Shattered (37 page)

The gun was a good compromise, a way of ensuring that we kept a little power, no matter what. We wouldn't use it. That was why he carried it, because he knew guns, he understood guns, and he knew that the safest way to use a gun was to make sure you never had to use it. We would all be safer this way, including Zo. That was Riley's point, at least.

But I didn't want him to bring it.

And I didn't want to hear that he understood guns. Or know why.

“Didn't think you'd show,” Zo said flatly when we joined her at the rendezvous point, just beyond the electrified border of the Temple grounds. It was just past midnight, but the main Temple blazed brightly on the horizon, and I realized the other night's darkness must have been part of the plan. Make it look empty and abandoned, so that the foolish, trusting mechs would spring the trap without thinking twice.

And here I was again. “You said it was important.”

She glared at Riley. “I also said come alone.”

He reached out and took my hand. Zo nodded. “I should have figured.” She gave him a nasty smile. “Watch yourself,” she suggested. “Lia's never without a guy for too long—but she's also never
with
anyone for very long.”

“You say that like you believe I'm Lia,” I pointed out.

“No,” she said. “Like
you
believe you're Lia. Same nasty habits.”

“Why are we here, Zo?” Obviously not for hugs and warm reminiscences of our halcyon youth.

She jerked her head at a flat, domed building just beyond an outcrop of trees. A smattering of rusty, broken machinery marked it as some kind of industrial space, one that seemed likely to have been abandoned long ago.

“They do it out here, away from the central areas,” she said. “They don't want anyone to know.”

“Know what?”

She didn't answer. Just crept silently toward the building, gesturing for us to follow. At the electrified zone, she held out her hand, waiting. I watched her face as our fingers touched, but it remained blank, no disgust, no curiosity, nothing. I couldn't remember the last time we'd touched.

With Riley's hand firmly gripped in my own, we made it through the invisible fence. She took us on a circuitous route through the industrial zone, skirting motion detectors and, at one point, yanking us back into a shadow just as a floodlight swept across the pavement. Zo nodded to the source of the light, a bulky pillar stretching up from a nearby building,
rotating slowly, painting a wide arc with its blinding beam. “AI targeters up there,” she whispered. “Coded to face recognition. If the light hits you and you're here without authorization …”

The use of deadly force was strictly prohibited in private security—which everyone knew meant it was tacitly allowed if the “private” in “private security” privately paid enough credit to make it worth someone's while to look the other way. Still, if Savona was risking it at the Temple, it must have meant he was protecting something big. I could see from the intent expression on Riley's face and from the way his eyes darted wildly across the landscape that he was constructing a mental inventory of the threats and weaknesses, like he already knew we'd be coming back—on our own.

Creeping slowly, in fits and starts, Zo led us to the edge of the large domed building—judging from the retractable front wall of frosted glass and the decaying, wingless fuselage parked outside, it must have been a hangar for private planes. The glass was too thick to see through, but there were a couple broken panes near ground level. “Just don't let them catch you spying on them,” Zo suggested, nestling herself in the shadow of one of the old planes.

I hesitated. If we went for the windows, we'd be in plain sight, target practice for anyone who happened to walk by—or anyone who spotted us from within.

“You came all this way,” Zo whispered loudly. “You want to puss out
now
?”

So Riley and I knelt on the cement, peeking through the broken pane. We watched silently, ready to run. But there was
only a handful of orgs inside, and none of them seemed likely to notice us. They were a little busy.

Bustling back and forth through a room stuffed with equipment—and at the center, four pallets with four bodies stretched across them, nude, motionless, the skin on their bare skulls stripped, exposing the wiring within. Wiring that was connected to machines, piping data to oversize monitors. Four mechs, and even though the telltale blue hair was gone and we were too far to see her face, I knew.
Ani,
I mouthed, and Riley nodded, his fingers tightening around the sill.

And hovering at her side, anxiously watching the man whose hand was shoved in her skull: the Honored Rai Savona.

We watched for long minutes, as if time was going to give us some glimmer of understanding. But it didn't, and eventually Zo released a long, low whistle. Time to go.

“They cart them back to the Temple every morning,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “For the vids. Then back here every night. If it helps, I'm pretty sure the skinners have no idea what's happening. I saw them up close once—they're long gone. Totally checked out.”

It didn't help.

I wanted to charge through the glass and throw them all over my shoulder, carrying them to safety. It was a fantasy. But maybe that made sense: This was a nightmare. “What the hell is he
doing
?”

“He's trying to figure out a way to kill them,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “All of you.”

“Not possible,” Riley said. “Not for long, at least. Our minds are backed up.”

“Savona turned on her,” I said, barely listening to the two of them, still seeing the mechs laid bare on those gurneys. Remembering what Jude had said about lab rats. “She threw herself away for him, and he did
that
to her.”

“What? Your former friend, the Brotherhood's newest recruit?” Zo shook her head. “Not exactly. She's a volunteer. Savona talked her into offering herself up for ‘the Cause.'”

“Which is?” Riley prompted her.

“I repeat: He's looking for a way to get rid of you, for good,” Zo said. “And he's getting close.”

“And you're helping him,” I said.

“Right. I'm helping him. By bringing you here.” Zo shook her head. “This isn't what the Brotherhood's supposed to be about. This isn't why I joined.”

“Don't tell me you're surprised?” I asked incredulously. “The whole point of the Brotherhood is to get rid of the mechs.”

“No! We don't want any more of them to be created. And we want to make sure the ones who still exist can't hurt us. Restrictions. Sanctions. We don't want to
kill
them.”

“You can't kill a machine,” I reminded her. “You just shut it off. I'm not human, right? I'm not your sister. That's what you said.”

“You're not,” Zo said. “But …” She rubbed her hands furiously over her face. “I don't know. You're
something
, okay? You talk like her and you act like her and …” Zo sighed. “It's just
enough. Enough death.
Enough
.”
Her voice hardened. “You should get out of here,” she said. “Before someone sees you.”

You don't even see me,
I thought.

“Come on.” Riley looped an arm around me, tugged me toward him. “Let's go.”

“Auden doesn't know,” Zo said suddenly. Awkwardly, with the same shamefaced half smile she used to flash on my birthday, when she would shove a gift in my face, then run away before I could open it.

“Know what?”

“What Savona's doing. I'm not supposed to either. But Auden's clueless. Thought you'd want to know.”

“Thanks, Zo.” I wanted to hug her.

Not because of what she'd done tonight or what she'd just said or because when I had last hugged my father, I had let go too soon. Like I let go of everything too soon.

Because she was still my sister, even if I wasn't hers.

Because she still didn't want me. But she wanted me to live.

“This isn't my skin.”

I
t was Jude's idea to fly.
Anyone could be listening,
he said, glancing up at the ceiling, where we all knew cameras were hidden behind the plaster.
No one can be trusted
. He didn't have to say her name; we were all thinking it. If Ani could turn—Ani, who'd been with Jude from the beginning, who had been beyond suspicion, who knew all our secrets—then maybe anyone could.

So we went to the mountains. Just the three of us, Jude, Riley, and I, in Quinn's plane. Jude had somehow managed to cut Quinn out with just enough subtlety that she hadn't tried to fight him on it, or maybe she'd just run out of fight. We found an untouched landing spot, a snow-covered valley between the low, rolling peaks, miles from civilization, miles from anything but more mountains and more snow. And we jumped.

Once we were in the air, surfing the wind, nothing mattered but the thunder in my ears and the pressure shifts that buoyed me up and down, the frigid slipstream flowing past, the ground hurtling closer as I angled my body down, coming in safely this time, not too fast, not to steep, no more recklessness than necessary, time slowing down as I plummeted and floated at the same time, and everything else—Zo and Ani and Auden and the Brotherhood—floating away from me as surely as Riley and Jude were, black and violet blots against a gray sky, disappearing into the clouds.

I landed soft and shallow, kicking up a mushroom cloud of snow. Jude and Riley were already down, wriggling out of their flight suits. By silent agreement, we gave ourselves a moment to recover from the flight, to ease back into ourselves, exchange the freedom of release for the strictures of restraint, to absorb the fact that the subzero temperatures, the snow beneath us and fluttering around us, the frost already forming on our eyelashes, provided no discomfort. The
awareness
of cold, the
knowledge
of it, but with no more discomfort than a thermometer might feel. Registering the sensation without experiencing it, that's what it meant to remember ourselves and so we sat there under the heavy gray sky, staring up at the dingy white slopes, our bare fingers plunged into the snow, remembering.

And then I told Jude everything.

And not just about what we'd seen with Zo. Jude had to know what Savona was capable of; he had to know what Savona had done in the corp-town and what he'd threatened to do next. I told him the truth. All of it.

“No one died,” I said, keeping my eyes on Riley's face, begging him not to be angry that I hadn't told him sooner. “Savona was behind the attack, just like we thought, but the deaths were staged.”

Riley didn't move, didn't speak, but his hand closed over mine with a gentle pressure. Jude didn't react.

“We can't go public,” I said quickly, before he jumped to the obvious conclusion. “We can't let him kill all those people.”

It was like Jude hadn't heard me.

“You're sure Ani was in there?” he asked. “Did she see you?”

“I told you, no one saw us,” I said, exasperated, not wanting to repeat what I'd told him about Ani's condition or remind him that she probably wasn't seeing anything anymore.

“How do you know it wasn't a setup?” he asked after making Riley run through everything Zo had told us a second time. “The org might have just been showing you what they wanted you to see.”

“The ‘org' is my sister. And she was telling the truth,” I said. “I can tell.”

“Oh, you can tell? Why didn't you say so.” Jude groaned and let himself flop back into the snow. “You dragged me all the way out here for this?”

“
You
dragged us out here,” I reminded him. “And I'm telling you I trust her.”

“I don't.”

“Trust
me
.”

He laughed. “I don't do that either.”

“Then trust
me
,” Riley said. “I was there, I saw it. Whether it's a setup or not, that part's real: They're experimenting on them.”

“They opened up their brains,” I said, wishing I could talk about it without
seeing
it, without imagining that it was happening to me. “And Zo said there's … damage.”

“You start treating people like toys, playing with their insides, there's always damage,” Jude said darkly. He swept his arms out to his sides, carving an angel in the fresh powder.

“I just don't get the point,” Riley said. “They've got to know whatever they do to us, we can download from storage.”

I'd spent the last day thinking of little else, and I was afraid I understood what Savona was trying to do—afraid because it seemed like it could work, and because it was
smart.

Auden's kind of smart.

“What if he's going after the backups?” I said. “Wipe those out, and he can do whatever he wants with our bodies.”

“The backups are stored on the central servers,” Jude pointed out. “The same ones that store all the network data. They're impossible to get to. You'd need an army.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “I'm not an idiot.”

“And neither is Savona,” he shot back. “So where does that leave us?”

“With the daily backups,” I said, and here's where it got scary. “What if he's trying to find a way to get to the storage servers through
us
? We access the server every time we do a memory dump. If they could find a way in through that …”

Jude looked thoughtful; Riley looked stricken. “We have to get them out,” he said.
“Now.”

Jude packed a handful of snow into a tight snowball, tossing it up and down as he thought everything through. Then he smiled. “No, we don't.”

“Aren't you listening?” I shouted. It felt like there should be an echo in a place like this, filled with so much emptiness, but my voice was just carried away by the wind. “We have to help them.”