Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  “Best way to keep it safe,” Jude explained. Across the street the passengers of the second car were doing the same.

  It was eerily quiet. The dark buildings shot up on all sides, and I reminded myself that at least some of them were full of people, staying warm, staying dry, staying off the streets after curfew. But everything was so still and empty, it was hard to imagine that anyone was alive here. The group moved stealthily, stepping lightly, staying clustered in a pack. Only Auden breathed.

  “What now?” I whispered.

  “We look around,” Jude said. “And we try not to get caught.”

  Caught by who? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t really want an answer.

  This city had been lucky. No major bombings, so no radioactive debris. Too far east for the Water Wars, too far north for the flooding. They’d gotten hit by the Comstock flu strain, but no worse than any of the other population centers, and in the last bio-attack, before the cities cleared out for good, they’d lost less than a million.

  They’d been lucky.

  Not lucky enough for anyone to stay, at least voluntarily, but that much was true for all the cities. Who would be crazy enough to stick around an energy-poor, germ-ridden death trap if they had enough credit to get the hell out?

  We wandered down the broad, empty avenues, flashlight beams playing across the pavement. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where the lights went off two hours after sunset, where you could only link in once a day if you were lucky enough to find a screen that worked, where the punishment for energy theft was death.

  I couldn’t.

  There wasn’t enough to go around, I reminded myself. Of anything. There wasn’t enough energy for everyone to stay wired all day, every day. There wasn’t enough fuel or enough road for everyone to own cars. There weren’t enough cows—at least not enough free-range, grass-fed cows, now that you weren’t allowed to raise anything else—for everyone to eat meat. There wasn’t enough space for everyone to have a kid. Either we would all have to suffer—or some would have to sacrifice.

  I was just glad it was them and not me.

  I was also glad my power cells were fully loaded. There was no wireless web of energy here, and if something happened, if I somehow got left behind, there would be nowhere to recharge. After a few days I would just…fade out.

  “Those used to light up,” Auden whispered in my ear, pointing at the thick, empty screens papered across almost every building. “Like giant pop-ups. Telling people what to buy.”

  “What a waste of energy,” I whispered back. Maybe these people deserved to live in the dark.

  Our feet crunched with every step. Crushed glass, I decided, as we passed broken window after broken window. Everything here was broken.

  I wanted to go home.

  A distant howl cut through the silence.

  “What was that?” I whispered, freezing in place.

  “Just a dog.” Jude didn’t bother to whisper. “Fighting it out for who gets to run the place. Like the rats and the roaches haven’t already won.” He turned sharply to the right, leading us down another wide avenue, its gutters flowing with trash. Auden was breathing shallowly and, for the first time, it occurred to me how the place must stink, with its mounds of garbage heaped on urine-stained pavement. “This way.”

  Two blocks later we heard the scream. High-pitched, piercing, it went on and on and—it stopped. It didn’t fade away. It just stopped.

  That was no dog.

  We went deeper into the city, and I tried not to wonder how we would find our way out.

  Jude stopped short in front of a building so tall it blotted out most of the sky. “Last stop for orgs,” he said, staring at Auden.

  Auden glared back. “Meaning?”

  “Building’s locked down, and all those biosensors…” Jude smirked. “You don’t want to start panting and get us caught, now do you?”

  “I’m supposed to wait out here while you…do what, exactly?”

  “Just taking a look around. We’ll be back before you get too scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” Auden said fiercely.

  Jude shrugged. “Great. Then you don’t mind if we—”

  “You’re not going with them?” Auden half-said, half-asked, grabbing my arm.

  I paused. “I don’t have to. I can wait down here with you…if you want.” I knew I should stay.

  But I didn’t want to.

  “No.” Auden closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. So you should do it. All the way.”

  Jude chuckled softly. “Funny, she never struck me as an all-the-way kind of girl.”

  I ignored him.

  “You sure?” I asked Auden.

  “Yeah. Go.” He gave me a weak smile. “Be careful.”

  “You too.”

  Jude and one of the other guys, the tall, brooding one named Riley, bashed open one of the doors, and we crept inside. It was even darker in there, a broad space smudged with shadows. A screen glinted in the beam of someone’s flashlight, and then another and another. This is where the city people came to link in, I realized. It explained why the building was locked down. It didn’t explain what we were doing there.

  Jude led us to a bank of elevators, and we waited as Riley pried open a control panel and dug his hands into the mess of wiring.

  “Isn’t the electricity shut off?” I asked.

  “They keep it running low-level in this building,” Jude said. “For the hardware. Easy to tap into if you know what you’re doing.”

  “And he knows what he’s doing?” I said, nodding toward Riley.

  “He knows a lot of things. You don’t hear any alarms going, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Thank Riley.”

  A few seconds later the elevator doors popped open. The group stepped on, but when I tried to follow, Jude held me back. “We’ll take the next one,” he said.

  Before I could argue, the doors shut, and we were alone.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  Another set of doors opened, and we stepped into the small space. Together. The doors shut behind us, and the elevator whooshed up the shaft. Jude turned to face me, backing me into a corner.

  “Touch me and I’ll kill you,” I hissed.

  He just laughed. “A, you’ve really got to train yourself to stop thinking in outdated terms, like life and death, and B, I have zero interest in touching you. Not at the moment, at least.”

  I promised myself I had no interest in touching him, either. “So what the hell is this about?”

  He pressed his hands flat against the elevator walls, one on either side of me, locking my body between his arms. “I thought you might have some questions. About your little…experience by the waterfall.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He smirked. “I think you do. And I think you loved it. I think you came back for more.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Better be careful.” It sounded more like a threat than a warning. “Don’t want to end up lost inside your own head. Better to get your thrills out here, in the real world.”

  “Is that what we’re supposed to be doing, wandering around this trash heap of a city?” I asked. “Am I being thrilled? I hadn’t noticed.”

  Jude dropped his arms. “That’s how you want to play it? Fine.”

  The elevator swept up and up.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  He didn’t bother asking what.

  “As human as possible,” he said bitterly. “That’s the BioMax party line. But it doesn’t mean they don’t have the technology to make us different. To make us better. They just don’t want to give it to us. Not officially, at least.”

  “Make us better? How’s some crazy intense b-mod trip supposed to make me better?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and I realized that now there was no denying
it. I’d uploaded the program, and he knew it.

  “There’s more where that came from,” he said. “But only if you’re willing to look.”

  The doors opened. We were on the roof. Three dark silhouettes tiptoed along a railing at the far edge, wobbling in the wind. There was plenty of wind, ninety-eight stories up.

  “They’re not jumping,” I whispered in horror. “Tell me they’re not jumping.”

  “No, we’re not jumping,” Jude said. “Just playing around. Admiring the view. Enjoy.” And he slipped into the shadows.

  I circled the roof, weaving through abandoned solar arrays and broken satellite dishes. The world above was no less shattered than the world below. The three mechs on the railing swung themselves over the thin metal barrier and began scaling it from the outside. I passed Quinn in a dark corner, wrapped around the guy whose name I would probably never know. Riley and Jude argued against the skyline. I veered in the opposite direction and found myself standing next to Ani, her blue hair black in the darkness. She’d folded herself over the railing, elbows propped on the metal, eyes fixed on the dead buildings that stretched beneath us. My eyes had adjusted to the night enough to pick out a few of the closest ones, but beyond that, there was nothing but a field of shadow.

  “Hey,” she said, without turning her face away from the nonview.

  “Hey.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  I shrugged. “Not much to see.”

  “I mean about the whole thing,” she said. “Tonight.”

  I shrugged again. “Seems like a lot of effort just to go somewhere we’re not supposed to be. What’s the point?”

  “Jude says there doesn’t always need to be a point. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.” Ani glanced over my shoulder. I turned to see Quinn and the guy, still going at it. “See? Fun.”

  “Maybe it’s none of my business, but…that doesn’t bother you?”

  “Why should it?”

  “I guess I just thought you and Quinn were…”

  “We are. Sometimes.” She smiled faintly. “But this is all new for her. She wants to…you know. Play.”

  “And that’s okay with you?”

  “Jude says we have to learn not to lay claims on one another anymore,” she said. “He says monogamy’s impractical if you’re planning to live forever.”

  “Seems like Jude says a lot.”

  Ani beamed. “He’s amazing.”

  “And you always listen?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “Where we come from. Where he comes from.”

  “So tell me.”

  “How do you think he knows his way around here so well?” she asked.

  I hadn’t really thought about it.

  “He used to live here,” Ani said. “Before.”

  “Really?” I leaned forward. I’d never met anyone who had actually lived in a city. “I mean, I knew he was…” I wasn’t sure which word would make me sound least like a spoiled rich girl. Everyone knew that the first mechs had been volunteers from the cities and the corp-towns. What everyone also knew, although no one said it, was that you’d be crazy to volunteer for something like that unless you had no other choice. “Do you know what happened to him? Why he volunteered?”

  Ani looked alarmed. “I’m not supposed to be talking about the past,” she said. “He’d kill me.”

  “I thought we were supposed to forget about our mortal fears,” I teased. “Retrain ourselves to accept immortality. Isn’t that what ‘Jude says’?”

  She shook her head, hard. “The past doesn’t matter,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s better forgotten.”

  “Easy for some people,” I said quietly. “Not so much for others.”

  Ani flopped forward against the railing again. “I don’t miss it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’d never go back.”

  “Are you from around here too?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t pushing too hard. I didn’t want to scare her away.

  “No. Farther west than that.” There was more than a little pain in her smile, but her voice stayed flat. “My parents are from Chicago.”

  “Oh.” From Chicago, not in Chicago. No one lived in Chicago, not anymore. And most of the ones who’d lived there the day of the attack weren’t living, period. The initial blast had only taken out a couple hundred thousand, but then there had been the radioactive dust. And the radioactive water. And the radioactive food. A radioactive city, filled with radioactive people. Who had, pretty quickly and pretty gruesomely, started getting sick. I hadn’t seen the vids, but then, it wasn’t really necessary. In school they made us watch footage of Atlanta. And Orlando.

  Once you’ve seen one ruined city, you’ve seen them all.

  I didn’t know how to ask the obvious question, but it seemed rude not to try. “Are your parents, uh, are they…did they…”

  “Still alive.” Ani’s mouth twisted. “At least, as far as I know. Which isn’t very far.”

  “You’re not in touch?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is it because of…what happened to you?” I glanced down at her body, and she got the idea.

  “I wish.” She hesitated. “How much do you know about the corp-towns?”

  I shrugged. “Just that it’s a good place to live, if, you know, you need a job. And that if you live there, you get stuff you need.” Stuff like food, electricity, med-tech—stuff you wouldn’t get in a city. Not unless you stole it.

  “You get it,” she agreed, “but only if you follow the rules.”

  There was a code of good behavior, I knew that. But it made sense to me. If the corporation was running the town, supplying houses and schools and doctors and lights, didn’t they deserve to make the rules?

  “And only if you’re willing to give other stuff away,” she continued.

  “Like the voting thing?” I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.” Residents of corp-towns sold their vote to the corps. Seemed like more than a fair trade. Most people I knew weren’t planning to vote anyway. Who cared which b-mod addict fame whore pretended to run the country next?

  “Other things, too,” Ani said. “Things for the good of the community. Like minimizing medical costs.”

  “Seems fair.”

  She looked down. “When you’re from Chicago, having a kid is not a good way to minimize medical costs.”

  “Oh.” You could take the people out of the radioactive city—but you couldn’t take the radioactivity out of the people.

  “Yeah. Oh. They signed a contract. So when they decided to have me…”

  “They got kicked out?”

  “Not until I was born.” The pained smile was back again. “Then it was straight back to city living for them. And their adorable legless wonder.”

  I forced myself not to look down at her long, slender legs. “You were born without…”

  “Among other things.” Her grip tightened around the railing. “Radiation poisoning really spices up the genetic soup.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So were they.” She shrugged. “After a few years they ditched me. Headed for the nearest corp-town, I guess.”

  “And you never—”

  “Ten years.” She shook her head. “Not one word. Guess they wanted to forget I ever happened.”

  “I really am sorry,” I told her. It seemed like such a lame thing to say. “It must have been…hard for you. On your own.”

  Ani shrugged, keeping her eyes fixed on the skyline. “There are places. For people like me. No doctors, of course. And not much food or…anything. But…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Anymore. Let’s just say that when they shipped me off for the download, I didn’t care what they were going to do to me. It couldn’t have been worse than where I was.”

  “So how did you get to volunteer?”

  She laughed. “Lia, what makes you think we volunteered?”

  “I didn’t—I don
’t know—that’s what they said. I believed it.” Which sounded totally feeble. But it was the truth.

  “It doesn’t matter. Jude’s right. None of that matters now. We’re better off.”

  She said it, but I couldn’t help thinking she wasn’t done talking. Not yet. If I could find the right question to ask. “Did you know him? Before?”

  She hesitated. “Not in the place. No. But later, in the hospital. When they were doing all the tests, deciding which of us they wanted. Jude was there. Riley too. They were friends from before. And the three of us…It just worked, you know?” She pulled a nanoViM from her pocket and flicked the screen to life. “You want to see something?”

  I nodded.

  “You can’t tell them I showed you,” she said. “Ever.”

  I nodded again.

  In the picture, three teenagers grinned at the camera. Two sat side by side in wheelchairs, their cheeks sunken, their bodies withering away. The girl had no legs. The boy had all his limbs, but they were twisted and gnarled. Useless.

  “Jude,” Ani said, tapping his hollowed face.

  The guy standing behind looked like a giant next to their fragile, wasted bodies. “Riley?” I guessed. “He looks pretty healthy.”

  She flicked off the screen. “He was.”

  He was also black. As was the boy who had become Jude. The girl’s skin was lighter, more caramel than chocolate, but still radically darker than the body she wore now. Ani saw the question in my face.

  “What? Did you think we were white?” she asked in disgust.

  I guess I hadn’t thought at all. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they…I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t…”

  “We were the first,” she said in a more bitter tone than I’d ever heard her use. “An experiment. So they used what they had, and what they had were standard-issue bodies for their standard-issue rich white clients. You get a new body, you get to customize. Us? We get something off the rack. We get this.” She looked down, now aiming the disgust at the body she’d been assigned. “You think I like this?” she asked. “You think I like the fact that my parents wouldn’t even recognize me, if they ever—” She choked it off. “Not like that’s going to happen.” She slipped the ViM into her pocket. “It doesn’t matter. Jude says that race is irrelevant, since it’s not like we even have skin anymore, not really. He says being a mech is like being part of a new race.” She lowered her voice. “But I know he hates it too.”