Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“Oh, please.” He rolled his eyes. “I see the time away hasn’t cured you of your inclination to melodrama. ‘Saved myself’? From what? As if they’ll be able to wring any dirty little secrets out of your location.” He shook his head. “Trust me, you’re not that interesting.” He rubbed his hands across his face, a neat little simulation of org exhaustion. “Yes, I can jam the tracking. And no , I’m not about to do it for everyone. It doesn’t occur to you that there may come a time when we can make the trackers work to our advantage? We don’t want them knowing we can screw with the data. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that you don’t put your cards on the table until you have to?”

I hated to admit it, but he was making sense. That was the problem with Jude—he always made sense. He was too good at rationalizing, turning his whims into logical inevitabilities.

“All I know is you pretended we were all in this together,” I said. “And then you did this, on your own.”

He’s not your friend . But that was Ben’s voice in my head. And beneath my anger, there was something else—maybe it was the fact that Jude had voluntarily revealed one of his precious secrets, one guaranteed to make me hate him. Or maybe it was the moment when, for just one second, the mask had fallen away, exposing his need. He needed me to believe him innocent. And I almost did.

“You think I don’t care about you? Them?” He swept his arms out to encompass the estate. Inexplicably, he was angry too—as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. “I’m doing this all for you!”

“Excuse me if I can’t quite see how you selling us out to BioMax is helping .”

“Because I’m taking care of it!” he shouted. “I make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t see. I know everything they know. Everything. ”

There was a long silence as I processed what he’d said. And he realized what he’d revealed.

If it were anyone else, I would have said he looked almost afraid.

“You get the GPS feed?” This wasn’t anger. I’d moved beyond anger. The thought of Jude sitting in front of a screen, watching us drift through our lives, watching over us like the Faithers’ god, probably delusional enough to believe that he was sitting in judgment rather than violation? That was sickening.

“You’d rather they knew everything, and we know nothing?” he said defensively, his voice rising. “Someone has to watch our backs.”

“And you love it, don’t you?” I said coldly. “Watching.”

It was one thing to know that strangers at BioMax were watching over my shoulder—even call-me-Ben was nothing more than a pretty face with a boring name attached, paid to pretend he cared about where I went and what I did. As for my father, he’d always been a watcher, keeping tabs on everything, from the hours I put in at the track to the experimental error rate in my biotech homework. That’s what fathers did. They paid attention, even when they weren’t supposed to.

But Jude was supposed to be one of us.

I felt like he’d stripped off my clothes, exposed my naked body.

Except it was even worse. Because the body was just an object. Eventually it would break or break down, and so what? It would be interchangeable with whatever came next. Only our minds were inviolate—that’s what Jude had taught us, wasn’t it? The thing that separated us from the orgs, the thing that made us mechs, that made us special . We lived in our heads. Unlike the orgs, we didn’t fool ourselves into believing that our bodies mattered. Only our minds were alive, and they belonged to us .

But now Jude had reached his long fingers inside my head and carved out a space for himself. He’d crawled inside me, without my permission, without my knowledge.

And he’d watched.

There was nothing personal in a location, I reminded myself. GPS coordinates weren’t diary entries. They only told him where I was, not who, not why.

But it was my choice whether or not to tell him anything.

And he’d taken that away.

I didn’t run. I didn’t turn around, skid down the hill of green, back to the road to nowhere.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jude said. Nearly pleaded.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I can.” Even if it means mass panic? I thought. Even if Jude’s right and we might need this later, when it really counts?

“I’m not going to try to convince you I’m right—”

“Good.”

“I’m going to bribe you,” he said, regaining a little of his composure. “You keep your mouth shut, and I’ll jam your tracker too. I’ll feed BioMax a false stream—no one will know where you go, not BioMax. Not me.”

Not my father. Not anyone.

“And let everyone else keep getting spied on?” I asked. “Turn myself into as big a liar as you are?”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the plan. Or tell whoever the hell you want and spend the rest of your life with the fine folks of BioMax crawling up your ass, watching your every move.”

I wasn’t the same self-centered bitch I’d been before the download. But I guess I was close enough. “Okay,” I said finally. Hating myself.

At least he didn’t smile.

“You really think you’ll be able to keep this to yourself?” he said.

I nodded.

He rolled his eyes. “You’ll last five minutes. Tops. So here’s the deal: You’ve got such a burning need to spill your guts, spill to Riley. You two are so tight now, so into your little secrets. I’m sure he won’t mind keeping another one. Especially for me.”

“You’re so sure he’ll just do whatever you tell him?”

Jude didn’t answer; he didn’t have to.

“All that time we were in the city, you knew,” I realized. “And when those orgs grabbed me, you—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to ground myself in the present, to shut out the sickening sensation that I was still tied to a chair, waiting, just imagining that I’d escaped. “You claim we should have called for help, but you knew where we were the whole time—and you did nothing.”

Jude stood up, brushing the grime off his jeans, starting into the house. “Not all of us do everything we want, whenever we want.”

I recognized the insult. But there was something else buried in there too. I just didn’t get it. If he’d wanted to rescue me, what had stopped him?

What’s the difference? I thought, disgusted with myself for even entertaining the idea of Jude rescuing me like I was some helpless maiden waiting for her noble prince.

He is not your friend.

“What are we really doing here, Jude?” I asked. “What’s the point of all this? What do you want ?”

“At least you’re finally starting to ask the right questions.” And he turned his back on me and went inside.

I told Riley that night. We sat in my bedroom with the door closed, both of us on the floor, our backs propped against the wall, our knees drawn to our chests, a foot of space between us.

He didn’t react when I told him what had happened to Mika and Sari, at least what little I knew. And he didn’t react when I told him about the trackers. He didn’t say anything until I told him that Jude had known all along.

“He must have a good reason,” he said then.

I almost laughed. “Why? Because he’s Jude , giver of all knowledge and wisdom, keeper of the peace?”

“Because he’s Jude,” Riley said, and he wasn’t joking. “I trust him. I wish you did. Maybe then we wouldn’t have…”

“You blame me.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. And I shouldn’t have cared so much. “I made you take me to the city. I didn’t let you voice Jude. I screwed everything up. Is that about right?”