Robin Wasserman - Torn

“And I thought you were a Brotherhood head case,” he said. “So I guess our reputations precede us.”

She ignored him. “You’re taking me with you,” she told me.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“When you take him down,” she said. “Him and the whole corp. I’m going with you.”

“She’s spunky,” Jude said. “You sure she’s related to you?”

“Is he always this big an asshole?” Zo asked.

“Definitely related,” Jude said.

This time we both ignored him.

“So?” she prompted me. “Do we have to fight, or do you want to save the energy and give in now?”

“Why would we let you in on anything?” Jude asked, replacing his charm offensive with a real one.

“Oh, you two are a we now?”

When he didn’t crack a smile, much less fire back, Zo realized he wasn’t joking. “What’s his problem?”

“You,” Jude said.

“Yeah, I’m an ‘org.’” She made finger quotes around the word. “Deal.”

“You’re an org who went along with Savona’s crap,” Jude said. “Who decided we were subhuman, and treated your sister like dogshit you scraped off the bottom of your shoe.”

Zo squared her shoulders. “I did what I did. I didn’t know—”

“That it could have been you ?” Jude finished for her. “Changes things, doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t know what it would mean to join the Brotherhood,” Zo said firmly. “And I didn’t know… Lia. My father’s mistakes have nothing to do with that. Neither do you.”

“She’s right,” I said. They looked equally surprised. “We could use her help.”

Jude rolled his eyes. “She’s twelve.” “She’s seventeen,” Zo said. “And she’s in.”

Jude sighed. “Fine. She’s in.” He smirked at her. “But you owe me one.”

She scowled back—Zo’s version of batting her eyelashes. “So collect. I dare you.” The scowl morphed into a brilliant, triumphant smile when it was clear he was out of ammunition. “In that case, can we get out of here and go plan this thing somewhere civilized?” she added. “I realize you two don’t care, but it’s about zero degrees out here and I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

I let her tromp through the mud ahead of us, which gave me a chance to dig my nails into Jude’s arm and, quietly but firmly, make one thing clear. “My sister is off-limits. ”

“She’s an org,” he said, as if that settled the issue.

“Like that would stop you.”

“Jealous?”

“Screw you.”

“Then we don’t have a problem.”

“Jude…” I let it hang there, my tone the best threat I could muster.

“She’s a big girl,” he said. “Seems like she can protect herself. In fact she seems a lot like you.”

“She’s nothing like me.”

“Really? Huh.” Jude put on his thoughtful look. “Funny, because she definitely reminds me of someone.”

I knew what he was thinking, because I’d been thinking it too, ever since the day I met him.

You , I thought, but I would never say it out loud, especially not to him. She reminds you of you.

Waiting was interminable. As was playing along, playing the roles that had been written for me: Riley’s dutiful girlfriend, keeping her simmering rage under control; BioMax’s willing stooge, putting aside her personal feelings for the sake of a greater cause. This was key, Jude assured me, when I balked at showing my face the next morning for a weekly meeting with Kiri, Ben, and my father. I had to find out what he’d told them, and if they knew that I knew; I had to pretend I was past it, over it, somehow beyond it, or risk losing all access. It seemed like a wasted effort—if they knew, then it was over. Ben might be dense, but surely even he wouldn’t believe that I’d forgive the corp for what they’d done, no matter how many “proud to be a mech” soliloquies I may have delivered at their beck and call. But when I arrived for the meeting, Kiri hadn’t yet arrived, and Ben seemed neither surprised to see me nor overly solicitous. There was only one small, irrelevant matter to be dispensed with—“Your father says an important matter’s come up that he has to deal with, and he’ll have to step away from our project for a bit; he said you’d understand”—before we got down to business. I did understand. As far as my father was concerned, this was a family issue, and we would deal with it—or hide it—as a family. My father loved his boundaries, his neat little compartments. This time he’d left all of them vulnerable.

Good.

Ben and I sat there, on our own, waiting for Kiri and doing our best to ignore each other’s presence. He buried himself in his ViM screen while I pretended to focus on mine, trying not to leap across the table, wrap my hands around his throat, and force him to tell me what he knew.

But I had to do something.

I started pacing, which seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to do when you were nervous and frustrated and killing time. But I realized, as soon as I started wearing a track in the rug—seventeen steps to the end of the room, turning on my heel, then back again—that there was a reason people were always talking about pacing but never actually did it. It was boring. And more than a little odd-looking.

“What are you doing?” Ben asked, finally looking up from his screen.

“Nothing.” I returned to my seat, taking the long way around so I could catch a glimpse of what he was staring at so intently, just in case it was something I wasn’t supposed to see. Which it was, but not in the way I’d expected. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?” I teased.

The girl in the pic couldn’t have been more than seventeen. She was pretty, if not in a particularly flashy way. Except for the brown hair, she looked a lot like Zo, though it may have just been her scowl.

“I wouldn’t have thought that was really your style,” I added. Ben’s tastes ran to conspicuously expensive suits that were always fashion-forward, if in the blandest of ways, and I’d never seen him less than impeccably attired. The girl on the screen was wearing some kind of faded flash dress two sizes too small, and not in the “oops, my button popped!” kind of way.

Ben slammed the ViM on the table, screen down, and glared at me. “She’s my daughter,” he said quietly.

“Oh.”

That made significantly more sense.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“That’s right. You didn’t.”

He didn’t lift the screen, nor did he look at me. Not for several long minutes, until Kiri walked in and the meeting began. Then he was all business again, same old Ben, smooth and insincere. Except that he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wondered if the subject of fathers and daughters cut a little too close to home when it came to me—if that meant he knew what BioMax had made my father do.

Or if it was something else. More secrets.

“We have a proposition for you,” Ben said, toward the end of the meeting. “And I think once you consider it, you’ll see the wisdom in—”

“You’re going to hate it,” Kiri cut in. No-bullshit Kiri , that’s how I thought of her, and now I couldn’t look at her without thinking, Did you know? Who was in the room, when they decided? Who was left that I could trust? Another reason I needed those files—but these offices were just for show; there was no access to anything. Even if I managed to get hold of Kiri’s or Ben’s ViM and get in remotely, Jude and I were reasonably sure they wouldn’t show us much. BioMax, like most corps, kept their dirty little secrets on secure, firewalled servers—likely nothing that could stand up against the full weight of a network invasion, but nothing we’d be able to topple remotely on our own. We had to get in at the source.