Torn

7. JUMP

Jude didn’t believe it, not at first. We had to show him the files we’d hacked and the vids we’d taken, and even then, I could tell, he wanted to think we’d somehow gotten ourselves turned around, stumbled into an alternate realm with no bearing on the real world. It was the first time I’d ever seen him underestimate the boundaries of org depravity.

On its surface this was less brutal than the antiskinner attacks and lynchings, less bloody than the corp’s initial foray into the download technology, its path littered with the corpses of unwilling “volunteers.” But I thought I understood Jude’s uncertainty and—though he never would have admitted it—his panic. Because this was coordinated and systemic. For all we knew, it was the reason BioMax had pursued the download technology to begin with. Certainly, supplying the military industrial complex paid better than a semihumanitarian mission to heal the broken children of the wealthy. Not to mention the domestic-sector applications, which we’d all seen. Which we’d all—the self-revulsion at this thought was overwhelming—used without a second thought.

“How could I be this stupid?” Jude said, as we huddled in his car and told him everything.

“How were you supposed to know?” I asked. “I worked there, and I didn’t.”

“Exactly. Stupid.”

I wasn’t going to fight with him, even if it would have been easier. “You’re right. We were stupid. Now what?”

“You’re asking him?” Zo said.

“I should be asking you?”

“Since when do you ask anyone?”

I wouldn’t have thought I had to remind her that things changed.

“Bossy big sister doesn’t exactly translate into fearless leader,” Jude said.

“Asshole. I got us this far, didn’t I?”

“With my plan,” he pointed out.

“My execution.”

“Congratulations,” Zo said. “You’re both equally useless.”

“This doesn’t have to change anything,” I said. “We can still sell the info to Aikida.”

Jude frowned. “And let them do the same thing?”

“So we go public,” I suggested. “This has to be illegal.”

“Not if they don’t want it to be,” Jude said.

“So what’s your brilliant idea?”

He didn’t answer. That was the worst part. Jude, the one person who shouldn’t have been surprised, had somehow failed to question the fundamental truth of our existence. That we were the only copies. That each of us existed as a unique unit, a single person, our identities protected and sacrosanct. It was the lie that allowed us to be human, wasn’t it? Because how could I be Lia Kahn if there was a second Lia Kahn wandering the earth, a third, a fourth, a hundredth—how could I be Lia Kahn if there was a battlefield of Lia Kahns, tanks and planes and, for all I knew, vacuum cleaners, all of them somehow, not quite, but mostly me? If BioMax could lie about this, they could lie about anything. They could put a copy of my brain into another body, awaken as many Lia Kahns as they liked.

Stripped-down personalities were still personalities; lobotomized brains could still think. Artificial intelligence dictated intelligence. So what made us people and them machines?

Nothing, I thought. To BioMax, we’re all just things.

There’s no sin in lying to a thing.

“So we’re screwed,” Zo said.

“We’re screwed,” I said. “You’re…”

“Not involved. Right. Somehow I forgot.”

I couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing. “Let’s just go home,” I said. Then, because someone had to, even if it was a lie: “We’ll figure something out.”

The real problem: This wasn’t a flaw in the system. This was the system itself. This was the corp that owned us, body and mind. This wasn’t something we could fight. But we were going to have to.

I dumped Zo and Jude at Riley’s place. Zo lunged for the shower, as if eager to wash off the day. I understood the impulse. Jude was more than happy to ensconce himself on Riley’s turf to keep an eye on Sari—the two of them circled each other warily like rival alley cats, and I half expected one to start peeing to mark the territory. True to form, Riley didn’t ask questions.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I told him.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I don’t care. Please.”

He gave in.

Only one problem: I didn’t know where I wanted to go. So we drove aimlessly, watching the muddy browns and grays stream by the window, the river of concrete and mud and smog. The water, that’s what I thought of first, the dead city beneath the sea. Our place, with its silent buildings and frozen cars, our city of algae and coral and darkness. It was the first place Riley had taken me, the first place he’d kissed me, back when we’d fit with jigsaw perfection. But we’d gone back too often these last few months, neither of us admitting what we were trying to do. It was a way of going backward. Beyond that fence nothing existed except us. We didn’t talk there, not like we used to. We ducked beneath the water and held hands and let the current carry us wherever it wanted to go. We hid.

It was too quiet there; it was too easy. Too still. After everything that had happened, I needed something else—not just the relief of Riley’s arms around me, but the relief of adrenaline and fear and forgetting. And then the answer was obvious.

It wasn’t our place; it wasn’t my place. It had belonged to Jude, once; it had belonged to all of us. I hadn’t been back there in nearly a year, because I had been too afraid. It was the place to start over again, because it was the place where things had gone wrong.

I keyed in the coordinates. Recognizing them, Riley tugged me toward him, and we curled up in the front seat as the car veered to the right, taking us west, off the highway, into the country, away.

The waterfall was tamer than I remembered. But it was wild enough.

Riley looked uncertain. “Why here?”

He knew how I felt about the waterfall. “I want us to jump,” I said.

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“After.”

I led him to the water. We took off our shoes, peeled off our clothes, and waded out to the edge of the precipice, buffeted by wind. The water roared. I could have shouted all my secrets and let the wind carry the words away.

I held out my hand. He grabbed it, squeezed, then let go.

There was no point in counting down. No point in being afraid. I’d leaped from planes. I’d leaped from cliffs. This was no different. If anything went wrong, my brain, my self, was safely copied and stored. Whatever happened to this body, BioMax had Lia Kahn, to do with whatever they wanted. She was their toy. I belonged to them.

I closed my eyes. Lifted my arms to the sky.

Jumped.

It was everything I needed. It was mindless, breathless, timeless, twisting and flailing and falling. The pleasure of the flight met the pain of the rocks. The water carried me down, carried me away. Sucked me under the falls, into a churning storm, the surface lit by a sheet of white water, the river cycloning around me, driving me down, dragging me up, then down and up again, like a bobbing cork, like a doll, like a body.

It was the moment that my brain kicked in, that I thought, Auden, and remembered his body sailing over the lower falls, floating at the bottom, facedown, breathless.

I kicked furiously, fought off the storm, and broke free to the surface of the icy river. I floated, ears submerged, eyes to the gray sky.

That’s when I saw Riley, his form a shadow against the sun, standing at the edge of the falls, looking down.

“So, you didn’t jump.”

“I didn’t jump.”

We sat cross-legged on the riverbank. Water gushed down from above, its spray misting the air.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“I know it’s okay.” He was angry. At himself, for freezing? At me, for dragging him here?

At me, for jumping, and leaving him behind?

There was a long pause. “Go ahead,” he finally said, sullen. “Ask.”

“Fine. Why didn’t you?”

He hunched his shoulders, scraping his knuckles against each other. “You know why Jude started this?”

“To remind ourselves of what it means to be a mech,” I recited, the familiar words strange in my mouth. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d given this speech on a daily basis. “With absolute control must come absolute release. Release from gravity, release from fear.”

“Release from death.”

Right. I’d left out the most important one, the bright line dividing mech and org. The absence that defined us. No end of the line, no period on our sentence. Endless days and years of downloading from one body to the next. We jumped from the waterfall because we could, because we could do anything. The drop wasn’t steep enough to permanently damage our bodies—they were too well constructed for that—but we jumped because it didn’t matter. If something went wrong, if the body were crushed or drowned or torn apart, we would remain intact. We jumped to defy death, as we defied it every day, by living on, far past our sell-by date.

“I bought it,” Riley said. “But since the fire…”

I waited him out. With Riley it was the only way.

“It’s not the same,” he finally said. “Now that I know what it’s like.”

I understood, or thought I did, but only because I’d become an expert at translating Riley’s begrudging admissions of inner life. So, spitting in the face of death was less fun once you’d died yourself.

Not org death—we’d all been through that. But mech death. Waking up yet again in the BioMax lab, with no memory of how you’d ended up there, with a gap in the story of your life. Knowing yourself to be a copy of a copy. It was fear of that moment that prevented me from downloading into a new, custom-made body that would look like the Lia I used to be. It was the fear that gripped me every time I stood on a ledge, the fear I needed, if the leap was going to mean anything. It was one thing to know you couldn’t die; it was another thing to believe it.

Maybe now Riley didn’t.

Since the fire, I’d spent so much time trying to convince myself he wasn’t a different person. I hadn’t thought to convince him. Even though every time he looked in the mirror, he saw someone different staring back at him. Because of me. Because I’d given him back something I thought he wanted, without bothering to ask.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come.”

He shook his head. “I’m just being stupid.”

“You’re not.”

“Jude’s right, you know. They have the power. If something happens, and they don’t want to put you into a new body, they don’t have to. They can do anything they want. They always do.”

I wondered if “they” meant BioMax, or if “they” meant everyone with more power, with more credit, everyone who’d ever used him as a tool or a toy, just because they could. It was nothing new for him; it was status quo.

Maybe that’s why, when I put my hands over his and told him what we’d found at BioMax and what the corp was doing to our friends, maybe to us, he wasn’t surprised. “Of course” was all he said. “Of course they would.”

I’d wanted outrage and shock. Maybe I’d even wanted violence: Riley throwing me off, leaping to his feet, out for blood. But this was more of what I’d gotten when I told him about my father: resigned acknowledgment that he’d been right about the world all along. Surprise that I hadn’t seen it coming.

“I know I promised I wouldn’t do anything,” I said, when he didn’t ask any follow-up questions. “But I had to.” And you made me lie to you.

“I know,” Riley said. “I get it. I figured you would.”

“That’s why you went to Jude behind my back?”

Riley issued a hard laugh. “Not like he listened.”

“You should have trusted me.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You were lying.”

“No, I mean you should have trusted me to decide for myself.”

A pause. “Maybe.”

But that’s what we did: We decided for each other. We lied; I lied. Maybe that was why I’d brought him here, because last time we’d been in this place, we’d been strangers. This was a place for a fresh start. No more lies.

First I kissed him. He closed his eyes, but I kept mine open, sweeping my gaze across his skin, trying to memorize the angle of his cheekbones, the crinkles at the edges of his eye, the way the skin shallowly dimpled below his ear.

“What was that for?” he asked, when I finally pulled back. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I need to tell you some things,” I said, before I could think better of it.

“There’s more? What’s left for them to do?”

“Not them. Me.”

The worst part? That didn’t surprise him either.

“It’s about that night at the temple,” I said. “There are some things that… you don’t know.” So easy to phrase it that way, passive and blameless. “Things you don’t know” as opposed to “things I didn’t tell you.”

We still sat cross-legged, facing each other. His hands rested on his ankles, and my hands rested on his. They were my safety line, my barometer. If I could hold on to them, I could hold on to him. If not…

I kept going. Eventually, I hoped, gravity would take over, dragging us down to the truth even if I changed my mind mid-fall and tried to pull us up again.

“I lied. About what happened. When I said the secops came before we signaled them—that we had no choice. That’s not how it was.” Keep talking. The faster I talked, the sooner it would end. “Auden found us, and I had to stop him from getting into the building, but then Jude wanted to use him as a hostage, and then—” It hadn’t been like this, one simple moment following another, cause and effect. It had been a fractured collage, and now, after so many months trying to forget, it was just a fog.

“Then what?” He spoke for the first time.

“Things got crazy. Jude was going to shoot Auden, so you… you had to stop him. Remember? You weren’t going to let anyone get hurt. So you…” I had told myself, all this time, that I was protecting him from the guilt. I was lying for him. But when had I ever been that altruistic?

“I what?”

“You shot him. With one of those pulse guns. And he passed out.” I wondered what it must be like to hear your life told to you like a story that had happened to someone else. To hear that you’d done things that you knew, deep down, you would never do. “But Auden had already alerted the Brotherhood, and then it was…” I shook my head. “Hell. We hid out inside the lab, and the Brotherhood was outside, and we didn’t have any choice.”

“So we called in the secops,” Riley said.

“Yeah. And we told them… if they came, if they rescued us and stopped the explosion and the Brotherhood, they could take Jude.” That wasn’t exactly right; it wasn’t how it had been. Saying it like that made it sound like a trade, like we’d given him up. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“We could have blown the place up,” Riley said. “With us inside.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“But you were too scared,” Riley said. “Right?”

I’d never admitted it to him. “It doesn’t matter now. We didn’t do it. We both agreed.”

“And then Jude blew the place anyway. With me inside.”

We were no longer holding hands.

“This is why I didn’t want you to know,” I said quickly. “I thought it would be easier—”

“On who?”

I deserved that.

“How do I know this is true?” he asked stiffly.

“It’s true.”

“How do I know?” he said again.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“For all I know, you’re lying now, and what you said before was true. Or none of it’s true. Anything could be true. I’m supposed to trust you?”

I reached for him, but he knocked my hand away, hard.

“I’m sorry!”

“It’s not that you lied, again,” he said, frost in his voice. “It’s what you lied about.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to know—”

“The truth? Those were my memories, my life. Who gave you permission to screw with that? Do you know what it’s like, not remembering? Like a big, black nothing. You were supposed to fill it. I trusted you.” He screwed up his face, like he would have spit on me, if only he could. “I let you tell me what was real. I believed you. I gave you that. And you shit all over it.”

I didn’t mean to hurt you—my father’s lame words, on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them.

“I made a mistake.”

This time he caught my hand in mid-reach, his fingers steel around my wrist. “Don’t touch me,” he said, and let go. “You could tell me anything,” he continued. “And I’d have to believe you, right? Maybe you set up Jude. Or both of us, for all I know. Maybe you were working with BioMax the whole time.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“They’re your partners, right? Your allies in the cause?”

My words; his bullets. He was better at this than I would have expected.

And I wasn’t allowed to fight back.

“Jude warned me.” He shook his head, furious. “He warned me not to trust you.”

“We both agreed,” I said, getting desperate. I had to make him understand. “You wanted to stop Jude from hurting anyone. No matter what we had to do.”

He wasn’t listening. And part of me understood that the denials didn’t matter, because he didn’t really believe I was conspiring against him. It was the lying he couldn’t forgive. And I couldn’t deny I’d done that.

“Funny,” he said. “All that time you hated Jude, tried to turn me against him, and now he’s your new best friend. Maybe that was the plan? Get me out of the way?”

“You know that’s ridiculous.”

“So explain why you lie to me, and trust him.”

“I don’t! I mean, I do. Trust you. Not him. He’s nothing.”

Riley laughed. “Or maybe you’re lying again. Maybe while you’ve been screwing with me, you’ve been fucking him.”

It was the ugliest thing he’d ever said to me.

He didn’t mean it, I told myself.

He didn’t.

“Well? You want to deny it?”

“You really want to have this conversation?” I said, patience fraying. “With your ex-girlfriend camping out at the foot of your bed?”

“So we’re both liars,” he said. “I feel so much better now.”

I decided not to think too hard about that one, and trust that he meant he’d lied about her being there, not about why.

“We can start over,” I said. “No lies. You know everything now.”

He stood up. I was losing him.

“You honestly expect me to believe anything you say?”

Maybe I should have begged. Dropped to my knees. Clung to him. I didn’t expect it to work, but maybe I should have tried.

I didn’t.

We stood there, side by side, watching the water. I waited for him to walk away from me, and wondered how long it would take me to walk home from here. The thought reminded me that I didn’t have a home anymore; I only had Riley’s bed, and probably I didn’t have that anymore either.

“Riley, I—”

“Don’t.”

Minutes, hours, I don’t know. Mech bodies don’t get tired; mech legs don’t buckle. We could have stood there forever, as if rusted in place. A monument to something dead.

Finally: “I know you didn’t mean it.”

For a second I let myself hope. But even the anger was better than what was left in its wake. A vacuum. Every word clear, measured—empty.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he added.

“It has to.”

“It doesn’t.” He finally turned to me. Riley’s eyes were deep brown, not the slate gray they’d been when I first knew him. BioMax had done their best to match the new color to the photo I’d given them, but I couldn’t imagine that any org would have eyes like this. And certainly no org had the pinprick of amber at the center of the pupil. Like a keyhole. I watched his eyes and imagined I could see something there that said this wasn’t over, no matter what he wanted me to believe.

But I was done seeing what I wanted to see.

“It’s too hard,” Riley said.

“It” meant “us.”

“So that’s it? Because it’s too much work?” I shook my head. No. No. No. “That’s supposed to be my thing, remember? I run away when things get tough. You stay. I’m the one who likes it easy, who gets everything handed to me—that’s what you think, right? You’re hard, you’re strong, I’m weak. So now who’s weak?”

“I’m not weak,” Riley said. “I’m tired.”

“Of me?” I asked. My voice sounded small, and I hated it.

“Of this.”

“Of us.”

“Come here,” he said, and opened his arms to me.

I wish I could say I turned my back on him. Not because I hated him or because he was wrong, but because it was my turn to be hard. Pride, dignity—invisible things, imaginary things, like the self, like the soul. They distort reality; they get in the way. But they still matter.

I stepped into his arms. I wished I could breathe in the scent of him, that his skin was warm and his chest rose and fell beneath his shirt.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this, I thought. We were supposed to be a fairy tale. A cliché of a love story, the princess and the rogue, the lady and the tramp. We had died and come back to life; we were copies who’d found reality in each other. We were machines who’d found love. The circumstances were extraordinary. How could the end be so damn ordinary?

Just another breakup.

Just another broken heart.

If I really wanted him, I would find a way to fix it, I thought.

If I really wanted him, I wouldn’t have driven him away.

But as usual I didn’t know what I wanted. Other than his arms around me.

I wanted that, but not enough to hold on when he let go. Imaginary dignity, maybe. But it was real the way we stood there, alone together, nothing left to say. It was real when we walked to the car in step, side by side, not touching, and drove away, mature, grown-up. Separate.

This is really happening, I thought. This is how it ends. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything.

Mechs don’t cry.

And there was nothing else left.