Robin Wasserman - Torn

They left that to bratty little sisters.

I pounded my fists against the door, again and again, harder each time, knowing that my mother would lose any game of wills she tried to play, because she was only human, and I was not. I could bang on that door for the rest of eternity.

It took less than an hour to wear her down.

“I’m not letting you out,” she said, from the other side of the steel door. “This is for your own good.”

“I know. I was just thinking, maybe if you let me get in touch with—”

“We don’t need any more of your helpful little mech friends swarming around here,” she said. “I think one is enough, don’t you?”

Jude, who was trying to break through the window despite my assurances it was virtually impossible, stopped his useless tinkering long enough to give the door a dirty look.

“It’s not that.” I rested my weight against the door, letting my forehead kiss the cool steel. When was the last time my mother had come up to my bedroom? When I was seven? Eight, maybe? However old I was before I’d gotten “too old” for bedtime stories and tucking in. Stop babying her, my father had said, and then I’d jumped on board with I’m no baby, and my mother had blushed, and that had been it: no more night-lights, no more stories, no more sweet-dreams kisses. My bedroom became my property, and I got my bedtime stories off the network; my mother retreated to the estate’s other wing. “I’m thinking about Zo.”

“What about her?” came the slow, careful response from the other side of the door.

“I’m worried about her.”

“Have you talked to her?” she asked.

“No. Have you?”

No answer.

“If she knew that I was here, maybe she would… you know.”

“ Forgive me?” My mother’s voice twisted on the word. Proving again, she was no fool.

“She doesn’t have to forgive you,” I said. “She just has to come home. And maybe she will, if she thinks I was willing to.”

“Why would you want her to think that?”

Good question. “It’s not safe for her out there on her own,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Jude whispered. I waved him off. My house, my mother, my sister: my game.

“But it’s safe for you ?” my mother said.

“I’m different,” I said. “Zo’s still a kid. And besides, I’m stuck here, right? So maybe something good can come out of it. Maybe if Zo knew the truth about you, if you gave her a chance to know what was actually going on—”

“I stayed with your father,” she said. “That’s what’s going on. I let him do whatever he wanted. No one’s wrong about that. It’s just the truth.”

“It’s not the whole truth. She deserves to know that.”

There was a long pause. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

I wasn’t ready for her to leave. “Mom.”

She didn’t say anything. For all I knew, she was already gone. I didn’t know her anymore; I didn’t know what to expect.

“Thanks,” I said finally. I meant it to help the lie.

Or maybe I just meant it.

There was another eternal pause. Then, “For what?”

“For trying.”

It was past midnight when the door eased open. “Shut up and let’s go,” Zo hissed, before Jude could open his big mouth and wake the house.

She brandished a slim silver cylinder that I assumed she’d used to pick the electronic lock. “You are so lucky you’re not an only child,” she whispered, as we crept out of the bedroom and down the hall toward Zo’s old room.

“And you are so lucky that Mom still knocks herself out on chillers every night, or your big, clomping feet would get us both thrown back into Kahn jail.”

She grinned. “You’re welcome.”

Zo’s bedroom was better equipped for a breakout than mine. “Nothing I haven’t done before,” she whispered, grabbing a compressible wire ladder from under her mattress and hooking it to the window frame. She swept out a gallant hand. “Ladies first.”

It had been a strange year. But there’d been nothing stranger than scaling the side of my own house, dim moonglow lighting the ladder rungs as I climbed, hand over hand, three stories down. Feeling like a criminal, stealing into the night with the Kahn family valuables, and our father might have pointed out that was exactly what I was doing— my most valuable possessions, he called us when we were little, and I’d taken it as a compliment, proud to be valued more highly than the new car. His to protect; his to destroy. Mine to creep through the darkness, following Zo as she darted in and out of the motion detectors’ sweep, avoided the cameras, deactivated the electronic gate, led us to freedom—freedom in the form of a beat-up two-door Chevrelle, Auden at the wheel.

“How’d you know?” Jude asked, as we piled into the car.

“Got the call from Mommy dearest.” Zo snorted. “Like I was supposed to believe Lia came crawling home, and wanted me for one big family reunion? Big sis is stupid—”

I jabbed her in the side.

“—but not that stupid,” Zo allowed, grinning at me. “And clearly, you’re lucky to have such a proficient juvenile delinquent for a sister.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

We holed up in Riley’s place, memories of him everywhere, looking for a way to fix what we’d all helped to break. Zo wanted to sneak back into the corp-town, bust everyone out. Auden wanted to go public, turn himself in to the authorities—turn himself into a martyr, if it would help, or a devil, if that would help more. And Jude was characteristically silent about what he actually wanted, uncharacteristically silent about everything.

But Zo couldn’t risk showing her face at the corp-town again, not with our mother on a rampage and Zo’s presumably suspicious disappearance timed with our own. Quinn and Ani had their own share of the toxin. We had to trust them to figure out something to do with it. Auden’s plan was just as craptastic, relying as it did on mythical authorities of an objective nature unaffiliated with any of the corps, unswayed by power and credit we didn’t have. Given that all of the secops were owned by one corp or another, that BioMax was in business with all of them, and that the Justice Department—the only arm of the government not officially licensed out to private enterprise—was also the one that hated mechs the most, we had a better chance of tracking down a unicorn. Turn himself in and he’d promptly disappear, only to resurface once BioMax and the Brotherhood had done whatever they planned to do and were ready to parade their scapegoat for public shaming.

We’d dropped what we knew and what we suspected about Safe Haven onto the network, posting it to every zone we could—knowing that most would get purged by BioMax and the rest would likely be lost in the noise, seeming no more or less credible than any of the other rumors flying about the skinner plague, as it was being called. Some probably even believed us—not just the crackpots who matched our claims with conspiracies of their own, but the occasional sane, sober observers who were inclined to suspect the corps were up to no good. Some wished us well, some even raised a little online ruckus, but none was in a position to help.

We were on our own. Two machines. Two orgs. Four teenagers with no power and no plan. At least Auden was on the run from nefarious cult leaders and corporate overlords. As opposed to me, hiding out from my mother.

It wasn’t the most promising of revolutionary cabals.

“We can’t do anything about what’s going to happen inside Safe Haven,” I said. “But we can stop phase three. Or at least we can try.”

“We can’t stop it if we don’t even know what it is,” Jude said, sounding defeated.