Shattered (39 page)

But I couldn't turn myself into a murderer.

Jude took the plane back to the estate, agreeing to send it back for us later, so that we could have time alone in the snow to think. Time alone for me to pretend I didn't care who Riley used to be or whatever lurked in the silence between him and his best friend.

“He wants us to agree he's right,” Riley said. “But he really will do it himself if he has to.”

We couldn't talk him out of it. And we couldn't warn the Brotherhood ahead of time. Or the secops.

“
I
can't,” Riley said. “I can't do that to him. And there's always a chance …”

A chance he might change his mind. Innocent until proven guilty, until his finger slipped onto a detonator, until someone died. So we would go along with him—until we couldn't go along with him anymore. We would find a way to get the hostages out, blow up the lab, save the day, without more bloodshed. And if that didn't work, we would call in reinforcements.

Would there be time, between thought and action, time to stop him—to talk him out of it, or to do whatever else, anything else it took?

We decided to bet there would.

But we weren't betting with our own lives.

“I've never gone against him,” Riley said. He hugged me from behind, his chin resting on my shoulder. “Never thought I would.”

“Are you sure—?”

“I can't let him do this. I owe him too much.”

I twisted to face him, without breaking free of his embrace. Our faces were almost touching. “What is it?” I asked. “What do you owe him?”

He let go. Looked away. Sank back into the snow. “It scared you. What he said.”

I shook my head. No.

All I did anymore was lie.

“It should have,” he said. “It would, if you knew.”

I didn't want to know.

“Then you tell me,” I said. “Go ahead. Scare me.”

He didn't speak, just stared down at the snow. Sleet spattered down on us, streaking our faces like the tears we couldn't cry. I reached out, touched his cheek. He grabbed my wrist. “Just tell me,” I said. “Why do you owe him? What did you do?”

“I told you what happened to Jude, how he got hurt,” Riley began. He wouldn't look at me. I put my hands over his.
Cold,
I thought, registering the thin layer of ice crystals coating our skin, without caring.

I nodded. “Some kids beat him up.”

“Because of something I did,” Riley said, so quietly I almost didn't hear him. “I stole this kid's chillers. That was back when there were still some b-mods floating around. But it was tough to get your hands on them. I didn't even like that crap. I was going to sell them. But …”

“They caught you.”

“They caught Jude. There were five of them. Older than us, and bigger. They came looking for me, and Jude told them he was the one who stole the chillers. They believed him. And they—” He choked down the words.

I squeezed his hand. “You didn't make them do anything.”

“I didn't stop them either. I was there. Hiding.”

“You were smaller. You were outnumbered.”

“So was Jude,” he said, his face twisting in self-disgust. “But he didn't tell them where I was hiding. Or that I was the one. He just let it happen. Like I let it happen. I … I just watched.”

“You were a kid!”

He ripped his hands away. “Why are you making excuses?”

“Because … I …” But if he didn't already know, I couldn't say it out loud. “So now you owe him. That's why you took care of him all those years.”

He scowled, angry that I didn't understand. “I told you, we looked out for
each other
. And when he wasn't there—when they took him away for all those tests or whatever—”

“BioMax?” I said.

He nodded. “I told you, he's smart.”

“You're smart.”

“Not like Jude. He knew how to get stuff, how to get out of stuff. And when he wasn't around …” Riley finally met my eyes. “You really want to hear it? All of it?”

No. “Yes.”

He recited it in a calm, flat voice, like a kid giving a history report, a kid describing a scene long past, holding no interest for him, bearing no relevance. “That guy Wynn you met in the city, the one that took you. He's one of the ones that did it to Jude. When we were kids,” he said. “And after Jude disappeared, I got mad. Guess I freaked out. And I decided to get him some payback.”

“But you changed your mind,” I said hopefully. I'd seen Wynn alive. Healthy. At least before the secops showed up.

“Didn't change my mind,” Riley said mechanically. “Missed. Hit someone else instead. Wynn's brother. Little kid, eight or nine.”

I stood up. I didn't even know I was doing it. I was barely aware of my legs in motion, rising, pushing me away from the ground, away from him. I just needed to be upright, feet planted on something stable. “What happened? To the kid?”

“What do you think happened?” Riley said harshly. “Blood loss. Infection. Took a couple days, I think. But then he died. That's what I hear.”

“You weren't around anymore.”

He shook his head.

“Because you got shot.”

He nodded.

“For revenge.”

He nodded again, still on the ground. I felt like I was looking down at him from very far away. “It's why Wynn was so angry. He thinks I won. That Jude and I get to live forever, and his kid brother's dead.”

“He thinks that because it's true,” I said flatly.

“Yeah. So that's why he took you,” Riley said. “That's my fault too. It all is.”

I shouldn't judge him,
I thought, staring down at this boy I'd thought I knew.
I wasn't there, I didn't live like that. I don't know what it took to survive
.

But maybe it didn't matter. Maybe death was death.

“I didn't want you to know,” Riley said. “I wanted to start clean.”

Because we were different now.

People change,
I thought. Auden had changed, more than I wanted to admit. Zo had changed, and changed again.

But then, they were people; we were mechs. Our brains were frozen, sliced, scanned, downloaded.

Maybe everything was frozen.

Stand up,
I begged him silently.
Convince me. Make me understand.

But he didn't move. He was looking past me, maybe thinking about the kid. I wondered what he had looked like. What his name was. Whether he'd seen it coming.

How much it had hurt.

“It's why I can't let Jude do this,” he said.

I'd almost forgotten why we were here, why we'd started talking about this. The present had receded into the background, pale and colorless. While the past was bleeding red over the snow.

“I promised,” he said. “Never again.”

“Promised who?”

“Myself.” He whispered. “The kid.”

This is still Riley,
I thought.

Jude was wrong: The past wasn't irrelevant.

But it was past.

I let myself drop into the snow beside him.

“I told you I deserved it,” he said, rubbing his fingers against his arm, against the artificial skin. “And it's still not enough.”

I couldn't picture him holding a gun, lining up a target. Pulling a trigger. Any more than I could picture him watching his best friend get kicked and pummeled, Jude's body broken, flopping helplessly on the ground, while Riley hid, safe and scared. I couldn't picture him scared or vengeful or anything but what he'd been to me—solid, bold, kind. Riley.

You believe what you want to believe
. Jude's voice. Always Jude's voice in my head.
Too scared to face the truth.

So I faced this. I faced him, Riley, all of him. What he'd done, what he was, who he wanted to be.

I put my cold hands on his cold face, and I drew him toward me.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. He wasn't saying it to me.

“I forgive you,” I whispered back, even though I wasn't the one with something to forgive, even though my forgiveness wasn't what he needed.

We stopped talking.

Later.

His fingers, like ice, trickling down my spine. Snow against our skin, snow filling the spaces between us, melting in the crush of flesh on flesh. His eyes drinking in my skin, the body that would never be my body.

“Don't,” he whispered, feeling me tense, pull away.

“Close your eyes.” My lips brushed his lids, shutting him away. I closed my own, hiding in the dark. Pretending we could be something else.

His hands, cold, his skin, soft. His voice, softer, in my ear. “Open them.
Look.
”

Backs against the ground, eyes to the sky, he linked our fingers, raised our joined hands toward the gray clouds. Traced his fingers down my wrist, down my arm, down my skin.

It felt like nothing.

His skin, pale against the snow, white on white.

“It's all wrong,” I said. Imagined a face with hooded brown eyes, a body with narrower shoulders, longer legs, skin the color of weathered oak, a boy I'd never known, a boy who gathered me in, rolled me over in the snow, sugaring our bodies in white.

Remembered a body that shivered in the wind, fingertips brushing lightly against skin, touches painful with promise.
Another body, another life. “You shouldn't look like this. I shouldn't look like this.”

“But this is us. This is it.”

I didn't want to look. I didn't want him to see.

“This isn't my skin.” Riley let the words drift into the wind. “This isn't how it should be. He said it doesn't matter anymore.”

Jude said.

Jude said nothing mattered, we were what we were. Bodies and minds.

“He's wrong,” Riley said. “It matters. Every day, every time I look—” He passed his hand in front of his eyes, pale fingers spread wide. “It matters. Except now. Here. It's just me. Us.”

Just us. Not machines built by human hands, not minds whirring with data. Not eyes that didn't blink or hearts that didn't beat. Not bodies that didn't move the way bodies were supposed to move, not skin that didn't feel the way skin was supposed to feel. Not something ugly, not something wrong.

Just him, his arms, strong. His skin, soft. His lips, cold. His eyes on my body, not turning away.

Just me, folded up in his arms. The sensation of his hands, the pressure, the temperature, the properties of closeness, the elements of touch, not like it used to be—not like it mattered.

Not pain, not passion, not abandon. Just a promise.

Just us.

“One way or another, we would always be fine.”

P
reparing seemed to take forever as Riley and Jude gathered equipment—that was their word for it, not weapons, not explosives, just
equipment
—from their contacts in the city, as we mapped out entry points and contingency plans, as we cold-shouldered Quinn, pretending that nothing was going on, as Riley and I huddled in dark corners of the orchard, rifling through our backup options and last-minute, last-ditch possibilities to stop the bloodshed. As I learned, just in case, to aim a gun, learned how it was heavier than it looked but not as heavy as it should have been, how my hand fit perfectly around its grip but its holster rested awkwardly at my waist. As three mechs hung on three posts, carried in every morning, carried out every evening, staring blindly over a roaring crowd, their
faces pale and twitchy in the vids, waiting for a rescue that was never going to come.

Riley and Jude prepared their way, and I prepared mine. Riley was convinced that he'd be able to talk Jude down before it was too late. I was in charge of the just in case.

It all seemed to take forever—but it took only three days.

Before we set out, I got Riley alone. “You sure about this?”

“We've got to get them out,” he said.

“No. I mean, are you sure we'll be able to stop him before …”

There was no warmth in Riley's expression, no hesitation in his voice. “No one's dying tonight.”

All mech eyes were cold, strangely blank, their flat color only accentuated by the pinprick of light flashing at their centers. But even beyond that, Riley's gaze was steel. For the first time, I could imagine those eyes set in another face, from another lifetime, surviving in a city the only way he knew how.

Then he rested a hand on my lower back and kissed the top of my head and whispered that it would be all right, we'd all be fine, and the look was gone.

And then we began.

True to his word, Jude's secrecy on the BioMax tracking tech had come in handy. As far as anyone at BioMax knew from the doctored stream of data, the three of us were safe and sound in bed—when in fact we were crossing the deserted grounds of an expired airport, insane plan in hand and weapons in tow. We set out after
midnight, picking our way along the route Zo had marked out. Safely through the electrified perimeter—thanks to a grounding strip passed along by one of Jude's city contacts—and through the shadows of hangars and warehouses, darting back each time the sweeping floodlights threatened to cross our path. The grounds were too large to cover every corner with cameras—unless Savona had sprung for a military-grade sat-cam, but if he'd gone that far, what little chance we had of success was pretty much gone, so there was no point in worrying. We had to assume that someone, man or machine, was deployed to watch the area around Savona's secret playpen, cameras that Zo hadn't known about, that weren't visible to the naked eye. Which meant we had to assume that they knew we'd been here before and were prepared for our return. Another justification, as far as Jude was concerned, for the surprise attack. Another reason for the guns.

But Riley had jury-rigged a signal jammer, a small-scale model of what they used in the cities to block the wi-fi and energy nets, ensuring that—if it worked—any cameras we passed in range of would report back scrambled, useless data to their central servers. It was a half-assed solution to a problem we weren't sure even existed—and there was a small, hateful piece of me that hoped it wouldn't work. That was the thought I tried to ignore as we crept toward the hangar:
Come and get us
. A silent missive to Savona's security forces.
Stop us before we can't stop ourselves.