I smirked, forcing myself not to seek out the camera. It would be hidden in a branch or a gutter, likely invisible and definitely out of my reach, which meant there was no point in tipping her off about how much the eye-in-the-sky act creeped me out. “It’s Ani’s shirt,” I said, plucking at the skintight mesh rippling with bucolic scenes yanked from the network. At the moment, there was some kind of galactic nebula unfurling across my chest.
“Was her shirt. Who do you think made her get rid of it?” Quinn’s low chuckle sounded almost authentic. Even after all these months in the mech body, I still hadn’t gotten a handle on laughter. Ani told me I was imagining things, but I was convinced my spastic barking made me sound like a wounded seal. Quinn had mastered it back when we were still in rehab. And she loved rubbing it in. “If I were you, I’d ditch it immediately.”
“As in strip down right here while you’re watching?”
“Now or later,” Quinn said with a soft giggle. “Remember what I said.”
I’m always watching.
I started heading back to the house.
“Wrong way,” Quinn said. “I have something for you.”
“What?”
“Just a little treat. Trust me.”
“Busy,” I said.
“Don’t you think Jude’s ass could use a break from all that kissing?”
I stopped walking.
“You don’t want to give him a rash,” Quinn added.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning back when you thought we were all freaks, Jude was enemy number one, and now you prance around here like his trained monkey.”
Thanks to the VM, I could answer even with gritted teeth. “Jealous?”
“Of you?”
Jude liked his toys new and shiny, that much I’d figured out. I suspected that Quinn had started to look a little rusty by the time I showed up. Besides, he may have been a mech, but he was still a guy—and when it came to guys, no toy was shinier than the one they weren’t allowed to play with.
“It’s not sucking up if I actually agree with him,” I reminded Quinn. “We all want the same thing, right?”
“I know what I want,” she said. “What about you?”
“You first.” Not that I was avoiding the question. The question was irrelevant. What I wanted I couldn’t have, so I’d decided to stop wanting it.
“I want you to come play with me,” she whined.
“Ask Ani.”
“Ani’s busy.”
Hard to believe. Quinn’s attention span was half the size of Jude’s—out of sight, out of mind was a way of life. And Ani knew it. “I guess Ani and I have that in common.”
“Somehow, I think the vidlifes can get by without you for a few minutes,” Quinn drawled.
“You know, I do have a life outside the network,” I lied. Living on my own with no parents, no school, and no obligations was a freedom the old Lia Kahn would have killed for. Freedom to hook up with Walker, to party all night dosed up on Xers and zone the days away on a cloud of chillers and chocolate, to dance in the moonlight with Cass and Terra while the randoms watched our flickering shadows, wishing they could steal our lives.
Now Walker was hooking up with the sister I hadn’t spoken to in half a year, and b-mods modded nothing. Music was just noise to me, the same way Cass and Terra were just names of people I used to know. My own life had taken a permanent trip to the department of dull. Who could blame me for preferring someone else’s?
It’s not that I’d become a total vid-head. I wasn’t one of the wastoids who spent all day and night whispering directions into the ears of the vidlifers and watching a bunch of strangers act out my wildest fantasies. I didn’t need to pull any strings to watch my dark and shameful fantasy unspool across the screen. Because it was there for me at any hour of the day, in infinite variations: the vidlifers themselves, head cases who had given up their identities, their wills, their lives to the masses. They spoke no words that weren’t piped into their ears, made no choices that weren’t chosen for them by randoms spread across the network. They’d erased themselves.
“Come on,” Quinn wheedled. “You don’t want to miss this.”
I gave in. “Fine.” The only thing more embarrassing than watching vidlifes was envying the vidlifers. I wasn’t about to put myself at Quinn’s lack of mercy. “Where are you?”
“Everywhere,” she hissed in a deliberately spooky whisper. Then cackled. “But right now? Down by the pool.”
I groaned. “No swimming, Quinn, you know that.” She just didn’t know why. No one did, except for Jude. And he was keeping his mouth shut; it was the one thing I’d let myself ask him for.
“Who goes down there to swim?”
“Not that either,” I snapped. But the small black cube was still in my pocket. Just for emergencies, I told myself. Like I always told myself.
“You’re just endless amounts of fun,” she complained.
“Feel free to go bother someone else. It’ll be hard, but I’ll get over it.”
There was a pause. “Just get your ass down here,” she said. “Oh and, Lia?”
“Yeah?”
“Seriously. Lose the shirt.”
Like Quinn said, swimming wasn’t exactly the only reason, or even the main reason, to trek across the grounds to the neo-mod steel-and-glass erector set that housed the pool. Nor was it the only reason I stayed away. The solar panels along the ceiling served double duty as net-linked screens, so you could fine-tune your zone and your backstroke at the same time. Or, as was mostly the case these days, so you could project a dizzying strobe show of light, color, and sound that made the perfect cooldown for anyone coming off a dreamer.
That’s what we called them.
Of course, usually when you dreamed—or should I say when orgs dreamed—they dreamed alone. Even cradled in each other’s arms, they were alone in the dark inside their own heads. For orgs, sleep was the ultimate isolation. Dreamers, on the other hand, didn’t require sleep. They required nothing but a tiny black cube, an ocular uplink, and the will to disappear into madness for anywhere from five minutes to forever. Thanks to the dreamers, mechs could, in their own way, regain their dreams. And thanks to the dreamer links—yet another of Jude’s “unofficial” updates—they didn’t have to dream alone. Hence the mechs sprawled across the pool deck, twitching and keening, and the bodies lining the pool floor, amorphous shapes wrapped together in the rippling water, their brains melting into a shared madness.
You didn’t have to touch to have a linked dream, but I heard it helped. Water too made things more intense. At least, that’s what I heard. I’d never tried it myself. These days water made things a little too intense—and the idea of dropping a dreamer in public repulsed me.
Quinn was waiting outside, and she wasn’t alone. I scowled at Jude. Typical of Quinn to drag him along. “What’s he—” I stopped.
It was Jude, but also… not Jude.
“Seth, this is the girl I was telling you about.” Quinn shot me a wicked smile. “Seth’s not interested in staying, but…” She raised her eyebrows. “I figured you could change his mind.”