Robin Wasserman - Torn

“And then you got caught.”

He nodded.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Why not just blackmail you into supporting the download? Why would they need”—I gestured at my body—“this?”

“They needed my support—but they also wanted to punish me,” he admitted. “The cruelty was excessive. Unnecessary. But they didn’t give me a choice.”

“Bullshit. You chose this .”

“They promised me she wouldn’t die,” he said, lamely, in that same voice I’d heard him use when he was praying. Choked, miserable, weak. “She’d just have a different life, they said. A better one.”

The worst part wasn’t the things he was saying, or the fact that he actually expected understanding, maybe even forgiveness, even though he hadn’t bothered to apologize. It was that he refused to look at me or speak to me. Not just as if I weren’t in the room, but as if all his promech preachings had been nothing more than a show, blackmailed out of him. That as far as he was concerned, his precious daughter, the one whose life he’d basically sold off to the highest bidder, was gone.

I exploded. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!”

“He’s not talking about you,” Zo said, with eerie calm. “He’s talking about me.” She gave me a wry, sickened smile. “What am I always telling you?”

“It’s not always about me,” I said mechanically, not thinking about the words because I was suddenly thinking about the other thing she always told me: that I was our father’s favorite. I was thinking about the day of the accident.

I was thinking about the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be in the car.

Zo was the one with the shift at the day-care center; Zo’s key card had started the car, so we could ensure there’d be no record that I had gone instead. In her place.

Seeing me finally get it, Zo nodded.

“No wonder you hate me,” she said to our father, her voice steady and toneless, like she was the machine. “ She was supposed to live. But you got stuck with me instead.”

He didn’t answer her.

Say something, I begged him silently. Fix this .

Like he was still my father, who could fix anything.

Instead of a monster who couldn’t do anything but destroy. And couldn’t even do that right.

The silence stretched on too long. Zo walked out of the room. Seconds later the front door slammed.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. Too late.

“Shut up.” I wasn’t waiting for him anymore. I was waiting for my mother. To slap him. To beat him. To hug me. To run away from all of us. But she did nothing. “Well?” I glared at her, willing her to fight back. To pick a side.

But she didn’t. She didn’t even cry.

We were a whole family of machines.

Were , as in past tense, as in we had been a family.

Now we were nothing.

Zo was slumped in the driver’s seat, cheek pressed against the window, face melting into the thin layer of frost coating the glass.

I pulled open the passenger door and got inside.

“No talking,” she said.

“Got it.”

I don’t know how long we sat there. I don’t know what she was thinking. I was trying not to think. Part of me wanted to start the car, get the hell away from the house before our father came out and said something that suckered us into going back inside. But the rational part of me, stronger now as the waves of rage ebbed away, knew that would never happen. He’d surprised me tonight, more than once. But he was still M. Kahn, our father, and he wasn’t going to beg.

We were safe in the driveway, for as long as Zo needed to stay there.

Zo needed.

Like Zo needed me to fill in for her that day.

It had been a long time since I’d let myself go there. For everything that had happened between the two of us, I’d kept that locked away somewhere, too deep and dark to dredge up into the light. But now… It was supposed to be her.

Sisters were supposed to protect each other. Especially big sisters. I should have been glad it was me instead of her. If I believed the things I said on the network every day, believed that mechs and orgs were different but equal, believed that each form offered its own rewards, I shouldn’t have cared. So I’d exchanged one life for another. I’d lost nothing but pointless nights zoned out on bliss mods, cackling with Cass and Terra and all the interchangeable orgs who couldn’t deal with a mech in their midst. I’d lost a boyfriend who could barely tell the difference between me and my sister, or at least didn’t care which of our tongues was in his mouth. I’d lost a family I was better off without.

I’d gained Riley. I’d gained time, lifetimes , a brain that could be eternally copied, a body that could be repaired, refreshed, exchanged. I’d trained myself not to think about whether it had been an even trade.

As I’d trained myself not to think about how things would have been different, with Zo in the car, me safe at home.

“I’m not going back inside,” Zo said, voice muffled. It was too dark to see if she was crying, and I knew that was the only reason I’d been allowed to stay. “Not ever.”

“Okay.”

This is not about me, I reminded myself. Not tonight.

“So what now?” I asked.

There was a pause. “I don’t know.” Zo puffed a hot breath against the glass, fogging up the window. Then smeared a finger through the condensation. A lightning bolt Z . For a second she was five years old again, and I was seven, and we were fighting sleep on a long drive, staking our claim on the foggy windows, painting names, flowers, faces—and then watching them disappear. We’d made a competition of it, who faded away first, who lasted. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Without asking, I reached across her and keyed in a set of coordinates, started the car. “Yes, you do,” I said, like a big sister should, fixing things.

What I knew about myself: Given the chance back then, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car. I wouldn’t have saved her.

At least this time, I could try.

Zo stopped me before I could knock on Riley’s door.

“Isn’t it kind of rude for us to show up in the middle of the night?” Zo asked.

“It’s no big deal.”

When she didn’t follow it up with the obvious dig about how often I did that kind of thing, I really began to worry.

“Maybe we should go,” she said instead.

“He’ll understand.”

“He doesn’t even know me.”

I had to laugh. “After that dinner the other night? I’d say he knows you.”

Zo laughed too, and it sounded good. But it didn’t last long. “Maybe I should wait in the car.”

I resisted the urge to take her arm. It was like herding a stray cat. You had to lure it in carefully, let it think the whole thing was its own idea. Or just grab it by the neck and toss it inside.

I knocked.

It took only a moment for Riley to appear. He opened the door just wide enough to slip out, then shut it again behind him. “Hey. What are you… everything okay?” He seemed off-kilter, like we’d woken him, but of course mechs didn’t sleep; we shut down at night as a matter of convenience and convention, switching ourselves back on with instant alertness. Noise “woke” us, as it did orgs. But there were no dreams to shake off; there were no dreams.

“No,” I said. “Not okay. But—” I glanced at Zo. She looked zoned out, and I wondered if she’d swallowed a handful of chillers in the car, or if it was just shock. “Can we talk about it in the morning? We need a place to crash.”

Riley paused. “I told you, the place is a mess…”