Torn

15. RIGHTEOUS

We couldn’t save him.

Not yet.

Riley was the one variable in all of this that wasn’t teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Safe—or relatively so, in a database, free-floating in the ether—Riley could wait. I didn’t want to let myself believe it was true, because if Ben was lying, if I let myself hope and then had to lose him all over again…

But once the idea was in my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. The idea of Riley being gone forever had been the impossibility; this last-minute reprieve felt inevitable. His death had never been real.

This had to be.

“You think he’s aware?” I said. “His mind’s all there. How do we know he’s not trapped in there, afraid and alone? How do we know it doesn’t hurt?”

“It doesn’t,” Jude said. “He’s not.”

“But how do we know?”

“We have to believe it,” Jude said, sounding like a deranged Faither. “Because if we don’t…”

Then we wouldn’t be able to leave him there. For just a little longer, I promised him. Until we fix everything.

Like there was much chance of that happening while we were locked up in my bedroom behind bulletproof windows and network jammers. If my mother didn’t want us out, we weren’t getting out. My father had spent years turning the Kahn house into a fortress. I’d always taken his word for our security and its necessity, never worrying that the barbarians would break down the gates, never chafing against his boundaries from my side of the wall. I’d been the good girl, and good girls didn’t know how to break out of bedroom prisons.

They left that to bratty little sisters.

I pounded my fists against the door, again and again, harder each time, knowing that my mother would lose any game of wills she tried to play, because she was only human, and I was not. I could bang on that door for the rest of eternity.

It took less than an hour to wear her down.

“I’m not letting you out,” she said, from the other side of the steel door. “This is for your own good.”

“I know. I was just thinking, maybe if you let me get in touch with—”

“We don’t need any more of your helpful little mech friends swarming around here,” she said. “I think one is enough, don’t you?”

Jude, who was trying to break through the window despite my assurances it was virtually impossible, stopped his useless tinkering long enough to give the door a dirty look.

“It’s not that.” I rested my weight against the door, letting my forehead kiss the cool steel. When was the last time my mother had come up to my bedroom? When I was seven? Eight, maybe? However old I was before I’d gotten “too old” for bedtime stories and tucking in. Stop babying her, my father had said, and then I’d jumped on board with I’m no baby, and my mother had blushed, and that had been it: no more night-lights, no more stories, no more sweet-dreams kisses. My bedroom became my property, and I got my bedtime stories off the network; my mother retreated to the estate’s other wing. “I’m thinking about Zo.”

“What about her?” came the slow, careful response from the other side of the door.

“I’m worried about her.”

“Have you talked to her?” she asked.

“No. Have you?”

No answer.

“If she knew that I was here, maybe she would… you know.”

“Forgive me?” My mother’s voice twisted on the word. Proving again, she was no fool.

“She doesn’t have to forgive you,” I said. “She just has to come home. And maybe she will, if she thinks I was willing to.”

“Why would you want her to think that?”

Good question. “It’s not safe for her out there on her own,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Jude whispered. I waved him off. My house, my mother, my sister: my game.

“But it’s safe for you?” my mother said.

“I’m different,” I said. “Zo’s still a kid. And besides, I’m stuck here, right? So maybe something good can come out of it. Maybe if Zo knew the truth about you, if you gave her a chance to know what was actually going on—”

“I stayed with your father,” she said. “That’s what’s going on. I let him do whatever he wanted. No one’s wrong about that. It’s just the truth.”

“It’s not the whole truth. She deserves to know that.”

There was a long pause. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

I wasn’t ready for her to leave. “Mom.”

She didn’t say anything. For all I knew, she was already gone. I didn’t know her anymore; I didn’t know what to expect.

“Thanks,” I said finally. I meant it to help the lie.

Or maybe I just meant it.

There was another eternal pause. Then, “For what?”

“For trying.”

It was past midnight when the door eased open. “Shut up and let’s go,” Zo hissed, before Jude could open his big mouth and wake the house.

She brandished a slim silver cylinder that I assumed she’d used to pick the electronic lock. “You are so lucky you’re not an only child,” she whispered, as we crept out of the bedroom and down the hall toward Zo’s old room.

“And you are so lucky that Mom still knocks herself out on chillers every night, or your big, clomping feet would get us both thrown back into Kahn jail.”

She grinned. “You’re welcome.”

Zo’s bedroom was better equipped for a breakout than mine. “Nothing I haven’t done before,” she whispered, grabbing a compressible wire ladder from under her mattress and hooking it to the window frame. She swept out a gallant hand. “Ladies first.”

It had been a strange year. But there’d been nothing stranger than scaling the side of my own house, dim moonglow lighting the ladder rungs as I climbed, hand over hand, three stories down. Feeling like a criminal, stealing into the night with the Kahn family valuables, and our father might have pointed out that was exactly what I was doing—my most valuable possessions, he called us when we were little, and I’d taken it as a compliment, proud to be valued more highly than the new car. His to protect; his to destroy. Mine to creep through the darkness, following Zo as she darted in and out of the motion detectors’ sweep, avoided the cameras, deactivated the electronic gate, led us to freedom—freedom in the form of a beat-up two-door Chevrelle, Auden at the wheel.

“How’d you know?” Jude asked, as we piled into the car.

“Got the call from Mommy dearest.” Zo snorted. “Like I was supposed to believe Lia came crawling home, and wanted me for one big family reunion? Big sis is stupid—”

I jabbed her in the side.

“—but not that stupid,” Zo allowed, grinning at me. “And clearly, you’re lucky to have such a proficient juvenile delinquent for a sister.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

We holed up in Riley’s place, memories of him everywhere, looking for a way to fix what we’d all helped to break. Zo wanted to sneak back into the corp-town, bust everyone out. Auden wanted to go public, turn himself in to the authorities—turn himself into a martyr, if it would help, or a devil, if that would help more. And Jude was characteristically silent about what he actually wanted, uncharacteristically silent about everything.

But Zo couldn’t risk showing her face at the corp-town again, not with our mother on a rampage and Zo’s presumably suspicious disappearance timed with our own. Quinn and Ani had their own share of the toxin. We had to trust them to figure out something to do with it. Auden’s plan was just as craptastic, relying as it did on mythical authorities of an objective nature unaffiliated with any of the corps, unswayed by power and credit we didn’t have. Given that all of the secops were owned by one corp or another, that BioMax was in business with all of them, and that the Justice Department—the only arm of the government not officially licensed out to private enterprise—was also the one that hated mechs the most, we had a better chance of tracking down a unicorn. Turn himself in and he’d promptly disappear, only to resurface once BioMax and the Brotherhood had done whatever they planned to do and were ready to parade their scapegoat for public shaming.

We’d dropped what we knew and what we suspected about Safe Haven onto the network, posting it to every zone we could—knowing that most would get purged by BioMax and the rest would likely be lost in the noise, seeming no more or less credible than any of the other rumors flying about the skinner plague, as it was being called. Some probably even believed us—not just the crackpots who matched our claims with conspiracies of their own, but the occasional sane, sober observers who were inclined to suspect the corps were up to no good. Some wished us well, some even raised a little online ruckus, but none was in a position to help.

We were on our own. Two machines. Two orgs. Four teenagers with no power and no plan. At least Auden was on the run from nefarious cult leaders and corporate overlords. As opposed to me, hiding out from my mother.

It wasn’t the most promising of revolutionary cabals.

“We can’t do anything about what’s going to happen inside Safe Haven,” I said. “But we can stop phase three. Or at least we can try.”

“We can’t stop it if we don’t even know what it is,” Jude said, sounding defeated.

“Whatever it is, it’s happening on that server ship on Sunday,” I said.

“You think,” Jude said.

Zo and Auden agreed that it was the only thing that made sense with what little else we knew. The once-a-month window had given it away. “If we can get on board with Ben’s team, we can figure out what they’re doing,” I said. “We can stop them.”

“Great,” Jude said sourly. “So all we need to do—assuming your blind hunch is right—is sneak on board a high-security facility floating in a secret location in the middle of the Atlantic and stop a team of determined and presumably armed genocidal maniacs from completing their nebulous mission. Brilliant plan.”

“Glad you agree.”

Jude was, of course, right. The plan—or, rather, ambiguous idea completely lacking in practical execution—wasn’t brilliant so much as insane. Especially the part that involved us getting ourselves onto a server ship without anyone noticing and, more to the point, without getting tossed overboard. The network servers were overseen by a private consortium of tech and security corps, its operations designed for maximal transparency (for those whose job it was to watch) and maximal secrecy (for the rest of us unwashed masses). They floated on massive ocean freighters, each the length of several football fields, shadowing the coastline, their endless rows of whirring machines processing the data of millions while armed guards—or armed machines, or, for all any of us knew, armed armadillos, or some deadly combination of all three—patrolled the corridors, sworn to protect the network with their lives. Ships set out once a month with reinforcements, repairs, representatives from any corp who needed to address problems with their dedicated servers—ships that plotted a top-secret course radioed to the captain on a special frequency only once the boat had X-rayed and analyzed every single thing, animate or in-, to come aboard.

The server farms were governed by no law but the law of expediency. Its servants followed a prime directive, to the exclusion of all else: Protect the servers. Protect the mindless hordes who trusted every piece of their lives to the security of the floating machines. Trusted not just their zones, their relationships and memories, but their jobs, their life savings, their lives—whenever they trusted their automated cars or their high-speed elevators or the biofilters that kept their air breathable and the wireless energy that kept everything humming, including me. The guardians of those ships protected all of us who acted as if the data cloud floated in an impermeable bubble through some alternate, inaccessible realm, as if we weren’t living in a virtual world built almost entirely on the switches and circuits and routers floating through poisonous waters and roughing stormy seas.

That, at least, was what we’d heard.

That was the only thing anyone knew about the server farms: rumors. Everyone knew a guy, who knew a guy, who used to work for someone who staffed one of the ships. Everyone had heard something, but no one knew anything. I’d once overheard my father arguing with one of his board members about whether or not the servers operated as independent international entities or were wholly owned American enterprises, and much as he’d tried to disguise it, the truth had been clear: Even he had no idea. Everyone knew—or at least “knew”—that once a month an elite group got access to the servers to upgrade them on behalf of their own corps, but either they were shielded from penetrating any of the ships’ secrets, or the ghostly overseers had a way to make them keep their mouths shut. Access to the servers meant access to everything. We were a world of connectivity; a linked-in globe. It was our pride as a human race. And apparently, it worked only if none of us knew how.

“We’re thinking too far ahead,” I said suddenly.

Auden laughed quietly. “I wouldn’t say that’s exactly your problem, Lia.”

“No, I mean it. You’re right, Jude—”

He held up a hand to stop me. “Moment of silence, please, while I enjoy this history-making moment.”

I smacked his arm. Lightly, but not too lightly. “You’re right that we have no way of getting on that ship or figuring out what’s going on—not by ourselves. And maybe you’re right that I’m just guessing. We need more answers. We need help, from someone who knows exactly what BioMax is up to—or at least knows how to find out.”

That woke him up. “Ben?”

“He’s leading the team, right? Whether he knows about phase three or he doesn’t, he’s going to be there when it happens. So either he gives us the information we need, or he makes sure that we’re there when it happens, too.”

“And why would he do that?” Jude asked.

There was a time when I would have hesitated to ask the next question. This time I didn’t. “Do you have a gun stashed here somewhere?”

Surprised, Jude shook his head. That was problematic. I’d counted on him having easy access to a weapon, as he always seemed to. We could get in touch with another of his city contacts, but that meant complications, and time…

Auden cleared his throat. “I do.”

“But it’s my gun,” Auden said, as we were packing up to leave.

“It’s safer to leave someone behind,” I said. “If anything happens and we need reinforcements—”

“Bullshit.”

“Auden…”

“You don’t want me along; just say it.”

I didn’t want to.

“You don’t trust me,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“But that’s not it,” he said.

“No. It’s not.”

He scowled. “It’s not your job to worry about me.”

There wasn’t time to protect his feelings—and after everything that had happened, maybe that was no longer a huge priority. “You’re weak,” I said. “The limp, the lung issues, what happens when your body gets too stressed… You could be a liability.”

He didn’t flinch. “See? It wasn’t so hard to just say it.”

“Fine. I said it. So now you’ll stay here?”

“Not a chance.”

“You’re not—”

“I can do this,” he said. “I’m not as weak as you think.”

“Or you’re weaker than you think. And we find out at the worst possible time.”

“Let him come,” Jude said.

“What?”

“If he says he can do it, he can do it.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “What, are you hoping he’ll do something stupid and get himself killed?”

“He looks weak,” Jude said. “It doesn’t mean he is. And you don’t get to decide what he’s strong enough to do.”

“Thanks,” Auden said, sounding surprised.

“I’m just saying what’s true,” Jude said. “I still hate you.”

“Back at you.”

“It’s wonderful that you two are bonding, but this isn’t some kind of self-actualization field trip,” I snapped. “We can’t afford—”

“We can’t afford not to use everything we’ve got,” Jude said over me. “Besides, he owes us.”

“I can do this, Lia,” Auden said.

I shrugged, and waved him out the door. At least he hadn’t asked me to trust him.

Jude followed, but Zo hung behind, watching me carefully.

“What?” I said finally.

She paused, looking unsure whether or not to risk it. “So you’re not going to try to talk me out of coming along?”

“Would there be any point?”

She shook her head.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

For a second I was afraid she was going to hug me. But instead she just smiled and ran past me out the door, practically skipping, as if she were seven again and I’d given her the secret password to the big-kids’ clubhouse. I told myself that she knew exactly how serious this was and how big a risk she was taking, and that—as she’d proved to me over and over again—she was old enough and tough enough to decide she wanted to take it.

After the accident it had quickly—though maybe not quickly enough—become obvious that I wasn’t the same person I used to be. It had taken another year to figure out that Zo wasn’t either. But I finally got it. She was, after everything, still my little sister. But she was also Zo Kahn, someone I’d never bothered to know, not really—and now that I did, it was clear that protecting her from herself was neither an option nor a necessity. It was also clear that, as far as she was concerned, this wasn’t just my fight. It was ours. So she was going to risk everything for it. And I was going to let her.

It had been easy enough for Zo to hack through the priv-walls on Ben’s zone to discover he lived on a modest estate less than twenty miles away. The zone offered a cornucopia of Ben trivia: He lived alone, on the opposite coast from his ex-wife and teenage daughter, who, judging from the number of plaintive messages he sent her and the nonexistent response, wasn’t any fonder of her father than I was of mine. The girl looked less like Zo than I’d thought when I first saw her picture—the stringy hair and baggy clothes were the same, but her features were smoother and more rounded. She had the same soft, waxy beauty as her father, if none of his impeccable fashion sense.

The house itself wasn’t that impressive. It was half the size of ours, with barely any grounds, and what there was had fallen into disrepair. Kudzu crawled up the decaying brick, nearly blocking out the windows, and the weedy, browning lawn clearly hadn’t been trimmed or watered in months. The security system was a sad, bargain-basement model—probably because no burglar in his right mind would choose a house like this to burgle when there were so many better options on offer—and Jude had no trouble jamming the alarm, shutting down the electrified perimeter, and easing open the back door.

“You’re good at this,” I said softly.

“Practice makes perfect,” he muttered.

I didn’t want to know.

It was well past midnight, and the house was completely dark. Auden, with a minimum of whining, had agreed to wait in the car under the theory that every criminal operation needed a getaway driver. Zo, Jude, and I used our ViM screens to light our way, and took our time making our way through the house, just in case we stumbled across anything relevant. Like a giant blinking poster detailing the logistics of phase three. Or a rabid guard dog.

Fortunately or unfortunately, there was nothing but a bare, personality-free house, with empty walls and furniture that, for the most part, appeared completely untouched. The kitchen was empty of both food and standard appliances. Breaking into someone’s house was different from breaking into a corp—it felt almost like we were peering inside call-me-Ben’s head, and, much as I disliked the guy, I couldn’t take much pleasure in the fact that the view was so pathetic. The only sign that someone actually lived here was the occasional pic of his daughter, some from years ago, some clearly recent, the only commonality between them the fact that Ben was never in the shot.

We crept up the stairs, peeking silently into each room we passed. The first was a closet, the second a marbled bathroom, and the third a true surprise: a cluttered laboratory, its tables and shelves filled with spare mech parts, its whiteboard walls covered with Ben’s messy scrawl, circuit diagrams dotted with question marks and the occasional exclamation point. Ben may not have gotten much living done in his house, but apparently that was because he was too hard at work. Against my will I felt another stab of sympathy, one that was easy enough to suppress when I reminded myself what he was probably working toward. We fanned out through the lab, searching for anything that screamed death to mechs, but none of us was particularly well equipped to analyze his equipment or the thrust of his research. Ben was one of the lead techs at BioMax, and had led the team that designed the original download technology—he could be working on anything, and we weren’t going to figure it out by studying his circuit boards. He would have to tell us.

The next door was the bedroom.

I held the gun. Jude cleared his throat. Ben woke up. There was a moment of sleepy confusion; then he saw the muzzle pointed at his forehead, and bolted upright. I stood at the foot of the bed, about five feet away from him. Far enough that he couldn’t do something stupid, like lunge at the gun. Close enough that even I couldn’t miss. Zo waited in the hallway, just outside the door, on guard for reinforcements we weren’t expecting—and, if it came to that, reinforcement herself if Ben proved somehow, unexpectedly, able to take on me, Jude, and a nine-millimeter pistol. The weapon was just as heavy as I remembered, but it fit more comfortably in my hands this time. The safety was off.

“What is this, Lia?” Ben asked in a low voice. I could tell he was trying not to show fear, but his eyes darted back and forth, from Jude to me to the gun and back to Jude again. He was afraid. His hand inched toward the nightstand.

Jude shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Unless you think your trigger finger’s faster than hers is.”

Even a low-budget security system came with silent alarm switches that could be conveniently positioned around the house. Maybe Ben had just meant to turn on the light, or reach for his ViM. But there was no point in taking the chance. “I’d listen to him,” I said.

Ben did.

“What are you doing here, Lia? What are you doing with that?”

“You think he’s talking about the gun, or about me?” Jude asked.

Ben wore a set of checkered flannel pajamas. His quilt was navy, with a thick black trim. For so long he’d been this BioMax boogeyman, always one step ahead of me, ready to cajole or blackmail or smarm his way into getting whatever he wanted. But now he was just a guy. And kind of a sad, small one.

“What’s phase three?” I asked.

“What?”

“You’re going to the server ship on Sunday. What are you doing there?”

“I told you before, we’re dealing with the virus—Look, is this about Riley?” He sounded almost impatient. “Because if it is, I was just trying to help. I didn’t know about the stored file until recently, and this really isn’t necessary; I can—”

“Shut up. This isn’t about Riley. What’s phase three?”

Ben swung his legs toward the side of the bed like he was about to climb out.

“Don’t move,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’re not going to shoot me, Lia.”

“You’re so sure?”

“I know you,” he said, the same old Ben, sure he knew me better than I knew myself. “This isn’t you. Him, maybe, but not you.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” I said. “But I’m guessing he will too.” Never taking my eyes—or the muzzle—off of Ben, I handed the gun over to Jude. Just once, I’d wanted to see how it felt to have the power over Ben, the control, to know he had to do what I wanted. But I couldn’t have pulled the trigger. I knew that, and he knew that.

For this to work we needed someone who could.

“Get back in bed,” Jude said. Ben did as he was told. “You want to tell me this isn’t me?” Jude sneered. “You want to tell me I don’t have it in me?”

Ben was a good liar, but apparently not that good. He gripped the edge of the blanket, tugging it around himself like it was bulletproof. “What do you want?”

“Phase three,” I said again.

“You keep saying that, and I’m telling you, I have no idea.”

We went back and forth several times, until it was made clear that Ben was either far more courageous or more clueless than we’d given him credit for, because even with a gun in his face—wielded by a mech who would have loved nothing more than to pull the trigger on the man who’d delivered the news of Riley’s death—he gave us nothing. I’d suspected all along that Ben wasn’t behind BioMax’s planned eradication of the mechs. He was too impassioned about the technology, too grossly sincere in his desire to help us, in his need to be liked. So maybe they’d kept him in the dark. It didn’t mean he couldn’t help us, willingly or not.

“I believe you,” I said finally.

“Really?” he asked, surprised.

“Really?” Jude echoed, equally so.

“Really. So here’s what you’re going to do.” I channeled my mother, and the imperious way she’d treated him, like he existed only to serve her purposes. I’d seen him bend to her, to M. Poulet, to anyone with enough power. If he liked to be led so much, we could accommodate him. “You’re going to take us with you when you go to the server ship. Then it’ll be easy to prove that you’re not doing anything but helping us. Because we’ll be right there with you.”

Ben laughed, but it was a sick, frightened noise. “That’s never going to happen.”

“Try again,” Jude growled.

“Do you know how much security there is on those ships?” Ben asked. “Even to get on the launch that’s going to take us out to the ship, there are massive layers of security to get through. They’re not going to just let me walk on board with a couple of mechs. And trust me, their guns are bigger than yours.”

“So you’re not going to help us,” Jude said.

“I’ve been trying to help you,” Ben said loudly, his voice climbing the register. “Why don’t you just let me? Walk out of here, and we can pretend nothing happened. Let me stop the virus, and you can all just go back to your lives.”

“All the people at Safe Haven, they can just go home?” I said.

“Of course.”

“Because they’re just being held for their own protection, right?”

“No one’s being held,” Ben said. “It’s like I tried to tell your mother: They’re not prisoners; they’re clients. We’re protecting them.”

“Have you been inside?” I asked.

He hesitated. “That’s not really my area.”

“So you can’t really say what’s going on inside.”

“It’s my corp,” Ben said. “I’ve been working there for twenty years. I’ve been working toward this, toward you, for twenty years. Why would any of us want to hurt you? We created you.”

“So you’re God,” I said. “Someone tell Savona. I hear he’s been hoping for an introduction.”

“I know BioMax took something from you, Lia.”

It was a tidy euphemism.

“But look what we gave you!” he continued. “A new life. Eternal life. A miracle. And this technology isn’t just about saving individual lives or winning wars—this is the preservation of human consciousness. Through any upheaval, through all our global crises, we now have the tools to endure. This is a new beginning for us, Lia. For humanity.”

The saddest part of all was that I believed him. At least, I believed that he believed it. He believed in BioMax.

He didn’t know.

“What’s the EMP generator for?” I asked.

“What generator?”

“In Safe Haven, behind the residence facilities, there’s an EMP bomb,” I said. “Useful for emitting a giant electromagnetic pulse that could wipe us out in one shot. And not much else.”

Ben shook his head. “You’re mistaken.”

“Or you are.”

“We’re wasting time,” Jude said. “Can you get us to the ship or not? Because if not, you’re not much use, are you?”

“Give him a chance,” I said. It was a little late to try good cop, bad cop, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. “I’m sure he’ll think of something.”

A bead of sweat trickled down Ben’s cheek. His hands had turned white with the pressure of gripping the blanket. “I will,” he said quickly. “I’ll think of something.”

But he didn’t. Jude was getting impatient.

“Walk us through it,” I suggested. “How do you get to the servers?”

“I have coordinates for the launch ship,” he said. “We meet and set off from there—”

“Slow down,” I said. “More details. When do you go. What do you do when you get there. You get the idea.”

“I’m due at dawn. The rest of my team will arrive by two p.m.”

“Who’s on the team?”

“Just my staff, other techs.”

“You get to decide who goes?”

He nodded. “I give the list to security; they screen us and let us onto the launch ship.”

“And why do you have to get there before everyone else?”

“There’s equipment to load,” Ben said. “This is a scheduled monthly maintenance check, so we’re replenishing equipment and supplies. I have to supervise that it’s all accounted for and loaded—”

“That’s it,” I said.

“What’s it?”

“The equipment,” Jude said. He got it too. “Shipping crates, right? Anything could be inside them.”

“Well, they screen them—”

“But you’re in charge,” I said. “You say what goes and what doesn’t. You could get around the screening.”

“Maybe.” Ben looked like he was almost as afraid of that prospect as he was of Jude shooting him down in his bed. It occurred to me that if he got caught trying to help us stow away, his ending wouldn’t be any more pleasant.

I hadn’t asked for this, I reminded myself. And I hadn’t started it. BioMax had. Call-me-Ben had chosen his side. It wasn’t my fault this was where he ended up.

Still, I was glad Jude was the one holding the gun.

“So we stow away in the crates,” Jude said. “Just one problem—what’s to stop him from screwing us over as soon as we’re inside?”

“Don’t suppose you’d just take my word for it?” Ben asked weakly.

“One of us needs to get on board with him,” I said. “To watch him.”

“That brings us right back where we started,” Jude said, disgusted. “Nowhere.”

“Not quite.”

It couldn’t be Jude, and it couldn’t be me. No one would ever believe two mechs had business on a server ship, especially under these circumstances. Auden’s face was too well known. Which left only one option.

And maybe I’d been thinking about it all along.

“Come in here, Zo,” I called.

Ben’s eyes widened as she came into the room.

“You recognize her?” I asked Ben.

“I don’t think we’ve met, but I know the name.”

Zo rolled her eyes. “Typical,” she said. “We’ve met about ten times. Don’t feel bad. No one ever notices me when big sister’s in the room.”

I didn’t argue with her, because when it came to BioMax she was right. Which was what I was hoping. “No one knows her,” I said. “She could be anyone. Even Halley.”

What little color was left in Ben’s face drained away. “What did you say?”

“Your daughter. Halley. Don’t you think she and Zo look a bit alike? I know you haven’t seen her in years, so maybe you should just trust me on this—”

“Do not bring her into this,” he said, with cold fury. So he did care about something beyond his corp and his cause. Who knew?

“No one knows Zo,” I said. “No one knows Halley. A little hair dye, some new clothes, a fake ID… There’s no reason to think that your crew would be able to tell one from the other.”

“You want—” He swallowed, hard. “You want me to pretend she’s my daughter? And convince my team—and ship security—that for some reason I need to bring her along on a maintenance trip to a highly secure server farm?”

I shrugged. “Tell them it’s a field trip. Or punishment. Or you’re trying to buy her love with a vacation on the high seas. I don’t care—you’ll think of something.”

Zo looked as uncertain as he did. “Lia, I don’t know—”

“And I suppose she’s going to, what? Hide the gun under her shirt? Or you want me to come up with an excuse for that one too? And have you thought about what happens to her if she tries anything? Surrounded by security?”

“We won’t have to worry about that,” Jude said, unexpectedly, and approached the bed. Ben pressed himself against the wall, eyes wild.

“Turn over,” Jude said.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“No. No, you want to shoot me, you look me in the eye.”

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Jude said. “But I will if I have to. Turn over.”

Very slowly, Ben turned over, and lay facedown on the mattress. He was shaking. Jude bent over him. Something silver flashed in his palm as he brought his hand toward Ben’s neck. Ben yelped with pain and jerked away.

“You can sit up now,” Jude said, backing away. Ben rubbed his hand against the back of his neck, frowning as he felt something that shouldn’t be there.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Just a little fail-safe,” Jude said. “Riley designed it. You remember how good he was with explosives.”

Ben looked like he was remembering exactly how good Riley had been with explosives, at least when it came to wiring the Brotherhood laboratory for demolition. He looked like he was also remembering that the explosion in that case had happened somewhat prematurely.

Jude lowered the gun. In his left hand he held a slim cylinder with a button at the end. “There’s a miniaturized explosive embedded beneath your skin, where your spinal cord meets your brain stem. I press this button, you go boom. Elegant, don’t you think?”

He held it out to Zo, who waited a long moment before accepting the offering. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to.

“You’re bluffing,” Ben said.

“You want a demonstration?” Jude asked. “I give Zo the word, and you’ll be smeared all over your bedroom walls. Which, admittedly, could use the decoration—but you wouldn’t be around to appreciate it, so what good would that do?”

“Lia, this is insane,” Ben said. “Tell me you know this is insane.”

“Ben, you scooped my brain out of my dead body and loaded it into a machine. Don’t talk to me about insane.”

“I want you to leave my house right now,” Ben said. “You leave, and I’m calling the secops, and we are done here. Done. You simply can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

“Ben, listen to me—”

“Right shoulder,” Jude said. “Two inches.”

Before I could ask what he was talking about, there was a loud crack. Jude barely flinched with the recoil. The bullet blasted into the wall, two inches above Ben’s right shoulder. Ben screamed.

“You understand I meant to miss,” Jude said. “Next time I won’t. Are you with me now?”

Ben nodded.

“Ready to help us?”

Ben snuck a few small glances at the hole in the wall, jerking his eyes away quickly, each time, like he preferred not to see. Then he nodded again. He was ready.

There were preparations to be made. Auden guarded Ben while we dealt with dyeing Zo’s hair and dressing her up to look as much like Ben’s daughter as possible. Zo herself took care of the fake ID—it clearly wasn’t her first attempt. While she was busy with that, I had Jude to myself, which gave me the perfect opportunity to ask why the hell he’d neglected to mention Riley’s magic mini-bomb at any point before the absolute last minute.

“Because I didn’t think of it until then?” he said.

“You just forgot?”

“No, I mean, we needed it, so I made it up.”

We were alone in the living room, with no chance of anyone overhearing us. Still, I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You were bluffing?”

“You thought I just happened to have the exact super-secret weapon that we needed in that exact moment?” Jude snorted.

“If it’s not an explosive, what the hell is it?”

“I palmed some stuff from his lab, just in case.”

“Just in case?”

He shrugged. “Bad habit. But it came in handy, right? That’s where I got the injector. The ‘explosive’ is just a random chip.”

“And the detonator?”

“Remote ignition starter for the car. Never leave home without it.”

I wanted to punch him. “And when were you planning on telling me? Or Zo?”

Jude got serious, fast. “Zo can’t find out,” he said. “The bluff works only if she believes it.”

“So you want to send her in blind and defenseless?”

“You want to give up and go home?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know I’m right,” Jude said.

I didn’t know. But I wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t need his permission to tell Zo the truth; I just had to figure out whether I should. So I pretended he’d convinced me, and shifted the conversation to what would happen if and when we got ourselves onto the server ship. We’d have one weapon, we’d have one hostage—and we’d be extremely deep in hostile territory with admittedly no clue as to what we’d do next. Playing it by ear wasn’t exactly a comfortable option, but it wasn’t clear we had an alternative. Ben would be able to guide us to the right part of the ship, and from there it would be up to us to figure out exactly what his team was planning on doing to the servers. I was more convinced than ever that he was clueless, which we could use to our advantage—but if he turned out to be a better liar than I’d thought, if he was leading the phase three charge, then we would deal with that, too. One weapon, one hostage. Worst case, we could try to alert the ship’s security team, revealing BioMax’s plans along with our presence, and probably, if the rumors were right about the on-board lawlessness, getting us all killed. But that was the thing we all understood, even if we hadn’t talked about it: There was a plan to get ourselves safely on board.

There was no plan to get off.