“For you,” my father snapped.
“Sorry,” I mumbled again.
“Your mother thought…” He shook his head. “You know how she gets.”
I tried to catch his eye, hoping for a smile. It was one of the things that brought us Kahns together—me, my father, and Zo, at least. We all knew how my mother got. But he wouldn’t look at me.
“But you knew where I went,” I said. “Because you’ve been watching me.”
“Can you blame me?”
“I had to leave,” I said.
“I realize you think that.”
“This is better.”
“I realize you think that too.” He frowned. “Though I can’t say I understand why.”
I wasn’t about to tell him what I’d seen, that I knew he felt obligated to treat me like a daughter and pretend everything was the way it used to be, even if it was tearing him apart. My father didn’t do weakness. Another reason my leaving was a gift to him. “How’s Zo?” I asked instead.
“She misses you.”
No, she missed her sister. As far as she was concerned, I was just an imposter, come to steal her sister’s identity and life. So Zo had stolen it first. Starting with Walker. But I wasn’t about to ask my father if Zo was still sleeping with myex-boyfriend.
I didn’t even care anymore. Walker felt irrelevant. I remembered wanting him, I just couldn’t remember why. Zo was welcome to him, as she was welcome to all my old friends and old clothes, my old spot on the track team, my old spot as favorite daughter. Only daughter.
“She didn’t want me there,” I said.
“She’s a child. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“She’s only two years younger than me,” I pointed out. Waiting for the inevitable: You’re a child too.
You don’t know what you want.
Come home.
But he didn’t say it.
Your sister misses you. Your mother misses you. Never I miss you.
It started to rain. My father glanced up, looking annoyed that the weather would dare interrupt him, then down at his shoes, already spattered with grime from the fat, filthy raindrops.
“Whatever you were doing in that corp-town,” my father said, steering us back toward the car, “I know it’s because you’re mixed up with these…” His face twisted. “People.” He raised his arm, letting his hand fall lightly on my left shoulder for just a moment, like he was choosing arbitrarily from a list of “fatherly gestures,” seeking one that felt right. This wasn’t it.
Did he think I had something to do with the attack?
Did he think I was capable of something like that? And if he did, why would he be here now?
Just ask me, I thought. Ask me what happened.
And I resolved that if he did ask, I would tell him everything.
“I don’t want to know about it,” he said, hunching his shoulders against the rain. “Just be careful.”
I was still a minor; if he wanted to force me to come home, he could. Or at least he could try. I’d been wondering all these months why he hadn’t—certainly he had enough credit and enough reach to find out where I was. To drag me home. But he hadn’t.
And now it turned out he’d known where I was the whole time. Known, and just left me there.
I didn’t miss you either, I thought.
And I missed you too.
I never understood it as an org, how a thing could be true and not true in equal amounts. When we were kids, they always tried to drill it into our heads, the way the universe constructed itself through a simultaneity of opposition: Light is a particle. Light is a wave. Light is both, at the same time it’s neither. Every reality contains its own opposite; every whole truth rests on two half lies.
These days, it made a lot more sense. That’s what happens when your whole life is an oxymoron.
Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn’t exist, all at the same time.
I am the same; I am different.
But when it came to my family, different won out. Some things create danger just by existing. I couldn’t go home again, even if he’d asked.
Which he hadn’t.
“I don’t think the authorities will be bothering you anymore,” he said. “But if they do, voice me.”
“Thank you,” I said. Formal, proper, like a stranger. Like him. “And for today. Thanks.”
Like it was no big deal that he’d made it okay, the way I used to think he could make everything okay. I wasn’t a child anymore; I knew better. Some things could be fixed with credit and power and properly applied pressure. Most things, the important things—things like bodies on the ground, bleeding from their eyes, things like what happened when the secops arrived and the guns came out and the losers fell, things like me, stuck between being a person and a thing—no one could fix. Not even him.
My father patted me on the back, twice. Item number two on the list of awkward “fatherly gestures.”
“Ben’s agreed to drive you back,” he said.
“Oh. Now?”
“Unless there’s something else you need?”
As I watched him, trying to figure out what he was expecting me to say, he met my gaze for the first time. But if there was a message encrypted in his blue stare, I couldn’t crack the code. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”
10. WATCHERS
I would have expected someone like call-me-Ben to drive a late-model Trivi or maybe even a Petra, one of those neutered bubble cars with a rotating cabin and a collapsible gel body—bland as his wardrobe, suitable for middle-aged trend chasers who preferred safety to style. But the car was a Taiko, black and practically dripping with credit, its bullet shape so streamlined that it was hard to imagine how a human form could fit inside. The wheels were hidden beneath the frame, so there was nothing to break the smooth, sleek line. I’d never seen one up close before, much less ridden inside, but I heard that with the right patch, you could override the velocity restrictions and push it to almost two hundred. Walker had always wanted one, and the fact that I knew anything about them at all was a testament to how crazy he’d been on the subject. You can’t tune out three years’ worth of obsession. (Trust me, I tried.)
The paint was supposedly some kind of special alloy that absorbed even infrared light—it looked like someone had carved a car-shaped hole in the universe and filled it with pure nothingness.
The door swung open. Ben was behind the wheel. I climbed into the backseat, hoping to endure the ride in silence. No such luck. He programmed the nav-unit for Quinn’s estate, then climbed in beside me. I stared out the window, watching my father’s figure recede into the distance.
“You’re welcome,” Ben said once we’d pulled out onto open road.
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“I noticed.”
I kept my eyes on the window. The land was flat here, sprawling green fields stretching toward the horizon. A herd of cows whizzed by in a spotted blur. The road wove through flower-dotted meadows; clumps of willow trees, their spindly, sagging branches kissing the road; acres of greening corn, bowing to the wind. Nowhere to hide, I thought, then wondered how long it would be before I stopped searching for safe harbors.
“No one gets something for nothing, Lia,” Ben said.