“Here,” Riley said, letting himself slam into a thick trunk, wrapping his arms around the tree and pressing his cheek to the bark. “This is good enough.”
“For what?”
“For keeping our heads down.” He sank to the ground, hands plunged into the layer of dead leaves swimming beneath the trees.
“You act like we did something wrong.” And maybe we did, I thought, remembering the faces. Eyes open, watching me, watching nothing. We could have stayed. We ran.
“Wake up, Lia,” he snapped. “You think it was an accident, that happening when we were there?”
“I don’t think anything. I don’t even know what that was.”
“It was a setup.”
“You think that was about us?” Because of us, is what I meant to say. Is what I didn’t want to say.
He shrugged. “If not, we have some pretty shit luck.”
“What else is new?”
“I’m staying,” he said with sullen finality. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”
As if he would leave me behind. It didn’t matter how much he sulked, I could telclass="underline" He wasn’t the type. “If you don’t care, how come you didn’t just leave me there?”
“Wasn’t thinking,” he said. “Now I am.”
I sat down next to him. The ground was spongy. Dry leaves crunched beneath my weight. “Those orgs,” I said, quiet. “People. You think they…”
“Yeah.” Riley looked down at his hands, still hidden in the leaves. “Some of them, at least. I don’t know.”
Some of them what? Died, or lived?
“I never—” I stopped, about to say I’d never seen a dead body, but that was wishful thinking. I’d seen my own, burned and broken, brain scooped out for slicing and dicing and scanning.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Sometimes it was useful being a mech, staying blank and keeping things inside. The problem came when you wanted to get them out. If I’d been trembling, if I’d been sweating or pale and cold or shivering uncontrollably, if I’d puked until there was nothing left but bile, if I’d felt anything in my body, then maybe my brain could have taken a break. Of course, if I was in a position to do any of those things, I wouldn’t have been sitting in the dark, rain beginning to patter against the leaves. I probably would have been dead.
Riley wouldn’t let me link in to the network. “They could use it to track us.”
“We don’t even know if ‘they’ are looking for us,” I argued. “And even if they are, you can’t track people through the network.”
He gave me a weird look. “Who told you that?”
“No one had to tell me. Everyone just knows.”
“You want to link in, you do it somewhere else,” he said. “Away from me.”
I didn’t want to go anywhere. “How long you think we need to wait?”
“Couple days maybe. To be safe.”
“Here?”
He almost smiled. “You got somewhere to be?”
Nowhere to be, no need to eat or sleep, nothing to do except find a way to stop seeing what I’d seen. And I had to admit, he’d picked a good hiding spot. All Sanctuaries had periodic ranger sweeps to make sure the orgs stayed out, but the odds of anyone finding us in the next day or two were pretty minuscule.
“You can shut down if you want,” Riley suggested. “I’ll keep watch.”
And lie there unconscious, trusting him to make decisions for the both of us? “I don’t think so.”
He tipped his head up, as if there were anything to see but dead branches. “Whatever.”
We sat there silently for a while. I almost laughed, remembering how much I’d dreaded having to spend a few hours in a car with him. Now here we were, playing at being alone in the world. But I didn’t laugh—thinking I’d been right not wanting to come.
Weird how tiny, stupid decisions make all the difference.
“You want to talk about it?” Riley said suddenly.
“What?”
“You know. What happened.”
Now I did laugh.
“What?” he asked, looking almost hurt.
“Since when do you want to talk?” I asked, still laughing, but only in my head, where I couldn’t stop. This is hysteria, I thought, my mental voice wracked with giggles, my body still and calm. Riley rested a hand on my upper arm, like he knew, and somehow it quieted the noise. He pulled his hand away.
“I didn’t say I wanted to talk,” he said. “I asked if you wanted to.”
“Fine,” I said. “But not about that.”
He nodded.
“Tell me something,” I ordered him. It felt good to boss a guy around. Normal, almost.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything.”
He looked more blank than usual.
“Like, tell me how you did that back there with the door,” I suggested. I didn’t particularly care, but it was something to say.
“I used to do a lot of that stuff,” he said. “It came in handy.”
I didn’t have to ask him when. It was the same nebulous before we all had and never talked about. Jude’s law. And Jude knows best, right?
“Okay, but how did you do it? Who taught you?”
He shrugged. “I just figured it out.”
“Fine.” I crossed my arms. “Great.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you always look at me like that?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m saying something wrong. Usually when I’m not even saying anything.”
“You’re never saying anything,” I pointed out.
“I am right now,” he said. “You’ve still got the look.”
“Maybe because you’re still not actually saying anything. Not really.”
“You’re strange,” he said. “Anyone ever told you that?”
“Not really, no,” I said coolly. Strange meant not fitting in; I defined in. “I saw a pic of you,” I added, turning it back on him. “You and Jude and Ani. From before.”
Jude had freaked out when he’d heard that, when I threw in his face that I knew what he’d been, before. Riley didn’t react.
“It was a long time ago,” he said tonelessly.
“Less than two years. Not so long.”
“Long enough.”
“So you and Jude, you were friends?” I asked, even though that much I knew. “Before?”
Riley smiled, a real smile, one of the first I could remember seeing on him. Sometimes, with mechs, a smile could transform the face into something even less human—the expression somehow incongruous on the synthetic lips, a quaint and unsettling party trick, like a dog propped at the dinner table with a fork and spoon. But Riley’s smile was natural enough, and it made the rest of him seem more real. “You know Jude hates talking about the past.”
I glanced over my shoulder as if making sure. “Yeah, Jude’s definitely not here,” I said. “So?”
“So nice try,” he said, then grimaced like he couldn’t stand not to answer. “But yeah, we were. Best friends.”
“Funny that he didn’t ditch you along with the rest of his past,” I said. “All part of embracing our bright new mech future, right?”
But Jude’s friendship with Riley apparently fit into the same category as our org names, one of the few things we weren’t obligated to dump in the garbage as a testament to our new lives. In its own way, continuity was as important as discontinuity, Jude maintained. The radical break from our past, from our old families and old values, could only have meaning if we kept some core piece of ourselves intact—and then, of course, there was the small practical matter that keeping at least a tenuous grasp on our old identities was necessary if we wanted access to our zones and credit. And so the past was irrelevant… except when it suited him. When he needed it to pay the bills or to guarantee loyalty. Or to throw it in my face, remind me how I’d ended up with him and why. That was the thing about Jude. He spoke with conviction, but sometimes the distinctions he drew seemed arbitrary, invented ad hoc to serve his own purposes. Then he turned preference into principle, and his particular conveniences became our general rule.