I didn’t get her, and suspected that was the idea, like she thought I’d be so intrigued by her ridiculous air of mystery that I wouldn’t kick her out. I wondered if Sascha had put her up to it. If so, they were both seriously overestimating my level of curiosity. “What do you want?” I knew I sounded like a sulky kid. I didn’t care.
“Heard your parents finally showed. Figured I would see how it went.”
They’d driven two hours for a fifty-minute visit, then gotten the hell out.
“Great,” I said sourly. “Heartfelt family reunion. You know how it is.”
She raised her eyebrows. It was a nice trick, one I resolved to master myself. “Not really. My family’s not an issue.”
“Too perfect for ‘readjustment pains’?” I used Sascha’s favorite phrase for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong.
“Too dead.”
“Oh.”
I refused to feel guilty. Not when she’d so blatantly manipulated the conversation to reach this point. “Sorry.” I lay back down again and turned over on my side, my back to her; universal code for “go away.”
“Don’t you want the details?” Quinn asked, sounding disappointed. “The whole poor little orphan saga, from tragic start to triumphant finish?”
If I’d still had lungs, I would have sighed. Or faked a yawn. “Look, if Sascha sent you in here to give me the whole ‘you should be grateful for what you have’ guilt trip, I’m not interested. Yeah, it sucks that your parents are dead, but that doesn’t make mine any easier to deal with.”
Silence.
I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.
“I’m sorry.” I twisted in bed, risking a glance at her face.
She raised just one eyebrow this time, which was even more impressive. “Yeah. You are.” She turned away, revealing a broad swath of artificial flesh exposed by her backless shirt. I didn’t know how she could stand it. Even at night I tried to cover up as much as possible. The more of me I could hide under the clothes, the less there was for others—for me—to see. Beneath the clothes I could imagine myself normal. Quinn, on the other hand, left very little to the imagination. She stalked out of the room, but paused in the doorway, tapping her fingers against the wall console. Lights off, lights on. Lights off. “You coming?”
I was.
“What are you doing?” I whispered as we waited at the elevators. “It’s not like they’ll work for us.”
“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.”