Torn (Cold Awakening) (11 page)

Zo stood exactly where she’d stopped, midway between us and the door, like she was the statue. Unwilling to stay, unable to leave.

“You did this to me.” In my head I imagined saying this with cold steel in my voice, showing him how little I cared for what he’d done. How little power he had over me, and how little I regretted losing all he’d taken away. But that’s not how it came out.

It came out hysterical, like a child having a temper tantrum, my voice climbing higher, my fists balled. Only my eyes didn’t betray me, and only because they had no tears.

“You killed me!”

I could see it in her face: My mother was still waiting for him to deny it.

He didn’t.

“It was blackmail,” he said. He couldn’t even look at me. Instead he turned to Zo, stupid enough to think she would offer a safe harbor.
She won’t help you,
I thought, feeling almost sorry for him. And then he kept talking, and the sympathy leaked away. “There was some … unsanctioned behavior on my part. Funds were shifted. Temporary … aberrations in the balance sheet.”

“You were embezzling,” I translated, disgusted. “
Stealing.
You, the honorable M. Kahn, who used to punish us for sneaking extra cookies after dinner because it was dishonesty unbefitting a Kahn.”

His head bobbed up and down, almost imperceptibly.

“Look at me,” I snapped. “Not her; not the floor.
Me. Look at what you did to me.
”

Again he obeyed.

I wondered if someday, looking back, I would at least take pleasure in that. I’d finally beaten him. But it didn’t feel that way. It didn’t even feel like he was in the room with me. This person, this craven, beaten-down
thing
, seemed like a defective copy, designed to bear judgment in his place.

“They found out about it,” he said. “They blackmailed me. I would have gone to prison, lost everything.
You
would have lost everything.” It was almost a whine.
Believe me,
it said.
Understand me. Forgive me.

Never.

“What would you have done without my credit?” he asked, eyes hopping from me to Zo to my mother, searching for refuge. “Any of you? There wouldn’t have been anything left. You would have ended up in a corp-town, working off my debt. I couldn’t let that happen.”

My mother rested a hand on his knee. I wanted to slap her.

“So instead of giving up your money, you gave up your daughter?” I asked. I’d never felt anything like this before, not since the download: an emotion that was so pure, so real. This was different from sex, from fear or pain, different even from the dreamers,
with their direct connection to the emotive centers of the brain. Like jumping from a plane, like stabbing myself, this blotted out any awareness of artificial nerves and conduits, stripped away the fake flesh and the mechanical organs, left
me
bare and exposed, nothing left but words and anger.

“They didn’t want money,” he said. “It wasn’t about that. They wanted support for the download from someone like me, someone people would listen to. The whole program was about to go down in flames; they were still waiting on approval for the download as a voluntary procedure and didn’t think it was going to come through; they needed someone who would
never give up
.” He choked out a noise that sounded almost like laughter. “I suppose they found some poetic justice in it, turning the download’s biggest enemy into its biggest supporter. I engineered the legislation that would outlaw the technology, and then …”

“And then you got caught.”

He nodded.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Why not just blackmail you into supporting the download? Why would they need”—I gestured at my body—“this?”

“They needed my support—but they also wanted to punish me,” he admitted. “The cruelty was excessive. Unnecessary. But they didn’t give me a choice.”

“Bullshit. You chose
this
.”

“They promised me she wouldn’t die,” he said, lamely, in that same voice I’d heard him use when he was praying. Choked,
miserable,
weak.
“She’d just have a different life, they said. A better one.”

The worst part wasn’t the things he was saying, or the fact that he actually expected understanding, maybe even forgiveness, even though he hadn’t bothered to apologize. It was that he refused to look at me or speak to me. Not just as if I weren’t in the room, but as if all his promech preachings had been nothing more than a show, blackmailed out of him. That as far as he was concerned, his precious daughter, the one whose life he’d basically sold off to the highest bidder, was gone.

I exploded. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!”

“He’s not talking about you,” Zo said, with eerie calm. “He’s talking about me.” She gave me a wry, sickened smile. “What am I always telling you?”

“It’s not always about me,” I said mechanically, not thinking about the words because I was suddenly thinking about the other thing she always told me: that I was our father’s favorite. I was thinking about the day of the accident.

I was thinking about the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be in the car.

Zo was the one with the shift at the day-care center;
Zo’s
key card had started the car, so we could ensure there’d be no record that I had gone instead. In her place.

Seeing me finally get it, Zo nodded.

“No wonder you hate me,” she said to our father, her voice steady and toneless, like
she
was the machine. “
She
was supposed to live. But you got stuck with me instead.”

He didn’t answer her.

Say something,
I begged him silently.
Fix this
.

Like he was still my father, who could fix anything.

Instead of a monster who couldn’t do anything but destroy. And couldn’t even do that right.

The silence stretched on too long. Zo walked out of the room. Seconds later the front door slammed.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. Too late.

“Shut up.” I wasn’t waiting for him anymore. I was waiting for my mother. To slap him. To beat him. To hug me. To run away from all of us. But she did nothing. “Well?” I glared at her, willing her to fight back. To pick a side.

But she didn’t. She didn’t even cry.

We were a whole family of machines.

Were
, as in past tense, as in we
had been
a family.

Now we were nothing.

Zo was slumped in the driver’s seat, cheek pressed against the window, face melting into the thin layer of frost coating the glass.

I pulled open the passenger door and got inside.

“No talking,” she said.

“Got it.”

I don’t know how long we sat there. I don’t know what she was thinking. I was trying not to think. Part of me wanted to start the car, get the hell away from the house before our father came out and said something that suckered us into going back
inside. But the rational part of me, stronger now as the waves of rage ebbed away, knew that would never happen. He’d surprised me tonight, more than once. But he was still M. Kahn, our father, and he wasn’t going to beg.

We were safe in the driveway, for as long as Zo needed to stay there.

Zo needed.

Like Zo needed me to fill in for her that day.

It had been a long time since I’d let myself go there. For everything that had happened between the two of us, I’d kept that locked away somewhere, too deep and dark to dredge up into the light. But now …
It was supposed to be her.

Sisters were supposed to protect each other. Especially big sisters. I should have been glad it was me instead of her. If I believed the things I said on the network every day, believed that mechs and orgs were different but equal, believed that each form offered its own rewards, I shouldn’t have cared. So I’d exchanged one life for another. I’d lost nothing but pointless nights zoned out on bliss mods, cackling with Cass and Terra and all the interchangeable orgs who couldn’t deal with a mech in their midst. I’d lost a boyfriend who could barely tell the difference between me and my sister, or at least didn’t care which of our tongues was in his mouth. I’d lost a family I was better off without.

I’d gained Riley. I’d gained time,
lifetimes
, a brain that could be eternally copied, a body that could be repaired, refreshed, exchanged. I’d trained myself not to think about whether it had been an even trade.

As I’d trained myself not to think about how things would have been different, with Zo in the car, me safe at home.

“I’m not going back inside,” Zo said, voice muffled. It was too dark to see if she was crying, and I knew that was the only reason I’d been allowed to stay. “Not ever.”

“Okay.”

This is not about me,
I reminded myself.
Not tonight.

“So what now?” I asked.

There was a pause. “I don’t know.” Zo puffed a hot breath against the glass, fogging up the window. Then smeared a finger through the condensation. A lightning bolt
Z
. For a second she was five years old again, and I was seven, and we were fighting sleep on a long drive, staking our claim on the foggy windows, painting names, flowers, faces—and then watching them disappear. We’d made a competition of it, who faded away first, who lasted. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Without asking, I reached across her and keyed in a set of coordinates, started the car. “Yes, you do,” I said, like a big sister should, fixing things.

What I knew about myself: Given the chance back then, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car. I wouldn’t have saved her.

At least this time, I could try.

Zo stopped me before I could knock on Riley’s door.

“Isn’t it kind of rude for us to show up in the middle of the night?” Zo asked.

“It’s no big deal.”

When she didn’t follow it up with the obvious dig about how often I did that kind of thing, I really began to worry.

“Maybe we should go,” she said instead.

“He’ll understand.”

“He doesn’t even know me.”

I had to laugh. “After that dinner the other night? I’d say he knows you.”

Zo laughed too, and it sounded good. But it didn’t last long. “Maybe I should wait in the car.”

I resisted the urge to take her arm. It was like herding a stray cat. You had to lure it in carefully, let it think the whole thing was its own idea. Or just grab it by the neck and toss it inside.

I knocked.

It took only a moment for Riley to appear. He opened the door just wide enough to slip out, then shut it again behind him. “Hey. What are you … everything okay?” He seemed off-kilter, like we’d woken him, but of course mechs didn’t sleep; we shut down at night as a matter of convenience and convention, switching ourselves back on with instant alertness. Noise “woke” us, as it did orgs. But there were no dreams to shake off; there were no dreams.

“No,” I said. “Not okay. But—” I glanced at Zo. She looked zoned out, and I wondered if she’d swallowed a handful of chillers in the car, or if it was just shock. “Can we talk about it in the morning? We need a place to crash.”

Riley paused. “I told you, the place is a mess …”

“Riley, this is an emergency.”

He didn’t move. Like he couldn’t see that this mattered more than some unwashed sheets.

I pushed past him. “Whatever you’ve got in there, it can’t be—” I stopped. Stopped talking, stopped moving.

It wasn’t a what.

It was a who.

The girl splayed on Riley’s bed had spiky red hair, bad skin, and no shirt. Her feet were kicked up on his pillows; her head lolled over the foot of the bed. She tilted her head back, watching me upside down.

“Was wondering when I’d finally see you again,” Sari said, with a sly smile like she’d been prepping the line for weeks, waiting for the perfect moment to deploy it. “Welcome to our home.”

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

W
hat is she doing here?” I hissed.

“She
was
sleeping,” Sari drawled. She didn’t bother to sit up. Or put a shirt on over the flimsy red bra.

I hooked a finger in Riley’s collar and tugged him toward the door. Zo dropped onto a couch in the corner, her face blank, her eyes empty. “Leave her alone,” I warned Sari. Then dragged Riley outside and slammed the door behind us. And slammed it again, for good measure.

“Well?”

Riley did his strong, silent thing, trying to stare me down. Not tonight.

“Say something.” The apartment had only one real room.
Small, flimsy partitions separated the living space from the kitchen from the bed. There was only one bed.

He risked a half smile. “Something?”

“What is that girl doing in your bed?”
Half naked
.

Did every relationship turn into a cliché? I resented the triteness of it almost as much as I resented the girl on the bed. Half-naked ex-girlfriend—
hot, org
ex-girlfriend—on the bed. Lying, defensive boyfriend. It didn’t take a genius to finish the equation. One plus one equaled girlfriend storming out in anger, boyfriend groveling for forgiveness. I’d played the scene plenty of times before. With Walker—given his Pavlovian flirting with anything of the double-X variety—I’d had it memorized, and could deliver my lines in thirty seconds flat.

But Riley wasn’t Walker. And storming away wasn’t so easy when you had nowhere else to go.

“She needed a place to crash.” Riley gave me a pointed look. “You know how that is.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Pretend it’s the same.”

“You need something. She needed something. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sure, exactly the same. Except that Zo was my sister, and Sari … the last time I’d seen Sari, she’d demonstrated her loyalty to Riley by double-crossing him, kidnapping me, and generally doing everything she could to help out the guy who wanted him dead.

She’d also made it painfully clear that “old friends”—Riley’s words—wasn’t exactly the most accurate description of their previous relationship. And that while she might not want him back, she had no tolerance for the prospect of someone taking her place.