Robin Wasserman - Shattered

At Savona’s command the screens overhead began streaming images from the corp-town attack, but even that was easier than listening to Auden. Ani was rapt, but I just looked away. Into the crowd, careful not to meet anyone’s eye but helpless not to search their faces, wondering what had drawn them here. What it was about their lives that hating me would remedy.

I didn’t find answers. Instead I found too much to recognize, fuel for paranoid imagination. A dusty blond head peeking over the crowd became Zo; a squarish face covered in brown scruff glanced at me with eyes I could imagine bleeding on the floor of Synapsis Corp-Town; a dead girl with pink hair clutched her dead mother’s hand. They couldn’t be here; none of them could. I wouldn’t give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some disease—the aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guilt—I couldn’t erase their impossible faces.

So I shut my lids and shut them out.

“We can’t forget!” Savona was shouting. “We can’t be lulled into a false sense of security by their assurances that this will never happen again. This will happen again! And again! And again! Unless we stop them. Unless we send the message, loud and clear, to each and every skinner. That you are not one of us !”

Ani nudged me, and I opened my eyes again, fixing on Savona, ignoring the crowd.

“Today, together, we forge a new beginning!” he ranted. “Your presence here is a promise. Standing here today we enter into a bond with our neighbors, with our Brothers. We cele-brate our humanity!”

Auden leaned forward to whisper something in Savona’s ear. He nodded. “This is no metaphor, friends. No empty words. We are more than words, remember. More than mind. We are alive , mind and body, and we embrace that fact, as we embrace one another. So go ahead!” he shouted. “Embrace your Brother, embrace your Sister, celebrate the bond we forge together!”

The people around us shifted uncomfortably.

“What’s he talking about?” I murmured to Ani.

She shook her head. “Don’t know. He’s never done this before.”

“I mean it!” Savona cried. “The network has torn us so far from one another, turning us into a sterile community of words and thoughts. Fight back. Here, now, fight back. Affirm your existence, the fact that you are here, not just in spirit, not just in mind, but in body. You are alive, you are human, as are we all. Embrace it!”

Tentatively at first, then enthusiastically, the audience turned in on itself, stranger greeting stranger, shaking hands, hugging, as Ani and I shrank toward each other, searching for an escape before someone could touch us. But there was no safe path through the crowd. The orgs closed in.

“Don’t be shy, honey.” A woman with a round, pockmarked face opened her bulging arms and swept me into them.

I felt her muscles stiffen.

Her body pull away.

Saw her eyes sweep me up and down.

Heard her scream.

“Skinner!”

And then it was chaos. A hand yanked the hood off my face. More hands tore at my shirt, pulled me away from Ani, into a teeming mass of writhing limbs, twisted faces. And the chant, Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! shaking the room. Gobs of spit splattered against my face.

“You’re lucky you’re a girl,” a man snarled, his fingers clamped down on the back of my neck, his thick, calloused lips peeled back from rotting teeth.

“It’s not a girl,” the woman beside him snapped. And to prove the point, she drove her fist into my stomach. It didn’t hurt, but I doubled over with the impact. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me down to my knees. Behind me, someone grabbed my shoulders, held me down. I could fight back against one, against three, but not against hundreds, and I imagined myself on the ground, trampled by the herd, feet grinding my body into the floor, like my feet had stomped the corp-town bodies, and wondered if it was what I deserved.

“Stop.” Auden’s voice, amplified and quiet at the same time, somehow cutting through the storm.

At his command, the grip on my shoulders relaxed. I shrugged it off and stumbled to my feet as the crowd dropped back a few steps. A circle of empty space formed around us. Ani sat on the ground, looking dazed, her hoodie torn. Someone had ripped a small patch of blue hair out of her head. Up onstage, Auden nodded with approval. I wondered what would have happened if he’d been closer. If he’d known it was me down here, probably he’d have been happy enough to watch the crowd tear me apart.

“Let them through,” Auden commanded, and his followers fell back, opening a pathway between us and the door. Several of them spit as we passed.

Just outside the auditorium, a man greeted us, draped in an iridescent robe that shimmered like Auden’s suit. He took my arm, like a gentleman, only his grip was steel. His other hand clamped down on Ani’s bicep. “I think it’s best that you come with me,” he said.

I wrenched my arm away. “Best for who?”

“Maybe we should just go with him,” Ani said, shooting a nervous glance at the door separating us from the angry crowd.

“What do you want?” I asked the man. “We weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s a public event, right?”

“I want nothing,” he said with a weirdly serene smile. “I’m just a messenger.”

“Oh yeah? For who?”

But even as I was asking, I knew. Who else?

“For Brother Auden and Brother Savona,” he said, face lighting up at their names. “They would like to speak with you.”

“Then they can come to us,” I said, though of course they couldn’t, because that’s not how this kind of game was played.

“Brother Auden has a message for you,” the man said. His hair was blonder than mine, almost white against his ruddy face. It fell in long, wispy strands across his eyes, which had a strange, faraway look, like he was peering through me into the distance at his divine reward. “He says, ‘It’s time we talk. Unless you want to run away again, Lia.’”

“He said that?” I asked. Stalling. “Lia?” So he knew it was me. Not just some anonymous skinner.

Lia Kahn. The one responsible.

The man nodded. “Ready?”

No.

The office was sparse, with little more than a desk and an oversize ViM screen plastered on one wall. The opposite wall was a touch screen, scattered with notes and scrawlings—but it went blank a moment after we stepped into the room. The desk looked almost antique, left over from the days when they installed screens and network links into the surface of dead wood rather than just building the whole desk as an integrated ViM that knew what you wanted nearly before you’d figured it out yourself. My father had one just like it—he claimed the solidity appealed to him, the permanence, but I think it was just that he didn’t like his desk talking back to him. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Rai Savona felt the same way.

He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.

Savona cleared his throat. “Since you’ve intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for.”

“Funny how you call me Lia when you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think that’s who I am,” I said, grateful for a voice that didn’t shake. “Or do you call your toaster by name too?”

“Consider it a courtesy,” Savona said. “An undeserved one.”

“You look better than you look on the vids,” I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I’d said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.