Robin Wasserman - Shattered

He shook his head. “I was…” His face twisted. “Preoccupied. You’ve got to understand, these tests they were doing—we’re not talking your standard med-check. They had to figure out how our bodies worked, how our brains controlled our bodies. That’s medical research, right? You give a little electric shock to your lab rat’s brain, see which part of his body shuts off. You carve open your lab rat, see how things are working, play around a little, sew him back up, watch what happens.” He tapped his temple. “You know how they figured out how this stuff works? They study damage. Damaged brains, damaged bodies. Zap a lab rat in the right place, and it forgets how to run the maze—presto, you know where rat memory lives. You can build your rat brain piece by piece, just by taking his apart. Piece by piece. Ever think about that? That’s their model. Damage. So you tell me, what does that make us? How are we supposed to be normal , when everything they know, everything we’re based on, was wrong?”

We’re not supposed to be normal , I thought.

“Never thought about it before, did you?” he asked. “How they perfected it.”

“I…”

“Didn’t think so.” He shrugged. “They needed to figure out how we were put together, make sure they could replicate it. And they didn’t want anything that would corrupt the purity of their experimental results. Muddy the neurological waters. Things like anesthesia. Pain meds.”

“So they just…?”

Jude watched me, waiting for me to react. Not wincing at the memory, not inviting my pity, but not flinching from it.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Nothing new about pain,” Jude said flatly. “I got used to that a long time ago. But that day that Ani’s girlfriend disappeared, that was… a bad day. It was hard for me to, uh, get around back then.” He paused, as close as he’d ever come to acknowledging who he’d once been. “But that day, I couldn’t even—” He rested his palm on the top of his tower of soil. Then he bore down and crushed it flat. “It was a bad day. And she stayed there with me. Barely knew me, and still had that empty look, because by that point we knew when someone disappeared, they weren’t coming back, but she just ignored it, she got me through the night, fed me, kept me from—” He waved a hand, like he was brushing away the memory. “I don’t like being helpless,” he said. “I don’t believe in it.”

“But you let her help you.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “I looked out for her after that. Made sure they didn’t take her in for the download until they knew what they were doing. She thought she owed me . Thought she could trust me.”

I’d been trying to figure out why Ani hadn’t tried any harder to snare Jude in her trap. But maybe she’d known what I never would have guessed. That this—the powerlessness, the guilt, knowing that he could have, should have vetoed the raid, foreseen the trap, saved the day, knowing he had failed—this would be worse. Maybe she was right all along: She had known a part of him no one else was allowed to see.

“Why are you telling me this, Jude?”

“So you get it. You don’t have to tell me what I did.” He closed his eyes. “I know what I did.”

I didn’t ask him why he’d done it.

I touched his hand. He drew it away.

“Why don’t you come back inside with me,” I suggested. “We can figure out—”

“You go,” he said. “I’m sure Riley’s looking for you. He’s always looking for you.”

I wanted to tell him something true, to trade confidence for confidence, secret for secret. But I couldn’t tell him the real secret. Because Savona might have been telling the truth. He might have been ready to kill all those orgs. I cared enough to be afraid of him; afraid for them.

Jude might not.

“I got a message from my sister,” I said. A smaller, safer secret. “She says there’s something we need to know. She wants to help.”

“Right,” Jude said wryly. “And it was so important that she couldn’t just tell you? She had to send you a cryptic message and then, let me guess, have you meet her somewhere? Alone?”

“I think she means it,” I said.

He stood up abruptly, brushing the soil off his hands. “Of course that’s what you want to believe,” he snapped, and it was like the conversation had never happened, like I’d imagined everything. “But you can’t seriously be considering it. After everything that’s happened? After—” He chuckled harshly. Fakely. “You think you can trust anyone ? You think you can trust an org ?”

I stood up too. “She’s not just any org. She’s my sister.”

“ She doesn’t think so,” he reminded me. “She thinks you’re a skinner who stole her sister’s identity. She thinks you’re the enemy. Maybe she’s right.”

“It’s easier for you to think that,” I shot back. “Like everything’s so simple, us versus them, orgs versus mechs.”

“You’re telling me it’s not? After seeing what Savona did to his prisoners ? What the whole org world let him do? They think we’re things , Lia. Not people. Not sisters. Things. I don’t want it to be us against them. It just is. How many times does the truth need to bite you in the ass before you stop turning your back on it?”

“Ani’s a mech,” I said quietly. “It didn’t stop her from joining them. So maybe Zo…”

He choked out a pained laugh. “Are you kidding me? You warned me, Lia, remember? But I ignored you. I should have known— I knew —but I didn’t listen. And now—” He stiffened, drawing himself up, still and straight. “Do what you want. Believe what you want. Let me know how that works out for you.” Jude pushed past me, pausing for a moment as our shoulders met. “You had more to lose. I get it,” he said, flexing his arm, stretching his fingers wide, then curling them into a fist, staring at the muscles working as if he still couldn’t quite believe they responded to his command. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you lost it. I really thought you’d figured that out.” He let his arm drop, and his fingertips brushed mine. Then he was in motion again, past me, out of the greenhouse, and I was on my own.

He wasn’t the only one who’d thought I had figured that out.

I’d told myself that I wasn’t the same person anymore. That the old Lia Kahn didn’t matter. But if I really believed that, then I would have deleted Zo’s message from my zone and accepted that she wasn’t my sister, just an org related to the org I used to be.

I would have let it go.

We lay side by side in the grass, our hands linked, watching the clouds. They were always thicker in the afternoon, or maybe it just seemed that way on the rare days when the morning sun peeked through the cloud cover and gray gave way to blue—only to inevitably fade away again within hours, the dark chill of daily life returning.

“I don’t want you to go,” Riley said. He squeezed my hand.

I’d gone to Riley after Jude. I hadn’t told him what we’d said, hadn’t told him anything. I’d just sagged against him, let him hold me up. I let myself be weak. But that was temporary, and now it was done.

“I have to,” I said.

“If it’s a trap—”

“I have to know. And besides, what would be the point of a trap? They had me—they let me go. If Savona had wanted me…”

“Maybe it’s not Savona,” he said. “Maybe it’s just your sister. Or maybe it’s him.”

Riley didn’t like to say Auden’s name.

“I guess I’ll find out.”

“Then let me go with you,” he said, even though I’d already told him no, and told him again.