“Let me guess, I’m forgetting about your mysterious contact,” I said. “The reason for the whole stupid rendezvous.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Jude hesitated. He slipped down along the wall and perched on one of the stairs climbing up to the entrance. I stayed on my feet. “If I tell you something, will you swear to keep it to yourself?”
“I don’t make blind promises.” Not to you.
“BioMax is tracking us,” he said. “GPS. They know wherever we go.”
“You knew?”
“You knew?” He gaped at me. “How?”
“You’re the genius, right? Figure it out.” I was too angry to look at him. To think that he’d known all along and hadn’t told us? Hadn’t done anything?
“You can’t tell anyone,” he said.
“No, apparently you can’t tell anyone!” I yelled. “Because you’re on such a freaking power trip about being the all-knowing Jude! How dare you keep this a secret?”
“What the hell was I supposed to do?” he asked. “If people knew… well, look how you’re reacting. I didn’t want to start an unnecessary panic.”
“I’m having a little trouble with the ‘unnecessary’ part—they’re spying on us, Jude.” I started pacing back and forth, trying to force out some of the anger through motion, but it didn’t work like that, not in the mech body. My brain just kept whirring, furious at all of them.
Jude was still sitting down, sprawled almost casually against the stone stairs. “BioMax isn’t our enemy. Not yet at least.”
“You so sure about that? Or you think it was just a coinci-dence that the attack happened while we were at the corp-town? That your so-called source never showed up? Wake up, Jude. Either BioMax has something to do with this or…”
“Or I did,” he said sourly. “Back to that.”
“What the hell am I supposed to think? Especially when you’re telling me you trust them. Even after this?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Jude said coldly. “You think you’re the only one who can do the math here? Are you really surprised? Did you believe all the BioMax crap, that they have our best interests at heart?”
“That’s exactly my point!”
“No! That’s exactly my point. If certain elements of BioMax were involved in this, all the more reason not to let them know we’re onto their tracking tech. Let them think we’re totally clueless. Let them expose themselves for what they really are.”
“And until then, what? We just sit around and wait?” I asked in disbelief. “How can you even stand it? Knowing—” I shuddered. “Knowing they’re watching you.”
He didn’t say anything. His gaze flicked away, just for a second, but it was long enough to reveal that there was something else. And I’d just hit on it.
Just like when I was in the car with call-me-Ben and he’d accidentally let slip that the trackers weren’t foolproof.
“But they’re not watching you, are they?” I said slowly, forcing myself not to yell.
He shrugged but couldn’t refrain from cracking a small, sharklike smile. He was actually proud.
“They think they are,” he said. Boasted. “Streaming live GPS, mapping my every move. And it’s all bullshit. I’ve been feeding them false data for months.”
“While you let the rest of us…” I stopped, searching for the words. I wanted to get this out right. No incoherent anger or misplaced betrayal, irrational reactions that he could brush off as weak and orglike. “You didn’t bother to tell any of us,” I said finally. “You let us hang and saved yourself.”
“Oh, please.” He rolled his eyes. “I see the time away hasn’t cured you of your inclination to melodrama. ‘Saved myself’? From what? As if they’ll be able to wring any dirty little secrets out of your location.” He shook his head. “Trust me, you’re not that interesting.” He rubbed his hands across his face, a neat little simulation of org exhaustion. “Yes, I can jam the tracking. And no, I’m not about to do it for everyone. It doesn’t occur to you that there may come a time when we can make the trackers work to our advantage? We don’t want them knowing we can screw with the data. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that you don’t put your cards on the table until you have to?”
I hated to admit it, but he was making sense. That was the problem with Jude—he always made sense. He was too good at rationalizing, turning his whims into logical inevitabilities.
“All I know is you pretended we were all in this together,” I said. “And then you did this, on your own.”
He’s not your friend. But that was Ben’s voice in my head. And beneath my anger, there was something else—maybe it was the fact that Jude had voluntarily revealed one of his precious secrets, one guaranteed to make me hate him. Or maybe it was the moment when, for just one second, the mask had fallen away, exposing his need. He needed me to believe him innocent. And I almost did.
“You think I don’t care about you? Them?” He swept his arms out to encompass the estate. Inexplicably, he was angry too—as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. “I’m doing this all for you!”
“Excuse me if I can’t quite see how you selling us out to BioMax is helping.”
“Because I’m taking care of it!” he shouted. “I make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t see. I know everything they know. Everything.”
There was a long silence as I processed what he’d said. And he realized what he’d revealed.
If it were anyone else, I would have said he looked almost afraid.
“You get the GPS feed?” This wasn’t anger. I’d moved beyond anger. The thought of Jude sitting in front of a screen, watching us drift through our lives, watching over us like the Faithers’ god, probably delusional enough to believe that he was sitting in judgment rather than violation? That was sickening.
“You’d rather they knew everything, and we know nothing?” he said defensively, his voice rising. “Someone has to watch our backs.”
“And you love it, don’t you?” I said coldly. “Watching.”
It was one thing to know that strangers at BioMax were watching over my shoulder—even call-me-Ben was nothing more than a pretty face with a boring name attached, paid to pretend he cared about where I went and what I did. As for my father, he’d always been a watcher, keeping tabs on everything, from the hours I put in at the track to the experimental error rate in my biotech homework. That’s what fathers did. They paid attention, even when they weren’t supposed to.
But Jude was supposed to be one of us.
I felt like he’d stripped off my clothes, exposed my naked body.
Except it was even worse. Because the body was just an object. Eventually it would break or break down, and so what? It would be interchangeable with whatever came next. Only our minds were inviolate—that’s what Jude had taught us, wasn’t it? The thing that separated us from the orgs, the thing that made us mechs, that made us special. We lived in our heads. Unlike the orgs, we didn’t fool ourselves into believing that our bodies mattered. Only our minds were alive, and they belonged to us.
But now Jude had reached his long fingers inside my head and carved out a space for himself. He’d crawled inside me, without my permission, without my knowledge.