I couldn’t remember.
“We’ll figure it out,” I told her, and put a hand on her shoulder, feeling awkward. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he tried to comfort me, with those halting, calculated gestures of fatherhood. “You’re not alone in this.”
She shrugged me off. “I’m always alone.” Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “Get me. Like some kind of twelve-year-old weeper sulking in her room and writing bad poetry. Forget it.”
“Zo—”
She stood abruptly. “I’m going for a walk. Check out the freaks.”
“I can—”
“No, you can’t. You stay; I’ll go. I know where to find you,” she said.
I didn’t follow her.
Zo was still gone when Riley finally showed. Which worked out nicely, because I needed an objective opinion on whether to loop Zo in on the plan.
“I want to break into BioMax’s system, find out what else they’re hiding, and use it to destroy them,” I said.
Riley raised his eyebrows. “Simple as that?”
“I didn’t say it would be easy—”
“Try impossible.”
“—but we know what they did to me. We know what they did to you. Who knows what else they’re hiding? And if Jude’s deal with Aikida is legit, and we can get the download tech for ourselves, we won’t need BioMax anymore. We won’t need anyone.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I didn’t like his tone. But maybe he just needed some time to adjust. Riley was cautious by nature, but he always did the right thing in the end. So I pressed on.
“What do you think—should I tell Zo, or not?”
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“Really? You don’t think she deserves the chance to—”
“I mean you shouldn’t do it,” Riley said. “Forget about BioMax, forget about revenge, don’t do anything until you’ve calmed down.”
“What are you talking about?” I stood up. It was one thing to be cautious; it was another to suggest that I was being reckless. “I’m calm.”
He just looked at me.
“This is a good plan,” I said.
“This is Jude’s plan,” he pointed out.
“Since when is that not a selling point for you?”
“Since when is it one for you?”
“Which part of ‘BioMax blackmailed my father into murdering me’ did you not understand?”
Yes, Jude was the one who’d led me to the secret—and yes, I’d reacted exactly as he’d expected, and was now stepping up to do his dirty work, just as he’d planned. Did knowing I was being manipulated make me any less of a sucker? I chose to believe it did. And maybe that was only because I’d been used by one person or another for so long that I could no longer tell the difference. But it didn’t matter. The enemy of my enemy was my friend, right? And, even if it was only thanks to Jude’s transparent scheming, I now knew the truth. BioMax was my enemy.
“Can’t you get what you need off your father’s zone?” Riley asked.
“Not enough.” Inside that corp there were names, there were dates, there were documents. Incontrovertible proof of what they’d done to me. And, while I was at it, what they’d done to Jude, to Riley, to Ani, the truth about their “volunteers” program, the useful citizens drafted into their experiments, sacrificed to their higher cause. Also: Getting to my father’s zone meant going back to my father’s house. I wouldn’t. “After everything they’ve done to you? You should want this.”
“What they did to me,” he echoed. “That didn’t matter so much, before.”
When I was working with them, he meant. Ignoring their crimes for the greater good, because they weren’t crimes against me. “I was wrong.”
“But you’re so sure you’re right now?”
“Are you defending them?”
“I just think you should slow down,” he said. “Think.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re going to tell me that I’m being reckless, given what you’ve got sleeping on your floor right now?”
“That’s different.”
“Right. Because it’s you,” I said. “Because I’m supposed to trust your judgment, but you can’t trust mine.”
“Lia, come on.”
“No! I won’t ‘come on’!”
“Stop shouting.”
“I’m not shouting!”
I was shouting.
“Fine,” I said. “So I’m mad. Congratulations, you figured me out.”
“You’re not mad at me.”
“No kidding.”
He took my hand and pressed my palm between his. “I love you,” he said.
It was the first time.
That wasn’t how I wanted it, like blackmail. Words to shut me up.
But I wanted it.
“You believe me?” he added.
I nodded.
I love you, too. I hadn’t said it either. And I didn’t want to say it now. Not so close to the lie he was about to make me tell.
“I’m worried,” he said. “You get that?”
I nodded again, then raised my head and met his gaze. That was how you lied, if you wanted it to work. Head on. Fearless. I knew what was coming.
“Promise me you’ll wait,” he said. “Think about what you’re doing. When you’re ready, I’ll be there. I’m with you. You believe me?” he asked again. I nodded. “So promise me?”
I didn’t cross my fingers. I didn’t try to avoid the question or offer a nonanswer that, in retrospect, could technically be considered some flavor of true. No excuses, no escape. I lied.
“I promise.” And then, because I hadn’t said it and the silence was hanging there, growing between us, because I needed a truth to cancel out the lie, because it was true: “I love you, too.”
He kissed my forehead, and then I tipped my face up and he kissed me for real, his eyes tightly shut.
He loved me, and I loved him, but he left when I told him I needed to be alone, and as soon as he was out of sight, I linked into the network.
And then I voiced Jude.
6. WHAT LIES BENEATH
The coordinates Jude sent took me deeper into Anarchy than I’d ever been before. I texted Zo that I’d meet her back at Riley’s, then wove my way through the manicured gardens into a deserted area of densely overgrown brush. Cloudy water from a sewage pipe trickled into a runoff creek, and after staring blankly at it for a moment, I realized it was probably the closest thing the park had to a waterfall. Coincidence, or Jude’s twisted sense of humor?
It took him two hours to arrive, which gave me plenty of time to do all that thinking Riley had urged me to do. I finished even more certain than when I’d started. This was the right thing to do. For me, and for all the mechs. Not to mention for my father.
I couldn’t go to the authorities, not with what I had. There were no authorities anymore, not objective ones, at least. The secops were all owned by one corp or another—and my father was on half of their boards. The rest of the BioMax execs probably had the other half covered. I needed something splashier than what I had, something that could tear the whole corp apart and take my father down with it. I needed to dredge up the corp’s deepest, darkest secrets—and then sell them to the highest bidder. No “authorities” were going to give me justice. That was something I’d get for myself.
“I’m in,” I said, as soon as Jude appeared from behind the trees. “But I have some conditions.”