“So.” I leaned forward. “Since you think he’s so great, does that mean you—?”
“No!” Ani recoiled at the idea.
“At the rate he’s been going, I guess that makes us the only two left.”
“Three.”
“Doubtful.”
“Not Quinn,” she said. “He promised.”
“Promised that he hasn’t? Or that he wouldn’t?” I asked, glancing up at the pedestal out of the corner of my eye. Quinn and Brahm were still going at it. I wondered what she would do if she knew Ani had come to the party. Or if she’d expected nothing less.
“Hasn’t and wouldn’t,” Ani insisted. “Won’t.”
“If you say so.”
“He says so,” Ani said. “That’s good enough.” She tipped her head forward and pressed it to the glass. Just for a moment. And when she looked up, she was smiling. “I’m in the mood to slam something,” she said, jerking a thumb at the idiots barreling into each other at full force, their skulls knocking with audible cracks. “You in?”
I’d played once before. It required no skill, unless you counted a total lack of restraint and a willingness to eventually find yourself crushed beneath a wriggling mass of sharp elbows and flailing feet. It was, when played right, like becoming a human pinball, ricocheting from body to wall to body again, limbs twisting and tangling. Hurling yourself into a stranger, hearing their bones crack against your head or their surprised grunt as your weight smashed down on their shoulders and sent you both toppling to the ground, left little room for rational thought. The world became pure matter in motion, action and reaction. It was brainless and stupid. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the night.
4. ALL FALL DOWN
The days had no shape. They passed, which was good enough. It was a Friday when Jude sent me to the corp-town, not that it mattered, because when you didn’t have school or a job or contact with the world beyond the bounds of the estate, when the seasons only shifted from cold and gray to colder and grayer, when you didn’t age and the sentence of your life had no foreseeable period, marking time became a formality.
But I remember it was a Friday.
He was in the vidroom, pumping the Brotherhood’s zone. It was all he ever did anymore, scanning the texts and vids they posted, Savona testifying before congressional subcommittees, Auden meeting and greeting fellow victims who’d suffered at the mechanical hands of the skinners, testimonials from new members, rigged debates with purported supporters of BioMax, who mumbled and stumbled their way through a halfhearted defense of the download technology before bowing to the inevitable, conceding that Savona was right and vowing to do everything in their power to take down the tech from within.
That was the party line: Eliminate the download, not its recipients. Hate the sin, not the skinner. Savona didn’t want to destroy us, he just wanted to strip us of our credit accounts, our citizenship, our identities, ourselves. He wanted it known that we were machines, and just as machines had their place, so did we.
It was beginning to rain when I got summoned. Riley was already there, slouched on a couch, his legs kicked up on one of its arms. Quinn and Ani were there too, not much of a surprise since Quinn had been hanging around Jude more than ever lately, and where Quinn went, Ani was sure to follow.
“I need you and Riley to run an errand for me,” Jude said, barely lifting his eyes from the screen. “He’ll fill you in. If you leave now, you should make it back by tonight.”
A road trip with Riley, the wordless wonder? No thanks. “Did I miss a memo? Since when do I take orders from you?”
Jude turned to me, miming surprise. But he knew exactly how much I hated the glorious dictator act. “Let me rephrase: Dearest, most valued, exceedingly busy Lia, can you do me this minor favor? Pretty please, with a cherry-flavored dreamer on top?”
“Forget it,” Quinn said, standing up. “I’ll go.”
Jude shook his head once, sharply. “Lia’s going.”
“Why?” Quinn and I said together. She glared at me.
Jude looked back and forth between the two of us, a smile playing on his lips. “Because I trust her.”
“And not me, right?” Quinn slumped back down on the couch. “Very nice.”
Ani rested a hand on her back, rubbing slow, wide arcs along her spine. “I trust you,” she murmured. Quinn shrugged her off.
I wasn’t sure which would be worse: leaving with Riley and enduring endless hours of his sulky scowl, or staying to bask in the stench of Ani’s desperation.
“How about you go yourself?” I suggested.
“Busy,” Jude said, turning back to the vidscreen.
“So send Riley alone,” I said. “Or are we working on the buddy system now?”
“One to pick up the package,” Jude said. “The other to watch the drop.”
Much as I hated it when Jude pulled the need-to-know spy crap on us, I couldn’t help it; I was intrigued. “The package of…?”
Jude shrugged. “Could be dreamers, could be new tech. Hell, for all I know, they’re giving us wings. Ours is not to ask, but to receive and enjoy.”
Quinn, Ani, and I all gaped at Jude. For months he’d been producing new, easily installed tech for our mech bodies—nothing major, a VM hookup here, nanojected titanium bone-knitters there, a microplayer that piped music inside your head. All untested, all unlicensed by BioMax, whose technicians—on the rare occasions when one of us showed up for a scheduled monthly tune-up or the more frequent emergency trips postcollision, crash, or other such self-inflicted catastrophe—eyed the tech with badly disguised suspicion and fear. The suspicion I got. Jude didn’t have to spell it out: He obviously had a connection at BioMax, some employee or former employee who’d decided to field-test the newest toys. But I never understood the fear. Especially since they didn’t even know the whole story. They saw the tech, because that was impossible to hide. But they didn’t know anything about the dreamers.
Of course, neither did the rest of us, if “anything” included where they came from, why they existed, or how they did what they did. Letting Jude believe he could order me around seemed like a small price to pay to find out.
Riley spoke six words on the drive.
One and two: You’ll see.
Three: Yes.
Four: No.
I asked my first two questions—Where are we going? Have you been there before?—as the car sped past the fields bordering the estate, spotted free-range cows grazing in a sea of genetically engineered green. I figured Riley would insist on driving manually, since he seemed the type, but he left the car in automatic, keyed in the mystery destination, and settled into the driver’s seat, apparently content to silently watch the road stream by.
“You ever learn how to drive manual?” I asked after half an hour had passed. That earned me word number four, a quiet “No.” Paired with a cool gaze that efficiently transmitted the message: You’re dumber than I thought.
Asshole, I thought. But I was the asshole. As if anyone learned to drive growing up in a city. Like there were any working cars in a place where energy was rationed so carefully that no one got more than a couple hours of electricity to spread out over a day. And what would he have needed a car for, anyway? Anywhere you needed to go in a city, you could get to on foot—not that there was anywhere to go except for the central distribution facility for the occasional ration of food. I’d heard sometimes they even handed out meds, mostly the experimental ones, but sometimes there was a surplus of something useful but defunct. When it came to disposing of unwanted waste, better the city than the garbage.