It was an empty threat. It had to be. This just wasn’t how things worked. Not anymore.
I stayed in my seat as one hour passed, then another, waiting for Ayer to return. I knew how to wait. Hadn’t I been doing it for days now? Hadn’t I been doing it for months, waiting for something to happen that would change everything? That would fix everything, turn back the clock to the time before I left home, before Auden, before the download? If you’re waiting for something that’s never going to happen—that you know is never going to happen—it shouldn’t count as waiting. But that’s how it felt.
Almost twelve hours passed. When the door opened, Ayer was wearing another, even frumpier suit, blue this time, with the Synapsis label emblazoned in a garish red. New clothes for a new day. And she wasn’t the only one. She set a neatly pressed pile of clean clothes down on the table beside me, complete with a pair of shoes. And not just any shoes I realized suddenly, confused—these were mine.
“You have a visitor,” she said, as the door swung open again.
For a moment I thought I was imagining him. That the pressure and confusion had plunged me into a dreamer flashback, or maybe some kind of wish-fulfillment mechanism had overwhelmed my neural system.
And then the hallucination spoke. “Hello, Lia,” he said, stiff and proper as always. Unreadable. I couldn’t look at him. Not without picturing him the way I’d seen him last, when I’d thought I wouldn’t see him again.
I forced myself not to get up. He wouldn’t want to touch me. But he crossed the room and rested his hands on my shoulders, and his lips brushed the top of my head, and I hugged my chin to my chest and closed my eyes and was sorry and grateful that I couldn’t cry. “Hi, Dad.”
9. UNSAID
“This is over,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”
I glanced at Detective Ayer.
“Don’t look at her,” he snapped. “She’s got no power here.”
“Lia, when was the last time you saw your father?” the detective asked.
“I—” I stopped. Trick question, obviously. But knowing she was trying to trick me into telling the truth wouldn’t help me come up with the correct lie.
“She’s not answering any more of your questions,” my father informed her. “And she’s leaving here with me. Now.”
The detective flushed. “M. Kahn, you understand, there’s paperwork to be completed, and even if everything you say checks out—”
“If?” My father wasn’t the kind to explode. If anything, he did the opposite—as his anger built, he contracted. He fell silent, his face scary white, his voice low, his eyes riveted on the target of his scorn, as if willing his gaze into a face-melting beam. Some people were too dense to notice the shift; true idiots mistook his stillness for passivity. But like Ayer had said before, she could read people, and she read my father. Or maybe she’d read enough of my file to know that a man like him—on the board of several corps, including hers—could get her kicked so far down the ladder that by the end of the week she’d be shipped off to the nearest wind farm to spend her days trolling for power pirates.
“I didn’t mean to question your integrity, M. Kahn,” she said tightly, each word clipped and precise.
“Much as I appreciate that heartfelt sentiment, your superiors aren’t relying on my word,” he said. “They’re acting on the records of BioMax Corp.”
“Just a coincidence that you sit on the board,” she mumbled.
“What’s that?” my father snapped. “Speak up.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Nothing.”
“Fortunately for all of us, I suppose, the decision is out of your hands,” my father said. “Your superiors haven’t seen fit to question the material supplied by BioMax, so unless there’s something else…?”
Detective Ayer turned to me, and her defeated expression regained a little of its spark. “You didn’t know, did you?” she asked.
“Didn’t know what?”
“That your alibi was out there, ready and waiting. That you could have ended this farce before it started.”
“Maybe I just enjoyed your company,” I said, pride overcoming curiosity.
She shook her head. I could see from her expression that she knew she’d be crazy to push the issue—and she was going to do it anyway. Her last stand. “I don’t think so. You asked how we tracked you down. Don’t you want to know?”
“Lia, we’re leaving,” my father said. Like I was still his perfect, darling daughter, who lived in the bedroom down the hall, said please and thank you and of course, yes, whatever you want, Daddy, like I hadn’t seen him on his knees praying to a God he’d never believed in, wishing that he’d had the strength to let me die.
He’d done me a favor, convincing me once and for all that I wasn’t the same person anymore, no matter how much we both might have wanted it. I’d done him a favor in return: I left.
“No. I want to hear this.” Knowing that he was my only option, that if he changed his mind about rescuing me and left me here, here is where I’d rot. Knowing that if I said one more yes and walked out the door with him, I’d keep walking, straight to the car, then to the house, to the old bedroom and the old life, the one that didn’t fit me any better than all the old clothes in Lia Kahn’s closet, custom-tailored to a body that was now a pile of ashes in some biowaste landfill.
“BioMax is tracking you,” Detective Ayer said. “BioMax knows where all you mechs are, every minute of every day. Took a couple days to get them to release the data, but once they did, we would have found you anywhere.”
Relief, that was first. No one had turned me in. Riley hadn’t betrayed me. Relief, and then disgust—with BioMax, and with myself for not figuring it out.
My father’s face was as blank as mine.
“That’s your big secret?” I said coolly. “You think I didn’t know that?”
As an org, I’d been good at bluffing; as a mech, I was a pro. Empty expression, inflection-free voice—Ayer would never know how much she’d thrown me. “Seems like you’re the one who’s been wasting time. All that data and you still can’t figure out who attacked the corp-town? What kind of detective are you anyway?”
Judging from her expression, the kind that wanted to violate the Human Rights Covenant and throw me into the wall. But she behaved. “BioMax doesn’t archive its tracking data,” she said tightly. Apparently my father wasn’t the only one who could release his bottled-up anger word by bitter word. “They can only tell us where you are, not where you were.”
Lie, I thought. BioMax would never collect the information just to throw it out. Ayer didn’t seem dumb enough to believe the line, but maybe she was smart enough to know it was all she’d get.
What else was BioMax lying about? Was it just a GPS tracker, or could they see what I saw, hear what I heard? Could they somehow know what I was thinking? My brain was a computer, after all—a computer they’d built. Shouldn’t it have occurred to me that they could read it as easily as I could read the network? That maybe they could write over it as easily as I could update my zone?
“Did you want to hear the rest?” Ayer asked, giving herself away with an inadvertent glance at my father. Because he’d given the secops something they didn’t have, I realized. Evidence that had convinced them to let me go—evidence that shouldn’t have existed.
“BioMax feeds the tracking data to my father,” I said flatly, confirming the guess with one look at Ayer’s face. My father remained unreadable. “They may not archive it, but he does.”