Robin Wasserman - Torn

“I thought the same about you,” Ani said. “Guess I was wrong.”

“So you’ve come to rescue the fair maiden from the tower?”

There was a pause. “And what if I did?”

Another pause, longer this time, like that wasn’t the answer Quinn had been expecting. “Then I hope you really like towers. Because you’re going to be stuck in this one for a long time.”

None of us was ready to admit she was right. There was no denying the fact that we were stuck behind locked doors, without any contact to the world beyond the steel dome, but it’s not like we’d expected to walk into paradise. Much less that we’d be able to just walk right out again. We would find a way.

BioMax staff were positioned at strategic points throughout the atrium, but they periodically disappeared through locked doors into some hidden portion of the dome to which we were denied access. It seemed likely that was where we would find our answers, and maybe even unrestricted access to the network that would let us document the conditions here. For whatever reason, BioMax clearly cared about persuading the world that they had our best interests at heart—which indicated that our best interests lay in revealing their lies. We could have used someone on the inside. But if Auden had been true to his word and snuck someone onto the staff, someone inclined to help us, he wasn’t making his presence known. We were on our own, and breaking an electronic lock and slipping into a forbidden zone without getting noticed by the cameras or the orgs was going to take more than luck and desperation. When the lights went out at the end of that first day, we’d yet to muster anything.

I’d expected that our best exploring would be done that night, but at ten on the dot we were herded into our dark rooms. The door shut behind us, locking with a loud click.

“Sweet dreams, my heroes,” Quinn said. “Can’t wait to see who you save tomorrow.”

She could pretend she didn’t care, but I could tell that even Quinn was allowing herself a little hope. I wasn’t the only one who felt motion was better than standing still, even if you weren’t sure what you were hurtling toward. I spent the night awake, hoping that the darkness and the quiet would facilitate some kind of brilliant insight about how to sneak into the restricted zone. But my mind strayed—away from what I could do, toward what I should have done. If I’d broadcast what I knew to the network sooner, if I’d found a way to out BioMax or stop the Brotherhood before any of this had ever happened, if all those months ago I’d let Auden kiss me and kissed him back, if I’d never gone to the waterfall and he’d never been hurt.

If Zo had been the one to get in the car that day.

It was getting easier and easier to dream without going to sleep.

Finally the lights flared; the alarm screamed; morning came. And with it a cardboard box of fresh uniforms. How thoughtful of them. I kicked it across the room, and cheap synthetic jumpsuits went flying—along with something else. Something that shouldn’t have been there at all. It clattered to the floor, blade gleaming under the fluorescents. Without hesitation, Jude snatched it off the ground and palmed it.

Ani and Quinn watched the door—if the cameras had caught our unexpected windfall and guards came blasting through, at least we’d be ready. Jude perched on his bed, slipped his hand beneath the pillow, and kept it there, drawing strength, I suspected, from the cool blade.

I knelt by the box. There was something taped into one corner: a slim plastic card. I tore off the tape and pulled it out, suspicions confirmed—it was a pass card, an exact replica of the ones the guards flashed as they slipped through their locked steel doors and into the forbidden zone.

I hid it as swiftly as Jude had hidden the knife, tracing my fingers across the smooth plastic.

Auden had come through for us after all.

I drew back my lips, feeling a sudden return to the days when every emotional response was a serious of careful decisions, a memorized series of muscles to be flexed and contracted. This is a smile. This is happy.

I couldn’t say it out loud, it was too dangerous. But the words played in my head, deliriously certain.

I know what to do with the knife .

“Don’t move,” I whispered, holding the blade a few centimeters from his skin.

Jude lay perfectly still beneath me. “Do it already,” he hissed.

It was harder than I’d thought it would be. Not the mechanics of it—those were simple. We lay in the bed together. He was on his stomach, and I straddled him, knees tight around his hips. A blanket was draped over my head, blocking the cameras but allowing in enough light that I could see the curve of his neck and the tip of the knife. I pressed my thumb against the spot, a hard, raised ridge at the base of the neck. Easy enough to slide the blade into the skin, peel away the flesh, remove the chip. It had, at least, seemed easy when I came up with the idea.

“You want me to do you first?” Jude whispered, when I hesitated.

“No. I have this.”

He’d asked me to do it. Not Ani, not Quinn. He’d wanted the knife in my hands.

It would take no more than the flexing of a single muscle to drive the blade into his back, cut a vital conduit, carve out a life. In the new age of the virus there was only this one body, and Jude was offering his up to me.

I slid the knife across the hard ridge of skin, fast and sure. He gasped, but didn’t move. “Almost done,” I said. I pressed my thumb against the lump, massaging the chip out through the small incision. It slid into view, coated in a viscous green fluid. “Got it.”

He flipped himself over without warning, and suddenly we were face-to-face. His orange eyes glowed in the dim light.

“Your turn.”

I lay beside him and bent my head. Exposed my neck. Trusted him.

It only hurt for a minute. Then I was free.

“Screw you!” Ani shouted.

“No, screw you !” Quinn leaped at her, fingers curled into claws, and went straight for her eyes. At the last minute Ani hunched her shoulder and shoved it into Quinn’s chest. Quinn tumbled backward, and Ani dropped onto her. She seized a handful of hair and gave it a vicious tug. Quinn shrieked.

Jude and I backed away from the gathering crowd, as every guard in the atrium turned his attention to the warring ex-lovers. The fight had been my idea, a lesson learned from the vidlife ordeal. The spectacle of two girls rolling on the ground and squealing exerted a gross but undeniable pull: instant diversion.

Two of Quinn’s friends had taken temporary custody of our tracking chips. Which meant that if we timed our escape correctly, no one in front of the cameras or behind them would witness us inching backward, sliding along the wall until we reached a nearly hidden door, swiping a pass card across the ID panel, and slipping out of our world and into theirs.

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this bare limbo, like a holding cell: metal walls and floor that made it feel like we were in a giant tin can.

“What’s the plan, idiots? You going to stand there until you get caught?”

“Zo?” I whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Um, saving you?” My sister dragged us a few feet down the corridor, then through an open door. She slammed it behind us, leaving us in total darkness. The space was large enough to fit the three of us, but only just. And something that felt suspiciously like a broom handle was poking into my lower back.

“Zo, did you just stuff us in a janitor’s closet?” I asked.