Torn

12. SAFE HAVEN

Like the machines BioMax designed, the operation was a well-oiled one. The corp had distributed a set of rendezvous coordinates to all mechs. From there we would be taken to the secure resettlement facility, its location and access well protected from the inquiring public. And from there… well, from there things got a bit hazy. Without knowing exactly what was going on inside Safe Haven, it was impossible to know how hard it would be to get everyone out, much less figure out exactly what BioMax and the Brotherhood intended to do if we failed. But even if we didn’t know what we were walking into, it felt good to be moving again. It felt right.

The coordinates took us to a vast concrete lot lined with rows of trucks and buses, each bearing a freshly painted BioMax logo. A thin trickle of cars pulled up to the registration point, disgorging their mech cargo, then driving away. Some were filled with concerned orgs who hesitated on the curb, drawing out the moment with embraces and farewells. But most mechs came alone and sent their cars away on autopilot. As we did, joining the procession of mechs, letting the BioMax reps take our names, scan our pupils, check the registration data embedded in our spinal columns. We shuffled down a line of intake staff, finally reaching a man with a white smock and a stiff smile. He had doctor written all over him, a game many of the techs liked to play, as if their machinations on our conduits and circuitry made them healers, when in fact they were nothing but plumbers, mechanics, engineers. “Welcome,” he said. Cue the mirthless grin. “I’m so pleased you’ve decided to take the prudent route and join us until this crisis is resolved.”

His hand flashed through the air, and then there was a sharp prick at the back of my neck, like something had sunk its fangs into my skin.

I slapped a hand over my neck. There was a rough patch at the tip of my spine, and a hard-edged lump that hadn’t been there before. “What the—”

Jude caught the doctor’s wrist as it swooped in his direction. “Not unless you tell me what the hell this is,” Jude said, glaring at the slim, silver injector that had been aimed at his neck.

“He’s nervous,” I said quickly. “You can understand that, right?” I tried to sound innocent and unsuspecting, a scared little girl who just wanted to be told what to do. “There are people trying to kill us! Maybe if you just explained… ?”

I doubt either of us expected him to. But after a pause he shrugged. “Just a precaution—it helps us keep track of your location,” he said. “If you don’t get one, we can’t let you into Safe Haven.”

Jude let go of the man’s wrist. “Just a precaution,” he repeated, bending his head forward.

“We’re not taking any chances,” the man said, jabbing the injector into Jude’s neck. I flinched, watching the tracking chip slide under his skin. Jude didn’t move.

The man slapped him on the back, then patted me on the shoulder. “All set.”

I tried to look grateful. Even though I felt like he’d stripped off my clothes and left me bare and helpless on the cement for any and all to see.

Jude looked blank. “I feel better already.”

They shoved twelve of us in the back of a truck. BioMax’s first step in keeping us safe involved an unpleasantly bumpy ride, the kind of lurching and slamming that in another life would have left me concussed and puking, but in this one just left me with a peculiar ringing in my ears after the sixth or seventh time my head slammed, hard, into the truck’s steel wall.

There were no windows.

There was, however, a projector that played a looped vid against the back wall. A familiar face with a soothing voice, telling us all how happy we would be once we arrived at our new home. (Temporary home, she was careful to say. Ours until the world was perfectly safe for us again. Like perfect safety was just within reach.) Kiri Napoor—who must have decided her principles weren’t worth her job—extolled the virtues of our secluded paradise as images of happy mechs frolicking in a bucolic pasture flickered across the screen.

“Looks better than where I live,” one of the other mechs mumbled. He was tall, with brown hair, broad shoulders, and a familiar face that made me suspect his body, like mine, was a generic model. The two girls with him, on the other hand, were strictly custom-made—the elaborate patterns of freckles on one and the deep dimples on the other were a dead giveaway, subtle org touches that BioMax never bothered with unless asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s a nonstop party,” Ani said. Jude shot her a look. Riling up the crowd would be fine—mandatory, even—once we got inside. But first we had to get in. Which meant playing nice.

“I don’t care what it is,” the dimpled girl said, “as long as it’s safe.”

The mech next to her, who’d spent most of the ride with her head lowered, long blond hair covering her face, suddenly looked up. “Did you know anyone who… ?”

“Couple friends. You?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, and dropped her head again. “I knew someone.”

She didn’t say anything else. I wondered if she was regretting that she’d boarded the truck at all, instead of following in the footsteps of her someone, uploading with him, virus or not. Her confession got everyone else going, and soon the truck was buzzing with questions and details, the whos, whats, hows, where-were-you-whens of natural disaster.

“I said, what about you?” the guy next to me repeated, poking me like I hadn’t heard him the first two times.

Before I could answer, Jude’s hand was at his throat. “Don’t touch her.”

The guy looked alarmingly unintimidated. He grabbed Jude’s wrist and jerked it away, then began to rise unsteadily to his feet, lurching toward us.

“Please stop,” I said, though part of me wanted to push Jude away and knock this guy out myself.

You’re not invincible anymore, I reminded myself. None of us was.

“It’s fine,” I said, louder. “Please.”

“You should teach your boyfriend how to keep his mouth shut,” the lurcher grunted, but at least he sat down.

“I don’t need you protecting me,” Jude hissed.

“And I don’t need to watch you get the crap kicked out of you again.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it again, and I knew we were both thinking about the last time he’d gotten the crap kicked out of him.

I didn’t understand how Riley could be everywhere and nowhere at once.

It was quiet after that, for one hour, then two, the twelve of us scrabbling for purchase as the truck lurched over bumps and veered around corners. There was a long, straight coasting that seemed to go on forever, then a string of mini-quakes as the tires ground over a gravel road. The truck jerked to a stop, flinging me into Jude’s lap. We were there.

Safe Haven was a corp-town. It made sense. Parnassus and BioMax were sister corps, subsidiaries of the same bureaucratic overlords, which meant the Parnassus residence facility would be up for grabs. I hadn’t been back to a corp-town since the Synapsis attack, and I would have been happy enough to keep it that way.

Not that the two had anything in common. Where Synapsis had been all fake greenery and reflecting ponds, the Parnassus corp-town made no attempt to disguise its primary purpose, which was the mining and making of things that it could transform into piles of credit. The people who lived there were, presumably, secondary. So there were no playing fields, no botanical gardens, no gleaming glass residence cubes with pristine atriums at their hearts. Parnassus workers lived in steel, windowless domes.

There was nothing here to remind me of the Synapsis corp-town and the bloated bodies I’d stepped over in my escape. Nothing except the fact of the corp-town itself, and the claustrophobic feeling that descended as we stepped into steel dome number seven. Residence centers in every corp-town were designed along the same principles: maximum sleeping facilities, minimum means of escape. I’d seen how quickly the Synapsis steel shutters locked down the building at the first triggering of an alarm; this dome was nothing but one huge steel shutter. It locked behind us.

It was obvious we wouldn’t to be mingling with the orgs. Those had been cleared out. Way out, judging from the barbed-wire fence we’d passed on our way in. So it was just us. The communal space, an atrium of bare silver paths and sloping steel archways, was mostly empty. A few mechs in identical orange sweats wandered through the metallic park, looking like they had nowhere in particular to go but around and around on the circular walking track. The mechs we’d arrived with seemed equally purposeless, standing around, waiting to be told what to do. So we blended, waiting patiently by the entry checkpoint, neither asking questions of the orgs guarding the gate nor speculating among ourselves what might lie beyond it.

I pulled out my ViM, planning to pretend to check my zone while I snapped a few surreptitious pics for the network. But I couldn’t link in.

“I wouldn’t bother with that,” a woman in a BioMax uniform informed me. “You can’t link in from here.”

There was a chorus of confused complaints, mine included. I was proving better than I would have expected at blending in. Turned out it was easy to be a sheep.

The org woman cleared her throat. “It’s for your own protection. As you know, it’s crucial that the location of this resettlement community be known to a limited population, and while none of you would intentionally compromise the safety of your fellow download recipients, we’ve decided the safest course of action is to jam the network, for the time being.”

“But what about our families?” Jude said, sounding laughably alarmed. “It’s bad enough having to leave them behind. You’re telling me I can’t even talk to them?”

I worried he’d gone too far over the top, but the woman looked suitably sympathetic. “We have, of course, made accommodations for communication with friends and family. Those communications will be monitored, and all sanctioned correspondence will go through. A small price to pay for your security and peace of mind, wouldn’t you say?”

Disgruntled murmurings, all amounting to: Sure. I guess.

I couldn’t believe they were accepting it. But then, they’d come here voluntarily, giving themselves up to BioMax’s protection. There were mechs here that we knew, that we’d spoken to, that we’d begged to choose us over the corp, showing them the evidence we’d gathered of what BioMax had done, what the corp had stolen from us, because we were nothing but machines, to be pared down for parts. The mechs who’d come here were the ones who didn’t care. Someone was trying to kill them; BioMax was trying to save them. It was simple as that.

At this point, trusting anyone was starting to seem impossibly stupid—and now I understood what Jude must have thought of me all those months, watching me on the vids, preaching trust and goodwill as I held hands with the enemy.

Once it had been made clear that the outside world—and its rules and freedoms—no longer existed for us, the intake process could begin in earnest.

They took our clothes.

They made us stand there together, twelve strangers, and strip ourselves bare while they watched. We tried to turn our backs to one another, tried to cover up with hands and crossed legs and awkward contortions, keeping our heads down, our eyes slitted, as the BioMax personnel circulated, searching us for “contraband,” for anything that might challenge the safety of the safe haven: knives or ViMs or dreamers or bombs. I closed my eyes as the woman’s meaty hands swept my body, and played the game I’d played too many times before, the familiar mantra: This is just the body; this is not me. She can’t touch me.

When her hands fell away and I opened my eyes again, I met Jude’s gaze. Alone in the group he stood tall, head up, eyes open. When he saw me watching, his lips moved, and I imagined I could understand the words they formed, a message to me:

For Riley.

They gave us clothes, freshly laundered, branded with the BioMax insignia. Beige and orange, nothing I would ever have voluntarily worn in public, but decisions like that were no longer voluntary. We’d been in BioMax’s possession for less than a day, and it was already starting to feel inevitable, the outside world real enough but irrelevant. Every detail of Safe Haven was designed to remind us that this was our life now. Temporary, they said, again and again, to the outside world. But in here they hadn’t said it once.

I knew we’d made the right decision, not bringing any kind of weapon—there was no way we would have made it through the intake process without getting it confiscated, and probably getting ourselves thrown out along with it. But I would have felt a lot better knowing that when I needed it, I had a way to fight back.

They gave us rooms, narrow steel cylinders with bare walls, four beds, and no storage space, which hardly mattered, since our belongings had been confiscated along with our clothes. (Say it with me now: For our own protection.) No light switches, because the lights were all programmed around the corp-town’s three-shift working schedule. They would go on when it was deemed time for the workers in this wing to wake up, off again when the curfew hit and they obediently went to sleep. Alarms and strobes marked the beginning and end of each working shift. Small favors: At least they weren’t putting us to work.

They weren’t requiring anything from us but our obedience—it was quickly becoming clear that there was nothing here to fill the day beyond following orders. It gave us plenty of time to weigh our options and argue about what to do next… . Which is why I was lying on the narrow bunk-bed cot, my face inches from the ceiling, trying to catch my reflection in the dull steel, when Quinn Sharpe—exactly as she had when I’d first seen her—poked her head into the doorway and woke us all the hell up.

“This is… unexpected,” she said, giving each of us a slow, careful once-over, her gaze finally settling on Ani.

I sat up. “We’re here to—”

Quinn tapped her lips, then her ear, then pointed to the ceiling. Unmistakable code for Shut up, they’re listening. And of course they would have cameras in the walls. Corp-town life was predicated on absolute compliance—one slip and, within minutes, you could find yourself shipped out to a city. But all-pervasive fear worked only if you had some way of enforcing 24/7 obedience.

Jude knitted his eyebrows together, frowning. “No VM either,” he mumbled. “They must be jamming that, too.” BioMax wasn’t supposed to know about the Voice Mind Integrator that offered Jude and his hand-selected allies a means of silent communication—but apparently they’d figured it out.

“Unexpected or not,” Quinn said, “I’m glad to see you.”

“Feeling’s not mutual,” Ani mumbled.

Ignoring her, Quinn came into the room and flung herself down on the empty bed. “I could use some new roommates anyway. Mine snore.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

Quinn rolled her eyes. “It’s a metaphor.”

Jude glanced at the ceiling. “What can you tell us?”

“First you,” Quinn said. “What am I missing out there in the real world?”

Jude gave her the rundown of everything that had been happening in the days since she’d turned herself in to BioMax: the useless attempts to eliminate the virus, the increase in antiskinner attacks. And the whole time, as he struggled for coded ways to paint her a picture of what we were doing here, as if it weren’t obvious, she watched Ani. I wondered whether she was using Jude’s monologue as a stalling device, to cover for her inch-by-inch examination of her former no-strings-attached whatever, in hopes that the whatever would finally turn to face her, and maybe even forgive and forget.

That hope must have died, because eventually she dropped the act. “You’re not even going to talk to me?” she asked Ani, crossing the room to sit down beside her. Ani immediately got up and walked to the opposite wall.

“Very mature.” Quinn stood again too.

Ani looked wary, as if expecting Quinn to chase her from one side to the other. Wary but determined, like she was prepared to run.

“So this is it?” Quinn said. “Silent treatment? It’s going to get a little awkward around here if we’re going to be roommates.”

“We’re not.”

“She speaks!”

Watching them parry, I was again reminded of the day I’d met Quinn and how impossibly difficult it was to get her to shut up and go away when she’d decided you would be her newest plaything. Quinn was a girl accustomed to getting what she wanted.

“Go away, Quinn,” said Ani.

“You forgive him, but not me?” Quinn said.

“Who said I forgive anyone?”

“Oh, grow up!” Quinn said. “So I did you, and then I did him. So fucking what?”

“So what is you promised you wouldn’t.”

Quinn laughed. “You’re right. I broke my promise. And you got your friends kidnapped and tortured. So I can see why you still feel you have the moral high ground.”

It was the thing none of us had dared say. Not Jude, because he was too busy trying to pretend it had never happened. Not me, because I’d spent enough time being a crappy friend.

Which must be why I lied. “Ani, she didn’t mean it,” I told her. “None of us think—”

“It’s fine.” Ani dipped her head. The fluorescent lights gave her indigo hair a midnight glow. “She can stay.”

I glared at Quinn. “You didn’t have to say that.”

“It was true,” Quinn said.

“So what?”

“Enough,” Jude said quietly. “We’re wasting time with this crap.”

“I said she can stay!” Ani said. “What else do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” Jude assured her.

Quinn smiled then, in what could have been triumph or relief, and whatever hardness had been in her voice drained away. “Speak for yourself.”

Quinn gave us the grand tour. There wasn’t much to see. Corridors of bedrooms, all identical to our own. The central atrium with its sloping steel beams, which looked more like a factory than a “common space for relaxation and socialization.” I hadn’t been around this many mechs since the time I’d spent at Quinn’s estate, but those days had been infused with a determined, sometimes manic joy—not happiness, per se, because certainly there wasn’t an overabundance of that to go around. But there was a desperation to confirm we’d made the right choices, and to prove to ourselves that we were living the best of all possible lives. Hence the dancing and the screwing, the cliff-jumping, the sky-diving, the wild parties and the zoned-out dreamers and the couples who lost themselves in the wilds of each other. Call it mandatory fun. The one mandatory element this resettlement zone was lacking.

Another difference between this and the estate: the presence of orgs, uniformed “volunteers” and “helpers” who wandered through our ranks with glazed expressions and recognizable bulges beneath their jackets: the pulse gun, which discharged an electric pulse that could cut down a mech at twenty feet, frying his neural matrix for at least an hour—and that was assuming the charge was set on low and nothing went wrong. Of course they weren’t there to shoot us. They were just there to watch. For our own protection.

According to Quinn, speaking in a low voice and veiled terms, the footage that BioMax had been airing to the viewing public had all been shot in the first few days, a suitable advertisement for idyllic corp living. Once the cameras shut down, so did the dome, locking the mechs indoors. Then came the confiscations of clothing, ViMs, all other belongings, the jammed network and VM signals. Communications to the outside were monitored, so if you wanted to tell your parents what a wonderful time you were having at Camp BioMax, you were free to do so. Anything with more detail or more accuracy was promptly censored. For our own protection.

It obviously wouldn’t be necessary to persuade the mechs that they needed to leave. So the real issue was persuading BioMax to let us.

“I get why you came back,” Quinn told Jude. “And I’m not surprised your little lapdog followed along—no offense,” she added quickly, before I could bare my teeth. “But I’d have thought you would be smarter,” she said to Ani.

“I thought the same about you,” Ani said. “Guess I was wrong.”

“So you’ve come to rescue the fair maiden from the tower?”

There was a pause. “And what if I did?”

Another pause, longer this time, like that wasn’t the answer Quinn had been expecting. “Then I hope you really like towers. Because you’re going to be stuck in this one for a long time.”

None of us was ready to admit she was right. There was no denying the fact that we were stuck behind locked doors, without any contact to the world beyond the steel dome, but it’s not like we’d expected to walk into paradise. Much less that we’d be able to just walk right out again. We would find a way.

BioMax staff were positioned at strategic points throughout the atrium, but they periodically disappeared through locked doors into some hidden portion of the dome to which we were denied access. It seemed likely that was where we would find our answers, and maybe even unrestricted access to the network that would let us document the conditions here. For whatever reason, BioMax clearly cared about persuading the world that they had our best interests at heart—which indicated that our best interests lay in revealing their lies. We could have used someone on the inside. But if Auden had been true to his word and snuck someone onto the staff, someone inclined to help us, he wasn’t making his presence known. We were on our own, and breaking an electronic lock and slipping into a forbidden zone without getting noticed by the cameras or the orgs was going to take more than luck and desperation. When the lights went out at the end of that first day, we’d yet to muster anything.

I’d expected that our best exploring would be done that night, but at ten on the dot we were herded into our dark rooms. The door shut behind us, locking with a loud click.

“Sweet dreams, my heroes,” Quinn said. “Can’t wait to see who you save tomorrow.”

She could pretend she didn’t care, but I could tell that even Quinn was allowing herself a little hope. I wasn’t the only one who felt motion was better than standing still, even if you weren’t sure what you were hurtling toward. I spent the night awake, hoping that the darkness and the quiet would facilitate some kind of brilliant insight about how to sneak into the restricted zone. But my mind strayed—away from what I could do, toward what I should have done. If I’d broadcast what I knew to the network sooner, if I’d found a way to out BioMax or stop the Brotherhood before any of this had ever happened, if all those months ago I’d let Auden kiss me and kissed him back, if I’d never gone to the waterfall and he’d never been hurt.

If Zo had been the one to get in the car that day.

It was getting easier and easier to dream without going to sleep.

Finally the lights flared; the alarm screamed; morning came. And with it a cardboard box of fresh uniforms. How thoughtful of them. I kicked it across the room, and cheap synthetic jumpsuits went flying—along with something else. Something that shouldn’t have been there at all. It clattered to the floor, blade gleaming under the fluorescents. Without hesitation, Jude snatched it off the ground and palmed it.

Ani and Quinn watched the door—if the cameras had caught our unexpected windfall and guards came blasting through, at least we’d be ready. Jude perched on his bed, slipped his hand beneath the pillow, and kept it there, drawing strength, I suspected, from the cool blade.

I knelt by the box. There was something taped into one corner: a slim plastic card. I tore off the tape and pulled it out, suspicions confirmed—it was a pass card, an exact replica of the ones the guards flashed as they slipped through their locked steel doors and into the forbidden zone.

I hid it as swiftly as Jude had hidden the knife, tracing my fingers across the smooth plastic.

Auden had come through for us after all.

I drew back my lips, feeling a sudden return to the days when every emotional response was a serious of careful decisions, a memorized series of muscles to be flexed and contracted. This is a smile. This is happy.

I couldn’t say it out loud, it was too dangerous. But the words played in my head, deliriously certain.

I know what to do with the knife.