Robin Wasserman - Frozen

She flicked off the screen. “He was.”

He was also black. As was the boy who had become Jude. The girl’s skin was lighter, more caramel than chocolate, but still radically darker than the body she wore now. Ani saw the question in my face.

“What? Did you think we were white ?” she asked in disgust.

I guess I hadn’t thought at all. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they… I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t…”

“We were the first,” she said in a more bitter tone than I’d ever heard her use. “An experiment . So they used what they had, and what they had were standard-issue bodies for their standard-issue rich white clients. You get a new body, you get to customize. Us? We get something off the rack. We get this .” She looked down, now aiming the disgust at the body she’d been assigned. “You think I like this?” she asked. “You think I like the fact that my parents wouldn’t even recognize me, if they ever—” She choked it off. “Not like that’s going to happen.” She slipped the ViM into her pocket. “It doesn’t matter. Jude says that race is irrelevant, since it’s not like we even have skin anymore, not really. He says being a mech is like being part of a new race.” She lowered her voice. “But I know he hates it too.”

“And Riley?” I asked, thinking of the tall, silent boy who never seemed to smile.

Ani shrugged. “Who knows? Hard to tell what he’s thinking, right?”

“I guess.” I paused. “So, when you said he was healthy, before, did you mean—”

She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I guess it’s okay for you to know where I came from. I mean, that’s my business. But if you want to know about them, ask them .”

“Okay. I get it.” A lot of good it would do me, though. Jude had already made it clear he wasn’t in the question-answering business. At least not when it came to questions I actually wanted the answers to.

“I don’t even know much myself,” she said in a softer voice. “He’s serious about the whole forgetting-the-past thing. Even before the download, he and Riley didn’t talk about where they came from. Not ever .”

I thought about the picture, the boy’s body curled up in the wheelchair, his legs and arms strapped down, his neck looking too frail to support his head. And then I thought about Jude, passionate and proud. I thought about his firm grasp, and the way it had felt when his broad arms embraced me. “I guess I can maybe understand that.”

Ani gave me a shy smile that suddenly made her look about ten years old. “I’m glad you came up here, Lia. Alone, I mean.”

“Not like I had much of a choice. If Auden had set off the alarms—”

Ani laughed. “There are no alarms,” she said, like it should have been obvious. “Jude just said that.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, picturing Auden standing nervously on the curb in front of the building. Alone. Where I’d left him. “Why would he lie like that?”

“Don’t be mad,” she said quickly. “He just wanted you to see what it was like with us. You know. On your own.”

I turned to face the view again, resting my forearms on the railing, staring out and trying to imagine a city filled with lights. “It’s not so bad, I guess.”

I probably should have been mad.

But I wasn’t.

As we made our way back to the car, Auden and I hung behind the rest of the group.

“Have fun up there?” he asked, sounding a little sullen.

I shrugged. “It was okay.”

“Hope you two found some time to be alone together.”

“ Us two?”

“You. Him .” He glared at Jude’s back.

I forced a laugh. “Don’t make me throw up.”

“You can’t,” Auden said flatly. “Remember?”

“Like I could forget.”

“You seem to have forgotten that he’s crazy. Dangerous.”

“You’ve got no reason to think that,” I said. “You’re just—” But that was a sentence that didn’t need finishing. “He’s not so bad.” I didn’t know why I was bothering to defend him.

No wonder Auden was freaked. I was a little freaked. But it didn’t mean something was going on. Just because I didn’t totally hate Jude, didn’t mean I—Well, it didn’t mean anything.

“You tell yourself that if it helps. If that makes it easier.”

So he was jealous, even though there was nothing to be jealous about—and even though he had no right to be. Auden didn’t own me. “Something you want to ask?”

“None of my business,” he said.

“Except you obviously think it is,” I pointed out. “Unless you’re still mad about what happened between the two of us.”

“You mean what didn’t happen.”

“So you are mad.”

“No.”

“Passive-aggressiveness is incredibly lame,” I said. “You do realize that, right?”

“How am I being passive-aggressive?”

I plucked at the fraying strap of his green bag. “What’d you do, throw the one I gave you in the trash? Light it on fire?”

“It’s new,” he said defensively. “I didn’t want to bring it tonight, mess it up.”

“Whatever. None of my business, right?”

“It was my mother’s,” he mumbled, so quietly that I thought I must have heard him wrong.

“What?”

“The bag.” He pressed it tighter to his body. “It was my mother’s.”

And I’d given him a bright, shiny new one, suggesting he throw the old one in the garbage, where it belonged. What a lovely gesture. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.” He stared hard at me. “We don’t have to talk about everything, do we?”

I looked away. No. We didn’t.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. The city was silent too, at least at first. And then I heard something. A scuffling, shuffling noise. Like careful footsteps, creeping behind us.

I didn’t say anything.

It was probably my imagination, just like the shadows flickering in every alley we passed. It was probably nothing.

Once we reached the cars, Jude loaded us all in—all except for a mech named Tak. I hadn’t talked to him much, partly because he scared me a little. It wasn’t so much the spikes around his neck or the patchy transparent casing on his face that revealed a layer of chunky wiring and circuitry. It was his eyes, which somehow looked even deader than mine. I told myself it was just a trick of the light.

Jude nodded at Tak. Ready? he mouthed.

Tak nodded back, and Jude tugged the tarp back across the car, leaving a corner of one of the windows unblocked. Then he jumped inside and slammed the door behind him. “Everyone scrunch down in your seats,” he ordered. “It’s safer.”

“But what about Tak?” I asked.

“Down,” Jude said. “You’ll see.”

I saw.

“I’m here, motherfuckers!” Tak screamed so loudly we could hear him through the thick windows. He stood in the middle of the empty street, as if waiting. “Come and get me!”

Nothing happened.

He screamed again and again until the words faded, replaced by an incoherent roar. And then, heeding his call, two figures emerged from the darkness, clothed in rags. One carried a knife. The other, a gun.

We couldn’t hear what the men said. But through our corner of window, we could see Tak laugh. The men advanced.

I grabbed Jude’s arm. “We have to do something!” I whispered, panicking.

“He can deal,” Jude said calmly. “Just watch.” And, like a coward, I did.

The man on the left raised his gun.

Tak laughed again. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “No matter how hard you try!” Then he raised his arms out to his sides. “I fucking dare you!”