The kettle screamed.
Neither one of us moved to quiet it.
6
Skylar
killer
“I WAS BORN here,” the boy said, later on that same evening. “Grew up here.”
He offered this information without my asking.
I wondered why. Was he bored? Trying to pretend we could be friends?
It was dark again, the light gone from the stormy sky. The days were shorter in winter, I’d learned, but the blizzard made them shorter still. There was food cooking on the stove again and we were waiting to eat it. I’d given up trying to pretend I wasn’t hungry. Besides, I would need my strength once the snow stopped and I made my escape. “Where are your parents? Your family?”
The wind shrieked. The blizzard seemed endless. “I don’t have any family.”
There was a hitch in his voice. It made me look at him. “What happened to them?”
“They’re dead,” he said simply. Then he shook his head. His eyes met mine, and I saw in them something new. An opening, a vulnerability, that he matched with his next words. “That’s not true. They’re not dead. They plugged in years ago.”
I stared at him, surprised. “But why are you—”
“Why am I still in the Real World?” he finished. “Because my parents never wanted children, not in this world or any other. So they dropped me off with some Keepers one day, I thought it was only for the afternoon, and then I never saw them again. It turned out they were dropping me off at a special place for children whose parents were plugging in.” His eyes fell to his hands and he stared at his palms like they might have answers. “They traded my life for the freedoms of the App World. I was their payment. Their ticket, so to speak.” He opened the door to the stove and stoked the wood, the embers sizzling. “Why else do you think I became a bounty hunter? It’s fitting, don’t you think? I was traded for passage into the App World, used as capital, so why not do the same with others now that I’m no longer a child? I learned very young what a body is worth and I’ve never forgotten the lesson.” He let out a long breath. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
He nearly sounded apologetic, and the significance of what he’d said felt heavy in the room. I went to the couch, the floorboards creaking, and sat down, doing my best to process what this information meant. But what I said to him out loud was harsh. “If you’re trying to make me feel bad for you, or get me to forgive what you’re going to do to me, then think again.”
Unlike before when I made a cold remark, this time the boy didn’t retreat behind that blank look. His eyes were pained, and I suddenly regretted my words.
“I know,” he said quietly.
Now I regretted them even more, despite how everything in me screamed against this.
How so very like Trader this boy was, abandoned by his family. How so very like me and so many others in the App World, like a Single, but this time a Single in the Real World. How many orphans would this divide in worlds make? How many children would have to grow up alone, learning to fend for themselves, to harden themselves against abandonment and all the loneliness that goes with it? How cruel this separation between worlds could be.
Is. How cruel it is.
And how cruel its people.
The two of us stared at each other, me on the couch, the boy standing by the iron stove, warming his hands, his mouth nearly hidden underneath his scarf. There was a shift in the air. I felt it, as sure as the instincts woven through my code in the App World that somehow made the transition to my real body. This boy was opening up, telling me his secrets. It meant I had a chance to win him over, that if I did I might get out of this with my life as my own. The storm was giving us time, and I needed to use it to turn us from enemies into friends, or at least something close to this.
I decided to give him some of my own truth, my own deepest pain.
“We’re not so different,” I said, just as quietly as he’d spoken before. “I was given up to the App World when I was barely five. I grew up as a Single there, a ward of the state, more or less.”
He studied me, but I couldn’t read him. “Maybe, but your family gave you up so you could have a better future. They gave you up out of love. At least, at first.”
“Don’t be so quick to jump to that conclusion.” My words were bitter. I backtracked. “I suppose that sounds like the truth, but I felt abandoned in the App World. I thought about it year after year, whether it was really love that made my mother and sister give me up, or if they just told themselves it was, when really by plugging me in they’d unloaded a great burden. Regardless of their reasons, I grew up alone in a world that resented its motherless and fatherless children.” I got up and joined the boy at the stove, warming my hands next to his, the two of us side by side. Like equals. Maybe even the same. “I spent my life waiting to unplug and find them, to find out the truth, hoping that when I got to this world I’d know once and for all that I was loved—that I’d always been loved. Instead I found out my sister was the leader of a movement dedicated to selling bodies and that mine was to be her first sale. I haven’t seen my mother in months and I don’t know where she is. And I’ve never even known the identity of my father.” I stopped short of mentioning Emory Specter. It made me sick to think about him.
The boy didn’t say anything, but I could feel his eyes shifting my way now and again. The sound of dinner bubbling on the stove was strangely comforting as the two of us stood there. It seemed to cancel out the terrible gravity of our conversation, of our confessions, really, or at least dull it a bit.
“Do you know anything about your parents?” I asked. “Have you sought out their bodies? They must be somewhere.” I didn’t mention the possibility that they might be part of the Body Market, that they likely would be eventually if not already. It didn’t need saying. We both knew this was the deal.
He walked over to the kitchen counter and picked up a wooden spoon, stirring the pot. “No.” He stared down into the bubbling stew. “I don’t know where they are.”
I joined him there, leaning my elbows on the counter, watching as the steam rose up around his face. His dark eyes were big when he wasn’t trying to hide them. “Why didn’t you plug in on your own? Find a way to?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t want to. Didn’t need to.”
This surprised me. There were always extenuating circumstances behind why someone couldn’t plug in—lack of capital, lack of access, too many Real World responsibilities essential to the maintenance of the App World’s existence. But to hear someone say they simply didn’t want to was unusual. “Why not?”
He shut off the flame and retrieved bowls from the cabinet and spoons from a drawer. He ladled some stew into each dish and carried everything over to the kitchen table. The two of us sat. I studied the food before me, inhaled the rich scent of vegetables and meat. There was something perfect about it, with the cold and the snow outside.
“Maybe I have a death wish,” the boy said.
I picked up my spoon. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He seemed to think about this, as though his own words surprised him. “The App World is too safe for me. Too sterilized. There’s no risk to living, no cost or consequences. How can you feel anything real, anything big, anything thrilling, if there’s never any risk? A life without risk is a life without meaning.”
A life without risk is a life without meaning.
Was that true? Did we need to risk our lives for them to be significant?
“I don’t know what I think of that,” I said. I took a mouthful of the stew. It was delicious. I loved the way it burned going down my throat, warming my insides on the way. I watched as the boy dug into his, occasionally pausing to glance up at me. This whole experience was strange, but our conversation tonight was the strangest thing of all. It was almost . . . intimate. “But you’re right about virtual life,” I went on. “It’s about avoiding risk. About never having to feel real pain or face the fragility o
f the body.” I thought back to the funeral and Emory Specter’s proclamation, which seemed so long ago. “Citizens of the App World have been seeking immortality since the beginning and now they’ve found it.”
The boy stopped eating. “I would never want to be immortal.”
“Me neither,” I agreed.
He put down his spoon and studied me. “You wouldn’t? But you’re from the App World.”
“I am,” I started, then corrected myself. “I was. When I left, it was mostly to find my family, but it was also because I wanted a choice. I wanted the chance to be in my body and know what it meant to live in it. Maybe I do agree with you, that somehow in life’s riskiness, by living in this fragile body instead of giving it up for virtual reality, too scared to live in it at all, we find something far more meaningful.”
The boy didn’t respond, he just gulped down the last of his stew and began clearing his place. As I finished mine, I noticed he’d stopped moving. He was standing facing the sink, his back to me, his hands gripping the edge of the countertop.
I wished I could see his face.
“Tell me your name,” I said suddenly.
He didn’t turn around. “You don’t need to know my name. It’s better if you don’t.”
“Better for who? You?” Disappointment filled my voice. His answer made him seem like a coward, and suddenly I didn’t want him to turn out to be a coward. “So it’s easier for you to hand me over and be done with me?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time. You don’t get into this profession if your will is weak.” He came over and grabbed my empty bowl and brought it to the counter. Silverware clattered heavily into the sink. “Don’t get the wrong idea. Just because you and I had a talk doesn’t change anything. We can have dinner, we can spend days trapped here, and we can have a million more discussions about the deepest desires of our hearts.” His breaths were coming quickly. He turned around to face me. “I could fall in love with you, Skylar, and it wouldn’t make a difference. When this storm is over, I’m turning you in and getting paid. That’s just who I am.”
My heart was pounding. I could nearly hear it. “If you’re that strong-willed, then telling me your name won’t change anything.” I rose from my chair and it shrieked along the floor. My hands curled into fists. “If you’re trying to protect me, then don’t. I don’t need anyone’s protection.”
His mouth was a thin line, his lips pressed together hard. Two round spots of red dotted his cheeks. He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. “It’s Kit. My name is Kit.” He dumped the rest of the dishes and the silverware into the sink with a great crash. Without another word, he walked past the stove, and disappeared into his bedroom.
Kit, Kit, went his name in my mind.
Or maybe it was my heart beating it out.
I clutched at my chest.
Then I let go. My will could be just as strong. I was the girl who’d plunged a knife into her sister’s eye. And I’d killed and killed again.
As the wind ripped around the house and the snow piled higher, the drifts nearly topping the windows, I considered what Kit said earlier, that he had a death wish. I let it console me as I took the long, sharp blade I’d seen him use to prepare dinner and slipped it safely between the layers of clothing bulking up my arms, hiding it in my sleeve for later, or just in case I decided to use it in the night.
Everything around me was red.
The floor, the ceiling. I pressed my hand against the wall and it yielded, my fingers disappearing into it.
I started to walk, and walk and walk and walk until people appeared, lots of them. They were talking over one another. I joined the stream and let the crowd take me along. It wasn’t long before I saw what pulled them.
Long glass cases, like coffins, appeared everywhere.
People walked up to them, peered into them, touching the sides with their hands.
The Body Market.
I was in the Body Market.
I began pushing through everyone, pushing beyond them, running from box to box, searching without even knowing what I was looking for, even though of course I did, my whole body and my entire mind knew it instinctively. It wasn’t long before I found her, and she looked exactly the same as she had two days ago.
Inara, beautiful and golden and lit up on a dais.
She was so peaceful.
I banged on the glass with my fists. “Inara, it’s me! It’s Skylar!” I’d meant to whisper, but for some reason it came out a scream.
That’s when I noticed that the walls and the floor and the ceiling were no longer red and plush but a cold flat gray that echoed my words, throwing them back at me. Throwing them back to the crowd behind me.
Everyone turned.
“That’s her!” one of them said.
Whispers became shouts, and people started toward me.
Their thick black boots thudded against the stone floor.
I ran, my pulse ripping through my veins, the aisles of the market a giant maze, a funhouse full of the shiniest glass, glass that reflected everything around it like mirrors. I slid the knife from my sleeve, held it like a dagger. I tore along, and eventually the sound of footsteps faded, so I slowed enough to look at the bodies on either side of the aisle, searching for Sylvia. I didn’t stop, wouldn’t have ever stopped, but then I recognized another one.
I halted, my lungs heaving, but I heard nothing else. Everyone else had disappeared and I was alone. A great emptiness seemed to surround me. I went to the body in the case. It was a boy. I looked upon him, the way his brown hair curled across his brow. I pressed my hands to the glass, the knife clanking against it. If the boy’s eyes were open, I knew they’d be the color of the sea where I loved to swim.
“Rain,” I whispered, a sharp pain stabbing my center. Regret and dismay did a dance around me and I gripped the handle of the knife harder. “Why are you here?”
That’s when I recognized more than just Rain.
Adam, too. In the glass box to Rain’s left.
And right next to him was Parvda.
The Keeper. She was here as well. How? Last I knew they were hidden and safe at the mansion.
But no. No, they weren’t.
They were all right in front of me.
Lacy. I even saw Lacy Mills.
And then, then I saw something even worse, someone whose presence made my heart break and fall into a million pieces.
“Mom? Mom!”
I tried to go to the coffin where she lay, lifeless, but for some reason my legs wouldn’t move, well, they would, but so slowly it might take forever to reach her. It felt like I was pushing my way through brush as high as my waist in a forest, even though there was nothing but air. I swung the knife like I could cut a path through whatever was holding me back, trying to get there faster, doing whatever I could. The handle of it burned my palm, but not with heat. It seemed made of ice.
With every step forward my mother only got farther away.
My feet began to slow, the knife began to slow.
Everything was so cold.
I was so cold.
I looked down at my feet. There was snow all around me, covering me, rising up my body, and when I turned toward the sky I realized the lights had gone out in the world. My body shivered, my teeth chattering against one another, clicking and clicking, and any bit of warmth left in me seemed to dislodge itself with the sounds.
“Skylar!”
I heard my name shouted. From far away.
But I couldn’t turn to it. I couldn’t seem to move.
“Skylar! Skylar!”
As the voice got closer I gathered all the strength I had left and raised the knife behind my head, the darkness so complete I couldn’t make out my own limbs. When I heard my name one last time, this time so near it was only a whisper away, I plunged the knife into whatever or whomever was upon me.
The next thing I knew I was back in the cottage, but I wasn’t in the living room on the couch. I was in
a different room, on a bed, and I was sopping wet. My clothing was soaked and my hair was soaked and dripping down my shirt. Everything was so cold. I was so cold. I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet. I couldn’t see them either. They were wrapped up in sweaters.
What in the world had happened?
“You’re awake.”
I sat up and my whole body groaned in protest. Kit was standing in the doorway. His eyes said nothing, but his clothing said something else. It was streaked with red.
“You have blood all over you,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
He pulled a shirt and pants out of a small chest of drawers. “You need to change out of those wet things. I would’ve . . . but I didn’t want you to think . . .” He placed the clothes next to me on the bed. “Just do it, Skylar,” he added, and left me alone.
I looked around again. This must be Kit’s bedroom.
I sat there a minute, trying to understand. But then my teeth started to chatter, and I remembered how they’d been chattering before, recently, though I couldn’t remember exactly when. I stood up and began to pull off my wet shirt, but my hands were still wrapped in sweaters. I let them unravel and fall to the floor. My hands wouldn’t work right. I couldn’t feel them. My fingers were curled into hooks, still and useless. Would my feet be the same way? I sat down and kicked and kicked until the sweaters around them fell off. I tried to wiggle my toes. Unsuccessfully.
I took a deep breath and tried to stay calm.
Then I did my best to peel away the rest of my clothing, replacing everything with the dry things Kit left me. The tips of my fingers and toes tingled, like someone was sticking tiny needles lightly into my skin, but not in an unpleasant way.
Not at first.
The tingling spread to my palms and the backs of my hands and my knuckles and the bottoms of my feet and the tips of them, too. Everything started to burn.
The tiny pins and needles became knives.
The pain stole my breath and I wished for the safety of the App World, for the healing power of a download that would take this horrible agony away. Tears poured down my cheeks.
The Body Market Page 4
