Wired (Skinned, Book 3) (10 page)

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"Enjoy the wait."

"Frankly, I don't have time for it. So I've got something to speed along your comprehension. Or at least your willingness."

"Finally." Because clearly, everything else had been preamble, priming the pump.
This
, whatever it was, would be why we were really here. "Tell me why I'm going to help you."

"Because it will hurt your father."

"Maybe you should pay closer attention," I said. "My father and I are fine. I have no interest in hurting him."

Jude's hand shot out and grabbed mine before I could pull away. He pressed something sharp into my palm. I assumed it was a dreamer, the tiny cubes that offered mechs a hallucinatory escape from the world. Jude had offered me my very first one in exactly this way. But the object was the wrong size and lacked the dreamer's distinctive etchings along the edge.

Jude was still gripping my hand. "You may not want to hurt him yet," he said. "But trust me, you will."

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SACRIFICE

"
You'd be a lot more tolerable if you'd just
own
your inner bitch.
"

It was a flash drive. Nearly archaic, used only for the kind of data you couldn't trust to transmission over the network and so reserved for hand-to-hand exchange. The drive had Chinese ideograms scratched across its length, which I assumed meant that Jude had picked it up during his stint at Aikida. Or at least that he wanted me to think so. I slid it into my pocket before Riley could see, and resolved not to think about it again until I was alone.

Which came sooner than I expected. Nested in Riley's arms, my head safely cradled on his shoulder as the car carried us through the pitch-black night, I didn't watch the nav screen or chart the twisting roads as we swept past. We stopped in an empty lot, the Windows of Memory glowing in the distance, the poisoned sea still a dark hole in the night. My car was waiting.

"You okay to drive home alone, or you want me to follow you?" Riley asked.

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I had assumed we would go back to his place. Talk about what had happened.

Or not talk.

"I'm okay," I said.

He'd been quiet the whole way back--uncharacteristically so, even for him. I couldn't tell whether he was disappointed because reuniting with Jude hadn't lived up to his hopes, disappointed in
me
for not sharing his enthusiasm, or just lost in thoughts that he'd decided weren't fit for sharing.

I wasn't expecting to be able read his mind, but I should have at least been able to
guess
at how he was feeling--either that, or I shouldn't have been afraid to ask.

He opened the door for me. I crawled across him, then paused, half in and half out of the car. "Unless you want me to come with you," I offered. "We could go to your place and--"

"It's a mess," he said quickly. Then darted forward and gave me a kiss. It felt perfunctory. "Good night," he said, and then I was out of the car and he closed the door and I was alone.

He waited until I got in the car, which was normal. Then he drove away before I did, which was not. But it meant I didn't have to wait any longer. I pulled out Jude's flash drive, half tempted to toss it out the window. But Jude didn't make empty threats, and he didn't lie. He would hit you with the truth, at least the truth as
he
saw it. Which meant there was something on the drive that I needed to see, even if it aligned with his agenda.

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I took out my ViM and uploaded the data to its temp memory storage. Virtual Machines were little more than conduits to the network, not meant for personal storage--under normal circumstances everything got uploaded to my zone and stored on the network--but sometimes you wanted to keep something isolated from the network, to keep it close or erase it for good. Jude's flash drive carried only a single file, an accident report about a crash that had happened a year before. My crash. The process had been standard, under the circumstances: a cursory joint investigation by the car corp and my father's lawyers, to determine liability and assign blame. The report had been compiled while I was still an unconscious lump of wires and synflesh in the BioMax rehab facility, but I'd seen all the details later on, forced myself to read through the series of catastrophic system failures--the shipping truck's chip malfunction, the hole in the sat-nav system, the malfunctioning of my car's backup detection system, a series of minimally unfortunate events culminating in an extraordinary one.

We'd gotten a tidy sum from both the car people and the trucking corp, not that we needed either. The principle of the thing, my father had said. Compensation for pain and suffering. I didn't ask: his, or mine?

I'd studied the report, memorized its key phrases, enjoying the way the legalistic terms sapped the color from what had happened. In the report there had been no pain, no suffering, no imprisonment beneath twisted metal, listening to flames

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crackle, sirens whine, breathing in the smell of burning flesh. The report was life reduced to its bare essentials, to yes and no, this happened and this did not, life reduced to a schematic of ones and zeros, just like me.

I knew everything about that report.

Which is why I immediately recognized that this wasn't it.

It started off the same, with the description of the circumstances of the accident--and, of course, the results. The itemization of injuries to the org named Lia Kahn and her vehicle. It was the "causes" section that read somewhat differently. No "mechanical failures." No "inescapable misfortune." And no failure of the truck's guidance system.

In this report blame was assigned: to my car. And the anonymous person who'd tampered with it. If this report was correct, the accident hadn't been bad luck or bad machinery or bad karma. It hadn't been an accident at all.

But ... if this report was correct, then what had happened to it? And where had the other one come from?

Living as a mech, I'd come to understand that some things could be true and not true at the same time; some things could contain their own opposite. But this wasn't one of them. If one of the reports was true, it meant the other was a lie.

I turned on the car and directed it toward home. Watched the night flow past. It was like I could feel him drawing closer, pulling me in. My father, my protector.

I went home because there was nowhere else to go. I went

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home to him because I had to know. My father had given me that first report. He had described the circumstances of the accident, filled in the portions that my trauma-scattered brain couldn't remember. He had been my memory.

Kahns don't lie
. It had been a family rule for as a long as I could remember. But I was a Kahn, and I lied all the time.

My father's study was forbidden territory. But my father was asleep, along with the rest of the house. And the ViM embedded in his desk would supply direct access to his zone. Whatever he knew would be buried there, somewhere.

I slipped out of my shoes and padded silently into the room, easing the door shut behind me. It creaked softly, and I froze. But there was no noise from the rest of the house.

I hadn't snuck in here since I was twelve, the night my father had confiscated my new pink miniViM--consequence of some petty and long forgotten trespass--and I'd decided to confiscate it back. I'd been caught, of course. Then yanked off the ground, carried up the stairs, tossed into my room, and grounded for a month.

I swept a finger across the screen to switch it on. The screen remained blank, save for a password request and a small white box, exactly the size of a thumbprint.

I'd expected the password protection; that wasn't unusual, especially when it came to someone as paranoid as my father. He had an assortment of passwords he used for various

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functions, and I'd figured out most of them over the years, so I had been reasonably sure I'd be able to crack this one. But I'd never heard of thumbprint security on a private ViM. And I had no idea how to get past it. Which meant I had to get my answers some other way.

Or just drop this altogether.

"I must still be asleep, because obviously I'm dreaming this."

I flinched, nearly knocking a glass picture frame off the desk. It wasn't a photo of Zo and me--since the accident, all photos of his daughters had been quietly but thoroughly expunged from the house. The face in the glass was our mother's, years younger, her smile shockingly real.

Zo stood in the open doorway, backlit by the hall light, her shadowed face unreadable. "I know Daddy's golden girl would never sneak into his holy sanctum. Invasion of privacy? Violation of the sacred Kahn Family Law?" She shook her head. "Clearly I'm hallucinating."

"Shhh! Please."

"Right." She wasn't whispering. "Wouldn't want to wake him. Wonder what he'd say."

"When I told him I caught
you
sneaking through his stuff? Yeah, I wonder."

"Like he'd automatically believe you over me? Like you're
so
trustworthy and I'm so--"

"That's not what I meant."

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"Yes it is."

Yes, it was. But I hadn't meant to mean it.

"And you were right." She laughed. There wasn't much humor in it. "You know, you'd be a lot more tolerable if you'd just
own
your inner bitch." Zo stepped into the office. "Like you used to."

"I was not a bitch!"

Now she laughed like I really had said something funny. "Right. And neither was I."

"Well ... I wouldn't go that far."

"I blame genetics," she said. "Look where we came from." Zo joined me at the desk, peering down at the blank ViM screen. "So, what are we looking for?"

I didn't answer--I was stuck on that word, "genetics," the one that seemed to imply, in her mind, some common thread linking us together.

"Well?" Zo prodded. "Or should I call our father down to help?"

"No!" She'd said "we." It didn't guarantee I could trust her, but it meant I could try. "There's something on there that I need to find out."

"I'm going to need more details, if you want me to find it for you."

"No point," I said. "He's got a thumbprint lock."

"Of course he does," Zo said. "Which is why I"--she pulled a strip of clear adhesive off the underside of his desk--

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"keep the nanotape imprint easily accessible. Sure you don't want to tell me what you're looking for?"

I gaped at my sister, who, last I checked, had slept through every comp-sci class she'd been forced to take. Where had she learned about nanotape? And where had she gotten her hands on some?

"Well?"

"Stuff about the accident," I admitted. "Anything you can find."

"Somehow I don't think Dad's the type to write weepy poetry about his personal tragedies, if that's what you're hoping for," Zo mumbled, but she entered in a password, pressed the nanotape to the thumb pad, and the screen flashed to life. Zo bent over the keyboard and began typing furiously, whipping through files with dizzying speed, not just the obvious news vids and porn, but locked subroutines that unleashed hidden archives and multilayered data dumps.

"I didn't know you were so good at this stuff," I said, because it seemed easier than asking why she was helping me.

"When did you know anything about me?" Zo said, with a flash of anger. She didn't look up until her fingers stopped flying over the keyboard. "There. Done. Everything."

Everything included several files that my father must have thought he'd deleted. Maybe he'd slept through his comp-sci classes as well, or at least the one where they'd taught that most fundamental of rules: Nothing is ever deleted. Not for good, at least. There were dozens of memos, warnings from

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BioMax that he was running out of time and better make his choice, references to payouts and consequences, and an ultimate response from our father, with the access code to the car's navigational system and a time his daughter was guaranteed to be in the car: 3:47 p.m. A time I recognized and remembered, because it was the time of the accident.

There had been a day, not long after my download, when my body had frozen. In the middle of a crowd--in the middle of a step--I'd shut down, turned into a statue, unable to walk, unable to move, unable to do anything but think and watch. I could see people staring at me, swirling around me, and I knew I was nothing more than an object to them, easily ignored, easily circumvented. Easily broken.

That was how I felt, watching the words swim across the screen.