I kicked furiously, fought off the storm, and broke free to the surface of the icy river. I floated, ears submerged, eyes to the gray sky.
That’s when I saw Riley, his form a shadow against the sun, standing at the edge of the falls, looking down.
“So, you didn’t jump.”
“I didn’t jump.”
We sat cross-legged on the riverbank. Water gushed down from above, its spray misting the air.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“I know it’s okay.” He was angry. At himself, for freezing? At me, for dragging him here?
At me, for jumping, and leaving him behind?
There was a long pause. “Go ahead,” he finally said, sullen. “Ask.”
“Fine. Why didn’t you?”
He hunched his shoulders, scraping his knuckles against each other. “You know why Jude started this?”
“To remind ourselves of what it means to be a mech,” I recited, the familiar words strange in my mouth. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d given this speech on a daily basis. “With absolute control must come absolute release. Release from gravity, release from fear.”
“Release from death.”
Right. I’d left out the most important one, the bright line dividing mech and org. The absence that defined us. No end of the line, no period on our sentence. Endless days and years of downloading from one body to the next. We jumped from the waterfall because we could, because we could do anything. The drop wasn’t steep enough to permanently damage our bodies—they were too well constructed for that—but we jumped because it didn’t matter. If something went wrong, if the body were crushed or drowned or torn apart, we would remain intact. We jumped to defy death, as we defied it every day, by living on, far past our sell-by date.
“I bought it,” Riley said. “But since the fire…”
I waited him out. With Riley it was the only way.
“It’s not the same,” he finally said. “Now that I know what it’s like.”
I understood, or thought I did, but only because I’d become an expert at translating Riley’s begrudging admissions of inner life. So, spitting in the face of death was less fun once you’d died yourself.
Not org death—we’d all been through that. But mech death. Waking up yet again in the BioMax lab, with no memory of how you’d ended up there, with a gap in the story of your life. Knowing yourself to be a copy of a copy. It was fear of that moment that prevented me from downloading into a new, custom-made body that would look like the Lia I used to be. It was the fear that gripped me every time I stood on a ledge, the fear I needed, if the leap was going to mean anything. It was one thing to know you couldn’t die; it was another thing to believe it.
Maybe now Riley didn’t.
Since the fire, I’d spent so much time trying to convince myself he wasn’t a different person. I hadn’t thought to convince him. Even though every time he looked in the mirror, he saw someone different staring back at him. Because of me. Because I’d given him back something I thought he wanted, without bothering to ask.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come.”
He shook his head. “I’m just being stupid.”
“You’re not.”
“Jude’s right, you know. They have the power. If something happens, and they don’t want to put you into a new body, they don’t have to. They can do anything they want. They always do.”
I wondered if “they” meant BioMax, or if “they” meant everyone with more power, with more credit, everyone who’d ever used him as a tool or a toy, just because they could. It was nothing new for him; it was status quo.
Maybe that’s why, when I put my hands over his and told him what we’d found at BioMax and what the corp was doing to our friends, maybe to us, he wasn’t surprised. “Of course” was all he said. “Of course they would.”
I’d wanted outrage and shock. Maybe I’d even wanted violence: Riley throwing me off, leaping to his feet, out for blood. But this was more of what I’d gotten when I told him about my father: resigned acknowledgment that he’d been right about the world all along. Surprise that I hadn’t seen it coming.
“I know I promised I wouldn’t do anything,” I said, when he didn’t ask any follow-up questions. “But I had to.” And you made me lie to you.
“I know,” Riley said. “I get it. I figured you would.”
“That’s why you went to Jude behind my back?”
Riley issued a hard laugh. “Not like he listened.”
“You should have trusted me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You were lying.”
“No, I mean you should have trusted me to decide for myself.”
A pause. “Maybe.”
But that’s what we did: We decided for each other. We lied; I lied. Maybe that was why I’d brought him here, because last time we’d been in this place, we’d been strangers. This was a place for a fresh start. No more lies.
First I kissed him. He closed his eyes, but I kept mine open, sweeping my gaze across his skin, trying to memorize the angle of his cheekbones, the crinkles at the edges of his eye, the way the skin shallowly dimpled below his ear.
“What was that for?” he asked, when I finally pulled back. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“I need to tell you some things,” I said, before I could think better of it.
“There’s more? What’s left for them to do?”
“Not them. Me.”
The worst part? That didn’t surprise him either.
“It’s about that night at the temple,” I said. “There are some things that… you don’t know.” So easy to phrase it that way, passive and blameless. “Things you don’t know” as opposed to “things I didn’t tell you.”
We still sat cross-legged, facing each other. His hands rested on his ankles, and my hands rested on his. They were my safety line, my barometer. If I could hold on to them, I could hold on to him. If not…
I kept going. Eventually, I hoped, gravity would take over, dragging us down to the truth even if I changed my mind mid-fall and tried to pull us up again.
“I lied. About what happened. When I said the secops came before we signaled them—that we had no choice. That’s not how it was.” Keep talking. The faster I talked, the sooner it would end. “Auden found us, and I had to stop him from getting into the building, but then Jude wanted to use him as a hostage, and then—” It hadn’t been like this, one simple moment following another, cause and effect. It had been a fractured collage, and now, after so many months trying to forget, it was just a fog.
“Then what?” He spoke for the first time.
“Things got crazy. Jude was going to shoot Auden, so you… you had to stop him. Remember? You weren’t going to let anyone get hurt. So you…” I had told myself, all this time, that I was protecting him from the guilt. I was lying for him. But when had I ever been that altruistic?
“I what?”
“You shot him. With one of those pulse guns. And he passed out.” I wondered what it must be like to hear your life told to you like a story that had happened to someone else. To hear that you’d done things that you knew, deep down, you would never do. “But Auden had already alerted the Brotherhood, and then it was…” I shook my head. “Hell. We hid out inside the lab, and the Brotherhood was outside, and we didn’t have any choice.”
“So we called in the secops,” Riley said.
“Yeah. And we told them… if they came, if they rescued us and stopped the explosion and the Brotherhood, they could take Jude.” That wasn’t exactly right; it wasn’t how it had been. Saying it like that made it sound like a trade, like we’d given him up. “We didn’t have a choice.”