Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“I’m not leading you into a trap.”

“Maybe you don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said.

I let go of him and sat up, angry that he didn’t understand. “This is my stupid decision,” I said. “Not yours. I’m not going to let you pay for it. I’m not going to let you get hurt because I made the wrong choice.”

He sat up too, facing me, resolute. “I’m not going to let you get hurt, period. The last time I let you go to the Temple—”

“ Let me? Since when do you let me do anything?”

“Since when do you ? You can’t stop me from going with you.”

“And what happens if something goes wrong?” I shouted. “And you end up in that Temple, stapled to one of those posts. Just because you were stupidly trying to protect me? How am I supposed to live with that?”

Riley took my hand and pressed it against his chest. “Feel that?” he asked.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I tried to pull away. He held fast.

“Heartbeat.”

“Energy converters don’t beat,” I snapped.

“Exactly.” He let go. “And I’m not Auden.”

“Who’s talking about him?”

“The accident,” Riley said. “He was trying to protect you. He forgot that you were strong, and he was weak. I’m not weak.”

“I don’t want you there,” I lied. “And maybe I don’t want you here either. Not if you’re going to start telling me what I’m thinking, like everyone else.”

“Take me with you, or I’ll follow you. I don’t care what you tell me. That’s the way it is.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“We’ll find out.” He leaned forward, hands gentle on my face, and kissed me.

We spent the rest of the day there, in the grass, together, hands and lips and bodies searching for a way to feel, our clothes on, our touches confined, restrained, not wanting to find out what would happen if we pushed too far, if we tried to feel something our artificial receptors couldn’t convey, if we let ourselves remember what our bodies used to be.

Whenever we went flying, when I stood at the edge of the sky, beneath the fear of falling, of crashing, there was the taste of something else, the fear that nothing would happen, that I would feel nothing, that the rush of speed, the terror of gravity, would be such old news that the drop would offer no release. It happened eventually, it always happened. Everything we tried got tired, and we would move on to something else. The waterfall. The cliffs. The plane. Maybe even the dreamers. Eventually, perhaps, we would run out of ideas and options and be left with nothing to jolt us into a moment of genuine release. We would be dead inside, for real this time, machines from the inside out.

Usually, I would ignore my fear or use it to kindle the fire I needed, and the rush would hit the moment my feet left the solid ground of the plane and the wind carried me away.

But sometimes I decided not to jump.

Zo sent me the coordinates of a point on the southern perimeter of the Temple campus. It was on the opposite side of the grounds from the main building, but it still felt strange to be there, knowing that Sloane and the others were less than a mile away, waiting for us to save them. Stranger still: knowing what was nestled in the pocket of Riley’s bulky coat.

He’d insisted on bringing the gun.

I would never let him hurt my sister.

But if this was a trap, if she showed up with a horde of her newfound Brothers and Sisters, all of them armed with pulseguns and eager for two new prisoners, I couldn’t let them hurt Riley. Not when it was my fault he was here.

The gun was a good compromise, a way of ensuring that we kept a little power, no matter what. We wouldn’t use it. That was why he carried it, because he knew guns, he understood guns, and he knew that the safest way to use a gun was to make sure you never had to use it. We would all be safer this way, including Zo. That was Riley’s point, at least.

But I didn’t want him to bring it.

And I didn’t want to hear that he understood guns. Or know why.

“Didn’t think you’d show,” Zo said flatly when we joined her at the rendezvous point, just beyond the electrified border of the Temple grounds. It was just past midnight, but the main Temple blazed brightly on the horizon, and I realized the other night’s darkness must have been part of the plan. Make it look empty and abandoned, so that the foolish, trusting mechs would spring the trap without thinking twice.

And here I was again. “You said it was important.”

She glared at Riley. “I also said come alone.”

He reached out and took my hand. Zo nodded. “I should have figured.” She gave him a nasty smile. “Watch yourself,” she suggested. “Lia’s never without a guy for too long—but she’s also never with anyone for very long.”

“You say that like you believe I’m Lia,” I pointed out.

“No,” she said. “Like you believe you’re Lia. Same nasty habits.”

“Why are we here, Zo?” Obviously not for hugs and warm reminiscences of our halcyon youth.

She jerked her head at a flat, domed building just beyond an outcrop of trees. A smattering of rusty, broken machinery marked it as some kind of industrial space, one that seemed likely to have been abandoned long ago.

“They do it out here, away from the central areas,” she said. “They don’t want anyone to know.”

“Know what?”

She didn’t answer. Just crept silently toward the building, gesturing for us to follow. At the electrified zone, she held out her hand, waiting. I watched her face as our fingers touched, but it remained blank, no disgust, no curiosity, nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched.

With Riley’s hand firmly gripped in my own, we made it through the invisible fence. She took us on a circuitous route through the industrial zone, skirting motion detectors and, at one point, yanking us back into a shadow just as a floodlight swept across the pavement. Zo nodded to the source of the light, a bulky pillar stretching up from a nearby building, rotating slowly, painting a wide arc with its blinding beam. “AI targeters up there,” she whispered. “Coded to face recognition. If the light hits you and you’re here without authorization…”

The use of deadly force was strictly prohibited in private security—which everyone knew meant it was tacitly allowed if the “private” in “private security” privately paid enough credit to make it worth someone’s while to look the other way. Still, if Savona was risking it at the Temple, it must have meant he was protecting something big. I could see from the intent expression on Riley’s face and from the way his eyes darted wildly across the landscape that he was constructing a mental inventory of the threats and weaknesses, like he already knew we’d be coming back—on our own.

Creeping slowly, in fits and starts, Zo led us to the edge of the large domed building—judging from the retractable front wall of frosted glass and the decaying, wingless fuselage parked outside, it must have been a hangar for private planes. The glass was too thick to see through, but there were a couple broken panes near ground level. “Just don’t let them catch you spying on them,” Zo suggested, nestling herself in the shadow of one of the old planes.

I hesitated. If we went for the windows, we’d be in plain sight, target practice for anyone who happened to walk by—or anyone who spotted us from within.

“You came all this way,” Zo whispered loudly. “You want to puss out now ?”

So Riley and I knelt on the cement, peeking through the broken pane. We watched silently, ready to run. But there was only a handful of orgs inside, and none of them seemed likely to notice us. They were a little busy.