8. DEAD END
They wore the standard green uniform of secop foot soldiers, a Synapsis logo swooshing across their chests to mark where their loyalties lay. Less a fashion statement than a fail-safe, the logo housed tracking and recording tech, relaying all data back to their corp-town bosses. For the lawless, it meant that once one secop had found you, they all had. For the secops, it meant Big Brother was always watching.
For me it meant there was no point in fighting back or running away, not unless I wanted my face on record as resisting a security action, which meant automatic detention. Given the other things my face was on record doing, detention no longer seemed much of a worst-case scenario. But there was the small matter of being tied to a chair.
Three of the men in green swarmed around me while two others guarded the door, their stunshots aimed at the hallway. There was no movement out there, no noise. Meaty hands untied the knots around my wrists and ankles.
“Hold still,” one growled, and without giving me a chance to obey, yanked my arms out in front of me. He clamped my wrists together in his large grip.
I reminded myself not to knee him in the groin. “You don’t have to—Hey!”
With his other hand he slipped a pair of cuffs from his belt and, with a smooth, practiced flick, snapped them around one wrist, then the other. The metal edges chewed into my skin.
“It only hurts if you fight it,” he muttered.
Nothing hurts me, you crackbrain. But I stopped straining against the cuffs. “How did you find me?” I asked, not expecting much of an answer. I didn’t get one. I didn’t get anything: no concerned questions, no reassurances, no urgency, just silent efficiency as they hoisted me out of the chair like I was an object. I got it. This wasn’t a rescue operation. It was a retrieval.
But how did they know where to find me?
The burliest of the secops slung me over his shoulder, treating me to another ass in my face, another upside-down ride. This time I wasn’t blindfolded. So I saw Sari and Mika as we passed—saw their bodies, that is, faces planted into the dirty floor, limbs twisted at wrong angles. A gun lay on the ground next to Sari; a knife glinted by Mika’s shoulder. The four bodies laying next to them, all strangers, rested next to equally useless weapons.
The privatization of security operations meant no more guns, I reminded myself. At least not the bullet-shooting kind that drilled bloody holes in your head.
And there was no blood.
Just unconscious, I told myself. The secops would have stunned them like they did to Bliss Tanzen’s boyfriend that time he took too many Xers and tried to set the school on fire.
But that guy’s father had been VP and part owner of the Freetower Corp, and the secops knew it. We were in a city now, where no one owned anything. And the bodies weren’t moving.
“Are they dead?” I forced myself to ask as my head bounced against the secop’s back. I could feel his shrug; my body rose and fell with his jerking shoulder.
He grunted. “What’s the difference?”
Another room. Another lock. Another chair. At least I wasn’t tied down, even if I was still trapped. And this time, I wasn’t alone.
There were six of us. All with the same blond hair, the same blue eyes, the same pale hands with long, tapered fingers, the same pert nose and full lips. I was beautiful, there was no arguing that.
Just not unique.
It was one of those impersonal, featureless waiting rooms—beige walls, beige tiling, uncomfortable beige chairs—and it should have been easy to imagine that we were just waiting for a doctor’s appointment or some kind of disciplinary encounter with the school principal. But there were little touches—the lack of a ViM screen on the wall, of windows, of anything that wasn’t nailed down, the uniform glowering by the door, the small Synapsis logos engraved into the ceiling tiles—that made it impossible to forget where we were. This wasn’t the kind of place in which people waited by choice.
“What?” the girl next to me said suddenly. “You’re staring.”
“No I wasn’t,” I said, quickly looking away. But everywhere I looked, there I was. In sonicshirts and net-linked hoodies and Zo-style retro gear, in full-on org drag and in silver-streaked mech mode that even Jude would be envious of. And still, all of them so much like looking in a mirror that when the girl turned to me, I had to touch my own lips to make sure they weren’t wearing the same scowl. I kept my eyes on my lap, which seemed safer. “You know what we’re doing here, anyway?”
“Quiet!” the secop at the door snapped.
The girl with my face just shrugged, unintimidated. “Don’t you watch the vids?” she whispered. “They called in every F-three-one-six-five in a two-hundred-mile radius of Synapsis. Can you blame them, after what happened?”
It hadn’t been difficult to memorize my serial number: F3165-11. It popped up on the glowing readouts that scrolled across my eyescreen whenever I performed a self-diagnostic check. F for female; 11 for my place in the production line of identical models. I’d never bothered to ask what the other numbers meant, since all I needed to know was that they meant me—along with everyone else in the room.
Called us in, she had said, but no one called me. They found me—they must have known where to look. Riley? I thought. Maybe he’d decided it was the only way. Maybe I’d been stupid one too many times, trusting my life to a near stranger who’d made it very clear he only cared about two people: Jude and himself.
“So you think one of them did it?” I asked, eyeing the other Lia’s. Not Lia, I reminded myself. “What’s your name?” I asked abruptly, before she could answer my first question.
“Why?” she asked. “You think I’m the one who did it?”
“Sorry, I just—”
“Kidding. I’m Katya.” She held out a hand for me to shake. But I couldn’t force myself to take it. “So was it you?”
“No!”
“Quiet!” the guard barked again, loudly enough that we both flinched.
“Trank out,” the other girl advised. “They just want to talk to us and then they’ll let us go home.”
Not all of us, I thought. Not the one they’re looking for. I was innocent—but how was I supposed to explain where they’d found me? Of course, if Riley had told them that much, maybe he’d told them everything. They could already know I’d run from Synapsis.
“And you believe them? That they’ll just send us home?” I asked.
The mech shrugged, looking like she didn’t have time to care. With her smooth, blond hair, self-assured smile, and immaculate clothes, she looked more like me than I did. It was like watching myself in a vid, acting out a scene I had no memory of performing.
“Why not?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
The door swung open, and a woman in a dowdy tech-free suit with the telltale Synapsis logo stencil across its collar poked her head in. “F-three-one-six-five-eleven,” she said, glancing at a ViM that fit discreetly in the palm of her hand. “Lia Kahn.”
“So you were nowhere near Synapsis Corp-Town at the time of the attack.” Detective Ayer’s voice was nearly as flat as that of a newbie mech, but she was org all the way. You could tell by her dry, flaky skin, pulled too tight by some cut-rate lift-tuck and not helped in any way by the stiff copper curls molded around her face. I knew the corps screened kids around the age of ten, tracking them for manual labor, for data entry, for the factories, wherever their aptitude would allow them to excel, and I wondered what it was about Detective Ayer that had screamed secops. Obviously it had been the right verdict—the corps only farmed out their best officers for off-site work. So she was either unusually good or unusually determined. Or both.