The detective looked disappointed that I wasn’t freaking out. She didn’t know him like I did. You didn’t say no to my father—if the information existed in the world, it was only a matter of time before he claimed it for himself.
“And according to him, you’ve spent the last several days at home with your family.” Detective Ayer smiled coldly. “I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t have mentioned that yourself, saved us both all this trouble.”
“I’m sure there are lots of things you don’t understand,” I said. “You must be used to it by now.” I could feel my father’s eyes on me, sense his approval.
“Unless there’s anything else, we’ll be going now,” my father said. “Once you apologize to my daughter for wasting her time.”
Detective Ayer looked like she’d rather die. “If you come across any information about the attack, I hope you’ll come to me,” she said. “We do intend to solve this case.”
“I hope you can,” I said. “Oh, and apology accepted.”
The clothes felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else. Which they did. They’d come from a dead girl’s closet. But I put them on anyway, grateful to trash the city rags. I laced up the dead girl’s sneakers. And let the dead girl’s father take me away.
My BioMax rep was waiting for us in the parking lot. Just as repulsively handsome as I remembered, even in his tacky suit with its thermo-pulse lapels and gold net-links at each cuff. The first time I met Ben, I’d fixed on the dimpled chin and the full lips, instinctively turning on the flirt even though I was stuck in a hospital bed unable to do anything but blink—and even though, at the time, my skull was stripped bare to expose the tangled mess of circuitry that lay beneath. That was back when I thought we were on the same team, still members of the same species. Before he leaned in close, gave me that sickly fake grin, and said, “Call me Ben,” my first tip-off that he wasn’t a doctor or a savior but just some guy who wanted to sucker me into trusting him. Even though I saw him every time I went into BioMax for a checkup or repair, I could never be bothered to remember his last name. Call-me-Ben it was. And now, apparently, we were on the same team again.
“Good to see you again, Lia,” he said. “Though not under these circumstances.”
“Seems like you’ve been seeing me nonstop,” I snapped. “So you like to watch? Seen anything you like?”
Ben raised his eyebrows at my father. “She knows?”
“She knows,” I said.
“We don’t watch,” Ben told me. “We keep track of where you go, but that’s it. No spying.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. That’s not spying at all.”
“It’s precautionary,” he said. “To make sure none of you get into any trouble. Like, say, wandering into a corp-town that’s about to become the site of biological warfare.”
“What’d you do?” I asked my father. “Pay him off to give the cops fake information?”
“BioMax is not in the business of violating its clients’ privacy,” Ben said stiffly.
“Especially not if it would prove your clients are a bunch of terrorists,” I guessed. “You know who attacked that corp-town, don’t you? And you’re protecting them.”
“We’re protecting all of you,” Ben said.
“You’re protecting your investment.”
“You don’t want to become an object of fear and hatred.”
“I didn’t want to become an object at all,” I snapped. “But no one asked me.”
“Enough,” my father said. He didn’t have to raise his voice. “Ben, thanks for your assistance. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…”
“Of course,” Ben said smoothly. “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
We walked. In silence, at first, until Ben was out of sight. The secops headquarters looked like a silver pyramid that had been smashed with a giant sledgehammer, leaving behind a crushed jumble of razor-sharp points and jagged edges. The planes of the building jutted at awkward angles, so that wherever you stood, it appeared ready to topple over on your head. Covered in silver-plated panels, it likely gleamed in the sun—but on a day like this, like most days, the sky a swirl of murky grays, it nearly faded into the clouds.
We kept the station at our backs, and instead wandered through its carefully groomed gardens, which burst with the bright purples and pinks of tropical flowers, genetically coded to survive the cold. It was something I never would have noticed before the download, the way the flowers looked wrong, almost plastic, sprouting from the frost-tipped grass. My father stopped abruptly, staring down at a large pink blossom the size of a fist, its stiff petals barely flickering in the breeze. For a moment I thought he was going to pluck it—ill-advised as that would have been, given the fact that despoiling private gardens was illegal and this garden happened to belong to the secops. Besides, what would my father want with a flower?
Finally he looked up from the flower—to me. I didn’t like it. It was too easy to imagine what he was seeing, the machine that usurped his dead daughter’s life. The mistake.
In his eyes I wasn’t some wondrous machine, a marvel of modern technology. I wasn’t a mech, I was a skinner. A thing, just like the Brotherhood of Man said, the thing that the people in the corp-town and the city saw when they glared at me, the thing, the object, with the unnatural gait, the unblinking eyes, the man-made brain.
In his eyes I wasn’t a miracle. I was a desecration.
His hair was a different color than the last time I’d seen him, black instead of his natural blond. He was a vain man, but not about his appearance—that was my mother’s domain, and I could only assume that, as usual, she’d decided to mod her look and changed his to match. It made his skin look paler, throwing the lines ridging his eyes and mouth into sharp relief; past time for another lift-tuck.
There had been a time, when Zo and I were kids, that our mother had insisted we all conform to some Kahnian Platonic ideal. Blond hair, blue eyes, Zo and I with identical waves in our shoulder-length manes, our honey-haired mother towing our father like an accessory, the two of them looking enough alike to be siblings. It was popular in those days, families looking alike, parading their designer genes like a uniform, but Zo and I put a stop to it as soon as we were old enough to fight back. It had been years since the two of us had been a matched pair, and my mother had given up trying to keep pace. But she’d never before picked a look so drastically un-Kahn. Although—given the metallic purples and silvers glimmering across my body—I wasn’t looking very Kahn myself these days.
No one watching us together would guess we were father and daughter.
“Do you mind if I…?” He broke off, then folded me into an awkward hug, his body stiff and unyielding against mine. Or maybe it was my body that was unyielding, my arms that stayed at my sides. “That’s from your mother,” he said, letting go, staring at the stupid flower again.
“Oh. I guess, give her one for me too?” It was hard to imagine. The last time I’d seen them touch, I was lying in a hospital bed. I couldn’t remember the time before that.
“You could do that yourself,” he said.
So we were done with small talk and onto the main event. “I’m sorry,” I said. I’m not sorry. “For leaving like that.” But not for leaving.
“Without saying good-bye?” he asked. “Or telling us where you were going? Telling us anything? Yes, I guess you would be sorry.”
Now I was the one staring at the ground. “It was easier that way.”