Now they’d found me.
My window was still blocked, but I could see them through the front windshield, silent now, all of them pointing.
“That’s it, we’ll go manual,” my father said, gunning the engine. “I’m going through them.”
My mother shook her head. “It won’t let you.”
“You have a better idea?”
She didn’t.
“Come on, Ana, we’re listening.”
She sighed.
He put his hands on the wheel, switched to manual. “I’ll find a way.”
“Wait.” I leaned forward, touching his shoulder without thinking. He didn’t flinch. I glanced out the windshield, and he followed my eyes, saw the man at the center of the crowd, the one with close-cropped blond hair and black-brown eyes, who had his hands in the air. It was a signal, and his followers—for it was obvious who was leading and who was following—fell back, clearing a path for the car. The man bowed low, but kept his face raised toward the car, his eyes fixed on me. He swept his arm out, his meaning clear. You may go. For now. And then it was our turn to follow.
It was Thursday, and Thursday meant Kahn family dinner. Even if one-fourth of the family no longer ate. They probably would have let me out of it, just this once let me sneak off to the room I hadn’t seen in nearly three months, close the door, start my new-life-same-as-the-old-life on my own, but that would have meant asking, and I didn’t. The food arrived before we did, and Zo, who usually showed up to family dinner an hour or two late, if at all, waited at the table, playing the good girl. “I got steak,” she said instead of “hello” or “welcome home” or “I missed you.” “And chocolate soufflé. All your favorites.”
And so we sat in our usual spots, and I watched them eat all my favorites.
“But what happens if you do?” Zo asked, stuffing the meat into her mouth. She didn’t even like steak. “Does it screw up the wiring? Or would it just sit there and, you know, rot? Like you’re walking around with chewed-up bits of moldy bread and rotten meat inside you?”
“Zoie!” My mother’s fork clattered to her plate.
“She’s just curious,” my father said. “It’s only natural.”
“It’s rude. And it’s not appropriate at the dinner table. Not while we’re eating.”
“We’re not all eating,” Zo pointed out.
I did not ask to be excused.
“There’d be nowhere for the food to go,” I said. “There’s a grating over the vocal cavity. Air goes out when I talk. Nothing goes in. Want to see?” I opened my mouth wide.
Zo shirked away. “Ew, gross. Dad!”
“Not at the table, please,” he said mildly.
To me, not to Zo.
“We thought you might want to take tomorrow off, dear,” my mother said. “Maybe do some shopping, spruce up your wardrobe?” Unspoken: Because my old clothes, custom-tailored for my old measurements, wouldn’t fit my new body. Another factoid she’d neglected to mention: I hadn’t shopped with my mother since I was nine years old. Now, for Cass, Terra, and me, it was a tradition—or, as Cass called it, a fetish—first the full-body scan, then the designer zones, ignoring the pop-ups for crap we would never wear, sending our virtual selves on fashion model struts down virtual runways, knowing that whatever we selected would, automatically and immediately, become the new cool, the new it, and savoring the responsibility.
“I’m just doing a reorder,” I said. Same look, new size. It’s what you did after an all-body lift-tuck or a binge vacation, when you didn’t want anyone to notice your new stats. It was ill-advised—no, that was too mild; it was potentially disastrous—to do a reorder with an all-new body. New hair, new face, new coloring. Fashion logic demanded a new look, especially for a fashion leader. But I preferred the old one. The masses would deal.
“Express it,” my father said. “So you’re ready for Monday.”
“Monday?”
“School. You’ve missed enough.”
“I thought…” I didn’t know what I had thought. I had, in fact, tried not to think. I still hadn’t peeked out from behind the priv-wall on my zone. As far as anyone knew, I was still missing in action. Although obviously, they’d seen me on the vids. They knew what I’d become. “Sascha, the counselor, said maybe I should take things slow.”
“Things?”
“Readjustment… things. Like, school. I figured, maybe I could link in for a while, and then—”
“You know how your father feels about that,” my mother said.
I knew.
School was the “crucible of socialization.” School was where we would be molded and learn to mold others. Meet—and impress and influence and conquer—our future colleagues. We were, after all, preparing to take our place behind the reins of society. There’d be time enough for linked ed when we finished high school and started specialization. And when we did we’d beat out all the asocial losers who’d spent their formative years staring at a ViM. So he’d said when I was six, desperate to escape day one and all the days that followed; so he’d said when Zo got caught cutting, when Zo got caught dosing, when Zo got caught scamming a biotech lab for one of her zoned-out friends and almost got kicked out for good. I didn’t want to make him say it again.
Zo stared down at my empty plate. “If she’s too scared to go to school, I don’t think you should make her.”
Thanks a lot, Zo.
“I’m not scared.”
Zo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m not.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“Zoie!” That was our mother again, trying, always trying, to keep the peace.
“What? I’m just saying, if it were me, I’d be afraid people would think I was, you know.”
Say it.
“You’ve been gone for a long time,” Zo said, like a warning.
I looked at my father. “Long enough. So, fine. Monday.”
I was ready.
Or I would be.
No one was linked in, no one but Becca Mai, who didn’t count, not even in an emergency, which this wasn’t, not yet. Of course no one was there. It was Thursday night, and Thursday night meant Cass’s house—not her parents’ neo-mod manor of glass and steel, but the guesthouse they’d built by the lake, even though they had no guests and never would.
I voiced Walker, who never went anywhere without a flexiViM wrapped around his wrist, set to vibrate with incoming texts and to heat up when I voiced. But he wasn’t there, and I pussed out. I couldn’t let him hear the new voice for the first time in a message. So instead I texted:
I’m home.
I flicked on the mood player, but no music played.
Right. Because the selection was keyed to biometrics, body temp, heart rate, and all the other signs of life I didn’t have anymore. So I skimmed through the playlist, chose at random, a soulsong from one of those interchangeable weepers we’d all worshipped a couple years before, when they’d first engineered the musical algorithm that would make you cry.
It didn’t.
But it was more than a lack of tear ducts. Or tears. It just wasn’t music for me, not anymore, not in the same way. I’d tried it a few times back in rehab, putting on a favorite track, something guaranteed to sweep me out of myself, and it had just been rhythmic noise. Song after song, and I heard every note, I tracked the melodies, I mouthed the lyrics—but it didn’t mean anything. It was noise. It was vibrating air, hitting the artificial eardrum with a certain frequency, a certain wavelength, resolving into patterns. Meaningless patterns.