Crashed Read online

  “They’re waiting for you inside,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Your many friends and admirers,” he said, with a go-figure shrug.

  “Riley?” I asked.

  Jude nodded.

  “Is he . . . okay?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t.”

  Jude grimaced. “He’s here, he’s fine. He’s inside with the rest. Seems everyone wants to know about your adventures.”

  “But not you.”

  “I know enough,” he said. “I’ve been watching the vids. It’s not pretty.”

  “No,” I said. “But I guess mass murder usually isn’t.”

  Jude shook his head, a look of impatience flashing across his face. “I don’t mean that. I mean that vid of you—”

  “Not me!”

  “Right. Whatever. That vid of someone who looks like you pumping poison into the system. The whole world thinks we just declared war on the orgs. It didn’t occur to you to voice me when any of this happened?”

  “So that’s what you’re mad about. Can’t stand that we actually handled something without you.”

  “Handled it.” Jude snorted. “Right. I’ve already talked to Riley. He wanted to come to me. You stopped him. You let him go back to that place alone. It didn’t occur to you I could have helped ?”

  “Could you have?” There was something strange about talking to Jude. The conversation felt familiar and profoundly alien all at once. It was the same disconnect that came from looking around at the place I’d been living in for the last six months. Like nothing was the same anymore. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he looked at me. Like he was staring at a two-dimensional copy of something he’d once cared about.

  Jude smashed a fist into the doorframe. His face stayed calm. “Go ahead. Ask me.”

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  I was too tired for the game. I gave him what he wanted. “Did you set me up?” I asked flatly. “Did you kill all those people?”

  He didn’t flinch. “You going to believe me if I say no?”

  “Say it,” I suggested, “and we’ll find out.”

  “If you think I could do something like that, I’m not going to waste my time convincing you otherwise,” he said.

  “Not much of an answer.”

  “Why even stay here if that’s what you think of me?” he asked. “Why don’t you just go?”

  Go where? I thought. “Fine.” Calling his bluff. “I guess we’re done here. I’ll pack up and be out by morning.”

  “Wait,” he said quietly. “Ask Riley.”

  “Ask him what?”

  Jude picked at a loose stone in the doorframe, scraping out the sediment between the stone and wood. He turned half away from me, his shoulders hunched, his head angled toward the door. “Ask him, and he’ll tell you I wouldn’t do this,” he said, careful to keep his eyes on the wall. “If you really think . . .”

  I didn’t know what I thought anymore. “What am I supposed to think?”

  He started to speak but choked off the words. Then he shook his head. “Think whatever the hell you want.”

  “Jude—”

  Suddenly, he whirled from the wall, facing me head-on. “I wasn’t the only one who knew you’d be at Synapsis.”

  “What?”

  It was like he was fighting a war with himself, the part that didn’t care what I thought battling the part that needed me to believe him.

  “You think it had to be me, because I sent you there,” he said. “That I was the only one who knew. But I wasn’t.” He sounded like a child, denying that he’d thrown the ball, broken the window. I waited for him to blame it on his imaginary friend.

  “Let me guess, I’m forgetting about your mysterious contact,” I said. “The reason for the whole stupid rendezvous.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Jude hesitated. He slipped down along the wall and perched on one of the stairs climbing up to the entrance. I stayed on my feet. “If I tell you something, will you swear to keep it to yourself?”

  “I don’t make blind promises.” Not to you.

  “BioMax is tracking us,” he said. “GPS. They know wherever we go.”

  “You knew?”

  “You knew?” He gaped at me. “How?”

  “You’re the genius, right? Figure it out.” I was too angry to look at him. To think that he’d known all along and hadn’t told us? Hadn’t done anything?

  “You can’t tell anyone,” he said.

  “No, apparently you can’t tell anyone!” I yelled. “Because you’re on such a freaking power trip about being the all-knowing Jude! How dare you keep this a secret?”

  “What the hell was I supposed to do?” he asked. “If people knew . . . well, look how you’re reacting. I didn’t want to start an unnecessary panic.”

  “I’m having a little trouble with the ‘unnecessary’ part— they’re spying on us, Jude.” I started pacing back and force, trying to force out some of the anger through motion, but it didn’t work like that, not in the mech body. My brain just kept whirring, furious at all of them.

  Jude was still sitting down, sprawled almost casually against the stone stairs. “BioMax isn’t our enemy. Not yet at least.”

  “You so sure about that? Or you think it was just a coincidence that the attack happened while we were at the corp-town? That your so-called source never showed up? Wake up, Jude. Either BioMax has something to do with this or . . .”

  “Or I did,” he said sourly. “Back to that.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to think? Especially when you’re telling me you trust them. Even after this?”

  “I don’t trust anyone,” Jude said coldly. “You think you’re the only one who can do the math here? Are you really surprised? Did you believe all the BioMax crap, that they have our best interests at heart?”

  “That’s exactly my point!”

  “No! That’s exactly my point. If certain elements of BioMax were involved in this, all the more reason not to let them know we’re onto their tracking tech. Let them think we’re totally clueless. Let them expose themselves for what they really are.”

  “And until then, what? We just sit around and wait?” I asked in disbelief. “How can you even stand it? Knowing—” I shuddered. “Knowing they’re watching you.”

  He didn’t say anything. His gaze flicked away, just for a second, but it was long enough to reveal that there was something else. And I’d just hit on it.

  Just like when I was in the car with call-me-Ben and he’d accidentally let slip that the trackers weren’t foolproof.

  “But they’re not watching you, are they?” I said slowly, forcing myself not to yell.

  He shrugged but couldn’t refrain from cracking a small, sharklike smile. He was actually proud.

  “They think they are,” he said. Boasted. “Streaming live GPS, mapping my every move. And it’s all bullshit. I’ve been feeding them false data for months.”

  “While you let the rest of us . . .” I stopped, searching for the words. I wanted to get this out right. No incoherent anger or misplaced betrayal, irrational reactions that he could brush off as weak and orglike. “You didn’t bother to tell any of us,” I said finally. “You let us hang and saved yourself.”

  “Oh, please.” He rolled his eyes. “I see the time away hasn’t cured you of your inclination to melodrama. ‘Saved myself ‘? From what? As if they’ll be able to wring any dirty little secrets out of your location.” He shook his head. “Trust me, you’re not that interesting.” He rubbed his hands across his face, a neat little simulation of org exhaustion. “Yes, I can jam the tracking. And no, I’m not about to do it for everyone. It doesn’t occur to you that there may come a time when we can make the trackers work to our advantage? We don’t want them knowing we can screw with the data. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that you don’t put your cards on the table until you have to?”

  I hated to
admit it, but he was making sense. That was the problem with Jude—he always made sense. He was too good at rationalizing, turning his whims into logical inevitabilities.

  “All I know is you pretended we were all in this together,” I said. “And then you did this, on your own.”

  He’s not your friend. But that was Ben’s voice in my head. And beneath my anger, there was something else—maybe it was the fact that Jude had voluntarily revealed one of his precious secrets, one guaranteed to make me hate him. Or maybe it was the moment when, for just one second, the mask had fallen away, exposing his need. He needed me to believe him innocent. And I almost did.

  “You think I don’t care about you? Them?” He swept his arms out to encompass the estate. Inexplicably, he was angry too—as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. “I’m doing this all for you!”

  “Excuse me if I can’t quite see how you selling us out to BioMax is helping.”

  “Because I’m taking care of it!” he shouted. “I make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t see. I know everything they know. Everything.”

  There was a long silence as I processed what he’d said. And he realized what he’d revealed.

  If it were anyone else, I would have said he looked almost afraid.

  “You get the GPS feed?” This wasn’t anger. I’d moved beyond anger. The thought of Jude sitting in front of a screen, watching us drift through our lives, watching over us like the Faithers’ god, probably delusional enough to believe that he was sitting in judgment rather than violation? That was sickening.

  “You’d rather they knew everything, and we know nothing?” he said defensively, his voice rising. “Someone has to watch our backs.”

  “And you love it, don’t you?” I said coldly. “Watching.”

  It was one thing to know that strangers at BioMax were watching over my shoulder—even call-me-Ben was nothing more than a pretty face with a boring name attached, paid to pretend he cared about where I went and what I did. As for my father, he’d always been a watcher, keeping tabs on everything, from the hours I put in at the track to the experimental error rate in my biotech homework. That’s what fathers did. They paid attention, even when they weren’t supposed to.

  But Jude was supposed to be one of us.

  I felt like he’d stripped off my clothes, exposed my naked body.

  Except it was even worse. Because the body was just an object. Eventually it would break or break down, and so what? It would be interchangeable with whatever came next. Only our minds were inviolate—that’s what Jude had taught us, wasn’t it? The thing that separated us from the orgs, the thing that made us mechs, that made us special. We lived in our heads. Unlike the orgs, we didn’t fool ourselves into believing that our bodies mattered. Only our minds were alive, and they belonged to us.

  But now Jude had reached his long fingers inside my head and carved out a space for himself. He’d crawled inside me, without my permission, without my knowledge.

  And he’d watched.

  There was nothing personal in a location, I reminded myself. GPS coordinates weren’t diary entries. They only told him where I was, not who, not why.

  But it was my choice whether or not to tell him anything.

  And he’d taken that away.

  I didn’t run. I didn’t turn around, skid down the hill of green, back to the road to nowhere.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Jude said. Nearly pleaded.

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure I can.” Even if it means mass panic? I thought. Even if Jude’s right and we might need this later, when it really counts?

  “I’m not going to try to convince you I’m right—”

  “Good.”

  “I’m going to bribe you,” he said, regaining a little of his composure. “You keep your mouth shut, and I’ll jam your tracker too. I’ll feed BioMax a false stream—no one will know where you go, not BioMax. Not me.”

  Not my father. Not anyone.

  “And let everyone else keep getting spied on?” I asked. “Turn myself into as big a liar as you are?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “That’s the plan. Or tell whoever the hell you want and spend the rest of your life with the fine folks of BioMax crawling up your ass, watching your every move.”

  I wasn’t the same self-centered bitch I’d been before the download. But I guess I was close enough. “Okay,” I said finally. Hating myself.

  At least he didn’t smile.

  “You really think you’ll be able to keep this to yourself?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He rolled his eyes. “You’ll last five minutes. Tops. So here’s the deal: You’ve got such a burning need to spill your guts, spill to Riley. You two are so tight now, so into your little secrets. I’m sure he won’t mind keeping another one. Especially for me.”

  “You’re so sure he’ll just do whatever you tell him?”

  Jude didn’t answer; he didn’t have to.

  “All that time we were in the city, you knew,” I realized. “And when those orgs grabbed me, you—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to ground myself in the present, to shut out the sickening sensation that I was still tied to a chair, waiting, just imagining that I’d escaped. “You claim we should have called for help, but you knew where we were the whole time— and you did nothing.”

  Jude stood up, brushing the grime off his jeans, starting into the house. “Not all of us do everything we want, whenever we want.”

  I recognized the insult. But there was something else buried in there too. I just didn’t get it. If he’d wanted to rescue me, what had stopped him?

  What’s the difference? I thought, disgusted with myself for even entertaining the idea of Jude rescuing me like I was some helpless maiden waiting for her noble prince.

  He is not your friend.

  “What are we really doing here, Jude?” I asked. “What’s the point of all this? What do you want?”

  “At least you’re finally starting to ask the right questions.” And he turned his back on me and went inside.

  I told Riley that night. We sat in my bedroom with the door closed, both of us on the floor, our backs propped against the wall, our knees drawn to our chests, a foot of space between us.

  He didn’t react when I told him what had happened to Mika and Sari, at least what little I knew. And he didn’t react when I told him about the trackers. He didn’t say anything until I told him that Jude had known all along.

  “He must have a good reason,” he said then.

  I almost laughed. “Why? Because he’s Jude, giver of all knowledge and wisdom, keeper of the peace?”

  “Because he’s Jude,” Riley said, and he wasn’t joking. “I trust him. I wish you did. Maybe then we wouldn’t have . . .”

  “You blame me.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. And I shouldn’t have cared so much. “I made you take me to the city. I didn’t let you voice Jude. I screwed everything up. Is that about right?”

  Riley looked down. He crushed his hands into fists, then brought them together, knuckle to knuckle. “I screwed up,” he growled. “I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “They wanted a trade,” he said. “You for Jude. And for me.”

  “I know that,” I said. “You want to tell me why?”

  “Wynn thinks we owe him something.”

  “What?” I figured I deserved to know.

  “A life,” he said. “Among other things. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry you got involved.”

  “And when they took me, you went to Jude.”

  He nodded. “Jude freaked. He swore we’d find you. But by the time we did . . .”

  “Secops showed up,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Except it was all a lie,” I pointed out. Couldn’t he see? “If he’s tracking us, he knew where I was the whole time. Just like always.”

  Riley didn’t answer. He tilted his head back against the w
all, staring up at the ceiling. “Never thought I’d be living in a place like this,” he said.

  “Did you hear what I said? Jude lied to you.” I wanted to shake him. “He was probably going to let me rot there.”

  Riley shook his head. “We were going to get you out. He would have done anything.”

  “So he told you.”

  “And I trust him.”

  “Even though he sent us to that corp-town? Come on, you’re telling me that you don’t even suspect, just a little, that—”

  Riley stood up. “Jude wouldn’t do that. Not to me.”

  “And not to the orgs,” I prompted him. “You know, the ones who died. You forgot to say he wouldn’t have hurt them. Doesn’t have it in him or something like that.”

  “Why are you here?” Riley asked.

  “What? I live here.”

  “But why? If you think Jude could do something like that.”

  “I’m not here because of him,” I snapped. And maybe, deep down, I didn’t believe Jude was capable of something so terrible; maybe I wanted to believe in him as much as anyone else. Or I just needed an excuse to stay, because I had nowhere else to go. “He’s watching all of us,” I said finally. “Maybe I just think someone should be watching him.”

  “You don’t know him,” Riley said, and he was already at the door, leaving me. “I do.”

  “Are you sure?” But I said it under my breath. Quietly, so it belonged to me.

  Riley hesitated in the doorway, drumming his fingers against the frame. It was strange—I wouldn’t have thought him the type to emulate org shifts and twitches, pretending that his body was anything other than what it was. But there he was, playing out a pantomime of org fidgeting. Jude had encouraged us to embrace our body’s natural stillness, its dissociation from feverish thoughts, yet another way to maintain control, another point scored in our game against the orgs. I’d bought it; Riley apparently hadn’t. “You okay?” he finally asked.

  I thought about my father then, the tightened line of his lips holding back a tidal wave. I’d never thought about what it must have been like to live behind his colorless expression. Caged by self-control, and in that cage, with him, my body after the accident, ravaged first by fire then by BioMax, my body now, the one he’d purchased, the one he’d willed into existence, the mistake.