Torn

by Robin Wasserman

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

  “Feeling’s not mutual,” Ani mumbled.

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

  “Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Very mature.” Quinn stood again too.

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

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

  “We’re not.”

  “She speaks!”

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

  “Go away, Quinn,” said Ani.

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

  “Who said I forgive anyone?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It was true,” Quinn said.

  “So what?”

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

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

  “Nothing,” Jude assured her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Auden had come through for us after all.

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

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

  I know what to do with the knife.

  TRUST

  “You’re not going alone.”

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

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

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

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

  “No. I have this.”

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

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

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

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

  “Your turn.”

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

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

  “Screw you!” Ani shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Tyson somebody?”

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

  “Tell me you didn’t—”

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

  “Sort of mad.”

  Sort of grateful.

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

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

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

  “Wait for what?” I asked.

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

  “And phase three is … ?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Was there a compression generator?”

  “A what?”

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

  I froze.

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

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

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

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

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

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