Torn

13. TRUST

“Don’t move,” I whispered, holding the blade a few centimeters from his skin.

Jude lay perfectly still beneath me. “Do it already,” he hissed.

It was harder than I’d thought it would be. Not the mechanics of it—those were simple. We lay in the bed together. He was on his stomach, and I straddled him, knees tight around his hips. A blanket was draped over my head, blocking the cameras but allowing in enough light that I could see the curve of his neck and the tip of the knife. I pressed my thumb against the spot, a hard, raised ridge at the base of the neck. Easy enough to slide the blade into the skin, peel away the flesh, remove the chip. It had, at least, seemed easy when I came up with the idea.

“You want me to do you first?” Jude whispered, when I hesitated.

“No. I have this.”

He’d asked me to do it. Not Ani, not Quinn. He’d wanted the knife in my hands.

It would take no more than the flexing of a single muscle to drive the blade into his back, cut a vital conduit, carve out a life. In the new age of the virus there was only this one body, and Jude was offering his up to me.

I slid the knife across the hard ridge of skin, fast and sure. He gasped, but didn’t move. “Almost done,” I said. I pressed my thumb against the lump, massaging the chip out through the small incision. It slid into view, coated in a viscous green fluid. “Got it.”

He flipped himself over without warning, and suddenly we were face-to-face. His orange eyes glowed in the dim light.

“Your turn.”

I lay beside him and bent my head. Exposed my neck. Trusted him.

It only hurt for a minute. Then I was free.

“Screw you!” Ani shouted.

“No, screw you!” Quinn leaped at her, fingers curled into claws, and went straight for her eyes. At the last minute Ani hunched her shoulder and shoved it into Quinn’s chest. Quinn tumbled backward, and Ani dropped onto her. She seized a handful of hair and gave it a vicious tug. Quinn shrieked.

Jude and I backed away from the gathering crowd, as every guard in the atrium turned his attention to the warring ex-lovers. The fight had been my idea, a lesson learned from the vidlife ordeal. The spectacle of two girls rolling on the ground and squealing exerted a gross but undeniable pull: instant diversion.

Two of Quinn’s friends had taken temporary custody of our tracking chips. Which meant that if we timed our escape correctly, no one in front of the cameras or behind them would witness us inching backward, sliding along the wall until we reached a nearly hidden door, swiping a pass card across the ID panel, and slipping out of our world and into theirs.

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this bare limbo, like a holding cell: metal walls and floor that made it feel like we were in a giant tin can.

“What’s the plan, idiots? You going to stand there until you get caught?”

“Zo?” I whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Um, saving you?” My sister dragged us a few feet down the corridor, then through an open door. She slammed it behind us, leaving us in total darkness. The space was large enough to fit the three of us, but only just. And something that felt suspiciously like a broom handle was poking into my lower back.

“Zo, did you just stuff us in a janitor’s closet?” I asked.

She snorted. “You really want to go with that as question number one?”

I cursed Auden. Of all the saviors to recruit, he chose my sister?

“You know what I’m still waiting for?” Zo asked.

“I’m guessing a thank-you.” Jude’s voice floated through the darkness. The closet was cramped enough that Zo’s arm was squashed against my side and Jude’s leg was pressed against my own.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Neither should you,” Zo said. “So I hope you figured out what you were supposed to do with the knife. Or we’re all screwed.”

“Auden sent you?” I was going to kill him.

“He didn’t have enough Brotherhood connections to get anyone in on that end,” she explained. “Fortunately, he had me.”

“Let me guess, you charmed your way in,” Jude said.

“You’re not the only one with BioMax friends in high places,” Zo said. “You know that guy Dad used to invite over for dinner, until he hit on Mom?”

“Tyson somebody?”

“Tyson Renzler. Let’s just say, apparently I take after Mom more than we thought.”

“Tell me you didn’t—”

“Ew! No!” She shoved me, hard. “But he’s had some creepy thing for me since I was fourteen. Always told me I should come to him if there was anything I needed—and made it very clear that he was perfectly okay keeping Dad in the dark. So here I am, folding towels, washing linens, and breaking you guys out. You mad?”

“Sort of mad.”

Sort of grateful.

“You knew I wouldn’t go back home,” Zo said.

“Told-you-sos later,” Jude said. “What do you know? What do we need to know?”

“Something’s happening on Sunday.” Zo affected a businesslike tone that I suspected she thought would make her sound older. “They’re all whining about not wanting to wait.”

“Wait for what?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something needs to happen on Sunday, and if it works, they can start phase three, but if it doesn’t happen, they’ll have to wait another month.”

“And phase three is… ?”

“I don’t know that either,” she admitted. “I poked around all I could without getting caught, but there’s nothing on file. And no one will tell me anything. That’s all I got.”

“Okay,” Jude said. “So we work backward. What’s phase two?”

“Getting us all in one place,” I guessed. “For whatever reason.”

“So we’re here. Now what?” Jude asked. “What else is back here? What are they all doing while they’re waiting around for phase three?”

“I don’t know… offices, security monitoring, that kind of thing.” Zo sighed, but at Jude’s urging she kept going, describing in detail everything that lay on the BioMax side of the wall. He stopped her when she got to the generator room that had been deemed off-limits to all personnel.

“Why would they need their own power generator?” Jude asked. “And why would it be off-limits?”

“Not to everyone,” Zo clarified. “I hung around for a while one afternoon, just to see what was going on. Some of the Brotherhood people definitely go in and out. They’re not wearing robes or anything, but I recognized them. From before, I mean.”

Jude leaned forward. “Does that mean you’ve seen inside? Even a glimpse?”

“Maybe. I guess. Just a bunch of equipment.”

“Was there a compression generator?”

“A what?”

They went back and forth, Jude spewing out technical terms, Zo trying to remember whether she’d seen a giant cylinder or a massive cube, and what kind of equipment had been carried in and out, and eventually I zoned out, trying to imagine why a spare portable power plant could be of any interest to anyone, much less any danger. Arguably, extra power indicated that they were looking out for us, ensuring that if anyone tampered with the main power supply, our bodies would continue to function. Without electricity we were nothing; we were little more than mute and lifeless dolls. Power was everything. The pulse guns had proved that. Too much power could be as dangerous as too little, shorting out our networks, leaving us temporarily useless.

I froze.

What would happen if they found a bigger gun, one that turned temporary to permanent? One that could target several mechs at once.

“It sounds like it could be an EMP bomb,” Jude said. “Set off a big enough electromagnetic pulse and—”

“Get rid of us all in one shot.” I hadn’t known such a thing existed.

“A big enough EMP blast wouldn’t just short-circuit us,” Jude said. “It would wipe us. Completely.”

“And the virus wiped the backups,” Zo said, sounding horrified.

“They’re not this stupid,” Jude murmured, thinking out loud. “I get wanting us out of the way so we can’t claim proprietary ownership over the AI tech; I get that they don’t want us making noise—but what’s the strategy? What’s the spin on pretending to save us, then turning around and wiping us out?”

“The Brotherhood!” I saw it all laid out now, the inevitable path, starting with the day we’d strolled into BioMax and set it in motion, so arrogant, so stupid, thinking we could talk a multibillion-dollar corp out of their multibillion-dollar profit. “Why do you think they’re here? BioMax lets them in, under the radar, then turns them into a scapegoat. They did it to Auden, and now…”

“They’re doing it to Savona?”

I could already see the press conferences Kiri would arrange, the note of sorrow in M. Poulet’s voice as he explained the tragedy, bemoaned how foolish he’d been to trust Savona, to close his eyes to the danger of the Brotherhood and their infiltrators. What a tragedy: a safe haven transformed into a mass grave.

We’d known we were going to have to get the mechs out; now we knew we had less than a week in which to do it. And now we knew exactly how determined BioMax would be to stop us if we tried to leave. They wouldn’t care who got hurt. Probably the more the better, as far as they were concerned. For all we knew, an escape attempt could offer them the perfect pretense to unleash their doomsday plan early. Which meant we had to move fast—but carefully.

Jude and Zo started throwing out ideas, bad ones, apocalyptic scenarios cribbed from video games, with the mech hordes storming their guards, scaling the walls, breaking free, leaving bodies strewn in their wake.

“It’s easier than that,” I said, seeing what they couldn’t, because they hadn’t been there, in the last corp-town, when the sirens blared and the orgs toppled like dominos, leaving me and Riley on our feet, utterly alone. Jude had once argued that the orgs would be willing to let a thousand mechs die if it would save a single human life. What was I willing to do to save a thousand mechs?

“It’s like you always say, Jude. They’re orgs. They’re weak. We use that.” I waited for him to get there before I could say it, so it could be his idea, and his responsibility. But he didn’t. “We knock them out,” I added. “If we could get access to the ventilation system…”

“We walk out of here, no questions asked,” Jude said.

“Uh, except for the part where you have no way of doing it,” Zo pointed out. “Unless you happen to walk around with some kind of magic sleeping potion in case of emergencies.”

“No,” Jude said. “But I know a guy who does.”

“Great. You ‘know a guy.’” I said. “So we just sneak out of here, meet up with your ‘guy,’ somehow sneak back in, or hope they’re moronic enough let us walk through the door again, without searching us this time. Easy?”

“We could slip it to Zo,” Jude said. “She could get it into the vents.”

“He’s right, I could—”

“You could not. What happens when they find you passed out by the vent access port and realize what you did?”

“So, better idea. He slips the stuff into the vents, you get everyone out—and I make it all possible by meeting up with this ‘guy’ in the first place. Tell me how to find him.”

But I knew where she’d have to go to find him. The same place all Jude’s ‘guys’ were. The place you lived when you were the kind of ‘guy’ who dealt in illegal bioweapons and various other diversions of the delinquent class.

“Are you forgetting what Auden said? No one leaves here without permission, not mechs, not staff.”

“I’m not exactly staff so much as Tyson Renzler’s pet project,” Zo said. “If I want to leave, trust me, I can make it happen.”

“Which means this will work,” Jude said. “I can tell her exactly how to find this guy and what she needs to say to him, no problem.”

“You want her to go into the city, by herself, and trust that your ‘guy’ won’t take advantage of that?”

“He’s a friend,” Jude said.

“Yeah. I’ve met your friends.”

“I can do this,” Zo said. “I’m not scared.”

“Then you’re an idiot. So now you’re really not doing it.”

“Lia,” she said. “Trust me. Just, for once, trust me.”

I peered at her in the dark, trying to decode the shadowy outline, piece together the expression on her face.

“I am scared, okay?” she admitted. “But I can do this. Let me.”

I didn’t care how many mechs it would save; I wasn’t willing to risk my sister. But maybe I didn’t get to decide that for her. “One condition,” I said.

“Anything.”

“You’re not going alone.”

She already knew where to find Auden.

Ani and Quinn helped spread the word to the rest of the mechs. It was a whisper campaign, notes scrawled in dust and wiped away, murmured in willing ears, even razored into flesh as our blade made the rounds. Word spread that it was time to get out, that staying here was death, that there would soon be a signal.

But there’d be no signal and no escape unless Zo came back with what we needed—and all the plotting and whispering and strategizing in the world wasn’t enough to distract me from what would happen if she never came back at all. What had I done, sending her into the city? I could picture her stepping over steaming piles of garbage, pressing herself against peeling building fronts as packs of rats (both the rodent and human variety) skulked past. I could even picture her following Jude’s directions to the towers themselves, decaying strongholds protected by legless and armless children who thought they were sentries, who hoisted machine guns nearly as tall as they were.

That’s where my picture faded. Because I couldn’t picture her getting in, and I couldn’t picture her getting out again, and I didn’t care how high the stakes were or how many of us would die if this didn’t work—none of it was worth what I’d done, letting her believe she could do it on her own.

But two days later it appeared, buried beneath our morning supply of linens, two slim aerosol tubes of Amperin, and a note bearing only two words:

Your turn.

She was safe.

It was a matter of waiting. Zo still had the hard part—disabling the ventilation system security. She’d give us the signal if and when it worked. When it came, Jude and I would head for the vents while Ani and Quinn coordinated the rest of the mechs, alerting them that the time had come. She’d warned us it might take five minutes to get a clear shot at the computer system, or it might take hours. There was no way of knowing. And so we waited, keeping one eye on the giant screens overhanging the atrium. They broadcast messages to keep us calm, sanitized news of the outside world and assurances of how quickly our prison term would end. Soon, hopefully, they would go dark, just for a blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment, and that would be Zo. It felt strange to be sitting on a bench side by side with Jude, as if we were just two friends out for a day in the steel-encased park. We’re allies, I thought. Not friends. There’s a difference. Though it was becoming increasingly unclear exactly what it was.

“Can you believe your sister?” Jude said, lounging back on the bench, legs stretched wide.

“What?”

“Everything.” Jude shook his head. “She’s impressive.”

“For an org, you mean.”

“For anyone.”

I’d never known Jude to admit respect for an org, much less this kind of naked admiration. “Don’t.”

“What?” Voice oh so innocent.

“You know what.”

“No… apparently only one of us is a mind reader.”

“Forget about Zo.”

“Ah, sibling rivalry. Ugly, Lia. Doesn’t become you.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“And you’re a joke. You really think I’d go after your sister?”

“It wasn’t a suggestion.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

“What? No!”

The self-satisfied smile appeared. “Jealous.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“There’s no shame in it—who wouldn’t want this?” His hands did a little eat your heart out flourish over his body.

I grabbed his hand and bent it backward, several inches farther than it was supposed to go.

“Hey!”

“Ready to shut up?”

“Ready to let go?” He yanked his hand away before I could. Still stronger; always stronger. “I was teasing, psycho.”

“I’m not joking about this, asshole.”

“You really want to do this? Now?”

“Got nothing better to do.”

“Fine. No Zo. I swear.”

“Whatever that’s worth.”

“Psycho and paranoid. Great.”

“I’m not saying it again—”

“Listen to me,” he said, suddenly serious. “I will never pursue your sister. With or without your permission. You know that. You know why.”

“Actually, I don’t.” But I was starting to get a very bad feeling. There was only one reason he would stay away from someone temptingly off-limits, just because I’d asked him to, just because she was my sister. Either he was lying, or…

“This is not going to happen,” I said, suddenly aware of every inch of my body and its too-close proximity to his. “You. Me. Never.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Riley was your best friend!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Never,” I said again. “Even if I wanted it to. Which, to be clear, I don’t.”

“You think I do?” Jude said quietly. “It’s the last thing I want.”

“I hate you,” I said, and in that moment, with a wave of revulsion and rage stronger than I’d felt for anyone, even Savona, it was true.

“You are so angry,” he said.

“Your observational skills never cease to amaze me.”

“No,” he said. “I mean you’re always angry.”

“Of course I am.”

“So just tell me why.”

I couldn’t believe it. All this time I’d thought we understood each other. That there was one common bond tying us together, one empty space that both of us were trying desperately to fill, one white-hot fire of purpose and revenge driving us both. And now he was confused? “Why aren’t you angry?” I said, only barely resisting the urge to shout. “He’s dead! And no matter what we do, even if we fix everything and save everyone, he’s still dead. And you just…”

“What?”

“You accept it.” I wanted to slap him.

Jude flinched like I had. The bright golden point flickered at the center of his pupils. “I’m angry.”

“Not like I am.”

“You want me to throw a tantrum? Will that convince you?”

“Joke about it,” I said. “Pretend it’s nothing. Whatever.”

“Lia, look at me.”

“I am looking at you.” But I wasn’t. I was looking at his forehead, and the silver lock of hair that kept slipping over his eyes. I was looking at his hands, slim fingers resting on the bench, unclenched and untroubled. I was looking at the door just over his shoulder, wondering what would happen when we broke through, if changing what came next would matter even though it couldn’t change what had come before. I was looking anywhere but at him.

“I didn’t get to say anything to him, before it happened.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. “I didn’t get to tell him… He thought I didn’t care.” I could still see myself in that parking lot, would always see myself, frozen, looking up at Riley, cartoon shock painted across my face. Looking at him and judging him and saying nothing. Letting him walk away.

“You’re wrong.”

“I should have gone with him,” I said.

“Great idea,” Jude said. “You could have both uploaded, and then you’d both be dead. Is that what you want?”

“It’s what I should want.”

Now it was Jude who looked away.

“Why did you?” he asked finally. “Let him leave.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew what he meant.

“That day. If you wanted to stop him, why didn’t you?”

He asked like he already knew the answer. That made one of us. But before I could come up with something, two BioMax goons appeared before us, jackets strategically swept back to reveal their holsters, refuting an argument we hadn’t thought to make.

“I’m going to need you to come with us,” one of them said.

“Kind of busy here,” Jude said, looping an arm around me. His other hand crawled across my knee and up my thigh. “If you know what I mean…”

I forced a smile. “What he said,” I told the guard. “Maybe you could come back later?”

“Now,” said the talky one, while the other one rested a hand on the butt of his pulse gun.

Jude and I exchanged a look: Whatever this was, we were going to have to postpone the strike. Ani and Quinn had their eyes on us from across the room, and hopefully Zo was catching this on one of the monitors and would figure out she needed to wait. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t caught Zo, too.

We followed the guards along the same path we’d mapped out for ourselves—through the locked door, down the corridor, coming nearer and nearer to the central vents.

I wondered if there was some way we could turn this to our advantage. I had the toxin on me—if we could distract the guards for a minute and slip away… “Maybe if you told us exactly what the problem is?”

“No problem,” the chatty one said. “Not anymore.” He grabbed me, snatched my thrashing arms behind my back, looping them together with plastic twine. I screamed, and he shoved something thick and scratchy into my open mouth, then pulled a bag over my head. I was blind, mute, and bound, all in under ten seconds. And from the sound of things—an angry oof from the other guard, a scuffle, a muffled scream, then silence—things had gone about the same for Jude.

Meaty hands folded my knees to my chest, and I felt myself lifted off the ground for a moment, then gently placed back down. Into something, it turned out, because soon the ground lifted beneath me, like I’d been loaded into a giant sling, and, cradled in the darkness, we began to move. Going somewhere—wherever this guy wanted me to go.

So much for saving the day. But I wasn’t thinking about the mechs we were leaving behind—I was thinking about myself.

I was afraid.

He can’t hurt me, I told myself, the familiar mantra kicking in, except now it was a lie, because now this body was all I had, and if he broke it, that was it. No more second chances. No more extra lives.

No more Lia.