Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“Why not?”

“Because…” Wasn’t it obvious? “We’re not supposed to leave here. The elevators are probably programmed.”

“Have you actually tried?” Quinn sounded bored, like she already knew the answer.

“No, but—”

“I have.” The elevator door opened, and as I hesitated, she asked again. “You coming?”

It had never occurred to me that I would be allowed to leave floor thirteen. Of course, it had never occurred to me to want to.

“The other floors are biorestricted,” Quinn said, nodding toward the skimmer that would collect and analyze our DNA samples. If, that is, we’d had any to give. “But the ground floor’s all ours.”

“Where are we going?” It felt strange to be talking to someone new after all this time. I had no reason to trust her. But I did.

It’s because she’s like me, I thought. She knows.

But I pushed the thought away. It was like I’d told Sascha. Quinn and I had nothing in common but circuitry and some layers of flesh-colored polymer.

“Field trip.” She smiled, and, again, it killed me how much better her expressions were than mine, how much more natural. In the dark it had been easy to mistake her for someone real. No one would make that mistake about me. “Don’t get too excited.”

The grassy stretch bounding the woods was larger than it had looked from the lounge window. The grass was beaded with dew, cold drops that seeped through the thin BioMax pajamas, but that didn’t bother me. Just like the brutal wind raking across us didn’t matter.

“Can you imagine actually seeing the stars?” Quinn asked. She’d selected a dark swath of grass sandwiched between the floodlit puddles of light, then stripped off her clothes and let herself fall backward, naked against the brush. I kept my clothes on my body and my feet on the ground.

At least at first.

“Get down here,” Quinn had commanded.

“Look, Quinn, it’s okay if you… but I don’t—”

She laughed. “You think I brought you out here for that ?” She stretched her arms out to her sides and down again, stick wings flapping through the grass. “Shirts or skins, I don’t care. Just lie down.”

I wasn’t about to take orders from her .

But I lay down.

“You used to be able to see them. Stars and planets and a moon,” she said now, pointing at the reddish sky.

The back of my neck was already smeared with dew. But she’d been right. It felt good to lie there in the grass, in the dark. The sky felt closer.

“You can still see the moon.” The telltale white haze was hanging low, making the clouds shimmer.

“Not like that,” Quinn said. “A bright white circle cut out of pure black. And stars like diamonds, everywhere.”

“I know. I’ve seen.”

“Not on the vids,” she said. “That doesn’t count.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“If you say so.”

We were quiet for a minute. I stared up, trying to imagine it, a clear sky, a million stars. Most of the vids I’d seen came from just before the war turned the atmosphere into a planet-size atomic dust ball. The dust was mostly gone—along with the people who’d built the nukes and the nut jobs who’d launched them and the thousands who’d gone up in smoke in the first attacks and the millions who’d been dead by the end of that year or the next. Along with the place called Mecca and the place called Jerusalem and all the other forgotten places that exist now only as meaningless syllables in the Pledge of Forgiveness. The dust was gone, but the stars had never come back. Pollution, cloud cover, ambient light, whatever chemicals they’d used to cleanse the air and patch up the ozone, the law of unintended consequences come to murky life. Someone would fix it someday, I figured. But until then? No stars. My parents talked about them sometimes, late at night, usually when they were dropped on downers, which made them goopy about the past. But I didn’t get the big deal. Who cared if the sky glowed reddish purple all night long? It was pretty, and wasn’t that the point?

“Why are we here, Quinn?”

She clawed her fingers into the ground and dug up two clumps of grass, letting the dirt sift through her fingers. “So we don’t miss any of it.”

“What?”

“ This . Feeling. Seeing. Being. Everything. The dew. The cold. That sound, the wind in the grass. You hear that? It’s so… real.”

I didn’t know I’d had the hope until the hope died. So she wasn’t the same as me, after all; she didn’t understand. She didn’t get that none of it was real, not anymore, that the dew felt wrong, the cold felt wrong, the sounds sounded wrong, everything was wrong, everything was distant, everything was fake. Or maybe it was the opposite—everything was real except for me.

I’d been right the first time. Quinn and I had nothing in common. “Whatever you say.”

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“What does?” Nothing did.

“The grass.” She laughed. “Doesn’t it tickle?”

“Yeah. I guess.” No.

“It’s like us, you know.”

“What, the grass?” I said. “Why, because people around here are always walking on it?”

“Because it looks natural and all, but inside, it’s got a secret. It’s better. Manmade, right? New and improved.”

Just because the grass—like the trees, like the birds, like pretty much everything—had been genetically modified to survive the increasingly crappy climate, smoggy sky, and arid earth, didn’t make it like us. It was still alive. “The grass still looks like grass,” I told her. “Seen a mirror lately? There’s no secret. We look like… exactly what we are.”

“You got a boyfriend?”

“What?” Under other circumstances I would have wondered what she was on. But I knew all too well she wasn’t on anything. If there were such a thing as a drug for skinners, I’d be on permanent mental vacation.

“Or girlfriend, whatever.”

“Boyfriend,” I admitted. “Walker.”

“You two slamming?”

“What?”

“You. Walker. Slamming. Poking. Fucking. You need a definition? When a boy and a girl really love each other—”

“I know what it means. I just don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“I’m only asking because… Well, have you? Since, you know?”

The thought repulsed me. The idea of Walker’s hands touching the skin, the look on his face when he peered into the dead eyes, the feeling—the nonfeeling—of his lips on the pale pink flesh-textured sacs that rimmed my false teeth. The thick, clumsy thing that functioned as a tongue. Would I even know what to do, or would it be like learning to walk again? Or worse, I thought, remembering the grunting and squealing. Like learning to talk. And that was just kissing. Anything else… I couldn’t think about it. “Have you ?” I countered.

She shook her head. “But look at my choices. Like I’m going to slam Asa?”

“You trying to make me vomit?”

“Good luck with that, considering the whole no-stomach thing.” She laughed. “Obviously options are limited. And I’ve been waiting a long time.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Longer than you. Four months, maybe? But that’s not what I’m talking about.” She didn’t offer to explain.

This girl was completely creeping me out. But not in an entirely bad way.

“So you haven’t, uh, had any visitors?” I asked finally. “No guys or… whatever?”

“No guys. No whatevers.”

“Sorry.”

“Why?” Quinn sat up, crossing her legs and resting her elbows on her knees. “According to you, it’s not like I’m missing out on much family fun time.”