still ran on gasoline (or would have, if they ran at all). Small clumps of orgs—their teeth rotting, their faces pockmarked, their insides and outsides racing each other toward decay—gathered in burnt-out buildings with broken windows, staring slack jawed at vids playing across giant screens. None of them noticed us as we passed.

“The vids play all day,” Riley explained. “When you’re a kid, you’re supposed to watch the ed ones, learn to read and all that. After, you can do whatever you want. But there’s nothing else to do.”

There was no wireless web of energy here, which meant no one had ViMs to watch the vids of their own choosing. It also meant our mechanical bodies would be powering themselves on stored energy, good enough to last three days, four if we pushed it. Riley was convinced that would be enough. And if it wasn’t, we could always sneak back to the Sanctuary for a quick recharge. There was no network either, at least no wireless access—they jammed the signal in the cities. Instead, communal ViMs let residents link into the network for a few minutes each day. According to Riley, most never bothered.

“How did you live here?” I asked as Riley led us down widening streets. The squat, brick structures gradually gave way to cement monoliths, their faces the color of ash.

“What was the other option?” He slowed down, his eyes tracking the broken windows we passed. Once he knelt to pluck a glittering scrap of metal from a small pile of trash. He held it out to me, proud of the find. “A real coin,” he said. “You can find them all over if you know what you’re looking for.”

“So?” I didn’t need him playing tour guide. “It’s not like they have any value anymore.”

He slipped it into his pocket. “Maybe not to you.”

Shadows flickered behind the glass. I turned my face to the ground. We’d agreed we shouldn’t bother trying to disguise ourselves—no disguise would hide what we were. Even if my picture hadn’t been all over the vids, two mechs traipsing through a city was a dead giveaway we were doing something we shouldn’t. Riley had claimed it didn’t matter. “There’s no law in the city, not really. You just do what you can until someone stops you.” Meaning no law but the unspoken kind, expressed only in the native language you absorbed growing up in the city, in favors and blackmail and protection money, in the unforgiving thresher of Darwinian selection. You either figured out how to survive, or you went extinct.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked now as we passed building after building, all of them identical except for the designs sprayed in black and gold across their faces. Sensing our presence, the graffiti rippled and swirled, occasionally emitting a piercing blast of noise, the artist’s primal scream embedded in the electropaint. “Can’t we just pick one and get off the street?”

Riley shook his head. “Even in a city, everything belongs to someone.”

He stopped suddenly in front of a building capped by two forty-story towers, its doors scarred by deep fissures running diagonally across their length as if giant claws had sliced through the metal. A thick layer of grime had turned the facade a dark, earthy brown. The windows at street level were all boarded up, but through the cracks I could see figures moving around inside.

“There are people in there,” I hissed as Riley started toward the door.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, well, shouldn’t we go back the way we came? What about all those empty houses?”

“You don’t get it,” Riley said.

“So explain it to me.”

“Now?”

I crossed my arms. “Now or never.”

So he did. Some of the buildings we’d passed probably were empty, he explained, but in the city, empty was death, home to roving bands of the desperate and hungry, as bestial as the outside authorities made them out to be. We couldn’t be killed, but we could still be attacked, robbed, dismembered… he left the rest to my imagination. There was safety in numbers as long as you chose the right numbers. Which was why most of the city crowded into the skyscrapers at its center, seizing a place as either protector or protected. Every gang had its own territory, some owning whole towers, others sharing space in a precarious balance of power, as in this building, Riley’s building, where west and east towers coexisted as uneasy allies and occasional combatants.

We entered the lobby, a long, narrow space with ceilings that towered three stories over our heads. At ground level, the windows were boarded up with jagged-edged wooden boards. But above, a latticework of steel beams and broken glass let in the light and—judging from the puddles, the rust, and the mold—the elements. Facing the entrance, a sleek wall of black marble rose from floor to ceiling, small holes smashed into it at regular intervals like hand- and footholds for a mountain climber. And at the point where the marble met the ceiling: the climber himself, hanging from a narrow cable, his long rifle aimed out at the street. There was a matching sniper at the other end of the lobby—one to guard the west tower, I decided, the other to guard the east. On the ground, two clumps of sentries mirrored the division, each protecting the entrance to one of the towers, all with their weapons trained on us.

Riley had called them “sentries,” but they were children, alongside a few decrepit and aged men and women. All carrying guns, all settled into wheelchairs or leaning on crutches and canes.

“Not enough power to run an elevator,”

“So either you climb the stairs…”

Or you didn’t.

Apparently, in a tower everyone had some job to do, even the ones forced to stay on the ground.

“Which floor did you live on?”

“The ground,” Riley murmured aloud. “With them.”

“But—” I stopped myself. Of course. Jude had stayed on the ground; Riley had stayed with Jude. “You sure about this?” I asked, nodding toward the nearest weapon—too near for my taste.

“Ground level’s neutral territory,” Riley said. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

I bristled at both the implication and the tone. But I did as I was told.

Riley strode up to one of the younger boys guarding the west tower. The kid sat malnourished and one-legged in a rusted wheelchair, a long, black gun laid across his lap. “Skinners?” he said, fingers rigid on the arms of the chair. “You don’t belong here.” One hand dropped casually, almost as an afterthought, onto the handle of his gun.

“Let ’em stay,” gargled an older man leaning on a crutch. “We can have some fun.”

“Shut it, Ches,” Riley snapped. When he spoke to the boy, his voice was gentler. “It’s me, Jay,” he said. “Riley.”

“Yeah, right. Prove it.”

“Fine.” Riley slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out the crushed coin he’d found, then tossed it to the kid. “For your collection.”

The boy’s eyes widened. With a furtive glance at his fellow sentries, he shoved the coin into his pocket. Then, never taking his eyes off Riley, scrawled something onto a piece of paper and shoved it into a long tube that ran up the side of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling. The page whooshed away.

“Pneumatic tubes,”

“Works on compressed air. Best way to stay in touch without power.”

“Since when do you know how to write?” he asked the kid.

The boy scowled and hocked out a mouthful of thick, yellowish saliva. “Gray made me. New rule. Reading too.”

Riley grinned. “Since when does Gray make anyone do anything?”

“Things change,” the kid said without matching his smile. “You should know.”

The response arrived a few moments later. The boy retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from the tube, read it over slowly, his lips moving as he pieced the letters together into words. Then he nodded. “Fifteenth floor,” he told Riley. “They’re waiting for you.”

Riley gave him a half shrug, half nod, then pulled me past the group of guards toward the stairs.

“Hey, Riley!” the kid called after us. “So what’s it like, anyway?”

“Quieter,” Riley called back, and then the stairwell door closed behind us and we were on our way up.

“Quieter?” I repeated as we climbed the steep, narrow flights, stepping over piles of garbage. The stairwell was a windowless concrete chimney stretching endlessly above us and echoing with the clatter of pounding feet.

“What’d you want me to say?” Riley took the stairs two at a time, keeping me at his back. “That while he’s stuck in shit for the rest of his life, I’m rich and safe and never hungry?”

“Just wondering what you meant,” I said. “Quieter.”

“There’s always people around in a city,” Riley said. And as if to illustrate his point, a crowd of slummers pushed past us on the stairs without pausing, their pupils wide and faces streaming with sweat, telltale signs of a shocker trip. They probably hadn’t even seen us. “Nowhere belongs to just you.”

The door marked 15 released us into a long, gray hallway lined with doors, windows at either end letting in little light. Three orgs were waiting for us, their limbs bundled tight into thick sweaters, their breath fogging in the chill air. The two guys were a couple years older than me, while the girl looked about my age.

“It’s hotter than I thought it would be,” the shorter of the two guys said, looking me up and down, his ratface scrunched like he was trying to pick up my scent.

The other shoved an elbow into his gut. “So this is the guy claiming to be Riley? What’s the game?”

The girl shook her head. “No game,” she said, her eyes laser focused on his face. “It’s him.”

The taller one spat out a bitter laugh. “Says who?”

“Says me.” The girl took a step toward him, then stopped with a foot of distance still between them. Riley stayed silent.

“How do you know?” the ratface asked.

“He voiced me a couple times. And sent some pics. After.” The girl blushed and ran a hand through her spiky red hair. She was wearing makeup, I realized. A red smear across her lips and something sparkly over her lids—compensating for her lack of genetic perfection with a layer of paint. As if she could make herself pretty through sheer force of will. Add to that the baggy clothes, no tech anywhere in sight, just plainprint on the shirt and, from the look of it, shoes that didn’t even conform to her feet. She looked like a total retro, which made sense, since the retro slummers my sister hung out with were just shoddy imitations. This girl was the original. Zo will be glad to know she’s doing it right, I thought instinctively, before remembering that I wouldn’t be telling Zo anything any time soon.

The taller guy scowled at her, and she blushed again, harder. Then she moved to his side, slipping an arm around his waist. Next to me, Riley stiffened.

“She right?” the guy asked Riley. “It’s you?”

“Yeah, Gray,” Riley said. “It’s me.”

“Prove it.”

“You sure you want me to?” Riley asked. “Because I didn’t think you’d want Mika and Sari to know about that time we were crashing at Bo’s place and freaked out on shockers. What’d you declare yourself? Emperor of Piss and—”

“It’s him,” Gray said abruptly. Mika snickered. “Heard about your new look,” he said to Riley. “But seeing it…” He shook his head. “Always had to be different, didn’t you?”

The girl, Sari, kept her arm around Gray but pulled her body slightly away from him—it was subtle, probably too subtle for any idiot guy to notice, but I did. It was a move I’d pulled myself, one that said to anyone watching, I’m with him… unless you’ve got a better offer? “I think what Gray means to say is that he’s glad you’re not dead.” She drove a steel-tipped boot into Gray’s ankle. “Right, Gray?”

“Right, baby,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her into him again. Maybe he wasn’t such an idiot after all. “Didn’t think you’d be back,” he said to Riley. “After you and Jude disappeared, we all—”

“You knew Jude?” I asked.

Gray jerked his head toward me. “Who’s this one?”

“A friend,” Riley said. I noticed he was keeping his eyes on Mika. Worried about what he’d do next, I wondered, or just trying not to watch Gray pawing his old girlfriend?

“Right.” Gray sneered at me. “Didn’t know you had a thing for blondes.”

“Maybe it’s true what they say,” Mika said. “I hear skinners—”

“Mechs,” I corrected him. It shouldn’t have mattered—sticks and stones and all that—but it did. Words counted.

“‘Skinner’ works for me,” Mika said. “Computer brain shoved into some fake skin, walking around like you’re a real person, stealing the identity of some dead guy—or girl, in your case. I assume.”

“I didn’t steal anything.” Orgs just didn’t get how something could be true and not true at the same time. In every way that mattered, I was the same Lia Kahn as I’d always been; in every way that mattered, I was completely different.

But I wasn’t pretending to be human. I was over that.

“Whatever,” Riley said. “It doesn’t matter. We need your help.”

“Figures that’s why you’re back,” Gray said. “You and Jude score big, and you disappear, but now that you need something—”

“You know why I stayed away,” Riley said in a low voice.

Gray cocked his head at me. “But she doesn’t, does she?”

Great. More secrets. “Why—”

“Lia.” Riley shook his head at me, slightly. As if he was in charge of whether and when I shut up.

“Why’d he stay away?” I asked Gray.

He shrugged. “Ask him. Besides, doesn’t really fit in anymore, does he, looking like that.”

Riley hugged his arms across his chest like he was trying to cover as much of his skin as he could. Like he was ashamed. In the corp-town, he’d stared down all the whisperers and gapers, silently daring them to do their worst. But here he slumped and covered up, looking like he wished he could rip the synflesh off his body, strip by pale pink strip.

“We just need to crash here for a while,” Riley said. For the first time, he met Sari’s gaze. “Please.”

“You’re in trouble,” Mika said. “We’ve got enough of that.”

“And if Jude and me had said that last year, you’d be dead right now,” Riley said. “You owe me.”

“We owe Jude,” Gray said. “Don’t see him here.” He grinned at me. “Unless he’s feeling a little more feminine these days. That you in there, kid?”

“Let us stay here, keep it quiet, and you and Jude’ll be even,” Riley said. “You know I speak for him.”

Sari gave him a shy smile, then perched on her tiptoes to whisper something in Gray’s ear. His eyebrows knit together in a ragged V, but then he nodded. “Fine. Sixteenth floor, unit six, vacant for emergencies. It’s yours. But only for a few days.”

“You’re fucking kidding,” Mika spat.

“I’m fucking serious,” Gray said. Ratface shut up.

Riley held out a hand to shake, but Gray didn’t move. After a moment, Riley dropped his arm. “Thanks,” he said.

“Nothing personal,” Gray said. “I get that you’re still the same guy, somewhere in there, but… you know.”

“Yeah, nothing personal.” Riley jerked his head at me. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Just for a few days,” Mika reminded us as we tromped behind him up the decaying stairs.

“Yeah, then what?” I muttered.

“Can’t hide forever,” Riley said. “We deal with this, then we can go.”

“Home?”

“Wherever.”

We trekked up to the sixteenth floor, where we got a room of our own. A room with three blank beige walls and a pool of piss on the floor. A fourth wall of cracked windows cast the room in dying light, enough to see the film of grit coating the rickety table and chairs.

Foregoing the broken furniture, Riley slumped on the floor with his back to the wall and his feet a few inches from the urine. I found a place on the other side of the room. Mika reappeared a moment later and tossed us a wad of clothing. “Gray said you’d want it,” he growled before slamming the door shut behind him.

A grimy pair of pants had landed nearest me. I nudged it with my foot, half expecting a cockroach to crawl out from beneath. “We want these?”

Riley was already scooping up the jeans and a black rag that might once have been a shirt. “We don’t want to be wearing what we wore in the vids,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Plausible deniability,” I said, flashing on the image that bothered me the most, my still, upright form at the center of those sprawling bodies, the only vertical in a horizontal world. “Got it.” I lifted the gray pants between two fingers, glad I couldn’t smell them, trying not to wonder what had caused the rust brown stain spread down the right leg. The T-shirt was of indeterminate color, the bastard child of mold and puke.

Riley turned his back on me, slipping out of his old shirt and into the new one in one smooth, swift motion, revealing only a glimpse of the skin underneath. Bodies were bodies, Jude always said. Shame was an org thing, a pointless leftover from the Garden of Eden. But I turned away as Riley went to work on the jeans. If he was so repulsed by the sight of me, I wasn’t about to watch him. Besides, taut abs, bare ass, whatever. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Instead, I focused on my own city gear. The pants were baggy, at least two sizes too big, but they knotted at the front, and I cinched them as tight as they’d go. The threadbare shirt was probably see-through, and I imagined I could feel a colony of insects swarming across my skin, burrowing deep into their new nest.

Regretfully, I dropped my own clothes on the floor, aiming squarely for the pool of urine, knowing it was the only way I wouldn’t be tempted to put them on again. Riley still had his back to me, waiting.

“A true gentleman,” I teased. “Unless you snuck a peek while my back was turned?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he snapped, like he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to.

“Fine. You can turn around now,” I said. “Your eyes are safe from the hideousness of my bare skin.”

“That’s not—I wasn’t—”

It wasn’t like him to stammer. I let the awkward moment drag on as his gaze strayed involuntarily down my body. Then I put him out of his misery. “What now?”

“We wait till dark,” Riley said. “Then we get on the network and see what we can figure out.”

“But what about—”

“Doesn’t matter if they track us to the city,” Riley said. “We’re protected here. Someone comes for us, there are warning systems in place.”

“Gray’s systems.” Like I was going to trust my life to a total stranger.

Like I hadn’t already.

Riley nodded. “I’ll link in from a public zone.”

“If it’s that easy, why wait?” I didn’t ask exactly what he expected to do once we got on the network, since the options—voice Jude, watch and rewatch the vids of the attack, give myself up—were all varying degrees of useless. But even a bad plan was better than no plan. I pulled out my ViM.

“You crazy?” he snapped. “Put that away.”

I was tired of him treating me like a defective. Was it my fault I hadn’t grown up in his precious little concrete hell? “What’d I do now?”

Riley rolled his eyes. “Signal’s jammed here, remember? And you don’t show off what you’ve got, unless you want someone to grab it.”

Someone, like the trigger-happy losers he’d chosen to entrust with our lives. “Nice friends you’ve got.”

“Who said they were friends?”

I slammed my head back against the wall. Hard. “Great. Just great. So who the hell are they?”

“Some guys who owe me,” Riley said. “Around here, that’s what you get.”

“So Jude’s just some guy who owes you?”

Riley looked down. “That’s different.”

“And Sari?”

He curled his fingers into a fist and ground his knuckles against his lips. “What about her?”

I allowed myself a small smile. We were back in my territory now. “You tell me.” Not that I cared about what Riley was or wasn’t doing with some random slum case, but—aside from the not insignificant satisfaction to be gained from getting the prince of silent sulking to actually reveal a byte of information—I was bored. “I didn’t know you kept in touch with any of your old… not-friends.”

“Why would you know?”

“Does Jude know?” I asked. “Doesn’t seem like he’d approve.”

“You think I need his approval?”

“You’re the one who nods along to whatever the hell comes out of his mouth,” I said.

“Maybe I’m loyal.”

“And that means never questioning anything?”

“Not the big things,” Riley said.

“That’s not loyalty, it’s blind faith.”

He just shrugged. “Says you.”

We’d gotten way off topic, and I suddenly wondered whether Riley was smarter than I’d given him credit for, steering me away. “So you miss it here?”

He swept his arms out before him, showing off the peeling, stained walls, the yellow puddle. “What’s not to miss?”

“I’m serious,” I said. “You could have come back after the download.”

“Thought you said you were serious,” Riley said, cracking a half smile. “And even if I’d wanted to…” He shook his head, turning his left hand over as if examining its smooth surface, free of identifying creases and whorls. “Wouldn’t have worked.”

“Just because you’re a mech?”

“Partly.”

“What if Jude had wanted to move back?”

Riley paused. “He didn’t.”

Before I could explain the meaning of a hypothetical, the door opened. I froze, but Riley leaped to his feet, assuming a fight stance, knees bent, fists drawn.

“Am I interrupting something?” Sari asked, stepping into our cozy little hideaway.

It took a moment for Riley to drop his fists.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice gruffer than the one I was used to.

“Honestly?” Sari took a few steps toward him. He backed against the wall. “Just to get a good look.”

“You got one,” he said.

“Also this.” Before he could react, she’d crossed the room and her arms were around him, her cheek pressed to his chest. He hesitated, and then his arms crept around her. His eyes met mine, over her shoulder, then closed.

It wasn’t an easily categorizable hug. There was no sex in it, barely even a spark, but there was still something about it that made me feel like I should leave the room, leave them alone.

Then she let go and slapped him across the face.

“Did that hurt?” she asked.

He shook his head. She slapped him again—or tried to, but he caught her wrist just in time. She twisted away from him.

“What the hell?” he shouted.

“You tell me,” she shot back. “Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here.”

“Before!” She took a couple deep breaths. “You stop voicing me. Or answering any of my texts. You totally disappear! So you tell me: What the hell?”

“Sari, come on.”

“You never came back.” She looked up at him, eyes clear and dry, mouth pinched to a point. This was a girl who didn’t cry. “Two years, and you never came back—until one day you just show up again? With her?”

“You know why I couldn’t come back,” he said.

“Even if you wanted to, right?” Sari snapped. “But you didn’t. Why would you? Better life, better girls, better everything, right?”

“Nothing’s better,” Riley growled. “And I’m not the only one with a new life. Since when are you and Gray so tight?”

“It’s not like that,” she said, the lie so obvious on her face that she must have intended it to be. She wanted him to know the truth behind the denial—to hurt him. I had to admire how well she played the game.

“So tell me how it is,” Riley said.

Her eyes narrowed; her voice tightened. “Like you care.”

“Since when do I ask, if I don’t care?”

She reached out her hand again, and Riley moved to intercept it. She gave her head a quick, sharp shake. He dropped his arm. Sari touched his face lightly. Her fingers flickered across his cheek, his chin, the bridge of his nose. “It’s really you?” she asked, peering into his eyes like there’d be some leftover in there, something familiar tying him to the face she’d known. A waste of time. But that was the thing about orgs. If they couldn’t touch it, see it, hear it, they concluded it didn’t exist.

Riley closed his hands around hers, removed them from his face. They stood that way, connected, for a long moment, then separated. I couldn’t tell who’d let go first.

“What do you want, Sari?”

She hesitated. The iron expression wobbled. Then stiffened again as she made her decision. “Just to talk. Like we used to.”

Riley looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he nodded. “Yeah. That’d be good.”

Sari shot me a nasty look. I couldn’t blame her. “Not here,” she said. “Not in front of her.”

“She’s okay,” Riley said.

“I don’t know her.”

“I do.” Riley said.

Do you? I thought, skeptical.

But Sari was convinced. She glanced back and forth between us. “Yeah. Obviously. But I don’t, and I don’t want her listening.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “It’s fine.”

Sari snorted. “Where you gonna go?”

“She’s right,” Riley said. “It’s not safe.”

He was doing it again, acting like I was some fragile blossom needing protection from the elements. And not even in a marginally flattering, she’s-such-a-beautiful-flower kind of way. More in the I-don’t-want-to-clean-up-the-inevitable-mess kind of way. On the other hand, as far as I could tell, this claustrophobic, stained, piss-ridden room was a pretty good stand-in for the city at large. And I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. “Fine.”

“You want me to go?” he asked, like he’d asked in the woods.

He’ll come back, I told myself, and I nodded. Just like last time, he looked hesitant.

Unlike last time, he went.

“That was quick,” I said, irritated by my relief as the door swung open. Only a few minutes had passed. “I figured you two would—”

I jumped to my feet as Mika and two other guys I didn’t recognize—big guys—stepped into the room, shutting the door behind them. Knees bent, fists clenched, I thought, trying to imitate Riley’s instinctive don’t-mess-with-me pose. The look on their faces suggested I wasn’t doing it quite right.

“Didn’t realize I was having company,” I said brightly. “You should have told me you were stopping by, I would have cleaned the place up.”

One of the musclemen paled as he looked me up and down. “You didn’t say it was going to be one of them.”

“We don’t have time for this shit,” Mika snapped. “Just do it.”

“It’s not natural,” he whined.

“Who’s supposed to be intimidating who here?” I asked Mika, trying to figure out how to get past four hundred pounds of muscle (plus a few pounds of Mika’s scrawn) to make it to the door. “Because I don’t think it’s working out the way you planned.”

“Do it,” Mika ordered like a guy who’s never given an order before.

“Do what?”

Instead of answering, the less chatty of the two musclemen darted toward me and twisted my arms behind my back. “Sorry,” he murmured, and before I could ask him sorry for what, something hard slammed into the back of my head and the transparent pane of glass between me and the world—between my artificially constructed reality and the vivid, visceral, live experience of org life—shattered into a thousand bright shards of pain.