Robin Wasserman - Torn

“None of your business.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“This is better for him,” I said. “If you care about that at all anymore, you’ll trust me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Should I even bother saying please?”

“So you’re asking me for a favor,” Jude concluded. “I knew you finally grew a spine, but the balls must be new.”

“I’m asking for him ,” I said. “He shouldn’t have to know what you forced him to do.”

“Oh, I forced him to shoot me? And set the secops on me?”

“Please,” I said again, hating that I had to beg. “You’re here, you’re fine, so—”

“Stop,” he said. “What did you think? That I dragged you here to mess with your pathetic little arrangement? Maybe you think I’m going to blackmail you into helping me with BioMax? I keep my mouth shut to Riley, and you do whatever I say?”

“I’m waiting.”

“You really think I’d do that?” he asked. He sounded hurt; he’d always been a good actor. “If you knew anything—” He stopped abruptly and changed course. “I really have been watching you on the network. I see what you’re trying to do. You might even have helped a bit, here and there. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. This is a waste of your time—and your rather ample talents. I’m not going to blackmail you into helping me. I don’t have to. Because once you think about it, you’ll see that I’m right. Anything else is just postponing the inevitable.”

“That’s your pitch? I’m going to help you because it’s the right thing to do?”

“ This is my pitch: Korinne Lat. Mara Wells. Portia Bavanti. Tyler—”

“What’s your point?” But I knew. I knew those names as well as he did.

“Mechs who’ve been attacked,” he said. “Mechs who’ve been ambushed or lynched or kidnapped by orgs. And those are just the ones we know about, because why bother to report a crime that’s not a crime?” As I’d learned my first month at BioMax, org-on-mech violence increased by 230 percent when mech attacks were officially declared consequence-free. Kicking and punching and strangling a machine were deemed to be property damage, and the mechs had no owners who could sue. (As several corp-controlled courts had ruled; a machine could not own itself.)

“Jude, I know all about—”

“And I could keep going,” he said, loudly. “You want more names? How about the names of the mechs who’ve lost everything because the corps have confiscated their credit and shut down their zones? Because mechs are no longer officially living people under the law; we’re things . With no standing. No rights.”

“Like I don’t know that.”

“You know, but you still have somewhere to live. You have a father to buy you things. You don’t know what it’s like to—”

“You think I don’t know?” I shouted. “I know exactly how many mechs are getting hurt every damn day. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’m working with BioMax. I’m trying to fix things. I’m trying to change them. So what are you doing? Hiding out like some kind of end-of-the-world nutcase, waiting for us to get so desperate that we throw ourselves on your mercy? Great plan, Jude. How could I ever have doubted you?”

He didn’t look at all surprised, or even disappointed. “Eventually you’ll see you’re fighting a losing battle.”

“Enjoy the wait.”

“Frankly, I don’t have time for it. So I’ve got something to speed along your comprehension. Or at least your willingness.”

“Finally.” Because clearly, everything else had been preamble, priming the pump. This , whatever it was, would be why we were really here. “Tell me why I’m going to help you.”

“Because it will hurt your father.”

“Maybe you should pay closer attention,” I said. “My father and I are fine. I have no interest in hurting him.”

Jude’s hand shot out and grabbed mine before I could pull away. He pressed something sharp into my palm. I assumed it was a dreamer, the tiny cubes that offered mechs a hallucinatory escape from the world. Jude had offered me my very first one in exactly this way. But the object was the wrong size and lacked the dreamer’s distinctive etchings along the edge.

Jude was still gripping my hand. “You may not want to hurt him yet,” he said. “But trust me, you will.”

It was a flash drive. Nearly archaic, used only for the kind of data you couldn’t trust to transmission over the network and so reserved for hand-to-hand exchange. The drive had Chinese ideograms scratched across its length, which I assumed meant that Jude had picked it up during his stint at Aikida. Or at least that he wanted me to think so. I slid it into my pocket before Riley could see, and resolved not to think about it again until I was alone.

Which came sooner than I expected. Nested in Riley’s arms, my head safely cradled on his shoulder as the car carried us through the pitch-black night, I didn’t watch the nav screen or chart the twisting roads as we swept past. We stopped in an empty lot, the Windows of Memory glowing in the distance, the poisoned sea still a dark hole in the night. My car was waiting.

“You okay to drive home alone, or you want me to follow you?” Riley asked.

I had assumed we would go back to his place. Talk about what had happened.

Or not talk.

“I’m okay,” I said.

He’d been quiet the whole way back—uncharacteristically so, even for him. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed because reuniting with Jude hadn’t lived up to his hopes, disappointed in me for not sharing his enthusiasm, or just lost in thoughts that he’d decided weren’t fit for sharing.

I wasn’t expecting to be able read his mind, but I should have at least been able to guess at how he was feeling—either that, or I shouldn’t have been afraid to ask.

He opened the door for me. I crawled across him, then paused, half in and half out of the car. “Unless you want me to come with you,” I offered. “We could go to your place and—”

“It’s a mess,” he said quickly. Then darted forward and gave me a kiss. It felt perfunctory. “Good night,” he said, and then I was out of the car and he closed the door and I was alone.

He waited until I got in the car, which was normal. Then he drove away before I did, which was not. But it meant I didn’t have to wait any longer. I pulled out Jude’s flash drive, half tempted to toss it out the window. But Jude didn’t make empty threats, and he didn’t lie. He would hit you with the truth, at least the truth as he saw it. Which meant there was something on the drive that I needed to see, even if it aligned with his agenda.

I took out my ViM and uploaded the data to its temp memory storage. Virtual Machines were little more than conduits to the network, not meant for personal storage—under normal circumstances everything got uploaded to my zone and stored on the network—but sometimes you wanted to keep something isolated from the network, to keep it close or erase it for good. Jude’s flash drive carried only a single file, an accident report about a crash that had happened a year before. My crash. The process had been standard, under the circumstances: a cursory joint investigation by the car corp and my father’s lawyers, to determine liability and assign blame. The report had been compiled while I was still an unconscious lump of wires and synflesh in the BioMax rehab facility, but I’d seen all the details later on, forced myself to read through the series of catastrophic system failures—the shipping truck’s chip malfunction, the hole in the sat-nav system, the malfunctioning of my car’s backup detection system, a series of minimally unfortunate events culminating in an extraordinary one.