Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“He had you,”I pointed out. “He took me instead.”

“Because that was easier.”

Because he knew you’d fight back, I thought, disgusted with myself. Because he knew I couldn’t.

“And he needs me to get Jude,”Riley added. “He wants both of us.”

“Why?”

There was another pause so long, I was afraid he’d gone.

“So do we have a plan?”I asked. “I assume Jude’s not just going to walk in and give himself up?”

Say yes, I thought. Say Jude’s already here, ready to play martyr.

But Jude didn’t do martyr, any more than I did damsel in distress. Self-preservation was his defining quality. Like it was supposed to be mine—I just wasn’t proving to be very good at it. Maybe Jude would sacrifice himself for someone else. For Riley, maybe—I was sure Riley thought so. Maybe even for Ani. Never for me.

“It’s complicated,”Riley said again, like I didn’t know what that meant. “But we’ll find you. Wynn’s got the top thirty floors of the east tower. Security’s good but not perfect. We can get through. Find you.”

“Take your time,”I said, wondering if sarcasm could travel through the VM line. “Not like I’m in any—”

The door eased open.

“Lia? What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Later. Company’s here.”A tall, slender figure stood in the doorway. It was too dark to see his face.

“I’ll get you out of there, I promise.”

Feel free to hurry, I thought. The man stepped into the room, slamming the door shut behind him. “Wynn?” I guessed.

A hard laugh. “Not as dumb as they said.” His voice was deep but hoarse, like the words scraped his throat on their way out.

“This is insane.”

Another laugh, more genuine this time. “Damn right. Welcome to the city, skinner.”

“I’ve never done anything to you.” It sounded lame, even as I said it, like I was starring in a vidlife, reciting someone else’s script, forced to play out the scene, though we all knew how it would end.

“You picked the wrong people to be friends with,” he said. “Bad luck. And they owe me. So now you pay up.”

“Whatever you want. I’ve got plenty of credit, I can—” But even in the dark, I could see he was shaking his head.

“Eye for an eye, baby.” His face was an unnerving blank in the dark. “Life for a life.”

Jude would never give himself up, not for me, I thought. And even if he did, this guy might never let me go. Everything in a city belonged to someone, Riley had told me, and you never gave up what you had, not if you were smart. Wynn wasn’t stupid, not if he’d set this whole thing in motion. I belonged to him.

“I never had a skinner before,” he said, approaching me. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t do anything but watch the shadow loom, the dim outline of a hand swoop toward my face. He dragged his knuckles across my cheek. Softly. Rested a hand on the back of my neck. Gently. Bent his head to mine, his lips feathering across my ear. “This could get interesting.”

The door exploded. There was a burst of light, someone screamed—maybe it was Wynn, maybe it was me—and a thud. Wynn’s body, smacking the floor. The man who’d shot him, his green uniform and black faceplate illuminated by dancing flashlights, ducked back into the hallway, leaving me alone again. Out there it sounded like a war, or at least the way war sounded on the vids: voices shouting on top of one another, boots pounding, thuds and thumps like punches landing, bodies falling, “Fucking animals!” someone yelled, another shot, and then silence. In the room, just one mech tied to a chair, an org sprawled at her feet.

A phalanx of secops marched in, stunshots drawn. “Lia Kahn?” the lead guy said.

It wasn’t a real question, so I didn’t bother answering.

“You’re coming with us.” Though the unidirected sonic blast of the stunshot could knock an org unconscious in seconds, we both knew it wouldn’t have any effect on me. Not that it mattered. I was outnumbered, outpowered—and almost as eager to get out as they were to bring me in.

As two of them began to untie me, a third kicked Wynn out of his way. His body rolled a few feet, then stopped, one arm flung over his head, palm up, fingers slightly bent as if he were holding an invisible hand. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

I never saw his face.

They wore the standard green uniform of secop foot soldiers, a Synapsis logo swooshing across their chests to mark where their loyalties lay. Less a fashion statement than a fail-safe, the logo housed tracking and recording tech, relaying all data back to their corp-town bosses. For the lawless, it meant that once one secop had found you, they all had. For the secops, it meant Big Brother was always watching.

For me it meant there was no point in fighting back or running away, not unless I wanted my face on record as resisting a security action, which meant automatic detention. Given the other things my face was on record doing, detention no longer seemed much of a worst-case scenario. But there was the small matter of being tied to a chair.

Three of the men in green swarmed around me while two others guarded the door, their stunshots aimed at the hallway. There was no movement out there, no noise. Meaty hands untied the knots around my wrists and ankles.

“Hold still,” one growled, and without giving me a chance to obey, yanked my arms out in front of me. He clamped my wrists together in his large grip.

I reminded myself not to knee him in the groin. “You don’t have to—Hey!”

With his other hand he slipped a pair of cuffs from his belt and, with a smooth, practiced flick, snapped them around one wrist, then the other. The metal edges chewed into my skin.

“It only hurts if you fight it,” he muttered.

Nothing hurts me, you crackbrain. But I stopped straining against the cuffs. “How did you find me?” I asked, not expecting much of an answer. I didn’t get one. I didn’t get anything: no concerned questions, no reassurances, no urgency, just silent efficiency as they hoisted me out of the chair like I was an object. I got it. This wasn’t a rescue operation. It was a retrieval.

But how did they know where to find me?

The burliest of the secops slung me over his shoulder, treating me to another ass in my face, another upside-down ride. This time I wasn’t blindfolded. So I saw Sari and Mika as we passed—saw their bodies, that is, faces planted into the dirty floor, limbs twisted at wrong angles. A gun lay on the ground next to Sari; a knife glinted by Mika’s shoulder. The four bodies laying next to them, all strangers, rested next to equally useless weapons.

The privatization of security operations meant no more guns, I reminded myself. At least not the bullet-shooting kind that drilled bloody holes in your head.

And there was no blood.

Just unconscious, I told myself. The secops would have stunned them like they did to Bliss Tanzen’s boyfriend that time he took too many Xers and tried to set the school on fire.

But that guy’s father had been VP and part owner of the Freetower Corp, and the secops knew it. We were in a city now, where no one owned anything. And the bodies weren’t moving.

“Are they dead?” I forced myself to ask as my head bounced against the secop’s back. I could feel his shrug; my body rose and fell with his jerking shoulder.