Torn

3. UNFORGIVEN

I told Riley the next day, on neutral territory. The park was technically called a “free expression zone,” but everyone knew it as Anarchy. The brainstorm of some aging trenders and sellout free spirits who’d outfitted their mansions, garages, and shoe closets and still had credit to spare, Anarchy was designed to be a space where no behavior or appearance, no matter how odd, could be punished. The odder the better, in fact—in Anarchy only banality was forbidden, and the only consequence was invisibility. Little wonder it was always full.

Unless you were crammed into a corp-town, crowds were mostly the kind of thing you read about in a history book or played at with virtual-reality hordes on the network. Crowds had gone out of fashion right along with pedestrian-packed sidewalks and sardine-can residence buildings and all those empty shells that once warehoused people who wanted to shop, people who wanted to eat, people who wanted to watch. Trap enough people inside a shell like that and the shell becomes a prison; the people become perfect targets. Blow up enough of them and people stop going. For a long time no one wanted to shop, eat, or watch as much as they wanted to stay in one piece. That paranoia had faded with the bad old days of suitcase nukes and bio bombs, but the effects lingered. Why suffer through a crowd when you can have anything you want delivered to your door for free, when you can play with the masses on the network and then, as soon as they get too loud, too sweaty, too smelly, shut them off and be alone again? These days there were clubs and parties, there was high school—there were crowds to be had, real live people clumping together en stinky, sweaty, stuffy masse. But they were always carefully selected, security screened, invitation only. They were always the same. Random swarm of strangers? We left that to the corp-towns, the cities, and the crazies in the Brotherhood. And now, Anarchy.

It was where you went if you wanted to be seen; it was also the perfect place to fade into the background if you didn’t. It was a free-for-all that let the luxe class imagine, for a safe, limited time, that they too lived in a lawless city of anything goes. No one was different, because there was no same. It was the kind of engineered, officially sponsored freak zone I was forced to hate on principle—officially endorsed transgression being a contradiction in terms.

That was in principle. In practice I loved it. Anyone could wander through. Anything could happen.

It had become a standard postargument routine for me and Riley. We sat in the same spot each time, a stone bench at the edge of the chaos, and over the course of a slow, quiet morning we eased into each other. Never talking about the argument the night before, staying a safe distance from combustible topics, musing about the weather or the trees or the naked man sprouting a peacock plume. Maybe that was the real reason we kept gravitating back to Anarchy. It was a guaranteed supply of safe, meaningless conversation. And that’s what we were doing when I told him—carefully, safely—that Jude had resurfaced.

I didn’t tell him the truth about what had happened the last time we’d all been together.

And I didn’t tell him about the kiss.

“We have to find him,” Riley said. He folded his hand around mine. It had been six months, and I was used to the fact that his hand was larger than it had been before, that our palms nestled differently now. His hand no longer felt like it belonged to a stranger. I had known this new Riley, in this body, longer than I had known the last one.

But that was the problem. I couldn’t stop thinking in terms of the old Riley and the new one. I knew the different body didn’t make him a different person. At least it shouldn’t have. But there was something that didn’t fit the way it had before. It wasn’t the larger hands or the sturdier build or the darker skin. This body was as handsome as the last, maybe more so, because there was a confidence about him that hadn’t been there before, a new comfort with the body and the way it looked and moved. This was the face he’d grown up with. I wondered if, during all those months in a generic mech body, he’d felt like a stranger to himself.

Now he felt like a stranger to me.

The old Riley had been there with me the night of the explosion; the old Riley, my Riley, knew what he’d done to Jude; he knew what it felt like to have the building collapse around him and watch the flames draw closer. This Riley never had those memories, because he’d been backed up on the computer before that night happened. If we were nothing but our memories, then this Riley was… different.

Someone, something had died in that fire. But I wasn’t allowed to mourn him. I wondered if Riley did. I would never ask. Questions like that hung in the space between us, the silence we pretended wasn’t there.

“If he’s back, he must want our help,” Riley said.

“He didn’t look like he wanted help.” I hadn’t repeated the cryptic words Jude had offered me. You’ll know where to find me, he’d said, certain I could solve his riddle, and certain I would want to. “He looked like he wanted a party.”

“If he’s back, why not tell me?” Riley sounded hurt.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think he blames me?”

“He can’t,” I said, because it was too late to tell him the truth: that Jude most certainly blamed Riley, for shooting him, for setting the secops on him, for betraying him, for choosing me.

“If he’s been hiding from us, he has a good reason.”

“Probably.”

It was another gift to him, this pristine version of Jude, who deep down, despite all evidence to the contrary, was a good guy. An imaginary Jude deserving of Riley’s imaginary friendship. The fairy tale was real to Riley, and who was I to say that didn’t matter? Maybe real was a matter of perspective.

Maybe I would tell myself anything to justify keeping my mouth shut.

“You think we should let this go?” he asked.

It occurred to me that he should let this go while I did everything I could to track down Jude before he could track down whatever petty revenge scheme he was surely plotting. But all I could say was, “Probably.”

It wasn’t enough.

“Maybe. But I can’t. I’ve got to know if he’s okay.”

So we started our hunt.

Searching for him by name proved useless, as expected. But there were cryptic references to a mystery mech popping up at certain elite gatherings, turns of phrase I recognized from my own days as Jude’s dummy—“the past is irrelevant,” “natural is weak,” “natural is hell”—that pointed us in the right direction, underground zones devoted to tracking his sightings. And once we knew where to look, he was everywhere. There he was bobbing in the background of a vidlife; there he was pretending to dose with a pack of zoners; there he was posing with a bunch of skinnerheads, their eyes large with longing. And he’d been noticed. Probably by BioMax, who had apparently decided to ignore the issue as long as he kept his mouth shut and didn’t blow up anything else; definitely by a slow-growing cult of net-fans, orgs and mechs alike, who’d established stalker zones that went crazy every time there was a new sighting. Theories flew about who he was, what he wanted, whether he was some kind of messianic figure determined to save us all or the skinner manifestation of original sin, weaseling his way into the org world so he could tear it down from within. The persona and its attendant mysteries were so carefully crafted that I could only assume Jude had cultivated them himself.

Not that Riley could see that, or would have cared if he did. All he saw was confirmation that Jude hadn’t disappeared forever. Thus: “We have to find him,” again and again, until there was nothing I could do but pretend I agreed. It was like he’d conveniently forgotten the way things had been with the three of us. The arguments. The sniping. The way Jude had held Riley hostage to the mistakes he’d made in the past, and the debt he owed Jude for things he’d done when he was too young to know better. The way Jude had sometimes looked at me like I was nothing, a passing phase, some toy that Riley would eventually get bored with. And then the other times, when he’d looked at me like… like he could see straight through me, into the secret at my center, one that I didn’t even know myself. Like he and I were the same, and, stuck on the outside, Riley would never understand.

But Riley and I were the only unit that mattered, which was why I went along with him on the search in the first place. We exhausted all the network sources without getting any closer to tracking down our target—Jude’s fans were obsessed with him, but their devotion was, without exception, practiced from afar. We needed off-line help, and there was one obvious place to start: the only mech besides Riley who we knew Jude would trust—though he had every reason not to. She was out of commission, so we started with the next best thing.

“You.” Quinn Sharpe’s face appeared in my ViM, unsmiling. She’d apparently missed me about as much as I’d missed her. “What?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said sweetly. “Life is good, and yes, I’d love to tell you all about it, thanks so much for asking, but I’d hate to interrupt what I’m sure is a busy day.”

“Then I guess you shouldn’t have voiced,” Quinn shot back. “Is that all?”

I could see her reaching for the disconnect. “Wait!”

“What?”

I glared at Riley over the screen. This was exactly why I’d wanted him to do it. But he’d been under the mistaken impression that, deep down, Quinn liked me.

“I have a favor,” I said.

“Then I guess you don’t need one from me.”

Calm, I instructed myself. Don’t fight back.

“I’m looking for Jude,” I said.

At Jude’s name her mask of scorn turned into the real thing. “Why would I know where he is?” Quinn snapped. “You think he tells me anything? He hasn’t even talked to me since…”

“Since you used him to screw over Ani?”

“I didn’t use him for anything but screwing,” Quinn said. “Ani had nothing to do with it.”

“I’m sure that would be a huge relief to her.”

“Drop the act, Lia. It’s not like you care about her any more than I do.”

I could hardly care less. There’d been a time when I thought Quinn might actually have loved Ani, or at least whatever the Quinn-world equivalent of that emotion might be. But she’d done an excellent job convincing me otherwise.

“I care,” I said.

“Then why are you wasting your time asking me about Jude, when you could be asking her?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Actually, you can. Which you would know too, if you gave a shit.”

“You’re saying she’s—”

“Awake,” Quinn said. “New body, healed brain, totally compos mentis. Figured you’d know that. Seeing how close the two of you are.”

I couldn’t believe it. BioMax had been studying her brain, searching for signs of what the Brotherhood had done to it and what they might have learned. They said the research would last “indefinitely,” which I’d started to believe meant forever. “I didn’t know.”

“Obviously.”

“Where’s she staying?”

“Still in rehab,” Quinn said. “The luxurious accommodations where you and I began our own beautiful friendship.”

“So have you… talked to her?”

There was a pause. Long enough for me to imagine a whole series of unanswered calls and texts, unheard apologies, aborted visits. But maybe I was giving her too much credit.

“Ani’s old news,” Quinn said. “I’ve got better things to do. And that goes for this conversation, too.”

She hung up.

“Sure you don’t want me to come in with you?” Riley asked.

We stared up at the cement monolith.

I shook my head. “I’ll be fine.” Some lies were necessary, even kind.

The download and rehab facility sat at the heart of a hundred acres of carefully cultivated wilderness, hidden from prying org eyes and nosy BioMax investors alike. Its location wasn’t secret—but it was sixty miles away from the complex that housed BioMax’s corporate headquarters. That was a sculpted swirl of glass and steel molded into the corp logo, but its existence was largely symbolic, a concrete manifestation of BioMax’s presence in the world, to prove to anyone who saw it—on the network, at least—exactly how much power the corp wielded. This building, the faceless stone fortress, was the power itself. All the labs, the devices, the networks, the brains that made BioMax the second largest biotech corp in the world, were here.

Also here: an icy storage room of lifeless, broken bodies awaiting disposal, their grinning skulls hollow as jack-o’-lanterns, their brains scooped out, sliced, scanned, tossed away. Down the hall a new machine, its eyes fluttering behind closed lids, its body rigid, wires feeding in and out of its exposed skull, monitors flashing, a family standing by, worrying, waiting. Or maybe no family, no visitors, just the thing, about to wake up and discover what it meant to no longer be human. To be an it.

To be a skinner.

The thirteenth floor would be filled with them—though not as full as it had been a year ago, before public sentiment had turned so sharply against us. Download was now exclusively for the desperate. But I supposed those were in constant supply. Accident victims, sufferers of incurable diseases, they’d all be there, healed, defective husk of a body traded for a model in full working condition. Twitchy mechs with spasmodic limbs, their brains learning to control the machine, their tongues learning to maneuver around porcelain teeth, their fake lungs forcing air through a fake larynx, mechs learning to walk and speak and pretend to smile. Every mech needed rehab, although it was a much shorter hell if you’d been there before and your downloaded brain had already formed the pathways needed to control a mechanical body. I hadn’t been back for more than a year, since I’d walked out, stiff and new but hopeful—stupid. Expecting things to be like they’d been before.

I could understand why Riley wanted to wait outside.

“I shouldn’t blame her,” he said.

I didn’t argue, or agree. I could tell he was working up to something.

“But I guess I do,” he continued, after a long pause. “I get that she was mad, but to turn on him like that? After everything?”

Jude and Riley had met Ani in BioMax’s experimental facility when the three of them were selected for the first download procedures. The first successful procedures, Jude would have reminded me. I could only imagine what he thought of me helping BioMax. Riley claimed to understand—that I was doing what was necessary. That you didn’t always get to choose your allies. But I hadn’t been there with the three of them; I didn’t know what had happened, or what BioMax had done to them. So I knew only what little I’d been told, and what I could guess from the unspoken promises and debts that had bound them together. Until Jude slept with Quinn and blew the whole thing apart.

“It wasn’t everything,” I reminded him. “It was after one specific thing.”

Riley scanned the distant windows, as if he could find Ani through the shaded glass. “One thing,” he said. “One time. It shouldn’t be the only thing that matters.”

I knocked.

There was a muffled sound, something that could have been “Come in,” so I did.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Ani was sitting up, wearing normal clothes—which I took as a sign that she was past the days when a perky caretaker would roll her over every morning and dump her into shapeless BioMax sweats, maneuvering rigid limbs through armholes and legholes, resolutely ignoring any and all bare skin. She’d gotten enough control of her body to dress herself. When she saw me, her face didn’t move. Which meant either she hadn’t remastered her emotional responses—or she was choosing to keep them to herself.

“Who told you I was here?” she said.

“Quinn.” I waited for a wince that never came. Her face was empty.

“I didn’t want anyone to come,” she said. But she nodded at the bed. “You’re here. Might as well stay. Sit down.”

The room looked exactly like the one I’d had. Featureless white walls, but Ani had posted no pics to remind her of the people waiting for her in the outside world. Before, she’d been one of the most avid zoneheads I knew, taking pics of everything, posting them to all of our zones and guilting us into pretending we cared. But now there wasn’t even a ViM screen in sight. It was just the bed, the chair, the desk, and her. She sat so still, she could have been another piece of furniture.

“So, are you… doing okay?” I didn’t know what to say. But stupid seemed better than silent.

“Would you be?” she asked dully.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“For, you know. All this.”

“Why do people do that?”

“What?”

“Apologize for crap they didn’t do. I’m the one who should be sorry, right?”

“Are you?

She shrugged.

When I’d found her in the hidden lab, she’d been stretched out on a gurney, naked, her skull peeled back, her eyes staring at nothing, her lips forming a constant stream of nonsense syllables. Sloane and the others had been in the same condition—because of Ani, I reminded myself—but they’d long since been downloaded into new bodies. Only Ani had stayed trapped in the strange digital limbo, a fugue state that call-me-Ben had assured me was painless. Probably.

“So… how bad was it?” I asked. “Did it hurt?”

“Which part?” Her face twisted into a scornful un-Ani-like expression she could only have picked up from Quinn. “The Brotherhood experimenting on my brain? Or BioMax experimenting on my brain? Or dying all over again and coming back to life?”

“Any of it,” I said lamely. “All of it.”

“None of it,” Ani said. “Unfortunately.”

I didn’t ask what that meant.

“Last time I uploaded a backup was at Quinn’s estate,” she said, and I knew what that meant, at least: that when they’d rebooted her in a new body, they’d used Ani’s last stored memory. One she’d uploaded before the ambush at the Brotherhood. “But they told me what happened. And I saw some stuff on the network.” Stuff like archived vids of Savona preaching while Sloane, Ty, and Brahm hung limply from wooden posts. While the camera flashed to Ani in the audience, Savona’s pet skinner.

“It’s weird,” she said. “Knowing you’ve done things that you can’t remember. It’s like, I’d never do that—but I did it. Didn’t I?”

“Yeah. You did.”

“Except it wasn’t me,” Ani said. “Just a copy of me. And now I’m a copy of a copy.”

“Don’t,” I warned her. If she started spouting Savona’s crap about how we were nothing more than computer programs deluded into thinking we were real, I didn’t know what I’d do, but it would end with her shutting up.

“It doesn’t matter.” Then, the ghost of a tentative smile, almost like the old days. A little shy, more than a little playful. “I watched your vidlife. It was… different.”

“The same, you mean,” I said. “As ridiculous as the rest of them.”

“I meant, different for you.”

“That was the point, I guess. Show the orgs we could be the same as them.”

“Acting something out doesn’t make it real.”

“We’re hoping the people who watch vidlifes are too dumb to figure that out.”

“I figured it out,” Ani said.

“Well… you know me.”

“Do I?” The last trace of the smile faded away. “I saw you with him.”

“Riley? He’s waiting outside, but he can come in if you want to see him—”

“Not Riley.”

I knew she didn’t mean Riley.

“Have you heard from him?” I asked.

Ani shook her head. “What did he whisper to you?”

I shrugged. “Same old Jude. Everything’s need-to-know, right? And I guess I didn’t need to know anything.”

“Didn’t look that way,” she said.

“He said: ‘When you want to find me, I’ll be a mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again.’ Mean anything to you?”

“No. But then nothing he says means anything to me.”

I knew better than to antagonize her when I needed her help, but there was only so long I could keep pretending that Ani was the wronged party. “Look, I know he screwed up, but—”

“If you’re going to tell me it doesn’t matter, and it was a long time ago, don’t. Long time for you, maybe. For me it’s been a week.”

“No. I was going to tell you that if you wanted to get back at him, you should have done it. To him. Sloane, the others, they didn’t do anything to you.”

There was a long silence. I waited to see what would come next, anger or acceptance. I suspected she didn’t know either, until she spoke.

“It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” she said, with a weak smile. “That’s what I said, when they told me. I thought they were lying. Then they showed me the vids.”

“They weren’t lying.”

“I remember wanting to hurt him,” she said. “And I knew how to do it. He doesn’t care about what happens to him. You can’t do anything to him that someone hasn’t already done. I needed something that would… I don’t know.”

Make him feel responsible.

Make him feel deceived. Betrayed. Lost.

Make him give up on trusting anyone, including himself.

She was right; she did know him.

“It was just an idea,” Ani said. “I didn’t think I would actually do it.”

I couldn’t imagine how strange it must be to wake up and learn you’d become a different person, somewhere in that dark space between one memory and the next. That you’d done the unthinkable, and you would never remember enough to know why.

Then again, maybe she was lucky: She got to forget.

“I’m not sorry,” she said.

I didn’t know how I was supposed to respond.

“You can’t be sorry for something you didn’t do,” she added.

“But you—”

“Not me,” she said. “Not really.”

I wondered whether she actually believed it. I could understand why she wanted to.

“Do you know what you’re going to do, when they let you out of here?” I said. Small talk seemed the best defensive maneuver.

“Throw a party?” she said dryly.

“I mean, do you have anywhere to go? Because you could stay with me… .” I tried to picture that, Ani bunking in the doily-draped guest room Zo used as a dump site for discarded junk, the three of us gaming, shopping, giggling like it was a fifth-grade sleepover. “Or Riley has some space, and I know he’d—”

“I’m going back to the Brotherhood.”

“What?”

She spoke slowly, enunciating for my benefit. “When I leave here, I’m going back to the Brotherhood of Man. Auden has agreed to take me back.”

“You’ve talked to—” I stopped myself. Auden was beside the point. “You can’t.”

“Actually, I can.”

“They hate us,” I told her. “They’re against our very existence. They’re trapped in an archaic, delusional, Dark Ages philosophy and can’t accept the fact that consciousness is transferable, humanity is fluid, that life isn’t defined by flesh and blood, it’s defined by our nature, and our nature is human. They think—”

“Spare me the speech,” Ani said. “I’ve seen you on the network. I get it. But you don’t understand what the Brotherhood is about.”

“Oh, really? It’s not about ripping your head open and trying to find a way to get rid of us? Because I was there, and I know what I saw. What they did to you.”

“That was Savona,” Ani said. “Auden’s in charge now, and he’s different. You, of all people, should know that.”

“He was different,” I agreed. “You, of all people, should know that things change.”

“And the Brotherhood has,” she said, with a serenity I could only assume masked insanity, or at least severe delusion. “So have I.”

“Okay, tell me. What does this new and improved Brotherhood have to offer, besides self-hatred?”

“The Brotherhood of Man celebrates humanity in all its forms and services those who have been overlooked or forgotten by—”

“Spare me the speech. I’ve seen the press release. What’s it got for you?”

“I don’t know.” Ani wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe… absolution.”

“Ani—”

“Everyone belongs somewhere,” she said. “They have to.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“So when is this joyous reunion taking place?” I asked finally.

“They say I can get out of here in another week.” She smiled. “You should go. I don’t want to fight. Not with you.”

I stood up. “Fine. But I’m coming back.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, but she didn’t tell me not to, and that was at least a start.

I was almost out the door when she called my name, so softly that I almost thought I’d imagined it.

“I lied,” she said, louder. “Jude’s been texting. Once a day. I don’t write back.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t delete them.”

“Okay.”

I waited.

“One of the texts was for you,” she said. “If you ever showed up. I don’t know what made him think I would even read it.”

Maybe because he knows you, as much as you know him.

“It’s a zone,” she said, then scribbled something on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. It was nothing but a random scramble of letters and digits. “He says when you’re ready to see him, drop a text and he’ll meet you there.”

“Where?”

“‘Where the sky meets the sky.’ He said you’d understand.”

Another riddle. Just as useless. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Ani said. “Sorry.” She didn’t sound it. “If you ask me, you should forget the whole thing. Let him come to you. After what I saw…” She was talking about the kiss. I willed her not to make it real by saying it out loud. “…he will. Probably at the worst possible time.”

It’s exactly what I was afraid of.

Where the sky meets the sky.

A mile past human sorrow.

Where nature rises again.

They meant something; they meant something to me. Jude wouldn’t have left a clue I didn’t know how to follow. I repeated the words, over and over, an unending litany, waiting for something to click. There was an echo of memory, enough to convince me that I had the answer, buried somewhere in my mind. But not enough to dig it up.

Remember, I willed myself, knowing that if I didn’t track him down soon, he would come for me again, at the worst possible time—or he would come for Riley, and I needed to get to him first.

Remember.

Remember.

When I finally did, it wasn’t Jude’s clue—it was that word. Remember.

The place itself was a memory. The Windows of Memory, memorial to the fallen, windows that peered out on a sanitized corner of a flood zone, a shadowy city buried beneath the sea. I hadn’t been inside the museum since I was a kid—Riley and I always skirted its edge, walking the shore until we found ourselves alone with the water, its algae-slickened surface reflecting the clouds. Where the sky meets the sky. And always, on our way back to the car, dripping and content, we passed the sculpted glass antelope, memorial to the city’s forgotten victims. I’d paused to read the inscription only once, that first time, but the words must have etched themselves somewhere in my memory, and a network search confirmed my suspicions: “In the midst of our human sorrow, let us never lose sight of the greater tragedy: the death of millions, innocent victims of civilization. As cities fall, may nature rise again.”

A mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again; I knew where to find him.

I wanted to be wrong. Because that was our place, Riley’s and mine. Riley had told me that he’d never brought anyone else there, not even Jude. He wasn’t supposed to know how much it meant to Riley, that it was the place he went to be alone—and now, the place he went to be with me.

But that was the thing about Jude, as he so loved reminding us: He had a way of knowing things. Especially things he wasn’t supposed to know. Those were his favorites.

I dropped a text at the anonymous zone. I figured it out.

The return message came a few seconds later, in the mouth of a cartoonish avatar, its sad puppy eyes and floppy puppy ears a mismatch with the lizardlike torso and dragon tail. It looked like the kind of av you build yourself when you’re getting started on the network, designing a zone with all the features of the fantasy world in your head, making up for the increasing drabness of real life. Like this was a game. Tonight, seven p.m. The puppy-lizard chirped, in a songbird voice, “I’ll be the strikingly handsome fellow with the charming smile.”

And I’ll be sick, I thought.

But I knew I would go.

I had never been there at night, and I’d never been there without Riley. Without him, without the sun glinting off the glass spires and shimmering on the water, without the crowds of orgs pretending to mourn, it felt like somewhere else. Somewhere new.

I scaled the fence that separated the tourist area from the wilderness, and padded softly down to the water. There was no reason to think that Jude would meet me at the same spot I always met Riley, but it was about a mile out from the Windows of Memory, a mile from “human suffering.” So that’s where I would begin. I’d had visions of Jude laying an ambush for me, emerging from the water like some kind of mutant swamp monster, just to hear me scream. If he was hiding, he’d hidden himself well; the coastline was deserted.

It was too dark to see the horizon. The ocean stretched into sky, and standing on the edge of it was like looking over a cliff into nothingness. I imagined what it would be like, wading into the dark water and floating above the silent city of death, with its frozen cars and grinning corpses. Floating away into the vast nothing.

I’d never been one to fear monsters crawling out of the dark—but I couldn’t turn my back on the lapping waves. I edged backward up the shore.

And bumped right into him.

So he got to hear me scream after all.

I whirled around. “What the hell are you trying to—Riley?”

“Hey.” He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Did I scare you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Uh, you told me to meet you here?”

“I did?”

“You didn’t?”

“Tell me exactly what ‘I’ said.”

“You told me to pick you up here, and then gave me some coordinates to program into the car for wherever we’re going next. You said it was a surprise.”

“That didn’t seem kind of… weird?”

Riley shrugged. “I don’t know. I figured it was some kind of romantic… something. A girl thing.”

“Girl thing?” I gave him a light smack on the shoulder. “Remind me to explain to you why you’re never saying that again.” I was stalling. Thinking. Waiting for him to see the obvious.

“Wait, if you didn’t send that message, then what are you doing here?” he finally asked. “And who were you waiting for?”

“Jude,” I admitted. The best lies start with a kernel of truth. “I got an anonymous message to meet here. I figured, who else would want to mess with me like that?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Why didn’t I? “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Too late.” He grinned, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to spot a wagging tail poking out of his jeans.

“I can see that.”

“I knew he’d show up eventually,” Riley said.

“Yeah. Can’t keep the Three Musketeers apart for long.” He was too excited to notice my tone. “Let’s go,” I added, eager to get out of our place before the specter of Jude spoiled it for good.

The car drove us away from the memorial, away from my house and BioMax and anything even remotely resembling civilization. It navigated over increasingly bumpy roads and unpaved gravel until, finally, we had to override the automatic controls and drive manually. Riley took the wheel while I called out the turns, using my ViM to map the coordinates because the car refused to help. It felt like the Dark Ages. Which was appropriate because, it soon became apparent, that’s exactly where we were headed.

In the end, three hours out, there were no more roads. Not official ones, at least. Nothing but weed-ridden stretches of concrete and the occasional barren field, its earth flat and dead enough that we could drive over it with ease. It wasn’t until the jagged skyline appeared on the horizon that I understood where we were going, and even then it was hard to believe. But we drew closer and closer, finally coming to the mouth of the tunnel that would lead us inside.

Nothing looked like I expected.

I’d seen images of it on the network, of course, but after a while one dead zone looked pretty much like another. They all featured the frozen parade of abandoned cars choking their escape routes, some doors flung open by long-ago passengers who’d desperately decided to get out by foot, others locking in bloated bodies of the unfortunates who stayed in their cars, trusting the traffic laws, trusting the highway flow, trusting the radio reports of a quiet, orderly evacuation, trusting right up until the moment the toxic cloud or tidal wave or flesh-eating supergerm gave them a final escape.

Not this city.

It was just empty. The bombs had flattened half its buildings and much of its population. The lingering radiation had taken care of the rest. I’d only been in one city before—unless you counted the underwater ruins—and that had been teeming with life. Even the emptiest streets had festered with rats, roaches, gutter rivers of piss. But here nothing moved. There were no bodies in sight, and I wondered if some unfortunate corp crew had moved them out, one by one—how such a thing could be possible when the deaths numbered in millions—or if they had lain fallow all these years, gradually returning to the earth. I wondered how the city would smell, if I could smell.

I couldn’t have handled bodies. I’d seen them in the ocean, of course, but that was different. The pale, preserved corpses that floated through the underwater city were dreamlike wraiths—nightmarish, but unreal. Bodies lining the streets, decomposing, swarming with maggots or flies or whatever hardy scavengers could survive nuclear war… that was a reality even I wouldn’t have been able to deny.

Jude was waiting for us, just beyond the mouth of the tunnel. He lounged on a bench at the center of a small concrete plaza, proud ruler of a broken skyline and a city of ghosts.

We stopped the car.

Opened the doors.

Greeted our long-lost friend.

Jude stood. “Riley.” He gave his best friend a once-over, taking in the new body, the new skin, the face that was molded as closely as possible to a face from old photographs. I realized this was a Riley he hadn’t seen in almost two years, and wondered if, finally, something had managed to throw Jude off balance. But he stepped forward with a cool half smile. “Didn’t think I’d ever see that face again.”

“Knew I’d see yours,” Riley said, and grabbed Jude, pulling him into a tight embrace. Not one of those guy half hugs, with a loose grip and a slap on the back. This was the real thing, the two of them clinging to each other. Jude’s hands were balled into fists. His eyes stayed on me.

He let go first.

“Welcome.” Jude spread his arms as if inviting us into his home.

I waited for Riley to ask all the questions I was sure he’d been saving up, about where Jude had been, what he wanted, what he needed, what had happened, what would come next… but that wasn’t Riley’s style.

“You keeping it together?” he asked.

“Always.”

And, apparently, with that he was satisfied. My turn.

“What are we doing here, Jude?” I asked.

He laughed. “Still asking the wrong questions, I see. Good to know some things haven’t changed.”

“So this is it? The top-secret home base? Where are you hiding the groupies?”

“No groupies,” Jude said. “Not this time. This time we play it safe. This city has been uninhabitable for decades. They didn’t just bomb the place; they infested it with radiation. Viral rad, the gift that keeps on giving. No org’s coming within fifty miles, not without protective gear and a significant risk of fatal exposure. It’s all ours.”

“Ours, as in you’re asking us to move in?” I said. “Here? Generous as always, Jude. But there’s no way in hell.”

“And you’re the boss, right?”

If he’d been hoping to bruise Riley’s masculinity, he was disappointed. Riley just looped an arm around me and grinned. “What else is new?”

So Jude took a different tack. “We don’t have to talk about the future now. There’s still plenty of ground to cover in the past.”

This was it, then. Jude was going to blast us for betraying him. He’d lured us to this heap of ruins so he could toss us into some abandoned bomb shelter, lock us up, throw away the key, move on with what passed for his life. And Riley and I, never aging, never dying, would spend the rest of eternity locked up together—how many days and years of apologizing would it take for him to forgive me, out of sheer boredom if nothing else?

But it was Jude who apologized, to Riley. “I didn’t expect you to get caught in the explosion.”

Riley shook his head. “Not your fault. I’m the one who wired most of the explosives. My fault I did it wrong.”

I watched Jude’s face carefully, but of course he was no helpless org, hostage to unconscious emotional responses. No eyebrow lifting, no eyes widening, no dropped jaw. Whatever emotion he did reveal would be intentional, theatrics. For now he stayed blank. “Wrong?” he echoed.

“I’m just glad no one got hurt,” Riley said.

“You got hurt,” Jude said.

“I mean orgs.”

Now Jude did lift an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that the point?”

Riley looked uncomfortable. “You wouldn’t have done it.”

Jude nodded, slowly. “Because you would have stopped me. That was the plan, right?”

“There was no plan,” I said quickly.

“I would have stopped you,” Riley admitted.

“Lucky that it didn’t come to that,” Jude said, watching me. “That would be awkward, wouldn’t it. If you’d set the secops on me. You’d probably be standing here wondering exactly how much I hated you. Whether I’d spent the last six months plotting my revenge, or some such melodramatic scenario.”

Riley gripped Jude’s arm. “You know I always have your back. Like you’ve got mine.”

“Always,” Jude said, and disengaged himself, gently but firmly. “Must be strange, not remembering.”

“Yeah.”

It was something else I’d never asked him. I’d waited for him to bring it up in his own time; he hadn’t.

“Feels like another person, you know?” Riley lifted a hand in front of his face, turned it slowly like he was searching for cracks in the synthetic flesh. “Guess it kind of was.”

“Nice model.” Jude gave Riley another slow once-over. “Expensive.”

“Worth it,” I said, curling an arm around Riley’s waist. He didn’t shrug me off, but he looked like he wanted to.

“Too expensive,” Riley said.

We never talked about the fact that his new body had been bought with my father’s money. Not since he’d first found out, and freaked. It doesn’t mean he owns you, I’d told him.

But now he owns you, doesn’t he? Riley had said. Was that worth it?

After that, we put it on the ever-expanding list of Subjects Not to Be Discussed.

“So the last thing you remember… ,” Jude prompted.

“That night before we went to the temple,” Riley said. “We went over the plan one last time, then I uploaded, and then—it’s blank. But Lia filled me in on everything else.”

Jude’s smile had turned predatory. “I bet she did.”

“Something you want to say, Jude?” It popped out, though I knew better. That happened around him.

“Nothing I haven’t already said. Welcome.” He rubbed his hands together, disposing of the unseemly business. “Let me show you around.”

He guided us through the dark wonderland of gutted buildings and shattered glass; it made Riley’s city look like a paradise. Leave it to Jude to seek refuge in the midst of death and decay, a broken landscape that proved, with every step, exactly how much damage the orgs were willing to do to each other. So many orgs these days liked to claim that organic life was sacred in the eyes of God. But it didn’t seem to stop them from killing whomever they liked, whenever they got the urge.

They’re no different from you, I reminded myself. Same mind, same memories. You used to be an org. Whatever they’re capable of, you’re capable of.

But nothing in me was capable of this.

“I’ve only been here for a few weeks, long enough to get the lay of the land and establish that it’ll serve our purposes.” Jude paused, then added, in a high, squeaky voice, “So where were you before that, Jude?”

“That supposed to be me?” I asked sourly.

“Glad to see you aren’t any less of an egomaniac than the last time I saw you.”

“Jude—,” Riley warned him.

“Kidding,” Jude said. He led us up a wide boulevard lined by rubble. There were no weeds poking from beneath the stones, no trees, no bushes, no green of any kind. “But since you asked: I spent most of the time in Chindia, honored guest of the Aikida Corp.”

Once a small Japanese pharmaceutical corp, Aikida was now the largest bio-and gen-tech corp in the world, with global headquarters in Chindia and a major presence in every developed country except the United States. BioMax, their primary rival, had made sure it would stay that way. That had been one of the primary conditions when the corps bailed out the government and turned it into their own quaint department of civil engineering—preservation of our inviolable corporate boundaries. Since the Bailout no foreign corporation had done business on American soil unless approved by the corp consortium. “What would they want with you? Unless you got a PhD in gen-tech while I wasn’t looking.”

“I’ve got something more valuable than a PhD,” Jude said. When we looked blank, he rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “In here, geniuses. It’s worth millions—and trust me, there’s not a gen-tech corp in the world that wouldn’t pay.”

“So they’re trying to reverse-engineer the download process and you’re their guinea pig?” I asked, surprised Jude would let anyone experiment on him again, no matter the price. “And you’re still in one piece?”

“Funny, you sound disappointed.”

“Honesty über alles, right?” His stated policy, not mine.

“They didn’t touch me,” he said. “They’ve already tried that on other mechs. Stripping them bare—no luck. They wanted something else from me. So we’re going to get it for them.”

I glanced at Riley, who looked wary. Thankfully. At least I wouldn’t have to try to talk him out of whatever insane plan was coming next.

“They need the master code for the brain-scanning program, and the full specs for the neural matrix,” Jude said. “We get it from BioMax, sell it to Aikida, and live happily ever after.”

“What’s with ‘we’?” I asked. “You’ve got your own BioMax connection, as I recall. Get him to give you what you need and leave us out of it.”

“After the incident at the temple, my connections have dried up,” Jude said. “I think I’ve managed to convince them that I’m harmless enough to drop their ridiculous vendetta against me, but I can’t get inside. You can.”

“But why would I? So you can get rich? What do you need money for when you have all this?” I gestured to the rubble.

“I have what I need,” Jude said. “This is bigger.”

“This is pathetic. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but BioMax isn’t out to get us—even you.”

“Now who’s willing to do anything for money?”

“They don’t pay me,” I told him. “I work with them because I want to help.”

“Right, the party line: mechs and orgs together, one big happy dysfunctional family.”

“At least I’m doing something, instead of just whining about how everyone’s out to get me.”

“And exactly what are you doing?” Jude snapped. “Letting them parade you around on the network like a trained monkey? You think playing at being some brainless slut on a vidlife is going to convince anyone of anything?”

“Jude!” Riley’s voice held an implied threat—one I was sure he dreaded carrying out.

“You’re not exactly the target demographic,” I said, evenly as I could.

Jude just laughed.

“Give her a break,” Riley said. “She’s doing what she thinks she has to.”

I didn’t need him to defend me. But I couldn’t help noticing it wasn’t much of a defense.

“Right,” Jude said. “Working with BioMax.” He laughed again.

“You think I’m working for them?” I said.

“I think working for someone implies payment. And the freedom to stop working whenever you want. It implies choice. You have none of that. What you have… call it indentured servitude. Call it slavery. Call it whatever you want, but the fact is, they own you. They gave you that body, and they can take it away.”

“I’m not going to argue.”

That caught him off guard. “That’s a first.”

“They own all of us,” I said. We were at their mercy; we depended on them to honor their contracts, and our existence. “That’s why we have to work with them. Because they’re all we’ve got.”

“No one owns me,” Jude said quietly.

“Sounds pretty. That doesn’t make it true.”

“As usual, your vision is severely lacking.”

“If you mean I lack the vision to see how selling corp secrets to Aikida is going to change anything, then I guess that’s another thing we agree on.”

“We’re not selling them for money,” Jude said.

“So what, then?”

“The only way we get free of BioMax is if we control the means to create new bodies and to download ourselves into them. And to make sure we store the uploaded memories on a server that no one but us has access to. Aikida is going to help us do that. We get them the specs they need; they supply us with our very own laboratory and production facilities, and a skeleton staff of scientists and engineers that can train us to do everything for ourselves. We sign a noncompete with them, to guarantee that we function only in this country, so we don’t interfere with Aikida operations—but beyond that we’re free.”

“And all of this is going to take place…” It was beginning to sink in. Why we were here. Why Jude was so proud of his ghost town.

“Right here,” Jude said. “Ground zero of our independence day. A country of our own, inside the one that doesn’t want us—let them stay on their side of the border, and we’ll stay on ours.”

I didn’t bother to ask about the benevolent dictator who would inevitably be leading this imaginary country of his. Instead: “You’re insane.”

“You see it, don’t you?” Jude appealed to Riley. “We’ve got everything we need here. Space, privacy, an almost completely intact infrastructure. It could be what we’ve always wanted. A place to be left alone.”

Riley’s gaze swept the jagged skyline. He didn’t answer.

“Riley, I was thinking you could take a look at the generators?” Jude said. He’d led us to some kind of power plant. Scorch marks scraped its sides, and one wall had collapsed. “See if I’m wrong about their condition? You know this stuff so much better than I do.”

“Not so much better,” Riley said, obviously pleased by the compliment.

“So much,” Jude insisted. “Take a look?”

“He’s not going in there,” I said, surprised the building was still standing. “It looks like the roof might cave in.”

Riley squeezed my hand. “I’ll be back in a minute.” And then, like we’d traveled back in time six months and nothing had changed between them, he did exactly as Jude said, and stepped inside.

Which left me and Jude alone.

“So you’re lying to him,” Jude said. “Again.”

“None of your business.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“This is better for him,” I said. “If you care about that at all anymore, you’ll trust me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Should I even bother saying please?”

“So you’re asking me for a favor,” Jude concluded. “I knew you finally grew a spine, but the balls must be new.”

“I’m asking for him,” I said. “He shouldn’t have to know what you forced him to do.”

“Oh, I forced him to shoot me? And set the secops on me?”

“Please,” I said again, hating that I had to beg. “You’re here, you’re fine, so—”

“Stop,” he said. “What did you think? That I dragged you here to mess with your pathetic little arrangement? Maybe you think I’m going to blackmail you into helping me with BioMax? I keep my mouth shut to Riley, and you do whatever I say?”

“I’m waiting.”

“You really think I’d do that?” he asked. He sounded hurt; he’d always been a good actor. “If you knew anything—” He stopped abruptly and changed course. “I really have been watching you on the network. I see what you’re trying to do. You might even have helped a bit, here and there. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. This is a waste of your time—and your rather ample talents. I’m not going to blackmail you into helping me. I don’t have to. Because once you think about it, you’ll see that I’m right. Anything else is just postponing the inevitable.”

“That’s your pitch? I’m going to help you because it’s the right thing to do?”

“This is my pitch: Korinne Lat. Mara Wells. Portia Bavanti. Tyler—”

“What’s your point?” But I knew. I knew those names as well as he did.

“Mechs who’ve been attacked,” he said. “Mechs who’ve been ambushed or lynched or kidnapped by orgs. And those are just the ones we know about, because why bother to report a crime that’s not a crime?” As I’d learned my first month at BioMax, org-on-mech violence increased by 230 percent when mech attacks were officially declared consequence-free. Kicking and punching and strangling a machine were deemed to be property damage, and the mechs had no owners who could sue. (As several corp-controlled courts had ruled; a machine could not own itself.)

“Jude, I know all about—”

“And I could keep going,” he said, loudly. “You want more names? How about the names of the mechs who’ve lost everything because the corps have confiscated their credit and shut down their zones? Because mechs are no longer officially living people under the law; we’re things. With no standing. No rights.”

“Like I don’t know that.”

“You know, but you still have somewhere to live. You have a father to buy you things. You don’t know what it’s like to—”

“You think I don’t know?” I shouted. “I know exactly how many mechs are getting hurt every damn day. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’m working with BioMax. I’m trying to fix things. I’m trying to change them. So what are you doing? Hiding out like some kind of end-of-the-world nutcase, waiting for us to get so desperate that we throw ourselves on your mercy? Great plan, Jude. How could I ever have doubted you?”

He didn’t look at all surprised, or even disappointed. “Eventually you’ll see you’re fighting a losing battle.”

“Enjoy the wait.”

“Frankly, I don’t have time for it. So I’ve got something to speed along your comprehension. Or at least your willingness.”

“Finally.” Because clearly, everything else had been preamble, priming the pump. This, whatever it was, would be why we were really here. “Tell me why I’m going to help you.”

“Because it will hurt your father.”

“Maybe you should pay closer attention,” I said. “My father and I are fine. I have no interest in hurting him.”

Jude’s hand shot out and grabbed mine before I could pull away. He pressed something sharp into my palm. I assumed it was a dreamer, the tiny cubes that offered mechs a hallucinatory escape from the world. Jude had offered me my very first one in exactly this way. But the object was the wrong size and lacked the dreamer’s distinctive etchings along the edge.

Jude was still gripping my hand. “You may not want to hurt him yet,” he said. “But trust me, you will.”