Robin Wasserman - Torn

“Not like I am.”

“You want me to throw a tantrum? Will that convince you?”

“Joke about it,” I said. “Pretend it’s nothing. Whatever.”

“Lia, look at me.”

“I am looking at you.” But I wasn’t. I was looking at his forehead, and the silver lock of hair that kept slipping over his eyes. I was looking at his hands, slim fingers resting on the bench, unclenched and untroubled. I was looking at the door just over his shoulder, wondering what would happen when we broke through, if changing what came next would matter even though it couldn’t change what had come before. I was looking anywhere but at him.

“I didn’t get to say anything to him, before it happened.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. “I didn’t get to tell him… He thought I didn’t care.” I could still see myself in that parking lot, would always see myself, frozen, looking up at Riley, cartoon shock painted across my face. Looking at him and judging him and saying nothing. Letting him walk away.

“You’re wrong.”

“I should have gone with him,” I said.

“Great idea,” Jude said. “You could have both uploaded, and then you’d both be dead. Is that what you want?”

“It’s what I should want.”

Now it was Jude who looked away.

“Why did you?” he asked finally. “Let him leave.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew what he meant.

“That day. If you wanted to stop him, why didn’t you?”

He asked like he already knew the answer. That made one of us. But before I could come up with something, two BioMax goons appeared before us, jackets strategically swept back to reveal their holsters, refuting an argument we hadn’t thought to make.

“I’m going to need you to come with us,” one of them said.

“Kind of busy here,” Jude said, looping an arm around me. His other hand crawled across my knee and up my thigh. “If you know what I mean…”

I forced a smile. “What he said,” I told the guard. “Maybe you could come back later?”

“Now,” said the talky one, while the other one rested a hand on the butt of his pulse gun.

Jude and I exchanged a look: Whatever this was, we were going to have to postpone the strike. Ani and Quinn had their eyes on us from across the room, and hopefully Zo was catching this on one of the monitors and would figure out she needed to wait. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t caught Zo, too.

We followed the guards along the same path we’d mapped out for ourselves—through the locked door, down the corridor, coming nearer and nearer to the central vents.

I wondered if there was some way we could turn this to our advantage. I had the toxin on me—if we could distract the guards for a minute and slip away… “Maybe if you told us exactly what the problem is?”

“No problem,” the chatty one said. “Not anymore.” He grabbed me, snatched my thrashing arms behind my back, looping them together with plastic twine. I screamed, and he shoved something thick and scratchy into my open mouth, then pulled a bag over my head. I was blind, mute, and bound, all in under ten seconds. And from the sound of things—an angry oof from the other guard, a scuffle, a muffled scream, then silence—things had gone about the same for Jude.

Meaty hands folded my knees to my chest, and I felt myself lifted off the ground for a moment, then gently placed back down. Into something, it turned out, because soon the ground lifted beneath me, like I’d been loaded into a giant sling, and, cradled in the darkness, we began to move. Going somewhere—wherever this guy wanted me to go.

So much for saving the day. But I wasn’t thinking about the mechs we were leaving behind—I was thinking about myself.

I was afraid.

He can’t hurt me, I told myself, the familiar mantra kicking in, except now it was a lie, because now this body was all I had, and if he broke it, that was it. No more second chances. No more extra lives.

No more Lia.

So this is how garbage feels, I thought, right before it gets dumped.

Scared. Hopeless. And very alone.

Would they leave me in a landfill? Toss me in a lake? Bury me so deep no one would hear me scream, which I would only be able to do once decades passed and the gag in my mouth decayed to dust? Or maybe they’d decided to get rid of me for good. A trash compactor would do the trick, though why grind up the body when it would be so easy to wipe the mind?

I wondered what it would be like to not exist. Maybe some part of me still would, deep in the bowels of BioMax, where for all I knew they’d lobotomized my stored neural patterns the way they had so many others, and some other, obediently simple-minded version of me was piloting war planes and enjoying target practice on guerrilla warriors.

This is what human garbage thinks about, on its way to the dump. Until the bag drops to the ground and hands reach in and pull it out.

Then all thinking stops, replaced with blind, animal panic.

Even when the garbage is a machine. Simulated emotion seems real enough when that emotion is stark terror, when every inch of you is singing out an alarm of I don’t want to die .

They pulled out the gag, and the scream began again as if it had never stopped.

“Enough drama, we get it,” a deeply familiar but somehow alien voice informed me. Alien because I’d never heard it sound like this: authoritative, impatient, absolutely certain.

Familiar because it belonged to my mother.

I was in a van, windowless and in motion, filled with people I would have preferred never to see again. Jude and I sat in the back, sandwiched between the two BioMax guards, who, as it turned out, didn’t work for BioMax at all. They worked for my mother. Who sat in the front seat, shoulder to shoulder with call-me-Ben.

At least it looked like my mother, but my mother wasn’t the type to hire armed guards, or to kidnap her own daughter, or to bark commands like “Shut him up”—when Jude’s gag came out and then promptly went back in again until he’d promised to behave—and “Stop acting like a child.” She’d always been the one who acted like a child, so easily persuaded by my father that whatever she’d done was wrong.

My mother didn’t have steel in her voice.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked, glaring at call-me-Ben, because starting with him was easier than figuring out what this new mother had done with the old one.

“Ben’s doing me a favor,” she said.

“If that’s what you want to call it,” Ben said, then mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “blackmail.”

She favored him with an icy smile. “I simply explained to your friend what I knew about the inner workings of his corp and how reluctant he might be for certain information to emerge.”

“We’ve already gone public with everything,” I said. “No one cares about what BioMax does to mechs.”

“Your version of ‘everything’ is somewhat narrow, dear. And the ‘public’ isn’t exactly anyone’s greatest concern. Ben knows that when I talk, the right people listen. So he decided on a different course.”

“Kidnapping me?”

“Extricating you from a dangerous situation,” my mother said. “One I would never have guessed you were foolish enough to put yourself into. I wasn’t about to leave you there.”

“So you trusted him ?” Jude asked.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” she said coolly. “ Both of you. Though I can’t say that was my intent.”

The guards dropped their heads. “I told you, taking him seemed like the best way not to make a scene,” one of them mumbled. “Didn’t think you’d care—”