Wired (Skinned, Book 3)

by Robin Wasserman

  44

  "A moment, Lia?" my father said, blocking our path to the door. It wasn't a request.

  I squeezed Riley's hand. "Wait for me in the car?"

  He was out the door before I finished the question. Leaving me and my father alone in the marbled entry hall. Even as the door shut, the tiles were scrubbing themselves clear of any tracked-in mud and dirt, real or imaginary. My mother had trained the house to be even more compulsive than she was.

  "This boy ..." My father let the words dangle between us.

  "What about him?"

  "How much do you know about him?"

  "Enough." And how much do you know about him? I thought, but didn't ask, because I already knew the answer. My father always did his due diligence.

  "Where he comes from ..." It wasn't like my father to drag things out like this. Usually his proclamations were more like bullets, hitting their target almost before you realized the gun had gone off. "He's not like us."

  "Not good enough for us, you mean. I know you're thinking it, so you might as well say it."

  At least he still cares, I thought. At least he still thinks I deserve the best.

  "I say what I mean." He pressed his fingertips together, brushing the base of his chin. A shadow of beard was growing in gray. "And I mean: Be careful."

  "Riley would never hurt me." It had been too good to be

  45

  true, I thought, this silent truce between us. If he ordered me to stop seeing Riley, I would have to choose. I would have to choose Riley. "If you would give him a chance ..."

  "You mean well," he said, "but you're naive, with limited experience of the world--"

  "Limited experience?" I didn't know whether to laugh or throw something. "In the last year I've been kidnapped, blackmailed, and arrested, not to mention dead." He winced, and I averted my eyes. He wouldn't want me to see the moment of weakness. I didn't want me to see it. "I think I've got experience covered."

  "That's not the kind of experience I mean," he said. I was looking down, so I didn't see him reach for me. But I felt his hand on my shoulder, its steady weight. "You're young. You don't understand that there's such a thing as too much difference. Things can be ... difficult." Then he sighed. "But I suppose you've earned the right to figure that out for yourself."

  I looked up and met his gaze, surprised.

  "What were you expecting me to say?" he asked, with a hint of a smile.

  "Nothing. I was-- Nothing." Suddenly, I wanted to hug him. Not in gratitude or relief, or anything like that. But because I remembered how it used to feel, when I was five years old, when I was ten, to be walled off inside his arms, hidden and safe. "I'll probably be home late."

  "As long as you come home."

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  "You don't need to say that every time I leave."

  He hesitated. Also unlike him.

  "It's good. Being back home," I said, since he wasn't going to.

  "Well, whatever happens, I hope you'll remember that."

  I tapped the side of my head. "Computer brain, remember? We never forget." It wasn't true--mech brains were no more reliable than orgs'. But as a lame joke to leaven the mood, I figured it would do.

  He didn't laugh.

  I wanted to go back to Riley's place, somewhere we could be alone, with walls separating us from the rest of the world. But he didn't want to, and I didn't press. You could fit twenty of his apartments into the Kahn house, and he could do that math as easily as I could.

  So we drove into one of the Sanctuaries, a wooded space guaranteed to be empty at this time of night given the late autumn chill, the rain, and the smog so thick you could barely see the trees. The patrols wouldn't even bother hunting for trespassers; this wasn't a night for orgs.

  Riley had a blanket in his trunk, and he laid it down in the dirt, as if our mech bodies were too delicate to sit in the damp, rocky soil. But I appreciated the effort, and I appreciated his body curling around mine, his face hidden by smog and night but still there. I pressed the back of my hand to his cheek. Solid.

  47

  Real. All I wanted was to sit there with him and not talk, not act, for the first time in two weeks. I wanted everything to stop .

  "Sorry about my father," I said. "He's ... you know."

  "An asshole?"

  I couldn't blame him for thinking it. "He doesn't mean it."

  Riley laughed.

  "Let's just forget about it," I said, sliding my hand down his chest. "I'll never drag you back there. Promise."

  He stiffened and pushed my hand away. "That's how you want to play it?"

  "What?"

  "Like you're doing me some kind of favor?"

  "It is a favor," I pointed out. "You hated tonight, didn't you?"

  He didn't answer.

  "So why would you want to go through that again?"

  "That works out pretty good for you," he said.

  I'd gotten much better at reading Riley, but I couldn't read this. "What's your problem?"

  "Seems like I am," he said. "I embarrass you."

  "You do not!"

  "Took you months to introduce me to your family--"

  "Because they're freaks."

  "--and now you want to make sure it never happens again."

  "Because I hate how he treated you." I leaned against him,

  48

  hoping the pressure of my body on his would snap him out of this.

  "You can't hate it that much," he said. "You're going back."

  "That's different."

  "I don't care what he thinks of me," Riley said. "But he treats you like crap."

  "He's trying."

  "You keep making excuses. Why are you so scared of him?"

  "I'm not!"

  "Right. You do whatever he says because you want to." Riley looked disgusted. I imagined how much deeper the disgust would run if he realized that it was true. If he knew how much I still cared what my father thought of me, he'd think I was pathetic. Maybe he already did.

  "Come on, he's my father."

  "So what?"

  "So--" So what did that mean to Riley, who'd never had one and, according to him, had never noticed the difference? Who couldn't go back home because home was a cement tower with broken windows and puddles of urine and old allies who'd found it to their advantage to ally with someone else? "So can we not talk about this anymore?"

  I should have told him what I'd said to my father before we left, that I'd stood up for Riley, that we were on the same team. But I couldn't get the words out. Defending Riley to my father, defending my father to Riley, always the wrong words to the

  49

  wrong person--always defending someone and still somehow always looking like a traitor.

  I wasn't going to let myself get sucked into this fight when I knew what Riley was really angry about. And who. It would be easy to pretend this was about my father, because then we could both pretend he was the problem and I'd done nothing wrong. The easy way out, my favorite exit.

  Not anymore.

  "Are we going to talk about it?" I said.

  "You just said you don't want to anymore."

  "Not my father. The vidlife. Jude."

  "What does Jude have to do with the vidlife?" Riley said, too eager. "Did he message you?"

  He didn't know.

  "What did you think of it?" I asked cautiously. "The vidlife."

  Riley shrugged. "I didn't watch."

  "None of it?"

  "You told me I wouldn't like it," he reminded me. "The stuff they'd make you do."

  "Oh." I should have been relieved. "So you didn't watch at all? Any of it?"

  "Did you want me to? You said--"

  "I know what I said."

  "So now you're pissed?" He sounded half bemused, half annoyed. "What, you want me to dig an archive, watch it right

  50

  now? Because I will." He reached for his ViM, and--even though it was likely a bluff--I grabbed his arm.

  "No,
you're right. It's not like I'm some kind of famewhore trolling for fans. I just figured you'd be ... curious."

  And maybe a little jealous.

  Not that I wanted him to be jealous.

  I definitely wouldn't have wanted him to see me kissing Caleb or tearing out Pria's hair. And I wouldn't have wanted him to see me with Jude.

  But I couldn't believe he hadn't even looked, not once.

  "It would've felt like spying on you," he said quietly. "I wasn't going to do that."

  I hated myself for questioning him. "I wouldn't have been able to resist," I said. "If it was you."

  "I know."

  Sometimes I loved that he knew me so well.

  Sometimes I didn't.

  Something crackled in the bushes. I jerked around, but there was nothing there. No eyes peering out of the darkness. Just the patter of the rain.

  "Can we go back to your apartment?" I said, suddenly feeling exposed. If we were going to talk about Jude, we were going to do it where no one could overhear us.

  He's not following me, I thought. But that was the thing about Jude--I had no idea what he was doing, or why.

  "I told you; it's a mess."

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  "And I told you I don't care."

  "I don't know why you'd want to go back to that shit-hole."

  "Because I want to go somewhere, and you've made it pretty clear we can't go to my place."

  I shouldn't have said it, scratching the wound before it had a chance to scab over.

  "I should go," he said. "You're tired; I get it." I could feel him shifting his weight, getting ready to stand.

  "No." I took his hand. We had to get used to each other again. That was all. It had been a long and strange two weeks. We needed to find our rhythm. "Please. Let's ... talk. Tell me what you did while I was away."

  "Same old stuff. You know."

  "I don't, actually." Trying to sound playful, not annoyed.

  He shrugged. "Doesn't matter."

  I felt like we were slipping back to the beginning, before we'd known anything about each other, when there'd been nothing to say. I brushed my fingers along his forearm, then traced them up his arm, along his collarbone, resting them on his chest, over the spot where his heart would have been. "Please," I said again. "I just want to pretend the last two weeks didn't happen, that I was here. With you. So tell me what we would have been doing, so I can picture it."

  He choked out a bitter laugh. "You wouldn't have wanted to be here, not for that."

  "For what?" I could hear it in his voice: gathering clouds.

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  "I wasn't going to tell you this--" He stopped himself. "I mean, I wasn't going to not tell you. I didn't think it mattered."

  It wasn't like Riley to circle the point like this. He was nervous. That couldn't be good.

  "Sounds like it matters," I pointed out.

  He stood up, crossing his arms over his chest. "I went back to the city."

  "What?" Now I was on my feet. "Why would you go back to that place?"

  "That place is home."

  "Not anymore."

  "I just wanted to go." He uncrossed his arms and curled one hand into a fist, closing it inside the other. "I knew you wouldn't get it."

  Someone had to stop; someone had to give. I drew close to him, though he kept his eyes fixed on the trees. "Riley." I touched his shoulder, but he didn't turn. "That place isn't safe for you anymore. Things are different now."

  "Yeah." He didn't sound angry anymore, only tired. "And you're just looking out for me, right?"

  "That's my job," I said lightly, as if none of this mattered. I turned him around, forcing him to face me.

  He smiled. "Maybe you should ask for a raise."

  "I'm pretty satisfied with my current compensation level," I said, touching his lips. "Especially the perks." I leaned forward, I closed my arms around him, I kissed him.

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  But he let me. Then we were on the ground again, limbs tangled, bodies sinking into the damp earth, finally in sync. It was how we ended all of our arguments, and so far it was effective. I tried not to think about what we would do when it wasn't.

  54

  UNFORGIVEN

  Maybe real was a matter of perspective.

  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,

  55

  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.

  56

  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.

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  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?"

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  "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."