Shattered (33 page)

“If it doesn't, we're mechs, right?” Sloane asked, sounding like she was expending a considerable effort to seem carefree about the whole thing. “Electrocution could be exciting. Aren't you curious?”

“Not particularly,” Ani said. “So let's get this right. Ready?”

“Ready,” I agreed. The word rippled down the line and, as one, we took a step forward.

Nothing can happen to me,
I thought, waiting for 50,000 volts to sizzle through me as I crossed the field. It wouldn't be enough to kill an org, but who knew what a shock like that would do to a mech body, a mech brain. We were nothing but electricity,
elaborately wired computers, and surely it would take less than 50,000 volts to fry the circuitry—maybe enough to send us careening into a brand-new body, but maybe just enough to warp our brains. When the wiring inside your head fused into a tangled knot, would you notice, or just think it was the outside world that had gone askew?

And then I took another step, and I was across.

Nothing happened.

“That's it,” Ani said, dropping my hand. “We're safe.”

“You sure?” I asked. She pointed to the faded etchings on the pavement, marking off the electrified area.

“Anticlimactic, right?” Sloane said. “Tell me a little piece of you wasn't hoping—”

“No piece,” I cut her off. “Not even a little one. I'll be happy for the whole night to be anticlimactic.”

The Temple loomed over us, white stone black in the night.

“It's
huge
,” Brahm said, staring up at its imposing face. In the dark, he didn't squint, nor did he move like the rest of us, careful and timid, afraid with each step. He moved like he could see.

“I heard them talking about expanding,” Ani said. “There's not enough room for everyone who wants to come.”

Sloane rolled her extinguished flashlight between her palms, keeping her head averted from the Temple. “How can there be that many morons in the world?”

“You know, Savona and Jude aren't so different,” Ani said.

“How can you
say
that?” Brahm asked.

I knew how she could say it.

“Jude's always telling us that we're not human and we should just accept it, right?” Ani said. “They're orgs, we're
machines
. How's that any different from what Savona's trying to say?”

I'd asked myself the same question.

“It just
is
,” Brahm said.

It was a pathetic answer. But none of us had anything better.

The Temple defenses were even more meager than Ani let on. Aside from the electrified perimeter, they were nearly nonexistent—no patrols, no guard posts or ID checks. And at the main Temple, nothing but a few easily tricked locks, nothing more than you'd find at the entrance of any organization matching the Brotherhood's self-description—open, accessible,
innocent.
Silent and single file, we followed Ani into the building. Instead of taking the moving sidewalk through the silver tunnel to Savona's staging area, we went the opposite way, slipping through an unmarked door into a labyrinthine zone of beige corridors. I recognized it from my last trip to the Temple—Auden's office lay along one of these hallways. Maybe he was in there, hunched over a desk, plotting his next strike on the skinners … or maybe staring out the window, watching the night, wondering how he'd ended up here. Because that's what I was wondering, sneaking like a thief, draped in black and raiding a nest of God-fearing vipers who'd prefer me erased, in body and mind. The night had a dreamlike quality, and I half expected to wake up to find that Auden and I had rendezvoused
at our favorite grassy hiding spot behind the high school and fallen asleep, dreaming up a new and horrible life.

But machines don't dream. Not that kind of dream, at least, the kind that ends in a gasping, blissful, sweat-stained
and then I woke up
.

Motion-sensitive lights in the floor cast the hallways in a dim glow as we passed, but apparently, foolishly, weren't tied into any kind of central security processor. Because the hallways stayed empty, our path to Savona's office was free and clear. Ani stopped in front of a door that looked no different from any of the others.
“This is it,”
she VM'd. There was a slim key panel along the frame. She keyed in a code.

I was wrong,
I thought as the door swung open.
This is actually going to work.

An alarm screamed.

The hallway flashed blue.

Blue, not red like the corp-town, but for a moment, in the keening wail of the alarm and the faces lighting up in the dark, I was back there again, hearing their screams, though there had never been any screams.

The Brothers approached from both ends of the hallway and streamed through the open office door. We were surrounded.

Five of us, ten of them, all in Brotherhood robes. All with guns raised, glinting in the flashing blue light.

“Don't you pay attention in
church
?” Sloane snarled at the one closest to her. “We're machines. You can't hurt us.”

“Don't test us,” he said.

“Whatever.” Sloane muscled past the guy and took off running down the hall.

The gun didn't make a sound. And neither did Sloane.

It happened nearly in silence: The guard took aim, depressed the trigger. And Sloane went rigid. Her body convulsed, then thumped to the floor. It convulsed once more, her head slapping against the tile, then lay still.

“Sloane!” Ty screamed. But she didn't move to help her. None of us did.

“She'll be fine,” the guard said. I had more time to examine his weapon now, and I realized what I'd first taken for an ordinary gun was more like a modified stunshot, like the kind the secops carried. The abbreviated barrel ended in a flat black plate with a narrow blue spark dancing between two metal prongs. “Turns out one little electric pulse is all it takes to temporarily disable your neural systems. I hear it hurts like hell. But you freaks are into that, right?” He scooped Sloane off the floor and tossed her limp body over his shoulder like it was nothing. Then, with a jaunty wave, he carried her down the hall, around the corner, and out of sight. Nine of them left; four of us.

“So who's next?” the largest of the men barked.

Next was Brahm, without warning. A different guard, barely pausing to aim, flicking his gun at Brahm like he was making a conversational point. Brahm collapsed, his body shuddering and shaking for several moments before going still. His eyes were open. I knelt, wanting to … I didn't even know. Cradle his head, maybe. Just touch him. Make sure he was still alive.

Not that there would have been any way to prove it. No pulse. No breath. Just a body with a deactivated brain.

“I wouldn't,” the guard closest to me said. “Charge might still be live. And it's not your turn yet.”

At his words, Ty lunged at her guard, fist making contact with the guy's bulbous nose. She made it about ten steps before the shock took her down.

Unlike the other two, she screamed.

“I'm not going to run,” I said with a confidence I didn't feel.

“Not her,” Ani said. “That was part of the deal.”

She wasn't talking to me.

“What deal?” But as I looked back and forth between them, as I took in the expression on Ani's face—nervous but not scared and not surprised—the way the guards parted to make way for her, the way they lowered their weapons, all except the one who kept pointing his gun at me, I got my answer.
Guess you'll finally have to admit you were wrong,
I said silently to Jude. Too bad I wouldn't be around to hear it. “Stupid question, I guess.”

“I'm sorry,” Ani said, not particularly sounding it. “I didn't think you'd volunteer to come. You didn't even think this was a good idea.”

“Imagine that.” I wanted to shake her. I thought I'd been suspicious, but now I knew I hadn't doubted her, not really. I'd thought the Brotherhood was setting her up. The thought of her working
with
them disgusted me. It was inconceivable that she'd changed this much, equally unlikely that this had been the real her all along. There was no reality palatable enough to accept.

I was no better than Jude, I thought. Blind.

“Is this really worth it? You hate Jude this much?”

“This isn't about him,” she snapped.

“Right.”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Then make me.” I glared over her at the guard holding the gun. It was strange, how many of these I'd faced since becoming a mech. Before the download, guns were just something slummers played with in cities and whatever random countries were still playing their ridiculous war games. Now I could stare at one and pretend not to care.

“What we're doing is wrong,” Ani said. “What we
are
is wrong. It's not our fault—we didn't
ask
to be this way. But we have to accept the truth. We don't belong here. We're
wrong
.”

“Don't tell me you actually
buy
that bullshit.”

I shouldn't have let her come back here
, I thought.
Not by herself.

Quinn and Jude left her broken—and I left her alone. Too busy with Riley to see that she was getting sucked in. Too busy, too obliviously happy to notice that she was drifting away.

“I told you before,” she said. “Brother Savona, Auden, Jude, they're all saying the same thing. We're machines. But that's what Jude doesn't get—what none of you get.
Machines
are supposed to be
things
. Not people. We don't belong.”

And there it was, the answer to the question she'd fired at us before, the difference between Jude and Savona. Both of them believed we were machines. Both of them believed we shouldn't
pretend to be human. But Jude believed we were something new, something of value, something
alive.
Savona didn't.

“You can't actually believe that about yourself,” I argued. “These people think you don't really think for yourself, or
feel
. You know that's wrong.”

Ani smiled sadly. “They programmed us well,” she said. “They fooled us into believing we were real. But we're not. We're computers. Copies of dead people. Everything about us is a lie.”

“It's not too late,”
I said, VM. Knowing it was.
“We can still get out of here.”
Knowing we couldn't.

“Enough,” she said, nodding at the guard aiming at me. I braced for the shock.
Nothing to fear
. Just a little pain, and not very far to fall.

I'm not afraid of the dark.

But he didn't fire. Instead he grabbed my shoulder.

“He'll take you outside,” Ani said. “Go back to Jude, tell him that if he cares about the others, he'll stay away from us. Tell him that even if he doesn't care, he'd better stay away. This is just a taste. He can't beat us.”

“Us?”
I asked incredulously. “You think you're one of them? These orgs are just using you!”

“I'm a machine,” Ani said flatly. “That's what I'm built for. And besides, I'm used to it.”

“Come on, skinner,” the guard grunted. As he yanked my arm, the hood slipped from his head. And I saw his face for the first time.

I knew that face.

At the Brotherhood rally, I had seen them in the crowd, faces of the corp-town dead, the old woman, the mother. The child. And I had assumed I was imagining it. Like I'd imagined Zo—except Zo's face had turned out to be real.

But here was the guard, with the same shaggy eyebrows, bulbous nose, scruffy chin, a face I'd seen only for a second in real life—but I'd watched those vids over and over again. I'd memorized the faces of the victims.

I knew that face.

“I know you.”

He turned his face away and let go, jerking his head. Two of the other guards flanked me and seized my arms, holding me in place. I kicked at them, no longer caring about their guns or the electric charge that could leave me twitching on the ground with my friends. I drove my foot into a shin, slammed my knee into a groin, and the grip on my left arm loosened. I yanked my arm free, whacking the guy in the face. Something hard and sharp cracked across my shoulder blades, and as I lurched forward, a fist caught me across the chin. I went flying backward, my head slamming back against the wall. “Stay down!” the guard shouted as I slumped to the floor. “Last chance. Then we shock you and dump you on the highway.”

The man, the one who was supposed to be dead, stood frozen a few feet away, watching.

There was pain—in my head, in my back, on my face—artificial nerves alerting me to damage, neural impulses flashing a message that radiated across my body:
Broken
.

But it was the kind of damage that would heal, and it wasn't the kind of pain that made anything clearer. Instead, the opposite: Everything faded away, blotted out, everything but the face of the dead man. “You were there,” I said quietly. Then again, shouting. “At the corp-town. You're supposed to be dead.” But he was finally backing away from me, into the darkness.

I didn't follow. Because I was on the ground. Because even if the pain was all fake, as fake as everything else, it hurt. Because of the guns.

The gun that slashed through the air, so fast I hadn't seen the guard raise his arm, only saw it coming at me, then felt it smash my face, smash my head back into the wall with another resounding crack. I raised my hands over my head, squeezed my eyes shut. Couldn't stop the next blow, striking the side of my head, knocking me flat. I curled tight in a ball, knees drawn in, head hunched against my chest, fetal and helpless against the kicks and blows. A boot driven into my stomach, my skull, the soft exposed flesh at the nape of my neck, crunching against my spine.