Robin Wasserman - Torn

That was in principle. In practice I loved it. Anyone could wander through. Anything could happen.

It had become a standard postargument routine for me and Riley. We sat in the same spot each time, a stone bench at the edge of the chaos, and over the course of a slow, quiet morning we eased into each other. Never talking about the argument the night before, staying a safe distance from combustible topics, musing about the weather or the trees or the naked man sprouting a peacock plume. Maybe that was the real reason we kept gravitating back to Anarchy. It was a guaranteed supply of safe, meaningless conversation. And that’s what we were doing when I told him—carefully, safely —that Jude had resurfaced.

I didn’t tell him the truth about what had happened the last time we’d all been together.

And I didn’t tell him about the kiss.

“We have to find him,” Riley said. He folded his hand around mine. It had been six months, and I was used to the fact that his hand was larger than it had been before, that our palms nestled differently now. His hand no longer felt like it belonged to a stranger. I had known this new Riley, in this body, longer than I had known the last one.

But that was the problem. I couldn’t stop thinking in terms of the old Riley and the new one. I knew the different body didn’t make him a different person. At least it shouldn’t have. But there was something that didn’t fit the way it had before. It wasn’t the larger hands or the sturdier build or the darker skin. This body was as handsome as the last, maybe more so, because there was a confidence about him that hadn’t been there before, a new comfort with the body and the way it looked and moved. This was the face he’d grown up with. I wondered if, during all those months in a generic mech body, he’d felt like a stranger to himself.

Now he felt like a stranger to me.

The old Riley had been there with me the night of the explosion; the old Riley, my Riley, knew what he’d done to Jude; he knew what it felt like to have the building collapse around him and watch the flames draw closer. This Riley never had those memories, because he’d been backed up on the computer before that night happened. If we were nothing but our memories, then this Riley was… different.

Someone, something had died in that fire. But I wasn’t allowed to mourn him. I wondered if Riley did. I would never ask. Questions like that hung in the space between us, the silence we pretended wasn’t there.

“If he’s back, he must want our help,” Riley said.

“He didn’t look like he wanted help.” I hadn’t repeated the cryptic words Jude had offered me. You’ll know where to find me, he’d said, certain I could solve his riddle, and certain I would want to. “He looked like he wanted a party.”

“If he’s back, why not tell me?” Riley sounded hurt.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think he blames me?”

“He can’t,” I said, because it was too late to tell him the truth: that Jude most certainly blamed Riley, for shooting him, for setting the secops on him, for betraying him, for choosing me.

“If he’s been hiding from us, he has a good reason.”

“Probably.”

It was another gift to him, this pristine version of Jude, who deep down, despite all evidence to the contrary, was a good guy. An imaginary Jude deserving of Riley’s imaginary friendship. The fairy tale was real to Riley, and who was I to say that didn’t matter? Maybe real was a matter of perspective.

Maybe I would tell myself anything to justify keeping my mouth shut.

“You think we should let this go?” he asked.

It occurred to me that he should let this go while I did everything I could to track down Jude before he could track down whatever petty revenge scheme he was surely plotting. But all I could say was, “Probably.”

It wasn’t enough.

“Maybe. But I can’t. I’ve got to know if he’s okay.”

So we started our hunt.

Searching for him by name proved useless, as expected. But there were cryptic references to a mystery mech popping up at certain elite gatherings, turns of phrase I recognized from my own days as Jude’s dummy—“the past is irrelevant,” “natural is weak,” “natural is hell”—that pointed us in the right direction, underground zones devoted to tracking his sightings. And once we knew where to look, he was everywhere. There he was bobbing in the background of a vidlife; there he was pretending to dose with a pack of zoners; there he was posing with a bunch of skinnerheads, their eyes large with longing. And he’d been noticed. Probably by BioMax, who had apparently decided to ignore the issue as long as he kept his mouth shut and didn’t blow up anything else; definitely by a slow-growing cult of net-fans, orgs and mechs alike, who’d established stalker zones that went crazy every time there was a new sighting. Theories flew about who he was, what he wanted, whether he was some kind of messianic figure determined to save us all or the skinner manifestation of original sin, weaseling his way into the org world so he could tear it down from within. The persona and its attendant mysteries were so carefully crafted that I could only assume Jude had cultivated them himself.

Not that Riley could see that, or would have cared if he did. All he saw was confirmation that Jude hadn’t disappeared forever. Thus: “We have to find him,” again and again, until there was nothing I could do but pretend I agreed. It was like he’d conveniently forgotten the way things had been with the three of us. The arguments. The sniping. The way Jude had held Riley hostage to the mistakes he’d made in the past, and the debt he owed Jude for things he’d done when he was too young to know better. The way Jude had sometimes looked at me like I was nothing, a passing phase, some toy that Riley would eventually get bored with. And then the other times, when he’d looked at me like… like he could see straight through me, into the secret at my center, one that I didn’t even know myself. Like he and I were the same, and, stuck on the outside, Riley would never understand.

But Riley and I were the only unit that mattered, which was why I went along with him on the search in the first place. We exhausted all the network sources without getting any closer to tracking down our target—Jude’s fans were obsessed with him, but their devotion was, without exception, practiced from afar. We needed off-line help, and there was one obvious place to start: the only mech besides Riley who we knew Jude would trust—though he had every reason not to. She was out of commission, so we started with the next best thing.

“You.” Quinn Sharpe’s face appeared in my ViM, unsmiling. She’d apparently missed me about as much as I’d missed her. “What?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said sweetly. “Life is good, and yes, I’d love to tell you all about it, thanks so much for asking, but I’d hate to interrupt what I’m sure is a busy day.”

“Then I guess you shouldn’t have voiced,” Quinn shot back. “Is that all?”

I could see her reaching for the disconnect. “Wait!”

“What?”

I glared at Riley over the screen. This was exactly why I’d wanted him to do it. But he’d been under the mistaken impression that, deep down, Quinn liked me.

“I have a favor,” I said.

“Then I guess you don’t need one from me.”

Calm, I instructed myself. Don’t fight back.

“I’m looking for Jude,” I said.

At Jude’s name her mask of scorn turned into the real thing. “Why would I know where he is?” Quinn snapped. “You think he tells me anything? He hasn’t even talked to me since…”