“You’re too high, Lia.” Jude again, a violet dot against the snow. Always telling me what to do. As he spoke, the jets sputtered out in the thin air and my webwings lurched, losing their lift.
“I can take care of myself.” I tilted forward into a dive, arms pressed against my sides to streamline the suit. I was done flying.
I was a bullet streaking toward the ground. Critical velocity came fast as gravity took over, sucking me down. The mountains rose below me, snowy peaks exploded from the earth, and now came the flood of fear. The others blew past, smears of color. Screaming.
“Pull up, you’re coming in too fast!” Ani.
“What the hell are you trying to do!” Quinn.
“Again?” Jude.
Riley, a black shadow against the snow, said nothing.
The ground came up fast, too fast, and I barely had time to level out before I was skimming powder, slicing down the slope, a white cloud billowing in my wake. Something was wrong. The slope too steep, the angle too sharp, the snow too shallow, and I heard the impact before I felt it, the sharp crack of my head crashing into rocky ground, my neck nearly snapping free of my spine.
And then I was rolling down the side of the mountain, blinded by snow.
And then I felt alive.
And then all motion jerked to a stop, a wave of white crashed over me, and the snow filled my mouth, my nose, my ears, and the world went very still and very silent.
And very dark.
I couldn’t see; I couldn’t move. I was a statue under the snow.
“We’re coming for you.” That was Riley in my ear, puncturing the silence. He felt so near, like we were alone together in the dark.
I didn’t answer.
They began to argue about how to reach me, and I cut the link, retreating into the quiet. The GPS would pinpoint my location, and my fellow flyers would eventually show up with snowfusers to dig me out. It didn’t matter how long it took; I could bide my time for centuries, arise icy but intact to a brave new world. It wasn’t so different from flying, I decided. Substitute dark for light and still for speed, but in the end, it was the same. Empty.
Once, I was afraid of the dark. Not the bedtime kind of dark, with dim moonlight filtering through the shades and shadows playing at the corners of the room, but absolute dark. The black night behind your lids.
I’d been trapped there for weeks after the accident, dark, still, and alone. A prisoner in my own body. And then I opened my eyes to discover that my body was gone. That I—whatever part of “I” they’d managed to extricate from my flesh-and-blood brain and input into their quantum cerebral matrix—was trapped after all in a body that wasn’t a body. There was no escape from that. Not into my own body, which had been mangled by the accident, flayed by the doctors, then burned as medical waste. Not into death; death was off the table.
After that, darkness seemed irrelevant. Temporary, like everything else.
With snow packing my eyes and ears, there was no warning. Just pressure, then a jolt. Fingers gripping me, hauling me upward. I dropped back flat against the fresh powder. System diagnostics lit up behind my lids: The network was intact, already repairing itself. Synflesh knitting together, ceramic bones and tendons snapping back into place.
A hand brushed the snow from my eyes. Riley knelt over me, his fingertips light on my cheek. Behind him, Ani, worried. The sky had faded to a purplish gray. “You okay?” Riley asked.
“She’s fine,” Jude said. “Just a drama queen in search of an audience.”
“Shut up.” Riley took my shoulders and propped me up into a sitting position. “Everything still working?” The mountains loomed over us, white and silent. Years before, this had been a vacation spot, a haven for insane orgs who enjoyed hurtling down slopes at breakneck speeds even though their necks, once broken, stayed that way. But when the temperature plummeted along with the air quality, mountain gliding and its attendant risks were cancelled for good. Leaving the snow free and clear for those of us who needed neither warmth nor unfettered oxygen; those of us who just wanted to be left alone.
I knocked the snow from my shoulders and shook it out of my hair. The rush had faded as soon as I slammed into the ground—I was back in mech mode now, cool and hollow.
I pulled my lips into a half grin. It had been hard, relearning emotional expression in the new body, twitching artificial cheek and eye muscles in search of something approximating a human smile. But by now I had total control in a way that orgs never did. Orgs smiled when they were happy, the motion automatic, a seamless reflex of muscle reacting to mind, neural and physiological systems so intertwined that forcing a smile was often enough to boost a mood. Like a natural b-mod, its behavior-modifying effects were brief but instantaneous. My smiles were deliberate, like everything else, and no amount of curled lips and bared teeth would mod my mood.
I let the grin widen. “Who wants to go again?”
Abruptly, Riley dropped his arms, dumping me into the snow. It was Jude who hauled me to my feet and Jude who bundled me up and strapped me into the waiting plane, while Quinn and Ani cuddled in the next seat and Riley sulked in a far corner.
“Have a nice fall?” Jude asked, as the plane lifted off and carried us back toward the estate. The thunder of the engines wrapped us in a soundproof cocoon.
I leaned back, pointing and flexing my toes. Everything was in working order. “I’ve had better.”
Jude arched an eyebrow. “You know, you continue to surprise me.”
“Because?”
“I didn’t expect someone like you to be such a quick study.”
I didn’t have to ask what he meant by “someone like me.” Rich bitch Lia Kahn, spoiled and selfish and so sure she’s better than everyone else. “Someone like the person I used to be,” I reminded him. “That person’s gone. You showed me that.”
“And I’m still waiting for an appropriate demonstration of gratitude.”
“You expecting me to buy you flowers?”
“Why would I need flowers when I have your sunny disposition to brighten my day?”
“What can I say?” I simpered at him. “You bring out the best in me.”
Jude stripped out of his suit, balled it up, and tossed it across the plane. “Funny how I tend to have that effect on people.”
“Oh, please.” I stabbed a finger down my throat. “Do not start lumping me in with your groupies.”
“They’re not groupies.”
But I could tell he enjoyed the designation. “What would you call them?”
“They’re lost, searching for answers—can I help it if they come to me?” Jude crossed his arms, pleased with himself. “I suppose I’d call them wisdom seekers.”
“And they’re seeking it in your pants?”
“So vulgar.” Jude tsked. “When the problem is your body, it’s not so difficult to imagine that the body is where the solution lies.” He reached for my hand, but I snatched it away.
“Save it for the groupies.”
“What?” he asked, amber eyes wide with innocence.
I turned my back on him, watching the clouds stream by. Even now there was something disconcerting about being up in the air without a pilot. Self-navigating cars were the norm—these days, only control freaks drove themselves—but the self-piloting planes were fresh on the market, powered by some new smarttech that, according to the pop-ups, was the world’s first true artificial intelligence. Unlike the smartcars, smartfridges, smarttoilets, smarteverything we were used to, the new tech could respond to unforeseen circumstances, could experiment, could learn. It could, theoretically, shuttle passengers at seven hundred miles an hour from point A to point B without breaking a sweat. It just couldn’t smile and reassure you that if a bird flew into the engine, it would know what to do.