Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“It’s fine,” I said. “She’s your friend now, right? Go.”

“I wasn’t asking for permission.”

“Fine,” I said again, even though it wasn’t.

“Fine,” she said. And she left.

I wanted to get into bed and shut down, forget the day had ever happened. But there were two messages waiting for me. That was bizarre enough, since pretty much no one was speaking to me anymore, not unless you counted the randoms I only knew from the network, and even if I did count them, they’d mostly faded away, since I wasn’t doing much zone-hopping these days. When you ignored the randoms for long enough, they tended to get a clue.

The most recent text was from Quinn.

I’m going. And so are you.

It didn’t make sense. Not until I saw the one that had arrived just before it, addressed to both of us. From an anonymous sender.

Congratulations, you passed the first test.

Then there was a time, a date, and an address.

Ready for phase two?

The car took an unfamiliar route, depositing me at some smallish house a little too close to the city for my comfort. There was a security field around the property, which lifted as I drove through. No one was waiting outside for me. I wondered if Quinn had already arrived. Or changed her mind about coming in the first place. It was, after all, slightly insane, showing up at a random spot in the middle of nowhere just because some anonymous message told me to. It was more than slightly insane to do so without telling anyone where I was going. But I had come this far; I was going in.

After all, what was the worst that could happen? It’s not like I could die.

I knocked. When the door opened, the blue-haired girl from the support group stood behind it. “You?” I asked, surprised. The girl—Ani, I remembered—had spoken even less than I had at the session, revealing only that, aside from the technicolored hair, she was kind of blah.

“Sort of me,” she said softly. “But not just me. Come in.” She stepped aside.

The place was crawling with them. Mech-heads. Skinners. Freaks. And I mean, crawling, literally, since a few of them were on the floor, writhing against the cheap carpeting—or against one another—their eyes rolled back, their fingers spasming. It was as if they were tripping on Xers, but I knew they couldn’t be, because they were like me.

No, I thought, trying not to stare, although they wouldn’t have noticed. Not like me.

The house was sparsely furnished: white walls, gray floor, a couple of cheap couches set at haphazard angles to the walls and each other, and not much more. Ani took a seat on one of them, settling back against Quinn’s arm. Quinn looked like she was home. There was an empty space next to them. I didn’t sit. On the other couch slumped a tall, lanky mech-head with brown eyes, brown hair, and a sour look on his waxy face. And next to him, staring at me with flickering orange eyes, someone familiar. Jude something, one of the earliest skinners. A year ago he’d been everywhere on the vids, hitting parties, crashing vidlifes, popping up on all the stalker zones. And then, a month or two later, people had gotten bored—or he had—and he’d disappeared. A month was longer than most insta-fame lasted; he’d been lucky.

He’d also been a brunet. But now he was… something else. His hair gleamed silver, and the color bled down his face, streaking his forehead and cheeks with a metallic sheen. His bare left arm was etched with the snaking black lines of a circuit diagram. But his right arm, that was the worst of it. The pseudoflesh had been stripped away, replaced by a transparent coating that glowed with the pulse and flicker of the circuitry underneath.

He wasn’t the only one. The writhing freaks were all streaked with silver, their skin painted with whirling diagrams or stripped away, wiring exposed. One had even decorated his bare skull with an intricate vision of the cerebral matrix that whirred beneath the surface. As Ani leaned forward on the couch, her shirt rose on her back, exposing a patch of bare, silvery skin.

“Stare all you want,” Jude said. “It’s important to know what you are.”

“What you are. A bunch of freaks,” I muttered. “What did you do to yourselves?”

“Not freaks. Machines ,” Jude corrected me. “And we didn’t do it. We’re just embracing it.”

“You think this is funny?” I asked, disgusted. “You want to turn us all into a joke?”

“Not a joke,” Jude said. “A machine.”

“I’m no machine!”

Jude glared at Ani. “I thought you said she was okay.”

“She is,” Ani said, glancing at Quinn. “When her friend—”

“We’re not friends,” Quinn and I said at the same time. Only Quinn laughed.

“She sounded like she got it,” Ani said. “And she walked out on the session. Seemed like a good sign.”

“What is this?” I asked. “Some kind of stupid spy game? You go to those meetings and what, report back? To him ?”

“Well, she’s not stupid,” Jude said. “There’s that.”

I stood up. “ She’s out of here.”

“Stay,” Ani said. “You belong here.”

I shuddered. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s better than Sascha’s crap,” Quinn said, stroking the silver streak on Ani’s arm. “They know what they are. What we are.”

“This isn’t who I am,” I said, backing away.

“It’s who we all are.” The guy next to Jude spoke for the first time. “Like it or not.”

“Let her go, Riley.” Jude flicked a lazy hand toward the door. “This is a place for people who want to look forward, not back. She’s obviously not ready to do that. Not if she’s still whining about what she was and denying what she is .”

“I’m not denying anything.”

“Your sentence is a logical impossibility,” Jude said. “Not to mention inaccurate. Come back when you’ve figured things out. We’ll wait.”

“I hope you can wait forever.”

Jude laughed. “What, you think you’ll make it out there? With the orgs?”

“The what?”

“Orgs—organics. Nasty little piles of blood and guts. Humans. You know, the ones who hate you.”

“No one hates me,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re not in denial at all.” Jude shook his head. “Come back when you’ve grown up a little.” He looked younger than me. But he was a skinner—looks meant nothing. “Well? What are you waiting for? Be a good little mech and get out.”

“You’re throwing me out?” Unbelievable.

Sorry, Quinn mouthed. But she stayed where she was.

“Have fun with your orgs,” he said with fake cheer. “Take care of yourself.”

“Take care of your mental problems,” I advised him.

And left.

There was a mech-head sitting on the edge of the front porch. I winced as the door slammed behind me, afraid it would catch his attention. I’d talked to enough skinners for one day. Maybe for life.

But the mech-head didn’t look up. He was hunched over, his fist wrapped around a switchblade, and he was carving something into the porch’s rotting wood, except—

I gasped.

He wasn’t carving the wood. He was carving his arm. The knife flashed as the point dug in again, slicing a gash from his wrist to his elbow. He shivered.

And then he finally looked at me, his lips drawing back in a sickening smile. His teeth were coated in silver.

“Feels good.” His voice was a sigh. “I mean, feels bad. But that feels good, too. You know?”