“You let them kill you,” I said. “You walked in here—”
“Walked.” She snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“—and asked them to kill you. To chop up your brain, make a copy, and stick it into some machine.”
“Damn right. Quinn Sharpe is dead. I would have killed her myself, if I could. You’re walking around here all day sulking—yeah, I’ve been watching; you’ve been too busy whining to notice—when you should be celebrating. You should be fucking ecstatic.”
“Look, I get it, I do. It makes sense, why you’d want to do it. And I get why this would seem better for you than before. But it’s different for me. What I was, what I lost—It’s different.”
Quinn shook her head. “The only difference is that you don’t get it, not yet. It doesn’t matter how you got here. What matters is that we’re here, now. The past is over. The people we were? Dead. Like you would be. Like you should be. Dead. You want the rest of your life to be a funeral? Or you want to actually live?”
That was my cue. I was supposed to jump to my feet and clasp her hands, spin in circles, somersault through the grass, dance in the moonlight, drink in the fact that I could swing my arms and pump my legs, that I was alive, in motion, in control. I was supposed to embrace the possibilities and the future, to wake up to a new life. It would be the turning point, some kind of spiritual rehabilitation, an end to the sulking and the self-pitying, a beginning of everything.
I lay still.
“You’ll figure it out.” She shrugged. “I’m heading back up. You coming?”
“Later.”
Shooting me a wicked grin, Quinn sprinted back toward the building, her hair streaming behind her and shimmering under the fluorescent lights, her clothes abandoned in a pile by my head. She ran flat-out, full-speed, running like she didn’t know how, arms flailing, feet stomping, rhythm erratic, running like little kids run, without pacing or strategy, running like nothing mattered but the next step. Running just to run. I wanted to join her, to race her, to beat her, and in that moment I knew the legs could do it. I knew I could do it.
I lay still.
I’m not like her, I told myself. Quinn’s life had sucked. Mine hadn’t. Quinn needed a new start. I didn’t. Quinn, if she wanted—because she wanted—was a different person now.
I wasn’t.
No wonder my father had treated me like a stranger that afternoon. I was acting like one. I was sulking in my room, I was snapping at people who were only trying to help. I was shutting myself off, shutting myself down; I was spewing self-pity. I was lying around, standing still, wasting time wondering what I was going to do and who I was going to be, when the answer was obvious. I was the same person I had always been. I was Lia Kahn. And I was going to do what Lia Kahn always did. Get by. Get through. Work. Win.
I wasn’t a skinner. I wasn’t a mech-head. I was Lia Kahn. And it was about time I started acting like it.
One week later they sent me home.
6. FAITH
Someone must have tipped them off, because when we got home, they were waiting.
Getting into the car was hard enough. When it lurched into motion I curled myself into a corner, shut my eyes, and tried to pretend I was back in my room on the thirteenth floor, standing still. I wasn’t afraid of going home. Lia Kahn had nothing to fear from her own house. It was just the ride—the pavement speeding underneath the tires, the sat-nav whirring along, veering us around a corner, a tree, a truck…
I linked in, picked a new noise-metal song that I knew I would hate, turned the volume up too high, and waited for the ride to end.
Except that when the car stopped, we still weren’t home. The music faded out, and a new voice shrieked inside my head. “An abomination! We shall all be punished for her sins!”
I cut the link. Opened my eyes. A sallow face stared through the window, mouth open in a silent howl. When he saw me watching he extended his index finger, and his lips shifted, formed an unmistakable word. “You.”
My father, behind the wheel even though he wasn’t actually using it, pounded a fist against the dash. The horn blared. My mother stroked his arm, more a symbolic attempt to calm him down than anything that actually had a prayer of working. “Biggest mistake they ever made,” he muttered. “Programming these things not to run people down.”
“Honey…” That was symbolic attempt number two. Except in my mother’s mind, these things actually worked; in the fantasy world she inhabited, her influence soothed the savage beast.
“I should plow right through you!” he shouted at the windshield. “You want something to protest? I’ll give you something to really protest!”
They crowded around the car, pressing in tight, although not too tight. The legally required foot of space remained between us and them at all times. They planted themselves in front of the car, behind it, all around it, blocking us in, so we had no choice but to sit there, twenty yards from the entrance to our property, waiting for security to arrive and, in the meantime, reading their signs.
“I’m sorry, Lee Lee,” my mother said, twisting around in her seat and reaching for me. I pulled away. “I don’t know how they found out you were coming home today.”
Their signs were hoisted over their shoulders, streaming in red-letter LED across their chests, pulsing on their foreheads. Jamming the network so we couldn’t call in reinforcements.
GOD MADE MAN. WHO MADE YOU?
FRANKENSTEIN ALWAYS BURNS
BREATH, NOT BATTERIES
“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.”
My father cursed quietly, then loudly.
“Just close your eyes,” my mother suggested. “Ignore them.”
“I am,” I said, eyes open.
My favorite sign depicted a giant extended middle finger, with a neon caption:
SKIN THIS!
It didn’t even make sense. But it got the point across.
My father fumed. “Goddamned Faithers.”
“Apparently we’re the damned ones,” I pointed out. “Or I am.”
“Don’t you listen to them.” My mother flicked her hand across her console and my window darkened, blotting out the signs. But it wasn’t the signs I’d been watching, it was the faces. I’d never seen a Faither, not up close. Before the accident, I hadn’t even seen much of them on the network. But after… Somehow my name had ended up on a Faither hit list. Until I fixed my blockers, they’d flooded my zone with all the same crap about how I was a godless perversion, I was Satan’s work, I didn’t deserve to exist. But I hadn’t expected them to come after me in person.
Religion went out of style right after the Middle East went out in a blaze of nuclear glory. Not that some people, maybe lots of people, didn’t keep privately believing in some invisible old man who gave them promotions when they were good and syphilis when they were bad. If you had the credit, you could even snag enough drugs for a one-on-one chat. You sometimes heard rumors about people—especially in the cities, where it’s not like there was much else to do—actually gathering together for their God fix, but as far as most people were willing to admit in public, God was dead. The Faith party was for all those leftover believers who—even after the nukes and the Long Winter and the Water Wars of the western drought and the quake that ate California and the wave that drowned DC—refused to give up the ghost. They were for life, for morality, for order, for gratitude, and, until recently, not against much of anything. Except reason, my father was always quick to point out. Then BioMax unrolled its download process, and the Faithers found their cause.