Auden grinned. “Whatever you say.”
We took Auden’s car. The coordinates Quinn gave me led us to a deserted stretch of road about an hour from his house, just a strip of concrete bounded on each side by a dark and desolate stretch of trees.
“You sure about this?” Auden asked as we parked the car on the shoulder and set out into the woods.
“Now you want to turn back?” Say yes, I thought.
“I guess not,” he said.
We disappeared into the trees.
The night was black. Auden led the way, silhouetted against the beam of the flashlight. We followed the GPS prompts, hurrying along the narrow, bumpy path, twisting through the trees, ducking under branches, Auden shivering despite his thermo-reg coat. I couldn’t feel the cold.
“You sure we’re not lost?” I asked.
He peered down at his dimly lit ViM. “According to the GPS, we’re almost—” He froze as the trees gave way to a riverbank dotted with people.
No, not people.
Skinners.
Although, in the dark it was harder to tell the difference.
They were lying in the grass, their flashlight beams playing against the trees, the water, the dark canopy of the sky. Beyond the treeline the night glowed with a pale, reddish light, just bright enough to cast flickering shadows on the fringes of my vision. As if, while watching, we were being watched.
Auden was still shivering. “Maybe we should—”
“Let’s do this,” I said, and started toward the group. He followed, careful to stay a few steps behind.
Most of them ignored us, but a few figures climbed off the ground as we arrived.
“No way,” one of them said, a tall, slim guy I didn’t recognize. “You can stay, but he goes.”
“Lia, you shouldn’t have.” Quinn appeared at my side and leaned in, her lips brushing my ear. “He’s not supposed to be here,” she whispered.
“This place is just for us,” a girl’s voice said. I thought it was Ani—especially when she threaded her arm through Quinn’s—although it was too dark to see whether or not her hair was blue. “It’s all we’ve got.” She jerked her head toward Auden. “They get everywhere else.”
Jude stood in the middle of the pack, silent. Watching.
Auden inched closer to me. “Maybe I should get out of here, let you—”
“You’re staying,” I said. “He’s staying. And he’s not a they.” Just like I wasn’t an us.
“He’s an org,” the first guy said. “He doesn’t belong here. And if you can’t get that, neither do you.”
“He goes, I go.”
The guy shrugged. “Fine.”
“She stays,” Jude said suddenly. His voice was deeper than I remembered. “They both do.”
There was no more argument.
After his pronouncement Jude wandered away. We were good enough to stay, but apparently not good enough to talk to. They all ignored us, except for Quinn and Ani, who sat down again, tangling their legs together. We joined them.
This is it? I thought. Some lame, food-free picnic in the woods?
Quinn did most of the talking, at least at first. Everything was new to her; everything was exciting. Life was amazing. Wonderful. She couldn’t get enough. I wanted to dig up a couple clumps of grass and cram them in my ears. Or, better yet, in her mouth.
Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. “So, Ani, what about you?” I asked. “What’s your story?”
She looked uncomfortable. “I… I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Why the download?” I asked. “What happened to you?”
“I… uh…”
“We don’t ask those questions here.” Jude loomed over us, his face hidden in shadow. “The past is irrelevant.”
“Typical,” Auden muttered.
“What?”
“I said, typical,” Auden said, louder. “That you would think the past doesn’t matter. It’s a common mistake.”
Jude sat down; Ani and Quinn leaped aside to make room for him. It should have made him less intimidating, down on our level. But somehow it had the opposite effect. Maybe it was those glowing eyes. “The past is irrelevant to us,” he said, stretching his legs out and resting back on his elbows. “What we were has nothing to do with what we are. Not that I’d expect an org to understand that.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m the same person I was.”
Jude laughed.
“I think what Jude’s trying to say is that the sooner you forget about your org life, the sooner you can realize the full potential of being a mech,” Quinn said, darting a glance at Jude. He gave her a small smile. She beamed.
“This is why I didn’t want to come,” I murmured to Auden.
Jude leaned forward. “Then why did you?”
“None of your business.”
“Maybe you got bored pretending you still fit in to your tiny, claustrophobic org life,” he suggested. “You’re looking for a better way.”
“Better?” I sneered. “If this is so much better, if you’re all so superior, then why doesn’t everyone want to be a skinner?”
Ani gasped.
“We don’t use that word here,” Jude said quietly. “We’re mechs. And proud of it.”
There was a long pause.
“Sorry,” I said, only because I felt like I had to.
“As for your question, I don’t care whether your rich bitch friends recognize my superiority. Some of us can make judgments for ourselves, without just valuing whatever the masses decide is cool that minute.”
“I don’t—”
“But don’t worry,” he said. “Even the rich bitches will catch on. Sooner than you think.”
I stood up. “This rich bitch is leaving.”
“So soon? Such a shame.”
“All that crap about embracing potential, and this is what you come up with? A supersecret society that meets at midnight to—What? Sit around in the mud, gossiping? Lucky, lucky me to get a membership. I’ll pass.”
Jude shook his head. “You really don’t understand anything, do you? This is just the staging ground. You can go if you want, but you’ll be missing the main event.” He stood up too. We stared at each other, and for a moment it felt like we were alone in the night. Then he shouted. “Ready?”
As one, the skinners—mechs—stood up and began walking along the riverbank. I looked at Auden, who shrugged. “We’ve come this far,” he pointed out.
We hung back, but followed the group along the river, tramping through the mud for a little over a mile, a rumbling in the distance swelling to a roar, until we finally rounded a bend in the river—and stopped short at the edge of a cliff. The river tumbled over the side, thundering down the rocks into an explosion of whitewater below. Far, far below.
“It’s a forty-foot drop,” Jude said. He peered down the falls. “Eighty thousand gallons of water per second. Welcome to your new life.”
The other mechs—there were seven of them—lined up along the edge.
“What are they doing?” I shouted, over the roar of the water. “Are you all insane?”
“It’s incredible, Lia!” Quinn shouted back. “You’ll love it.”
I shook my head. “They’re going to kill themselves.”
“Not possible,” Jude said. “They—we—can’t die. Can’t drown. So we get a little bashed up on the way down. Trust me, it’s worth it.”
Someone jumped.
One moment there were seven shadowy figures standing on the rim, the next, there were six. And a human-shape form disappeared into the churning water. I didn’t hear a scream.