Robin Wasserman - Shattered

I couldn’t see her face, but I could see Jude’s, his closed eyes, his faint smile as her hair tickled his cheek. And then his eyes opened—and met mine. He grabbed her roughly and flipped her off the sofa, and I recognized her cry of complaint at the same time I recognized her face. At the same time I heard the small, sad sound escape Ani. It was the whimper of a wounded animal who’d given up the fight.

“You promised,” she whispered. Her hand closed over the pendant around her neck. The warm blue glow lit up her pale skin.

Jude leaped off the couch, nearly landing on Quinn. She just glared at him and proceeded to slowly, calmly pull her shirt back on. “I changed my mind,” she said.

Jude rushed the doorway, chest still bare, hair rumpled, eyes wild. “Ani, look—”

Ani slammed the door in his face.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told me.

“I wasn’t even going to try,” I said with a small, hopeful smile. But she just turned away from me and walked briskly down the hall, neck stiff, head erect, arms tight against her sides.

I didn’t try to follow her. I didn’t try anything.

But I should have.

When you don’t eat, you don’t exercise, you don’t work, and you don’t have to slog through school, there’s no obvious start to the morning. Sometimes, especially when you can go back to “sleep” simply by instructing your brain and body to shut down, there’s no obvious reason to start at all.

Which is why I figured I might not see Ani for another day or two. But instead she showed up at my door just as the sky was pinking up.

She didn’t come all the way inside, just leaned in the doorway. “About yesterday,” she said. “I just want to make sure you know it’s a nonissue.”

“If you want to talk…”

Ani flashed a bright, fake smile. “Nonissue means non-discussion.”

“Fine.” I decided not to point out that she was the one who’d come to me.

She traced her finger along the doorframe like she was examining it for cracks. “Interesting, isn’t it? That stuff Savona was saying about how we can’t be blamed for what we do, because we have no souls?”

“No one has a soul,” I pointed out. “Orgs or mechs. It’s a fictional concept. Like unicorns. Or zombies.”

“Right.” Ani choked out a bitter laugh. “Can’t imagine why anyone would believe in the walking dead.”

“We’re not dead.”

“We used to be.”

I tried to ignore the image that popped into my head, the gleaming morgue, the burned corpse with my face. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“Look, human morality comes from human mortality, right?”

“Says Savona.”

“Fine,” she granted me. “Says Savona. Life on Earth is unfair, but after you die, God punishes the evil and rewards the good.”

I grinned. “Soul is one thing, Ani. You want to start telling me you think there’s a God ?”

“That’s not the point,” she snapped. I dropped the smile. “If people are good because they believe they’ll be rewarded after they die, that’s all that matters. So what does that say for skinners—”

“Mechs,” I corrected her.

“We don’t die,” she said. “So what do we have to be afraid of? What’s to stop us from doing whatever we want?”

“What’s to stop anyone?” I asked. “God doesn’t exist, heaven and hell are fictions, and only a few crazy Faithers still think otherwise. So under your theory, the whole world should be going crazy with bad people doing bad things.”

She just looked at me, like, Your point?

I thought of the corp-town attack. Of the reason the corp-town had biosensors to be hacked, all the attacks that had preceded it. The weapons ban. The prison ships that used to circle the continent, and the islands for the cases too hard-core for the ships, and the cities that had replaced them both, a useful repository for nearly anyone who colored outside the lines.

“And no one did anything wrong back when the God delusion was still going strong,” I said sarcastically, arguing with the voice in my head as much as with Ani. “You don’t need to believe in heaven to be good, just like you don’t need to believe in hell to know you don’t want to go there.”

Ani shrugged. “Jude’s the one always saying mechs play by different rules,” she pointed out. “Maybe things like loyalty, doing the right thing, keeping promises have nothing to do with us.”

Keeping promises. Now we were getting somewhere. “And none of this has anything to do with Jude and Quinn, right? Because you don’t want to talk about that.”

“Monogamy’s impractical when you’re going to live forever, right?” Ani forced a smile. “No big deal.”

I noticed she wasn’t wearing Quinn’s necklace anymore.

“Ani, look, maybe you should—” I broke off as my ViM pinged with a text from call-me-Ben.

Remember our deal. I don’t have forever.

“Lia, I should probably get out of here.”

“Wait, I really want to talk to you,” I said, keying in a response. Working on it. Need more time to get the info out of Jude. Ben had granted me two more weeks to produce the name, but now he was texting me at least twice a day with annoying reminders not to drop my end of the bargain. I was beginning to think that ferreting out his BioMax mole didn’t matter to him nearly as much as bending me to his will and forcing me to acknowledge, on a daily basis, that he was in charge.

“I’m out of here,” Ani said.

“Wait. Please.”

“Why?”

I could have told her about the deal with call-me-Ben. But that would mean making a decision. Because no matter how she felt about Jude now, she’d never let me betray him.

Not that I was planning to. But.

“You heard everything I said to Zo yesterday,” I said.

She nodded.

“So you know Zo started hooking up with my boyfriend. After the download.”

“I figured,” Ani said. “Sorry.”

“I saw them.” I could still picture the two of them, pressed up against the brick wall behind the school, skin to skin. I didn’t care anymore. Walker belonged to a different Lia, and she was gone. “That’s how I found out.”

“So what ?” she asked, face twisted in sour anger. “What do you want from me? You tell your pathetic story, and I tell mine? Except that you saw mine, right? You know how it ends.”

“I just thought—”

“Sorry,” she said. Though she didn’t sound it. “But it’s different for you. That guy was your boyfriend. Zo was your sister.”

“Right, and Quinn is your—”

“Nothing,” Ani said. “No labels, no obligations.”

“And Jude is supposed to be your friend,” I reminded her. “Like a brother, you said.”

“Guess I was right,” Ani said. “Because look what your sister did to you.”

“Yeah, and it sucked . I just thought you’d want…”

“What?”

A long pause. “I don’t know,” I said feebly.

She smirked. “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.” She sounded like Jude.

We just watched each other for a moment, like animals gauging a potential predator, weighing the options: fight or flight. Riley chose for us. He appeared behind her, leaning over her shoulder into my room.

“You busy?” he asked. “I can come back.”

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Ani said at the same time. “Not busy.”

“We’re talking,” I said firmly.

“We’re done,” Ani said. “I should go, anyway. I’m late.”

“Go where?”

“Back to the Temple,” she said. “Savona sent me a message this morning, said he and Auden are willing to talk to me if I want to come in. This could be the way to end all this.”