Robin Wasserman - Shattered

He grunted. “What’s the difference?”

Another room. Another lock. Another chair. At least I wasn’t tied down, even if I was still trapped. And this time, I wasn’t alone.

There were six of us. All with the same blond hair, the same blue eyes, the same pale hands with long, tapered fingers, the same pert nose and full lips. I was beautiful, there was no arguing that.

Just not unique.

It was one of those impersonal, featureless waiting rooms—beige walls, beige tiling, uncomfortable beige chairs—and it should have been easy to imagine that we were just waiting for a doctor’s appointment or some kind of disciplinary encounter with the school principal. But there were little touches—the lack of a ViM screen on the wall, of windows, of anything that wasn’t nailed down, the uniform glowering by the door, the small Synapsis logos engraved into the ceiling tiles—that made it impossible to forget where we were. This wasn’t the kind of place in which people waited by choice.

“What?” the girl next to me said suddenly. “You’re staring.”

“No I wasn’t,” I said, quickly looking away. But everywhere I looked, there I was. In sonicshirts and net-linked hoodies and Zo-style retro gear, in full-on org drag and in silver-streaked mech mode that even Jude would be envious of. And still, all of them so much like looking in a mirror that when the girl turned to me, I had to touch my own lips to make sure they weren’t wearing the same scowl. I kept my eyes on my lap, which seemed safer. “You know what we’re doing here, anyway?”

“Quiet!” the secop at the door snapped.

The girl with my face just shrugged, unintimidated. “Don’t you watch the vids?” she whispered. “They called in every F-three-one-six-five in a two-hundred-mile radius of Synapsis. Can you blame them, after what happened?”

It hadn’t been difficult to memorize my serial number: F3165-11 . It popped up on the glowing readouts that scrolled across my eyescreen whenever I performed a self-diagnostic check. F for female; 11 for my place in the production line of identical models. I’d never bothered to ask what the other numbers meant, since all I needed to know was that they meant me —along with everyone else in the room.

Called us in, she had said, but no one called me. They found me—they must have known where to look. Riley? I thought. Maybe he’d decided it was the only way. Maybe I’d been stupid one too many times, trusting my life to a near stranger who’d made it very clear he only cared about two people: Jude and himself.

“So you think one of them did it?” I asked, eyeing the other Lia’s. Not Lia, I reminded myself. “What’s your name?” I asked abruptly, before she could answer my first question.

“Why?” she asked. “You think I’m the one who did it?”

“Sorry, I just—”

“Kidding. I’m Katya.” She held out a hand for me to shake. But I couldn’t force myself to take it. “So was it you?”

“No!”

“Quiet!” the guard barked again, loudly enough that we both flinched.

“Trank out,” the other girl advised. “They just want to talk to us and then they’ll let us go home.”

Not all of us, I thought. Not the one they’re looking for . I was innocent—but how was I supposed to explain where they’d found me? Of course, if Riley had told them that much, maybe he’d told them everything. They could already know I’d run from Synapsis.

“And you believe them? That they’ll just send us home?” I asked.

The mech shrugged, looking like she didn’t have time to care. With her smooth, blond hair, self-assured smile, and immaculate clothes, she looked more like me than I did. It was like watching myself in a vid, acting out a scene I had no memory of performing.

“Why not?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

The door swung open, and a woman in a dowdy tech-free suit with the telltale Synapsis logo stencil across its collar poked her head in. “F-three-one-six-five-eleven,” she said, glancing at a ViM that fit discreetly in the palm of her hand. “Lia Kahn.”

“So you were nowhere near Synapsis Corp-Town at the time of the attack.” Detective Ayer’s voice was nearly as flat as that of a newbie mech, but she was org all the way. You could tell by her dry, flaky skin, pulled too tight by some cut-rate lift-tuck and not helped in any way by the stiff copper curls molded around her face. I knew the corps screened kids around the age of ten, tracking them for manual labor, for data entry, for the factories, wherever their aptitude would allow them to excel, and I wondered what it was about Detective Ayer that had screamed secops. Obviously it had been the right verdict—the corps only farmed out their best officers for off-site work. So she was either unusually good or unusually determined. Or both.

“How many times are you going to ask me the same question?”

“Until I get the truth.”

The car, I thought suddenly in alarm. What if they’d found our car at Synapsis and somehow traced it back to me? I tried not to panic. The car belonged to some mech I barely knew, who had contributed it for general use when he arrived at Quinn’s estate. There was nothing connecting it to me.

And that’s all you care about, right? Jude taunted in my head. You. Who cares what happens to anyone else?

“Were you in Synapsis at the time of the attack?” the detective asked impatiently.

“Of course not,” I said. Think frivolous, I told myself. Think oblivious, superficial, bitchy. In other words, Think Lia Kahn. If I could will myself back to that person, the org Lia Kahn, who would never have been caught dead hanging out with Jude and his lackeys, much less running errands for him in a slummy corp-town, if I could convince myself, then I could convince her too, and she would let me go home. Or wherever. “Why would I be slumming in a corp-town?”

“Why slum in a city ?” she countered. “Odd choice of field trip for a pampered little rich girl like you.”

“Um, because the city is wow?” I suggested with a giggle. “You can do anything. ” Wide eyes, dim smile.

And maybe it was working. Because Ayer gave up her pacing and sat down across from me at the narrow metal table. The interrogation room was small and spare, without the mirrored wall I expected from the old-time vids. But the mini-cams posted in each corner got the message across pretty clearly: Someone was watching. Ayer propped her elbows on the table and folded her hands. She rested her chin on her knuckles. “So you just snuck into the city last night to have a little harmless fun?” she prompted, almost kindly.

I nodded.

“And things got carried away?”

“It was like, I just wanted to take a pic and post it on my zone, you know?” I babbled, as if I was too nervous to filter my words. “Because last time I snuck into the city, Cass and Terra didn’t believe me, like I’d just make something up, and okay, it’s not like I actually went into the city, but I think it should count if you just, you know, get close enough to see. And smell it, if you know what I mean.”

“I thought you mechs couldn’t smell,” Ayer said thinly.

“Right. Um. I mean, that was before. But I’m a… skinner now, right? So I figured I could do it, and I just asked this guy if I could take a pic of us together, and he totally freaked out and went all crazy on me, like he was on some kind of schizo shocker trip, and then I’m, like, tied to a chair .”

“Must have been pretty scary,” Ayer said.

I nodded again, eagerly—maybe too eagerly. “So can I go now?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t want those city guys to know I got them in trouble or anything, so…”