Torn Page 16

  There were no clean punches; there was no delicate dancing around each other like boxers in a ring. They were on each other, arms gripping necks and waists, and then they were rolling on the ground, a cloud of grunts and snarls and thuds—and sometimes a crack as a head slammed into the pavement.

  All that in seconds, and even as I was watching, I was moving, my legs as autonomous as their fists, no longer in my control. I was moving toward them, I was shouting “Stop! Please! Stop!” and my hands were on someone’s shoulders, someone’s waist, tugging uselessly, and then someone’s elbow caught my jaw and I was flying backward and I was on the ground.

  They didn’t stop. They didn’t notice.

  When the ringing stopped and my vision cleared, Zo was by my side. Saying something about sitting down, but I stood up, wondering whose elbow it had been.

  Stood up, but stayed where I was. Not because I was afraid, but because I wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t stop them, and they couldn’t hurt each other, not really. None of us could hurt each other anymore.

  It lasted longer than it would have if they were orgs, but it couldn’t have lasted as long as it felt. And then Jude was on his back, arms splayed, done. Riley knelt over him, fist drawn back.

  “Go ahead,” Jude urged him. Jagged gashes laced his skin, and his fingers jutted at angles fingers weren’t supposed to. Strange to see so much damage and yet no blood. No repercussions. “Finish it.”

  And for a moment I thought he was going to. But then Riley dropped his fist. His shoulders slumped, and he stood up.

  “Finish it!” Jude shouted. He raised himself a few inches off the concrete, then dropped back again.

  Crack.

  “I am finished,” Riley said. He held out a hand, but not to Jude. For a moment I wondered if he was holding it out for me—wondered if I would take it, if it was offered—but then Sari stepped in and wrapped her fingers in his, and they walked away together.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  Even though he was already gone. I was working on delayed reaction; I was frozen.

  Zo was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear it, or didn’t want to, not if it would distract me from staring at the space Riley had left behind. I wouldn’t listen to Zo, but I let her take my hand and deposit me carefully on the curb. And then I watched her kneel beside Jude, her knees resting where Riley’s had been. Her hand brushed the hair from his forehead, with a gentleness I didn’t know she had. She spoke his name, once, twice, then—getting no response—bent her head to his chest. Listening.

  “No heartbeat,” Jude said. She flinched, and jerked backward. “But I appreciate the thought.”

  Zo helped him to his feet and led him, silent and dazed, to the curb. Then sat him down next to me and joined him on the other side.

  “You okay?” I said.

  He turned his head to look at me, then turned away. I didn’t know if it was disgust for the question, or the closest he was willing to get to shaking his head. No.

  I rested a hand on his shoulder, lightly, thinking, This is wrong; he’s not the one I should be comforting; this isn’t my job.

  But the one I should have been comforting was gone. Still, I took my hand away.

  Jude didn’t move. He mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “He said he shouldn’t have started it,” Zo said.

  “You didn’t start it.”

  “I start everything.”

  “What happened in there?” Zo nodded at BioMax. “Why was he so angry?”

  There was a long pause, long enough that I thought Jude wasn’t going to answer. “It wasn’t about what happened in there.”

  “Was he right?” I asked. “Have you been holding it over his head all this time?”

  “It took about thirty seconds for you to start accusing me of things,” Jude snapped. “That’s a new record.”

  “I’m not—” But I was. “Maybe if you’d bothered to talk to him, rather than letting him feel guilty so that you could use him—”

  “We talked,” Jude said. “Yesterday.”

  “About what?”

  “Things.”

  “What things?”

  He raised his head and turned to me again, golden eyes blazing. “You, for one. Want to know what he had to say? What I had to say?”

  My mouth opened, but nothing came out. I didn’t even know what I was afraid of.

  Even his smile looked broken. “Didn’t think so.”

  “I’d like to hear,” Zo put in.

  That got a more authentic smile, but not a response. “It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “This was going to happen eventually. It had to.”

  “You’re pathetic,” I said. “Both of you. This had to happen? Like this was some kind of manly rite you both had to go through? A guy thing?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Right. Because I’m sane, and I don’t go around punching out my best friends.”

  “Maybe because you don’t have any.”

  “Screw you.” I jerked my head at Zo. “Let’s go. We’re out of here.”

  Zo didn’t move. “I don’t think we should leave him like this… .”

  She may have been right, but I didn’t care. “He’ll be fine; won’t you?”

  “I’m always fine,” Jude said.

  “See?”

  Zo didn’t respond. She wasn’t even looking at me—she was looking past me with an exaggerated expression of horror.

  “Nice try. What is it this time, monster behind my back?”

  “Worse,” Zo muttered.

  Of course, I thought. What else could make this perfect day complete? What else could make Zo tremble?

  “Girls,” our father said. “Is this a bad time?”

  GONE

  “He would be broken, like I was broken.”

  Can we go somewhere more private?” my father asked.

  Zo and I spoke at the same time. “No.”

  He lasered a look at Jude. “Then perhaps your friend here would be willing to leave us?”

  “No,” we said again.

  My father sighed. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this in front of strangers.”

  “Funny how I don’t care,” I said.

  Jude shifted his weight, as if preparing to rise. “I can go.”

  “No.” My hand clamped down on his arm, holding him in place. “You’re not leaving. He is.”

  “Not until you hear what I have to say.”

  “So say,” I told him. “Then go.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here, Zoie,” he said.

  Zo let her hair fall across her face. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “If she wants to let you talk to her, fine. But don’t talk to me.” She retreated to a spot on the curb several feet away, dragging Jude with her. They sat down together, close enough that they could still hear us, far enough to make very clear that she wouldn’t be participating in any rituals of apology and forgiveness.

  My father sighed again, theatrically, like we were supposed to feel sorry for him and his grand, exhausting efforts. Why can’t I just punch him? I wondered. It would be so simple, curling my hand into a fist, forcing it into his jaw, wrestling him to the ground. In the end it was nothing but physics, controlling the electronic synapses that would set the limbs in motion, calculating the appropriate speed and angle of impact. I could hurt him, as Riley had hurt Jude. It had been easy enough for them to go from words to actions. So why couldn’t I?

  “Are you wondering how I knew you were here?” he asked.

  “You’re on the board,” I said, glancing at the BioMax building. “You know what they know.”

  He got the implication. “I didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. “I never would have allowed it.”

  “Because you have so much power over them.”

  My father believed sarcasm was the refuge of the weak-minded, those incapable of meeting an argument hea
d-on. He ignored it.

  “Now that I do know, I’ll—”

  “Put up a fight? Careful, Dad. You’re running out of daughters.”

  He cleared his throat. “Your mother is worried about you. Both of you.”

  “Is she still living with you?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Then she can’t be too worried.”

  “Lia …”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What?”

  “My name.” He’d given me that name, after his dead grandmother. It meant “bringer of truth.” But when he said it, it meant I created you. I named you. I own you.

  “I’m not going to beg, Lia. I’m sorry—deeply sorry. You will never know how much. I recognize how difficult it is to forgive, how much strength it takes—”

  “So I’m weak?”

  “I can see this is useless,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Now we agree.”

  “I don’t know what more I can say. I’ll do whatever I can to make this up to you, Lia, but I’m not going to beg. I have my limits. I’ll always be here, when you change your mind,” he said, like it was a foregone conclusion I would. He’d always been this condescending, I realized. I’d just been too oblivious to notice or too desperate for his approval to care.

  He walked away.

  He had limits, all right. Limits on his capacity to be human, much less a father. I believed he was sorry. I believed he truly wanted me to forgive him. He just didn’t want it as much as he wanted to preserve his pride. If he actually loved me, he wouldn’t hesitate to beg. He wouldn’t give up so easily. He wouldn’t stand there so stiff and proud. He would be broken, like I was broken.

  He wouldn’t have walked away.

  “He doesn’t even want my forgiveness,” Zo said, sad and small on the other side of Jude.

  “Would he have gotten it?” Jude asked.

  But Zo was in her own world; I could hear it in her voice. Jude didn’t exist for her right now. Neither did I.

  “He didn’t want it,” she said, sounding distant. “He didn’t even ask.”

  There was nowhere to go. We let the car drive us in circles while we sat quietly, facing away from one another, staring out the window or, in my case, at our reflection. Zo broke the silence. “You know what I like about you being a mech?” she asked, then answered her own question. “It’s a lot quieter. You don’t do that annoying mouth-breathing thing anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You were a total mouth breather, and it was really heavy sometimes, like—” She sucked in and blew out loud lungfuls of air to demonstrate.

  “Did not!”

  Jude laughed. It was quiet, and it was over almost as soon as it began, but it was something.

  He turned away from the window. “What other charming habits have you been keeping from me?” he asked, a pale imitation of his formerly smug self.

  Zo took the opportunity to begin cataloging the many offenses I’d committed against her over the years: the bathroom hogging, the finger tapping, the throat clearing—and what could I do but jump in with a list of my own? Running out of those, we soon found ourselves drifting into a debate over the merits—or lack thereof—of my former friends and, inevitably, Walker, our shared boyfriend, as Jude egged us on. For a moment things seemed almost normal, Zo slipping seamlessly into the annoying tagalong role she’d played back when all she’d wanted was permission to follow me around, and Jude, plainly enjoying the swapping of sisterly grievances, switching his allegiance minute by minute, the better to keep the banter going. But joking about Walker, his stubble, his breath, his brain, which seemed capable of understanding only one rudimentary concept at a time, was a little too much—less because it was weird to be dishing on a guy who’d logged time in both of our beds, more because thinking about Walker made me think about the one who’d followed him, and I wasn’t ready to think about Riley yet.

  I fell silent. They didn’t push it; they changed the subject. It was strange, I thought, barely listening to their debate over some celebrity gossip Zo had seen on a stalker zone, the way three people who’d spent so much time hating one another could function so seamlessly as a unit, understanding the things that weren’t said, knowing what to ignore and what to pretend so we could all make it through the ride to nowhere. There was even a moment, Zo teasing Jude about knowing something he shouldn’t have unless he’d been secretly perusing the stalker zone himself, when it didn’t feel like we were pretending at all. It felt like maybe normal was within reach again, somewhere on the other side of all our disasters.

  That was the moment, that first glimmer of inexplicable hope, when Sari’s text came in, priority level high:

  Come home

  Something wrong with Riley

  The apartment was cleaned out. Sari’s stuff—which had been splayed over the furniture and floor—was gone. Along with mine and Zo’s. The small pile of possessions we’d amassed since abandoning Casa Kahn was nowhere in sight.

  Sari was gone too.

  You notice the strangest things, the most trivial details, when everything’s falling apart.

  Your eye takes in everything, too much: the fecal brown of the walls, the play of light across the windows, the sounds puncturing the silence, a gasp, a shriek, and an empty hole where your voice should be, but you have no words.

  You have no words and you have no volition as your legs carry you to a body sprawled on the floor, facedown, arms crooked, everything still.

  And, finally, you find your scream. “Riley!”

  I was on my knees, cradling his head, the day repeating itself with different players. He lay motionless, eyes closed. His uplink jack lay beside him, like he’d been holding it when he fell. Sari had left him like this. Helpless.

  “Riley!” I screamed again, thinking, hoping, that maybe, for whatever reason, he’d shut down for the night on the floor instead of the bed; that if I yelled loud enough, if I turned him over and slapped his face and shook him, then he would open his eyes. But if he’d just shut down, the first scream would have woken him. There was no such thing as mech deep sleep. There were just two basic options: On.

  Off.

  Zo tried to pull me away, but I elbowed her backward. Déjā vu. Like no matter how we started, someone would end up on the ground, someone would get pushed away, someone would be on her knees, desperate.

  But Jude was stronger. He took my arm and yanked me to my feet.

  I slapped him, harder than I’d hit Riley, harder than I’d hit anyone. “What did you do to him?”

  “What? I was with you all day!” “You must have done something, when you fought—broke something, you must have—”

  “Lia. Stop.” He grabbed my shoulders, held them steady, so much stronger than me, hung on no matter how hard I thrashed. He waited for me to stop, to face him—and eventually, there was no other choice. The only sound in the apartment was Zo’s uneven breathing.

  “I’m calm,” I said, trying to sound it. “Let go.”

  He did.

  I was calm, and I would force myself to stay that way, until I got Riley whatever help he needed. Then I would figure out who to blame.

  It was the last place any of us wanted to go, but there was nowhere else.

  We loaded Riley into the car. Gently, although there was no need to be gentle. I tried not to wonder whether he was awake in there, if he knew what was happening. I lifted his eyelid, not sure what I expected to find. All mechs had a glimmer of gold at the center of each pupil. Riley’s had gone black.

  That means nothing, I thought, as we sped toward BioMax and tried not to worry about what they would do when we arrived. What else could they do after everything that had happened but punish us—punish him. I was certain they’d turn us away.

  They didn’t.

  This has happened before, I thought, as we waited in a cramped hallway while the techs worked on him, and I tried to forget what was happening three or four floors belo
w us, machines with our minds and our memories following orders, obeying commands.

  What was the last thing I said to him? I thought, and hated myself for not remembering, because the truth was I hadn’t said anything; I had watched Riley and Jude break each other, and then I had watched Riley leave. No comment.

  I didn’t understand why they were helping us, and when the tech emerged from his little room, apology fixed on his face, I waited for him to tell us it had been a mistake, word had come down from on high that Riley was not to be touched.

  I couldn’t look at the guy’s face.

  They had tossed three flimsy chairs into the hall for us, and we sat while the tech stood. There was no confusion about who was in charge.

  “We’ve done everything we can think of,” the tech said, “but we’ve had no success waking him up. I’ve never seen damage like this before. The neural matrix is completely fried.”

  He said it like he was talking about a damaged exhaust pipe on a used car.

  “I was afraid of that,” Jude said. “So how long’s it going to take to get another body? Or can you reuse this one?”

  The tech swallowed hard. “Someone’s coming down to talk to you about that.”

  “Why don’t you talk to us about it?” Jude said, an edge to his voice.

  “I’m not really qualified to—”

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Tell us. We can handle it.”

  Lie.

  The guy laid it out in a flat, toneless voice. “This has never happened to us before. The servers are supposed to be incorruptible. But …”

  “But what?” That was Jude, and I wanted to press a hand over his mouth, because if the tech didn’t say it, it couldn’t be real.

  “But the files have been corrupted. Something must have happened during the uploading process, some kind of bug; we don’t know yet. Whatever fried his neural matrix also destroyed his backup copy on the network server. It’s been completely deleted.”

  Deleted.

  Not dead.

  Not gone.

  Delete. Verb, meaning: to eradicate, obliterate, wipe away.