The Body Electric - Special Edition (15 page)

twenty-five

I sink to the ground, my back to the steel door protecting us. My entire body is trembling, a strange, personal aftershock of the explosion. Even though the panic room is solid and sealed tight, I imagine that I can smell smoke. The idea of it sickens me.

“Mom?” I ask.

Mom doesn’t lift her head from where I dropped her on the floor, but her eyes look up to meet mine. “What happened?” she asks weakly.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Rosie blew up.”

I get back up and then help her to stand. Together, we move slowly to her bed. I hook her cuff into the health monitors. Everything’s off the charts—her heart, her breathing, her neurons. I quickly schedule an appointment with a Dr. Simpa, Mom’s latest physician.

Then I pick up Mom’s sleeping pills.

Mom grips my hand. “Ella, don’t—” she says. “Let me stay awake. Maybe I can… help…”

But I give her a double dose of sedatives anyway, and I watch as her eyes close in just a few moments. “Get restful and tranquil sleep with our special blend of morphine and melanin!” the label on the bottle of mopheme reads. I rub my thumb over that word: tranquil.

Tranquility through freedom!

I open the panic room door.

The first thing I notice is the smell. Acrid, burning. It’s a sharp odor that makes me want to flinch away. But I cover my nose and mouth with my arm and creep forward.

The entire interface window is gone. The glass and the wall framing it—nothing but a jagged, gaping hole. A gentle breeze wafts up, cutting through the burning rubble.

The floor from the kitchen to the where the interface room used to be is blackened and charred, with pock marks made from debris, and a long, stretching series of blast marks.

Rosie the android is nothing but bits of rubberized synthetic flesh, burning circuitry, and barely recognizable pieces.

I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life.

This… this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from.

The door slides open and Ms. White bursts inside. She makes a little mewling cry, and rushes for me.

“Your mother?” she asks when she finally releases me from the hug.

“She’s sleeping,” I say. “I gave her mopheme. The steel walls in her bedroom—that’s what saved us.”

Ms. White holds me out at arms’ length, not willing to let me go. “Oh, you smart, brilliant girl,” she says, pulling me in closer and kissing my forehead. Then she pushes me away, examining my face. “Us?” she repeats. “You were here with Rose? I thought you were in Representative Belles’s office?”

I shake my head. “I ran here as soon as I saw the androids blow in the plaza.”

A tableau of emotion flitters across Ms. White’s face, and I cannot read her expression. She swallows, hard. “Oh, Ella,” she whispers. “What if you hadn’t been here for her?”

My eyes are open and wide, staring at the blast pattern burnt into the floor behind Ms. White. Mom wasn’t that far from Rosie, and she was already weak.

A blast like that would have killed her.

Like it killed Akilah.

The shock of the thought surprises me so much that I jerk back, making Ms. White watch me with concern. I don’t know what happened to my best friend, whether she died or not, or whether the person I’ve been talking to for the past year is even the same friend I grew up with.

All I know for sure right now is that Mom almost died.

Ms. White straightens, her gaze never breaking from mine. I can see her jawline go taut, and she nods emphatically, even though neither of us has said anything. “Right,” she says. “I’m going to contact some construction workers right away—if they can’t fix the hole, they can at least make it safe for you to stay here. Unless you’d rather…?”

“I’m not leaving Mom,” I say.

“No, I meant—well, you could stay with me. And your mother… maybe she should go to the hospital… No, not the hospital. It’ll be crazy right now, best not to expose your mother to that. I can call Dr. Simpa, arrange a special visit in his private labs…”

“We’re not leaving,” I say again. “And I’ve already gotten Mom an appointment with Dr. Simpa.”

“I’ll arrange for a nurse to come. A real one,” she adds when she sees my look. “No more androids.”

“Who did this?” I say. For the first time, there’s emotion in my voice. “Was it the terrorists?”
Or was it Jack Tyler?
I almost ask, but the words don’t form in my mouth.

Ms. White frowns. “It seems likely.”

“‘Tranquility through freedom.’ That’s what Rosie said before she blew. Could this have something to do with the Tranquilitatis disaster?” I don’t know if I would have made the connection if Representative Belles hadn’t brought it up earlier, but it seems far too much of a coincidence to just be chance.

Ms. White’s eyes widen slightly. “Have you seen the news already?” she asks.

I shake my head silently, my hand already going to my cuff to bring up the reports.

Ms. White stops me. “PA Young announced that the terrorists might have roots in the lunar colonies, perhaps even traitors from the lunar base. She’s had investigators studying the old Tranquilitatis disaster, and she believes that this attack was instigated by the same group of terrorists who caused the deaths of the colonists all those years ago.”

I drop my hands and take a step back, surprised at this.

“What?” Ms. White asks, concern etched in her voice.

“I was with Representative Belles just before the attack,” I say, even though I know she knows this. “And he mentioned the disaster. Said it was an accident caused by androids.”

Ms. White narrows her eyes. “I’ll let PA Young know he said that. It’s very suspicious he’d be talking about it now, just before the attack…”

I nod, agreeing with her.

“It could be that Belles has already joined the terrorists. Maybe lies like that are what convinced him to join their side.”

“Maybe,” I say slowly, remembering the way the representative looked so scared.

Ms. White sighs, sinking into a chair at the table. “Who knows, really? This could have just been a stunt to distract the government from a bigger problem, or—”

“It was more than a stunt!” I roar, my voice rising far louder than I intended. Rather than be surprised by my volume, though, Ms. White’s face melts with sympathy and emotion.

“You’re right,” she says simply. “This is war.”

twenty-six

While Ms. White helps set up a new—human—nurse with Mom, I retreat to my bedroom, bringing up the news before I collapse onto my bed. Dozens of programs on the android attack pop up in my vision, but they tell me nothing that I haven’t already heard or guessed—a terrorist attack from an unknown group. The only thing I didn’t know before was the exact number: 104. One hundred and four people dead. Mostly government officials, but one child, aged eight, who had accompanied her mother to Triumph Towers, in order to meet the Prime Administrator as an award for an art contest.

One hundred and four.

I take a shaky breath and silence the news for a moment. “Search: reasons behind android explosion attack,” I say, and my vision blurs as the cuff sends the information to my eyes. A moment later, a semi-circle of floating boxes surrounds my head—or at least, it feels that way. I focus on different boxes, reading text and listening to reports, but everything is speculation, and it’s all far too weak.

Maybe there aren’t any answers. Maybe there never are.

Most of the news reverts back to PA Young’s speech about the possibility of the terrorism reaching as far back as the Tranquilitatis Disaster so long ago. When I try to research the failed colony, nearly everything I read has already been altered to include the new information.

I feel so helpless.

I hug my pillow to my chest, silencing the new programs so I’m alone in the darkness, the way I really feel.

“I wish you were here,” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination.

I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?

When I open my eyes, he’s not there.

Of course he’s not.

Sighing, I reopen the news scans. They all say the same thing, and soon, I notice a pattern. All the government sanctioned channels report first on the total damage, repeating that number—one hundred and four deaths—over and over. And then they zoom in on the little girl victim. They say things like, “dreamt of being a doctor,” and “favorite color was pink,” and then they all mention that the little girl had gone to see the Prime Administrator—as a prize for a re-envisioned flag symbolically encompassing the colonies—in her bright pink dress, but died in the plaza with her mother before she reached the offices. It’s all carefully composed, designed to pull on my heartstrings, and it makes me sick to see the threads of their manipulation so carefully woven around me.

I zoom in on the picture of the little girl, so large that it’s like she’s standing in my bedroom in front of me.

My heart stills.

I know her.

My interface zooms through information as I look up Representative Belles’s history on the interface. It doesn’t take long for me to find exactly what I’m looking for: a family photograph. In the reverie during which I spied on Belles, I saw his worst nightmare, his biggest fear. Two children, casualties of war, dead at his feet. And I saw the youngest, the daughter, today, earlier, laughing and playing with the representative before I collapsed.

Before she was killed by an exploding android.

I read what little information is on the interface. Her name was Estella Belles, and she was eight years old. I examine the photograph further—her mother is the same woman in the news reports now, another casualty of the explosions. Belles and his son, Marcos, a scrawny kid who might be fifteen, are all that remains of the family.

In the news, Estella has a bright pink dress on, with a chocolate stain on the front. Her image has been caught mid-spin. “An innocent victim of the terrorist attack,” the headline says as I look at the image.

This isn’t a picture of a girl walking
into
Triumph Towers. This is the representative’s daughter. She hadn’t gone to meet the Prime Administrator; she’d gone to see her father. And they were
leaving
, not arriving, when I passed out, which was quite a lot of time for them to get away. And the only image the news shows is of her spinning around when I saw her, long before the attack.

Because… because they don’t have any other image of her. I close my eyes, trying to think of the plaza just before the android blew. The little girl was definitely
not
there.

I wave aside the news reports, trying to think with a clear head. If Estella Belles’s death wasn’t an accident, it was certainly murder. PA Young knew that Representative Belles was considering rebellion, perhaps already working with the terrorists. They had no reason to kill his family… but maybe PA Young did.

I shudder at the thought, wrapping my arms around my body. Am I really contemplating that it was the
government
that killed Belles—not the terrorists? That would mean either the government was using the terrorist android attack to hide their own murder of two innocent people, including a child… or that the android attack itself was coming from the government.

My hand goes instinctively to my cuff, ready to call Akilah and discuss my fears with her, just as I have done with every problem I’ve ever had in my life. But I pause. Thanks to Jack, I don’t even know if I can trust my best friend.

A whiff of the acrid smell of burnt metal wafts through my room, coming from the remains of the other half of my home. Rosie didn’t blow up when the other androids did. She blew up later—because she was busy hacking into our interface system. Exploding androids all across the city would be an effective way to make everyone, including us, forget about how our interface system was hacked.

Was the android explosion a cover-up of the terrorists looking for a way to steal Mom’s information, or the government looking for a way threaten Representative Belles?

There’s a war going on, that much is clear.

And I’m no longer sure I’m on the right side.