Girl of Flesh and Metal

by Alicia Ellis

  “Confidentiality? We’re talking about murder, Jacks. We can’t sweep this under the rug.”

  He went silent.

  Jackson sounded so much like my parents right now. My top lip curled back in disgust, at myself and at him. Mostly at myself.

  “I murdered three people.” My voice cracked as I stated the full truth of it aloud for the first time. I licked my lips and continued. “And your solution is to throw money at it. I love you, but—”

  “I love you too.”

  “Let me finish.” I held up both hands. “I love you, but you and I want different things. I don’t want to go to an Ivy League school, marry young, and have babies.” My volume increased with each word. “I don’t want to be a CyberCorp executive. I don’t want any of this.” Anger and frustration swelled in my chest.

  “I’m sorry.” I expected him to say more, but his jaw tightened, lips pressed tightly together. “That’s not what you need right now. I’ll shut up.”

  Silence permeated the car, and in the midst of it, Debbie’s pale, dead face filled every corner of my mind.

  “Keep talking,” I whispered.

  His mouth opened and then snapped shut, and then opened again. “I’m not sure what the right thing to say is.”

  “Anything.” I let my head drop back against the seat and examined the clear glass of the car’s ceiling. Above us, the sky expanded gray in all directions, lit up by the streetlights around us. “Just make noise.”

  Jackson inhaled a long breath. “Things are a mess right now. I know.” He motioned toward my robotic arm. “Our lives have changed. And thanks to CyberCorp, we’ll get through this after things settle down.”

  “Thanks to CyberCorp?” My voice burned with acid. I was wrong. Talking was not better than silence. “Thanks to CyberCorp for controlling my life since the day I was born? For ripping my arm off and making me a murderer?” By the time I finished, I was shouting. The words shredded my throat, still raw from crying.

  “Calm down.” His voice had that annoying soothing quality my mother had mastered.

  “I don’t want to be my mother,” I hissed, more quietly. “That’s not going to change when things settle down.” I pushed all the derision I could muster into those last few words, before opening the car door and scrambling out. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but I get to make that decision. Not you and definitely not CyberCorp.”

  I slammed the car door and stomped around the side of my house to my bedroom window.

  Jackson’s footsteps followed behind me, but I didn’t turn around.

  28

  By morning, I had to accept I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. It was a nightmare—but real.

  And I couldn’t escape it. With every blink of my eyelids, there lay Debbie in the dark of my mind. Pale skin, eyes wide, mouth open. Her glaring eyes demanded justice, and I would give it to her—even if it meant a lifetime in jail or a needle in my arm.

  My hands had strangled Debbie—and Harmony and Kevin—but maybe that wasn’t entirely my fault. If my subconscious was affected by the AI in my chip and arm, I needed to get that fixed now, as in right now.

  If there was a reason for this, I needed to know it. Debbie deserved that too. Right?

  I called Ron.

  “Hey, Lena.”

  “Did you figure out where that data in my head came from?”

  “Sorry. Haven’t had a chance yet.”

  He hadn’t had a chance yet? Debbie was dead. I had strangled her. And Ron hadn’t had a chance to do this one little thing.

  I resisted the urge to throw my hand-screen against the wall. “It’s really important, Ron. I’m in serious trouble, and I think it has to do with that data.”

  “The rollout is only—”

  “I’m so fucking tired of hearing about the rollout,” I snapped. “This is my life. And other people’s lives.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Although I wanted to tell Ron the whole truth, I didn’t trust him with this. We got along great, but we’d known each other for all of three weeks. I paused to get my tone back under control. “Please, Ron. It’s urgent.”

  “You know I love working on your arm, but it’s not up to me. Fisher isn’t going to let me take any more time with you without a damn good reason.”

  “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said my life is at stake. Please. Do this for me.”

  Seconds of silence passed before he spoke again. “Okay. I’ll look at it today.”

  “Thank you. I’ll call you later.”

  I couldn’t go to school today. Everyone would know about Debbie’s death, and the suspicious stares I’d gotten after Harmony’s and Kevin’s deaths would start anew. Only this time, I would know I deserved them.

  Those whispers and glares wouldn’t roll off my back. I couldn’t ignore them, not when I had Debbie’s blood on my hands.

  Even though she hadn’t bled when I strangled her, I imagined the red stain on my palms every time I looked at them. For the hundredth time, I rubbed them with soap and water until my right hand—the one that was still flesh—turned red and raw. My eyes stung with tears I couldn’t fight. They rolled down my cheeks and clouded my vision.

  I left the faucet running and dropped down on the closed toilet seat. Maybe I could stay here forever, with my head in my hands. Maybe I could undo all of it if I just sat here and never moved again.

  My hand-screen vibrated on my bed. With a groan, I pushed myself to my feet, shut off the sink, and trudged out to grab it.

  It displayed a message from my mother, who wanted me to come downstairs. I wiped the stray tears from my face and dragged myself down the steps. My body felt unreal, distant, like a car on auto-drive.

  “In the kitchen, Lena,” she called.

  When I stepped into the room, I found my mother sitting with Detectives Garrett and Johnson. A teacup rested on the table in front of each of them.

  I considered prostrating myself before all of them. I could confess what I’d done and beg them to help me figure out why I’d done it. But I restrained myself.

  I doubted these police would believe my arm made me do it. I wasn’t even sure I believed it.

  Up until now, the arm had done only things I’d wanted to do. It reacted to my thoughts, my desires. I’d wanted to hurt Harmony that day in the lunchroom. As much as I tried to blame that on CyberCorp’s artificial intelligence, I couldn’t.

  Now that I knew I’d killed three people, I kept telling myself the arm was a separate entity from me, but history proved otherwise. It did what I wanted it to do. And apparently, I wanted to stop the Model One rollout enough to kill three people.

  “What’s this?” I asked, instead of the confession I still itched to make. Not that it mattered. It had to be all over my face—written there in bold, block lettering: I’d killed Debbie Carlyle. That was how it went for murderers, right? It got stamped on their souls for everyone to see.

  “The police have more questions for you.” My mother said this with the same even tone she used when asking Marcy to cook steak for dinner.

  An empty chair stood between the two detectives, but I opted to stand. I didn’t want to get too relaxed, or I might end up blurting out something without thinking it through. “What questions?”

  Detective Garrett glanced down at the empty chair and then back up at me. When I didn’t sit, she said, “Your classmate Deborah Carlyle was murdered last night.”

  I froze and reminded myself to breathe. Breathing was normal; holding my breath was suspicious.

  “You sure you don’t want to sit? You don’t look well.”

  “No. I’m . . . I’ll be okay. Just tired.”

  The detectives exchanged a look I couldn’t read.

  “It’s come to our attention that you were at Miss Carlyle’s house last night,” Detective Garrett said.

  How did they know that? I started to deny it, but if the police thought I was at Debbie’s, they probably had evidence to back
that up. “Yes. Me and my boyf—ex-boyfriend—took a drive last night and ended up near her house. It’s right around the corner.”

  “We questioned Miss Carlyle’s neighbors. One of them took down the license plate number of Jackson Watts’s car. She said he and a young woman caused a commotion on the street, and she wanted the plate number just in case. I understand Mr. Watts is your boyfriend. Is that right?”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected.

  “What were you arguing about?”

  “You were at the Carlyles’?” My mother’s grip tightened around her mug.

  I waved her aside. Each question exacerbated the ever-present pain in my head, and I could deal with only one of them at a time. “He doesn’t accept that we’re broken up. He wants to get back together, and I want him to leave me alone.” I’d always heard that the best lies are based on truth.

  Detective Garrett continued without sparing a glance at my mother, who looked more agitated by the second. “The problem is, Miss Hayes, your mother was kind enough to give us access to your home’s security records, thinking it would remove you from our suspect list. The security records show that you were here all night.”

  Of course, they did. My ID chip was on my nightstand.

  “You understand how suspicious that looks, don’t you?”

  My mother stood and pushed her chair back from the table. “It’s time for the two of you to go. I assume you have no warrant for Lena’s arrest, or else you’d be executing it right now. So I want you out of my house.”

  “How is it,” Garrett continued, “that you were simultaneously at home and outside the Carlyles’ home?” She waited for an answer, but when no one gave it, she continued. “Someone manipulated your home’s security system to make it look like you were home, to give you an alibi. Why would you need an alibi unless you were guilty of something?”

  “I said leave.” My mother’s voice stayed even, still as the surface of a deep lake, with a world of monsters beneath it.

  The detectives shoved their chairs back and moved toward the doorway.

  To me, she added, “Don’t say another word until we call our lawyers.”

  “We’ll be back,” Johnson said, “with a warrant.”

  He and his partner stepped into the foyer and out of my view. A moment later, the front door opened and then closed behind them.

  “What were you doing at Debbie’s last night without your chip?” my mother asked as soon as the cops were safely out of the house. “Do you have any idea how suspicious this looks?”

  Not nearly as suspicious as it looked when I woke in Debbie’s room over her dead body. But still pretty bad, I imagined.

  I slumped into the nearest chair. My breathing—almost calm a moment ago—broke into short, deep pants. I’d managed to block Debbie’s face from my mind for only a few minutes, but now she returned with full force. Still staring. Still accusing.

  “I . . . I haven’t kept my chip on me since I came home from the hospital.” I pulled in a long breath. “It stays on my nightstand. No one can force me to carry it. It’s unconstitutional, and I choose not to . . . I choose not to . . .” I’d given this chips-are-evil speech before, but now I couldn’t recall how it went.

  “Yes, yes, I know.” My mother gave a half-shake of her head, but it suggested a full amount of annoyance. “But it’s not socially acceptable not to have one. Don’t you . . .” For the first time, she seemed to notice that I was on the verge of a panic attack. “Lena?”

  “It’s . . . invasion of my privacy . . . It’s . . . Nobody can make me—”

  “Lena, stop.” She placed a hand on my back and rubbed in a slow circle. “Breathe, honey. What’s going on?”

  “Debbie . . . Debbie . . .”

  Pale skin, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “Don’t say another word.” Her hand stilled on my back. “I’m calling our lawyers and our public-relations people. We’ll spend the day figuring this out. I’ll call your school to let them know you’re home sick, and your father to let him know we need him here today.”

  Before I could respond, she’d already touched her ear and opened her mouth to give instructions to her micro-comm. Her hand started rubbing my back again in long, slow circles.

  I gathered my breath and managed a shout. “Marissa!”

  She touched her ear again to put the device back on standby and stared at me, brows raised. “We don’t have time to waste here, Lena. Whatever’s on your mind should be said to the lawyers. Not to me. I can be subpoenaed.”

  “I need to tell you. I need to tell someone now.” I spit it all out. “I’ve been sleepwalking ever since I got the new arm. Last night, I woke up in Debbie’s bedroom.”

  “Okay.” She moved her hand from my back and dropped into the nearest kitchen chair. Her eyes closed for a few seconds and then reopened. “What are you saying?”

  She knew exactly what I was saying, but she wasn’t going to believe it unless I used the actual words. “I didn’t plan to, but I killed Harmony, Kevin, and Debbie. In my sleep.”

  She dropped her face into her hands. When she looked up again, her eyes looked tired, and her face lacked its usual poise. “I’m going to call your dad, and the lawyers, and the PR people. And we need to get you to CyberCorp to reprogram your AI chip.”

  “Shouldn’t we remove it altogether?”

  She shook her head. “Unfortunately, that’s not an option. We can’t remove the chip now that it’s embedded in your brain—at least, not without risking your life, and definitely not before you’ve healed properly from your other surgeries.” She pressed her lips together. “Can I ask you some questions? Since I know the truth, it can’t hurt for me to get a few more details.”

  I nodded.

  “Did you touch anything while you were at the Carlyles?”

  “No, not with my right hand anyway, and I don’t think the left would leave any evidence behind. No DNA, no fingerprints.”

  She nodded. “Why was Jackson there? He wasn’t . . . helping you, was he?”

  “God, no. He followed me.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “Everything. I was a mess when he found me. I told him everything.”

  “How much do you trust him?”

  If she had asked me that two months ago, I’d have told her I trusted him with my life. But things had changed since then. “I don’t know. We broke up.”

  “Last night?”

  “No, the night of the accident. He was there last night because I wasn’t taking his calls.”

  “Is he upset enough to tell the police what he knows?”

  I shrugged.

  She chewed on her lower lip. “It’s your word against his. Things will go easier if you take him back.”

  “I don’t want to be with him anymore.”

  “You don’t love him?”

  “I don’t want to be with him anymore.” This time, I pushed more emphasis into each word.

  “I see. You’d rather be in jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes!” I jumped up from my chair. “I’d rather be in jail. You didn’t see her, staring at me with those eyes. She saw me. Before she died, she watched me strangle her. And now she’s gone and . . . and we’re not just going to cover this up.”

  She raised both her hands and gestured for me to sit back down. “Breathe, Lena. Try to stay calm.”

  I did as she asked and sat back down—not at all calm, but making a decent show of it.

  “Cover it up?” my mother asked. “It sounds so distasteful when you say it like that.”

  “Is that your plan though? Because I don’t want that. Debbie deserves better.”

  “I haven’t decided. Right now, I want to give our lawyers as much information as possible, so they’re armed to handle the situation. We’ll decide as a family what our next step is.”

  “The lawyers aren’t part of our family.”

  She glared at me. “Now is not the tim
e, Lena.”

  “Fine,” I muttered. “You haven’t asked me yet if I wanted to kill Debbie. Aren’t you curious about whether I’m a premeditated killer? Do you even care, or is it more important that I don’t tarnish your good name?”

  “Do you think so little of me?” She brushed her fingers against my face. “I know who you are. You’re a lot of things, but killer is not one of them.”

  Tears threatened to break the dam of my eyelids—desperate tears. Because I wished I had as much faith in myself as my mom did. Until last night, I would have agreed with her.

  But waking over a dead body had changed everything.

  29

  By afternoon, my mother had doped me up on a sedative.

  I still saw Debbie every time I closed my eyes. But it left only a dull ache in my stomach now—rather than a burning need to claw my belly open and spill my guts onto the floor just to have something else to think about.

  Six lawyers filled the living room. They took up the couch, a few armchairs, and a couple spots on the floor. The stress of their questions wreaked havoc on my head, and no amount of pain medication and sedatives made the lawyers disappear.

  I’d managed to find a spot on the last available armchair, where my mother had insisted I sit in case they had questions for me—and they had a lot of them.

  I had never felt my blood pressure rising before, but I could feel it now. Tension increasing second by second, shoulders stiffening. Inside, a small voice grew louder and louder, urging me to escape this room, this house, this arm.

  But I couldn’t outrun what I’d done last night. Everywhere I looked, the image of Debbie’s body ghosted over everything else. Inescapable.

  And I didn’t deserve to escape it. If she haunted me, it was no more than I deserved.

  When I couldn’t stand it a minute longer, I pushed to my feet and smoothed my clothing. Paper stopped rustling, phone calls paused, and every eye turned to me.

  My mother was the one to speak. “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t have the heart to come back with a snappy remark—something about how I didn’t need a horde of people watching over me. Unfortunately, last night had proved otherwise. I needed all the watchers I could get. But right now, I wanted my little sister. “Bathroom.”