Robin Wasserman - Shattered

I shook my head. “What if I said you’re right?” I asked Zo. “That I’m not the same person?”

“You’re not a person at all,” Zo said calmly. “I can’t fault you for believing you are. But I can help you see the truth.”

“How, by sleeping with my boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t your boyfriend!” she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. When she spoke again, the calm was back. “That was wrong,” she said. “I thought I was protecting Lia. But—” She swallowed hard. “Lia’s dead. I can’t protect her anymore. I see that now.”

Lia’s dead. The words didn’t sting like they once had. But it wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it—blank. Impersonal. Like she really believed I was nothing to her.

“So you don’t hate me anymore.”

“I don’t feel anything about you,” Zo said. “You’re a machine.”

“Right. You don’t hate me. You’ve just decided to devote your life to the Brotherhood, which, big coincidence, wants to wipe mechs off the face of the Earth.”

“You never bother to listen to anyone but yourself, do you?” she said with a flash of the old Zo. “No one wants to do anything to you. We just want them to stop making more of you. So that no more families get destroyed.”

Like ours, she didn’t say. Because she didn’t have to.

“We broke up, you know,” Zo said suddenly. “Me and Walker.”

“How would I know?”

“Well we did.” A giggle slipped out. “He’s insanely boring.”

She had a point.

“I really don’t care, Zo. I’m over it.”

“I heard,” she snapped. “Mechs are too superior to worry about us pathetic little orgs, right? Too special ? You must be a natural.”

“I think this is pathetic, Zo,” I said, not sure whether I meant the Brotherhood or our conversation. “But not because I’m a mech.”

She twisted the fabric of the robe around her index finger, a nervous habit left over from when we were kids. “So you’re not even going to ask about them?” Zo said, a little of the old bitterness bleeding through around her edges.

“Who?”

She rolled her eyes. “Mom. Dad.”

Your mom and dad, I would have said. Except I wanted to know. “How are they?”

“Like you care,” she said.

“I do.”

“That’s why it’s been six months and no one’s heard from you.”

So she didn’t know I’d seen our father.

A herd of Brothers swept past us, piling onto a blue bus marked elixir corp-town. There was a fleet of buses just like it, each bus with a different corp logo on it, each presumably awaiting a shipment of corp-towners returning home with full stomachs and plenty of ammunition for their antiskinner campaign.

“Just tell me,” I snapped.

“How do you think they are? Their precious little baby disappeared.”

“So? Now they can lavish all their attention on their other precious baby.”

She snorted. “Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of love to go around these days.”

“Meaning?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. None of my business. Not my family. I forgot.”

“What family?” she asked. “Mom’s so zoned out that half the time she barely remembers her own name, much less that she has a kid and husband. Not that her husband’s ever home. Or speaks to either of us when he is.” She smeared her hand across her forehead, like she was rubbing away thoughts the Brotherhood didn’t permit. “It’s too late for us,” she said with a new lilt to her voice. “But at least I can help others.”

“Savona tell you that?” I asked sourly.

“Actually, it was Brother Auden.”

“So I’m not your sister, but suddenly he’s your brother?”

“He’s my friend ,” she said.

“And you just love stealing my friends, don’t you?”

“I didn’t have to steal him,” Zo said. “He came to me. Said you ran away from him, just like you ran away from us. Explained how we’re better off.”

“We should go,” Ani urged again, tugging at my arm.

“Thanks for the cat,” I told Zo as a good-bye.

She flinched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whatever.”

Ani caught my eye with a silent question— Stay or go? I didn’t hesitate.

Go.

We walked away—but Zo’s voice stopped us after a few steps.

“Is he doing okay?” Zo asked. “You know. The cat.”

“He’s fine,” I told her.

She paused. Then, so softly I almost didn’t hear: “He missed you.”

“Yeah.” I kept my back to her. “I missed him too.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Ani on the ride home, before she could say anything.

Her smile contained far more pity than I would have liked. “I wasn’t even going to try.”

I pretended to link in to the net, just so I wouldn’t have to look at her. But really I was staring past the screen, out the window, counting the mile markers as they streamed by.

Mile by mile, the car brought us home.

The entryway was one of the oldest parts of the mansion and came outfitted with two elaborate crystal chandeliers whose bulbs had apparently been burned out for several decades. Despite the high ceilings and ten-foot windows, the place always felt oppressive to me. Maybe it was the dark mahogany walls or the pillars that sprouted every few feet or the velvet couch inset into the fireplace that inevitably housed some mech or another in the throes of a dreamer fit—but even on a good day, something about the room screamed, Get out while you still can . And this had not been a good day.

“Don’t,” Ani said when I began to head upstairs to my room, to blissful, silent solitude.

“I’m not going back to the dreamers,” I said, like it was any of her business if I did.

“It’s not that,” she said, even though it obviously was. “Just… don’t you think we should find Jude? Tell him what happened while it’s still fresh?”

“If this is your attempt to keep me from crawling off to sulk, it’s a pretty pathetic one,” I said.

She grinned. “I have no shame. Not if it works…. So?”

“So…” I sighed. “Someone should get what they want today. Why not you?”

We found Jude the first place we looked. The vidroom. The door was half open. We both heard the moans and sighs at the same moment. Ani shot me an unusually mischievous glance. “We should probably let him have his privacy, but… who knows what’s going on in there. He could be hurt or something.”

“It does sound pretty dire,” I said, grinning. She was going above and beyond to perk me up. Mission accomplished. “What if it’s an emergency?”

“Excellent point,” Ani said. “We’re just doing what any good friends would do.”

She swung open the door.

Jude lay on the couch, his chest bare, on top of a girl with long, black hair, her shirt tangled in her arms as she tried to wriggle out of it. He pulled the fabric out of her hands and yanked it over her head, laughing as it caught briefly on her earring and she smacked his hand away. She was facing away from the door, so we saw only her long, slender neck, exposed when she leaned forward to press her lips to Jude’s chest. He wrapped his arms around her narrow waist, mechanical muscles bulging beneath synthetic skin.

I couldn’t look away.

I no longer hated the sight of my own body, not the way I once had, but I couldn’t imagine reveling in it, not like the two of them, much less exposing it to someone else, pressing skin against skin. The memory of that night with Walker was too fresh—I would never let anyone else look at me the way he had, touch me like I was diseased.