Robin Wasserman - Shattered

You believe what you want to believe . Jude’s voice. Always Jude’s voice in my head. Too scared to face the truth.

So I faced this. I faced him, Riley, all of him. What he’d done, what he was, who he wanted to be.

I put my cold hands on his cold face, and I drew him toward me.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He wasn’t saying it to me.

“I forgive you,” I whispered back, even though I wasn’t the one with something to forgive, even though my forgiveness wasn’t what he needed.

We stopped talking.

Later.

His fingers, like ice, trickling down my spine. Snow against our skin, snow filling the spaces between us, melting in the crush of flesh on flesh. His eyes drinking in my skin, the body that would never be my body.

“Don’t,” he whispered, feeling me tense, pull away.

“Close your eyes.” My lips brushed his lids, shutting him away. I closed my own, hiding in the dark. Pretending we could be something else.

His hands, cold, his skin, soft. His voice, softer, in my ear. “Open them. Look. ”

Backs against the ground, eyes to the sky, he linked our fingers, raised our joined hands toward the gray clouds. Traced his fingers down my wrist, down my arm, down my skin.

It felt like nothing.

His skin, pale against the snow, white on white.

“It’s all wrong,” I said. Imagined a face with hooded brown eyes, a body with narrower shoulders, longer legs, skin the color of weathered oak, a boy I’d never known, a boy who gathered me in, rolled me over in the snow, sugaring our bodies in white.

Remembered a body that shivered in the wind, fingertips brushing lightly against skin, touches painful with promise. Another body, another life. “You shouldn’t look like this. I shouldn’t look like this.”

“But this is us. This is it.”

I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want him to see.

“This isn’t my skin.” Riley let the words drift into the wind. “This isn’t how it should be. He said it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Jude said.

Jude said nothing mattered, we were what we were. Bodies and minds.

“He’s wrong,” Riley said. “It matters. Every day, every time I look—” He passed his hand in front of his eyes, pale fingers spread wide. “It matters. Except now. Here. It’s just me. Us.”

Just us. Not machines built by human hands, not minds whirring with data. Not eyes that didn’t blink or hearts that didn’t beat. Not bodies that didn’t move the way bodies were supposed to move, not skin that didn’t feel the way skin was supposed to feel. Not something ugly, not something wrong.

Just him, his arms, strong. His skin, soft. His lips, cold. His eyes on my body, not turning away.

Just me, folded up in his arms. The sensation of his hands, the pressure, the temperature, the properties of closeness, the elements of touch, not like it used to be—not like it mattered.

Not pain, not passion, not abandon. Just a promise.

Just us.

Preparing seemed to take forever as Riley and Jude gathered equipment—that was their word for it, not weapons, not explosives, just equipment —from their contacts in the city, as we mapped out entry points and contingency plans, as we cold-shouldered Quinn, pretending that nothing was going on, as Riley and I huddled in dark corners of the orchard, rifling through our backup options and last-minute, last-ditch possibilities to stop the bloodshed. As I learned, just in case, to aim a gun, learned how it was heavier than it looked but not as heavy as it should have been, how my hand fit perfectly around its grip but its holster rested awkwardly at my waist. As three mechs hung on three posts, carried in every morning, carried out every evening, staring blindly over a roaring crowd, their faces pale and twitchy in the vids, waiting for a rescue that was never going to come.

Riley and Jude prepared their way, and I prepared mine. Riley was convinced that he’d be able to talk Jude down before it was too late. I was in charge of the just in case.

It all seemed to take forever—but it took only three days.

Before we set out, I got Riley alone. “You sure about this?”

“We’ve got to get them out,” he said.

“No. I mean, are you sure we’ll be able to stop him before…”

There was no warmth in Riley’s expression, no hesitation in his voice. “No one’s dying tonight.”

All mech eyes were cold, strangely blank, their flat color only accentuated by the pinprick of light flashing at their centers. But even beyond that, Riley’s gaze was steel. For the first time, I could imagine those eyes set in another face, from another lifetime, surviving in a city the only way he knew how.

Then he rested a hand on my lower back and kissed the top of my head and whispered that it would be all right, we’d all be fine, and the look was gone.

And then we began.

True to his word, Jude’s secrecy on the BioMax tracking tech had come in handy. As far as anyone at BioMax knew from the doctored stream of data, the three of us were safe and sound in bed—when in fact we were crossing the deserted grounds of an expired airport, insane plan in hand and weapons in tow. We set out after midnight, picking our way along the route Zo had marked out. Safely through the electrified perimeter—thanks to a grounding strip passed along by one of Jude’s city contacts—and through the shadows of hangars and warehouses, darting back each time the sweeping floodlights threatened to cross our path. The grounds were too large to cover every corner with cameras—unless Savona had sprung for a military-grade sat-cam, but if he’d gone that far, what little chance we had of success was pretty much gone, so there was no point in worrying. We had to assume that someone, man or machine, was deployed to watch the area around Savona’s secret playpen, cameras that Zo hadn’t known about, that weren’t visible to the naked eye. Which meant we had to assume that they knew we’d been here before and were prepared for our return. Another justification, as far as Jude was concerned, for the surprise attack. Another reason for the guns.

But Riley had jury-rigged a signal jammer, a small-scale model of what they used in the cities to block the wi-fi and energy nets, ensuring that—if it worked—any cameras we passed in range of would report back scrambled, useless data to their central servers. It was a half-assed solution to a problem we weren’t sure even existed—and there was a small, hateful piece of me that hoped it wouldn’t work. That was the thought I tried to ignore as we crept toward the hangar: Come and get us . A silent missive to Savona’s security forces. Stop us before we can’t stop ourselves.

I could have stopped us at any time—by setting off an alarm. Or with one swipe across my ViM, setting the last-minute backup plan in motion long before the last minute. But I’d promised Riley I would wait.

And I’d promised Sloane, Ty, and Brahm—and even Ani—that we would come back for them. We would get them out.

“This it?” Jude asked as we reached the hangar. It was starting to snow, fat, dirty flakes, floating over our heads. We crouched beneath the rusted fuselage of a small plane, one wing missing and the other hanging cockeyed by a snake of heavy-gauge cable and a bent steel frame. Riley began laying out the equipment as Jude tiptoed over to the hangar, kneeling before the broken pane. I watched the play of light and shadow through the frosted glass—it was thick enough to disguise the shapes that moved within, but I had an indelible record playing across my mind every time I made the mistake of closing my eyes. Jude spent only a few seconds at the window, then returned to us, nearly invisible in his black camo gear. Hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders hunched, a fine dusting of snow coating his hair, he scooped up an armful of explosives, his face blank. “It’s just like you said,” he said tonelessly.