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?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know.
But…
Pain, I thought. I miss pain.
I shook my head harder.
He tossed the knife and caught it neatly, gripping the blade. Then, like a knight making an offering to his queen, extended it to me. “You’ll like.” His teeth gleamed. Not like the knife handle. It was inky black, sucking in light. “You’ll see.”
“You’re crazy,” I whispered. I couldn’t get my voice to work right. Just like I couldn’t make myself walk away. “You’re all crazy.”
He just nodded.
And the knife was still there, waiting.
I didn’t want it.
I did not.
“I’m not one of you,” I said louder. Backing away. “I don’t belong here.”
The mech-head just shrugged and started carving again.
They were all psycho, I told myself. Freaks. Nothing to do with me. Nothing like me.
I’d been wrong to come; I’d been stupid.
I’d been stupid a lot, lately. But that was over. And smart decision number one? Leaving this place, these… people.