Skinned -1 (18 page)

I didn’t want to die.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was now I
couldn’t.
My father wouldn’t let me.

Zo peeked into the room, hesitating in the doorway. “I heard,” she said.

Big surprise. “That’s what happens when you eavesdrop.”

Zo scowled. “I wasn’t—whatever. Forget it.”

“I’m sorry.” Not that I was, not real y. But I didn’t want her to go. “This day just sucks.”

“Yeah.” She looked like she didn’t know what to say. Neither did I. Zo and I had never talked much before, and now we didn’t talk at al .

“You think he’s right?” I final y asked.

“What, Dad?” She shrugged. “What’s the difference? You planning on another accident? Or should I say”—she curled her fingers into exaggerated quotation marks

—“
accident
?”

I wondered, again, why she seemed to hate me so much. But I couldn’t ask.

She might answer.

“Not Dad,” I said. “The Faith guy. About—you know. Al of it.”

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” Zo said. “So I kind of doubt you have one.”

“But the rest of it? About me being just a machine, fooling myself into believing…You think he could be right?” She hesitated. Too long. Great—another answer I didn’t want to hear.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Of course he’s not right. I’m just—”

“I don’t think you’re fooling yourself,” Zo said slowly. “And I don’t think…I don’t think it’s true what he said. About it not being natural. What’s natural anymore? Besides…” She glanced toward the window. The fog—or smog or haze or whatever it was—was bad today, so thick you couldn’t even see the trees. “Nature sucks.” I laughed. She flinched.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Zo shifted her weight. “I’m just not used to it yet.”

“My laugh.”

“Your whole…Yeah. Your laugh.”

“Remember when Mom decided she wanted to be a singer, and she made us sit through her rehearsal?” I didn’t know what had made me think of it.

A smile slipped onto Zo’s face, like she couldn’t help it. “And we just had to sit there while she butchered that stupid song over and over again. What the hel was it cal ed?” We both paused. Then—

“‘Flowers in the Springtime’!” Together.

She giggled. “Everything was going fine until you made me laugh—”

“
I
made
you
laugh?”

“You made that
face
!” she said accusingly. “With your cheeks al puffed up and your eyebrows scrunched….”

“Yeah, because I was holding my breath, trying not to laugh at
you
, looking like you were having some kind of seizure.”

“Okay, but how could you not laugh, when she kept singing that stupid song—”

“‘Flowers in the springtime, apples in the trees,’” I warbled in a falsetto. “‘Your hand in my hand, gone weak in my knees.’”

“She sounded like a sick cat,” Zo sputtered.

“Like psycho Susskind, that night we left him outside in the thunderstorm.”

Zo shook her head. “Like psycho Susskind, if we threw him out the window. Howling for his life.”

“And when you started laughing—”

“When
you
started laughing—”

“I thought she was going to kil us both.”

Zo grinned. “At least that was the end of her singing career.”

“Career,” I said. “Yeah, right. A bright future in breaking glasses and shattering eardrums.” I shook my head. “And remember when Walker showed up that night, I had to explain why I was grounded, but that just started me off laughing again, and then
you
started again, and we couldn’t get the story out? I wonder if I ever did tel him what that was about.”

“You did,” Zo said flatly. She’d stopped laughing. “You texted him later and told him.”

“Oh. Right, okay. How do you even remember that?”

“I have to go,” Zo said. It was like the last few minutes hadn’t happened. “I’m late.”

“Where are you going?”

“What do you care?” she snapped.

I didn’t say anything.

She sagged against the doorframe, just a little, not enough so most people would notice, but I was her sister. I noticed. “I’m going out with Cass, okay? Is that a problem?” But she didn’t ask like she real y wanted to know.

“It’s fine,” I said. “She’s your friend now, right? Go.”

“I wasn’t asking for permission.”

“Fine,” I said again, even though it wasn’t.

“Fine,” she said. And she left.

I wanted to get into bed and shut down, forget the day had ever happened. But there were two messages waiting for me. That was bizarre enough, since pretty much no one was speaking to me anymore, not unless you counted the randoms I only knew from the network, and even if I did count them, they’d mostly faded away, since I wasn’t doing much zone-hopping these days. When you ignored the randoms for long enough, they tended to get a clue.

The most recent text was from Quinn.

I’m going. And so are you.

It didn’t make sense. Not until I saw the one that had arrived just before it, addressed to both of us. From an anonymous sender.

Congratulations, you passed the first test.

Then there was a time, a date, and an address.

Ready for phase two?

“If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?”

T
he car took an unfamiliar route, depositing me at some smal ish house a little too close to the city for my comfort. There was a security field around the property, which lifted as I drove through. No one was waiting outside for me. I wondered if Quinn had already arrived. Or changed her mind about coming in the first place. It was, after al , slightly insane, showing up at a random spot in the middle of nowhere just because some anonymous message told me to. It was more than slightly insane to do so without tel ing anyone where I was going. But I had come this far; I was going in.

After al , what was the worst that could happen? It’s not like I could die.

I knocked. When the door opened, the blue-haired girl from the support group stood behind it.
“You?”
I asked, surprised. The girl—Ani, I remembered—had spoken even less than I had at the session, revealing only that, aside from the technicolored hair, she was kind of blah.

“Sort of me,” she said softly. “But not just me. Come in.” She stepped aside.

The place was crawling with them. Mech-heads. Skinners. Freaks. And I mean, crawling, literal y, since a few of them were on the floor, writhing against the cheap carpeting—

or against one another—their eyes rol ed back, their fingers spasming. It was as if they were tripping on Xers, but I knew they couldn’t be, because they were like me.

No,
I thought, trying not to stare, although they wouldn’t have noticed.
Not like me.

The house was sparsely furnished: white wal s, gray floor, a couple of cheap couches set at haphazard angles to the wal s and each other, and not much more. Ani took a seat on one of them, settling back against Quinn’s arm. Quinn looked like she was home. There was an empty space next to them. I didn’t sit. On the other couch slumped a tal , lanky mech-head with brown eyes, brown hair, and a sour look on his waxy face. And next to him, staring at me with flickering orange eyes, someone familiar. Jude something, one of the earliest skinners. A year ago he’d been everywhere on the vids, hitting parties, crashing vidlifes, popping up on al the stalker zones. And then, a month or two later, people had gotten bored—or he had—and he’d disappeared. A month was longer than most insta-fame lasted; he’d been lucky.

He’d also been a brunet. But now he was…something else. His hair gleamed silver, and the color bled down his face, streaking his forehead and cheeks with a metal ic sheen.

His bare left arm was etched with the snaking black lines of a circuit diagram. But his right arm, that was the worst of it. The pseudoflesh had been stripped away, replaced by a transparent coating that glowed with the pulse and flicker of the circuitry underneath.

He wasn’t the only one. The writhing freaks were al streaked with silver, their skin painted with whirling diagrams or stripped away, wiring exposed. One had even decorated his bare skul with an intricate vision of the cerebral matrix that whirred beneath the surface. As Ani leaned forward on the couch, her shirt rose on her back, exposing a patch of bare, silvery skin.

“Stare al you want,” Jude said. “It’s important to know what you are.”

“What
you
are. A bunch of freaks,” I muttered. “What did you do to yourselves?”

“Not freaks.
Machines
,” Jude corrected me. “And we didn’t do it. We’re just embracing it.”

“You think this is funny?” I asked, disgusted. “You want to turn us al into a joke?”

“Not a joke,” Jude said. “A machine.”

“I’m no machine!”

Jude glared at Ani. “I thought you said she was okay.”

“She is,” Ani said, glancing at Quinn. “When her friend—”

“We’re not friends,” Quinn and I said at the same time. Only Quinn laughed.

“She sounded like she got it,” Ani said. “And she walked out on the session. Seemed like a good sign.”

“What is this?” I asked. “Some kind of stupid spy game? You go to those meetings and what, report back? To
him
?”

“Wel , she’s not stupid,” Jude said. “There’s that.”

I stood up. “
She’s
out of here.”

“Stay,” Ani said. “You belong here.”

I shuddered. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s better than Sascha’s crap,” Quinn said, stroking the silver streak on Ani’s arm. “They know what they are. What
we
are.”

“This isn’t who I am,” I said, backing away.

“It’s who we al are.” The guy next to Jude spoke for the first time. “Like it or not.”

“Let her go, Riley.” Jude flicked a lazy hand toward the door. “This is a place for people who want to look forward, not back. She’s obviously not ready to do that. Not if she’s stil whining about what she was and denying what she
is
.”

“I’m not denying anything.”

“Your sentence is a logical impossibility,” Jude said. “Not to mention inaccurate. Come back when you’ve figured things out. We’l wait.”

“I hope you can wait forever.”

Jude laughed. “What, you think you’l make it out there? With the orgs?”

“The what?”

“Orgs—organics. Nasty little piles of blood and guts. Humans. You know, the ones who hate you.”

“No one hates me,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re not in denial at al .” Jude shook his head. “Come back when you’ve grown up a little.” He looked younger than me. But he was a skinner—looks meant nothing.

“Wel ? What are you waiting for? Be a good little mech and get out.”

“You’re throwing me out?” Unbelievable.

Sorry,
Quinn mouthed. But she stayed where she was.

“Have fun with your orgs,” he said with fake cheer. “Take care of yourself.”

“Take care of your mental problems,” I advised him.

And left.

There was a mech-head sitting on the edge of the front porch. I winced as the door slammed behind me, afraid it would catch his attention. I’d talked to enough skinners for one day. Maybe for life.

But the mech-head didn’t look up. He was hunched over, his fist wrapped around a switchblade, and he was carving something into the porch’s rotting wood, except—

I gasped.

He wasn’t carving the wood. He was carving his arm. The knife flashed as the point dug in again, slicing a gash from his wrist to his elbow. He shivered.

And then he final y looked at me, his lips drawing back in a sickening smile. His teeth were coated in silver.

“Feels good.” His voice was a sigh. “I mean, feels bad. But that feels good, too. You know?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

But…

Pain
, I thought.
I miss pain.

I shook my head harder.

He tossed the knife and caught it neatly, gripping the blade. Then, like a knight making an offering to his queen, extended it to me. “You’l like.” His teeth gleamed. Not like the knife handle. It was inky black, sucking in light. “You’l see.”

“You’re crazy,” I whispered. I couldn’t get my voice to work right. Just like I couldn’t make myself walk away. “You’re al crazy.” He just nodded.

And the knife was stil there, waiting.

I didn’t want it.

I did
not
.

“I’m not one of you,” I said louder. Backing away. “I don’t belong here.”

The mech-head just shrugged and started carving again.

They were all psycho,
I told myself. Freaks. Nothing to do with me. Nothing
like
me.

I’d been wrong to come; I’d been stupid.

I’d been stupid a lot, lately. But that was over. And smart decision number one? Leaving this place, these…
people
.

Leaving—and never coming back.

One month passed.

See how easy that was? From point A to point B in three little words, skimming over everything that happened in between. As if it were possible to do that in real life, as if you could just shut your eyes and open them a moment later only to find: One month passed.

It’s not. Days pass slowly; minutes pass slowly. And I had to live through them al . I went to school, most days, at least. I lingered in empty classrooms after the bel , then hustled to the next class at the last minute so I could slip in the door just before the teacher started droning. And again for the next class, and again. I ate lunch outside, alone, in a spot behind the lower school building where no one was supposed to go. No one ever knew I was there, because the biosensors deployed to catch students wandering astray couldn’t catch me. I went directly home at the end of every day, taking the long way around to the parking lot so I wouldn’t have to pass by the western edge of the track and see Zo and the others running heats across the field.

It got colder.

I didn’t notice. Some afternoons I shut myself in my room, linking in and sending my av on missions across the network, avoiding the zones of anyone I used to know, racking up kil s on Akira, thrashing players who lived on the other side of the globe and had no idea they were playing against a machine.