Shattered (26 page)

There was a bit of uncomfortable mumbling in the crowd, as if they weren't sure whether they were supposed to cheer or boo.

“But I was the one trapped in the fairy tale,” Auden continued. “I was under a spell. And just like in a fairy tale, it took a kiss from a princess to wake me up.”

I couldn't shake the feeling that his eyes were resting on me.

“The skinner breathed its dead breath into my body. It gave me life, though it had none of its own to give. And despite everything else, I'm grateful to it for that.”

Now the crowd didn't hesitate. The booing and cursing drowned him out for several moments. But then Auden raised his hand, and they fell silent.

“I
am
grateful,” he said. “Because when I opened my eyes,
when I
felt
the pain of being trapped forever in this broken body, I knew the truth. That humanity doesn't live in the mind. That I am my mind
and
my body. And no matter what the skinner says, no matter how good a show it puts on, this is the one truth the skinner cannot hide. They can lie—their bodies can't.”

Savona joined Auden at center stage, basking in the applause. It was easier when he began to speak. I could ignore his words, the same old Faither bullshit about how only God could create life, about how skinners were abominations, how creating more of them would drive society to its knees, and on and on—it didn't penetrate. I'd heard it all before, empty logic resting on the existence of some ludicrous invisible eye in the sky. It was easier because it wasn't Auden.

At Savona's command the screens overhead began streaming images from the corp-town attack, but even that was easier than listening to Auden. Ani was rapt, but I just looked away. Into the crowd, careful not to meet anyone's eye but helpless not to search their faces, wondering what had drawn them here. What it was about their lives that hating me would remedy.

I didn't find answers. Instead I found too much to recognize, fuel for paranoid imagination. A dusty blond head peeking over the crowd became Zo; a squarish face covered in brown scruff glanced at me with eyes I could imagine bleeding on the floor of Synapsis Corp-Town; a dead girl with pink hair clutched her dead mother's hand. They couldn't be here; none of them could. I wouldn't give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some
disease—the aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guilt—I couldn't erase their impossible faces.

So I shut my lids and shut them out.

“We can't forget!” Savona was shouting. “We can't be lulled into a false sense of security by their assurances that this will never happen again. This
will
happen again! And again! And again! Unless we stop them. Unless we send the message, loud and clear, to each and every skinner. That
you are not one of us
!”

Ani nudged me, and I opened my eyes again, fixing on Savona, ignoring the crowd.

“Today, together, we forge a new beginning!” he ranted. “Your presence here is a promise. Standing here today we enter into a bond with our neighbors, with our Brothers. We cele-brate our humanity!”

Auden leaned forward to whisper something in Savona's ear. He nodded. “This is no metaphor, friends. No empty words. We are more than words, remember. More than mind. We are
alive
, mind and body, and we embrace that fact, as we embrace one another. So go ahead!” he shouted. “Embrace your Brother, embrace your Sister, celebrate the bond we forge together!”

The people around us shifted uncomfortably.

“What's he talking about?” I murmured to Ani.

She shook her head. “Don't know. He's never done this before.”

“I mean it!” Savona cried. “The network has torn us so far from one another, turning us into a sterile community of words and thoughts. Fight back. Here, now, fight back. Affirm your
existence, the fact that you are here, not just in spirit, not just in mind, but in body. You are alive, you are human, as are we all. Embrace it!”

Tentatively at first, then enthusiastically, the audience turned in on itself, stranger greeting stranger, shaking hands, hugging, as Ani and I shrank toward each other, searching for an escape before someone could touch us. But there was no safe path through the crowd. The orgs closed in.

“Don't be shy, honey.” A woman with a round, pockmarked face opened her bulging arms and swept me into them.

I felt her muscles stiffen.

Her body pull away.

Saw her eyes sweep me up and down.

Heard her scream.

“Skinner!”

And then it was chaos. A hand yanked the hood off my face. More hands tore at my shirt, pulled me away from Ani, into a teeming mass of writhing limbs, twisted faces. And the chant,
Skinner! Skinner! Skinner!
shaking the room. Gobs of spit splattered against my face.

“You're lucky you're a girl,” a man snarled, his fingers clamped down on the back of my neck, his thick, calloused lips peeled back from rotting teeth.

“It's not a girl,” the woman beside him snapped. And to prove the point, she drove her fist into my stomach. It didn't hurt, but I doubled over with the impact. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me down to my knees. Behind me,
someone grabbed my shoulders, held me down. I could fight back against one, against three, but not against hundreds, and I imagined myself on the ground, trampled by the herd, feet grinding my body into the floor, like my feet had stomped the corp-town bodies, and wondered if it was what I deserved.

“Stop.” Auden's voice, amplified and quiet at the same time, somehow cutting through the storm.

At his command, the grip on my shoulders relaxed. I shrugged it off and stumbled to my feet as the crowd dropped back a few steps. A circle of empty space formed around us. Ani sat on the ground, looking dazed, her hoodie torn. Someone had ripped a small patch of blue hair out of her head. Up onstage, Auden nodded with approval. I wondered what would have happened if he'd been closer. If he'd known it was me down here, probably he'd have been happy enough to watch the crowd tear me apart.

“Let them through,” Auden commanded, and his followers fell back, opening a pathway between us and the door. Several of them spit as we passed.

Just outside the auditorium, a man greeted us, draped in an iridescent robe that shimmered like Auden's suit. He took my arm, like a gentleman, only his grip was steel. His other hand clamped down on Ani's bicep. “I think it's best that you come with me,” he said.

I wrenched my arm away. “Best for who?”

“Maybe we should just go with him,” Ani said, shooting a nervous glance at the door separating us from the angry crowd.

“What do you want?” I asked the man. “We weren't doing anything wrong. It's a public event, right?”

“I want nothing,” he said with a weirdly serene smile. “I'm just a messenger.”

“Oh yeah? For who?”

But even as I was asking, I knew. Who else?

“For Brother Auden and Brother Savona,” he said, face lighting up at their names. “They would like to speak with you.”

“Then they can come to us,” I said, though of course they couldn't, because that's not how this kind of game was played.

“Brother Auden has a message for you,” the man said. His hair was blonder than mine, almost white against his ruddy face. It fell in long, wispy strands across his eyes, which had a strange, faraway look, like he was peering through me into the distance at his divine reward. “He says, ‘It's time we talk. Unless you want to run away again, Lia.'”

“He said that?” I asked. Stalling.
“Lia?”
So he knew it was me. Not just some anonymous skinner.

Lia Kahn. The one responsible.

The man nodded. “Ready?”

No.

The office was sparse, with little more than a desk and an oversize ViM screen plastered on one wall. The opposite wall was a touch screen, scattered with notes and scrawlings—but it went blank a moment after we stepped into the room. The desk looked almost antique, left over from the days when they
installed screens and network links into the surface of dead wood rather than just building the whole desk as an integrated ViM that knew what you wanted nearly before you'd figured it out yourself. My father had one just like it—he claimed the solidity appealed to him, the permanence, but I think it was just that he didn't like his desk talking back to him. I shouldn't have been surprised that Rai Savona felt the same way.

He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.

Savona cleared his throat. “Since you've intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for.”

“Funny how you call me Lia when you've made it pretty clear you don't think that's who I am,” I said, grateful for a voice that didn't shake. “Or do you call your toaster by name too?”

“Consider it a courtesy,” Savona said. “An undeserved one.”

“You look better than you look on the vids,” I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I'd said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.

“Some things are necessary,” he said.

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. “You make yourself look
weaker
?” I asked incredulously. “For effect?”

Auden pulled himself up straighter, his expression grimly proud. “I'll do whatever it takes.”

Savona bared his teeth in a mirthless smile.
“He's not as weak as he was the day you abandoned him,” he said, placing a supportive hand on Auden's shoulder. Auden shrugged him off. “But the damage you caused is permanent. Damage to his spine, his organs, his life expectancy—”

“It was an accident,” Ani said.

I said nothing.

“But you made him stronger too,” Savona said. “You showed him the way.”

“Then why can't he speak for himself?” I snapped. “Or is he too drugged up and brainwashed to even know I'm here?”

Auden raised his head. His eyes were paler in person, his pupils still too large. “The only drugs I'm on are for the pain.”

He raised a hand to his face, then abruptly dropped it, as if trying to adjust glasses that he'd just remembered were no longer there. Suddenly the last six months dropped away and I was back in his hospital room, standing by his bed, begging him to forgive me, because if he did—if he had—none of it would have happened, I would be home and we would be together, whole and healed, and everything else would be background noise. Something to watch on the vids, and then shut off when it got old.

“What do you want?” he asked flatly.

“Just to talk. You and me. Can't we just go somewhere? Away from . . .” I glanced at Savona.

Auden shook his head.

“Maybe it's not a bad idea,” Savona murmured in honeyed tones.

“No,” Auden said sharply. “Not going to happen.” Savona nodded. I recognized that nod. It was the same one that Jude got from his mechs when he issued one of his edicts. It was a pledge of obedience. Savona was letting Auden believe he was in charge.

Or Auden really was.

As Auden took a few steps, it became clear that the weakened martyr onstage was less of an illusion than he would have liked to think. Slowly, with one foot dragging slightly behind the other, he lurched around the side of the desk. His gait was awkward and spasmodic, almost like mine when I'd first learned to walk in the new body. I tried not to imagine the electrical impulses shooting through his spinal cord, stimulating dead nerves to life, one painful step at a time. He sank into the desk chair with a soft sigh of relief and rested his arms on a stack of papers. It took me until that moment to realize this was
his
office not Savona's. Whatever Auden was, he wasn't zoned and he wasn't a puppet.

“I don't know your name,” he said, looking at Ani for the first time.

She looked at me, like I was supposed to give her the answer. Or maybe just permission. “Ani,” she finally said.

He nodded. “Ani. You've been visiting us for the last few weeks.”

“I didn't mean to—”

Auden held up a hand to stop her. “It's fine. But there's no need for all this sneaking around. The Temple of Man is a public space. We're here to help anyone who needs us.”

“Really?” I snarled. “Even us world-destroying soulless monsters? Tell me something—if your God's so impressive and all-powerful, how come he can't give a soul to a machine? He can do anything, just not that?”

“He's not my God,” Auden said, and I felt at least a shadow of relief that however far gone he was, he hadn't plunged all the way off the cliff. But then he kept going. “He's just God.” He shot a quick glance at Savona, who nodded in approval.

“He can do anything He so chooses, as you astutely point out,” Savona put in. “He
could
have created a universe where gravity is repulsive or men walk on their hands or giant lizards rule the Earth. But he didn't. He created
this
universe and does honor to us by His choice. He
chose
to endow humans—only humans—with a soul, to make us rulers in His earthly kingdom. And much as you might enjoy indulging your what-ifs and could-have-beens, this is our reality, yours as much as mine. The sooner you face that, the easier it will be for you.”

Shades of Jude, I thought. Funny how eager some people were to accuse you of denying the truth—especially when “the truth” was one they'd invented.

“You really believe this crap?” I asked Auden. “What happened to science? Logic? The power of empiricism, all that?”

“Logic and empiricism dictate that the ability to
mimic
self-awareness doesn't establish the existence of an inner life. Human consciousness transcends computation.” He didn't even look at me. “You're not to blame for what you are,” he told Ani. “You don't understand, which must be difficult.
And when you're ready, we're here to help. Bring your friends, if you'd like. We have nothing to hide.”