Robin Wasserman - Shattered

So you were a damaged orphan, strapped to a bed for fifteen years, trapped inside a wasted body, I wanted to say. So what?

We’re all damaged, I wanted to say. And we’re all here now. Stuck. It doesn’t mean we get to do whatever we want. Or hurt whoever we want.

But I didn’t.

I wanted to believe that she went to Jude not because she wanted him, not even because she chafed at anyone telling her what she could and couldn’t have, but because she didn’t want him, suddenly didn’t want anyone but Ani, and the idea of that, chaining herself to a person when she’d finally gotten free of her cage, losing the freedom to want what she was supposed to want, freaked her out so badly that she pounced on Jude, did it practically in public, did it and would have done it again and again until she got caught.

I wanted to believe that about her and pity her rather than blame her, but I couldn’t, not quite. And so instead of asking the question and getting the answer I didn’t want, I left.

After it happened, Jude took to sitting in the greenhouse, cross-legged on the floor beneath the tables bursting with purple and golden blossoms, hidden from the hothouse lights by the wide fronds of an anthurium plant overhanging its pot.

“She liked to come here,” Jude said, squinting up at me when I found him there. It was two days after the failed raid, and the glass building blazed in the sun. From his perch in the leaf-shaded dark, I must have been a silhouette to him, backlit by the light. “She’d just sit. Said it kept her calm.”

“I didn’t know that.” I sat down across from him.

I’d come to accuse him. And it seemed fitting here, at the greenhouse, where Jude had once explained to me that when it came to hurting people, motives didn’t matter.

He looked past me, eyes flitting from plant to flower, settling on the windows. Cyclones of dust whirled in the pale beams of morning light. “This was her favorite part about being a mech,” he said. It didn’t feel like he was talking to me; it felt like he would be saying it if I were there or not. “No more sickness. No more death. As much credit as she could want. No more—” He shook his head, jaw clenched. “All the shit we got past, and this was still her favorite.”

“The greenhouse?”

“The flowers. Trees. All this nature crap. She never saw any of it before. The city’s all concrete. We used to laugh about it. How we never really got nature until we turned into machines.”

“She’s not dead, Jude.”

“What?” He looked at me, confused for a moment, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“Ani,” I said. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. She’s not dead.”

“Might as well be.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Like you care.” Jude scooped up some loose soil by his feet, building it into a low mound. “You left her there.”

“You weren’t there,” I reminded him. Driving the knife in. “You don’t know what it was like. I couldn’t have gotten her out. Even if she’d wanted to come back.”

“I know you,” he said nastily. “Always looking for an excuse to give in. Run away.”

“Run away?” I spit the words out. “You’re the coward who didn’t go in the first place! No, too risky for you , so we should all suffer in your place. None of us should have been there that night, Jude. Not us, not Ani —and you knew it. You just didn’t want to believe it.”

“I wanted…” His voice drifted off.

“You wanted to pretend you didn’t hurt her, like it never happened!” I fired the words like bullets, knowing they couldn’t hurt him, nothing could hurt the mighty Jude. “You wanted to just pretend she was fine and everything was fine, and it wasn’t. It’s not !”

“Shut up!” he shouted. Startling us both. “You think I don’t know this is my fault?” His voice was ragged. “You think I need you to tell me that?”

“This is Ani’s fault,” I said quietly. It slipped out, not at all what I’d been intending to say. “She did this.”

“ I did this,” Jude said. “Just me.” He cupped his hands, sweeping more soil into his pile, packing it hard, smoothing his mound into a tower. “She ever tell you how we met?”

I shook my head, not really expecting him to continue. But he did, like he talked about the past all the time. Like he didn’t care anymore.

“We were in there together for almost a month,” he said. “Me, Ani, a few others. They never told us what they were testing us for. Or why the ones who disappeared never came back. I was the only one who knew what we were doing there—”

“How?”

A ghost of the old cocky smile crossed his lips. “Knowing things is something of a hobby for me. I’m rather good at it,” he said. Not boasting, just stating a fact. “But the rest of them, no idea. You don’t tell the lab rats why you’re putting them through the maze, right?”

“I thought Riley knew too,” I said hesitantly, feeling like I was breaking Riley’s confidence by admitting what he’d said. “I thought you got him into the program?”

“He told you that?” Jude asked, surprised. “I didn’t think he’d… huh.”

“What?”

“He tell you the rest? About what he was doing there?”

“He got shot,” I said.

“Right, and…?”

“And what?”

Jude nodded with approval. “I didn’t think so.”

“What?”

“Ask your boyfriend,” he said. “If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

But I wasn’t asking Riley much of anything at the moment. All I wanted was his arms around me, his voice in my ear, telling me—

Well, that was the problem. Riley would tell me it was going to be all right. That I’d done nothing wrong. That I couldn’t have stopped Ani, couldn’t have saved any of them. That we’d find a way.

He wouldn’t judge me, and he wouldn’t question me.

He wouldn’t guess that I had a secret from him, from everyone, that Savona had given me a piece of poisonous knowledge, forced me to swallow it. That everything I told him about that night was infected by the lie of what I couldn’t say.

So I avoided him.

And instead sought out Jude, who couldn’t judge me but also couldn’t trust me, because he knew better. We were both liars, both cowards, in our own way. The same.

He turned back to his small pile of dirt, reaching into one of the plant pots to scoop out a fresh supply. “Anyway, Riley wasn’t there, not at first. I got him in at the end, when it seemed like they had figured out what they were doing, and it was going to work. At the beginning, when they were still screwing around, throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick? I was on my own.”

“With Ani.” I tried to picture it, the two of them with their old faces, their wheelchairs, two people who had nothing in common with the mechs I knew, and everything in common with each other.

“Yeah. She was from a different city, hung with a different crowd the first week we were in there. But most of them were gone after the first week anyway, so… anyway. There was this girl, Jeri. From the same city as Ani. And they were—I don’t know. I never knew if they were together, or what. But one day Jeri just wasn’t there anymore. And Ani—I’d seen her around by then, you know. There weren’t that many of us left, so you pretty much knew everyone. That day, she was just kind of empty. Like she was there, but not there anymore, you know? Nothing behind the eyes.”

“And you took pity on her? Decided you were going to rescue her from her misery?” I’d intended sarcasm, but it didn’t come out quite right.