She looked down. “When you’re from Chicago, having a kid is not a good way to minimize medical costs.”
“Oh.” You could take the people out of the radioactive city—but you couldn’t take the radioactivity out of the people.
“Yeah. Oh. They signed a contract. So when they decided to have me…”
“They got kicked out?”
“Not until I was born.” The pained smile was back again. “Then it was straight back to city living for them. And their adorable legless wonder.”
I forced myself not to look down at her long, slender legs. “You were born without…”
“Among other things.” Her grip tightened around the railing. “Radiation poisoning really spices up the genetic soup.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. So were they.” She shrugged. “After a few years they ditched me. Headed for the nearest corp-town, I guess.”
“And you never—”
“Ten years.” She shook her head. “Not one word. Guess they wanted to forget I ever happened.”
“I really am sorry,” I told her. It seemed like such a lame thing to say. “It must have been… hard for you. On your own.”
Ani shrugged, keeping her eyes fixed on the skyline. “There are places. For people like me. No doctors, of course. And not much food or… anything. But…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Anymore. Let’s just say that when they shipped me off for the download, I didn’t care what they were going to do to me. It couldn’t have been worse than where I was.”
“So how did you get to volunteer?”
She laughed. “Lia, what makes you think we volunteered?”
“I didn’t—I don’t know—that’s what they said. I believed it.” Which sounded totally feeble. But it was the truth.
“It doesn’t matter. Jude’s right. None of that matters now. We’re better off.”
She said it, but I couldn’t help thinking she wasn’t done talking. Not yet. If I could find the right question to ask. “Did you know him? Before?”
She hesitated. “Not in the place. No. But later, in the hospital. When they were doing all the tests, deciding which of us they wanted. Jude was there. Riley too. They were friends from before. And the three of us… It just worked, you know?” She pulled a nanoViM from her pocket and flicked the screen to life. “You want to see something?”
I nodded.
“You can’t tell them I showed you,” she said. “Ever.”
I nodded again.
In the picture, three teenagers grinned at the camera. Two sat side by side in wheelchairs, their cheeks sunken, their bodies withering away. The girl had no legs. The boy had all his limbs, but they were twisted and gnarled. Useless.
“Jude,” Ani said, tapping his hollowed face.
The guy standing behind looked like a giant next to their fragile, wasted bodies. “Riley?” I guessed. “He looks pretty healthy.”
She flicked off the screen. “He was.”
He was also black. As was the boy who had become Jude. The girl’s skin was lighter, more caramel than chocolate, but still radically darker than the body she wore now. Ani saw the question in my face.
“What? Did you think we were white?” she asked in disgust.
I guess I hadn’t thought at all. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they… I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t…”
“We were the first,” she said in a more bitter tone than I’d ever heard her use. “An experiment. So they used what they had, and what they had were standard-issue bodies for their standard-issue rich white clients. You get a new body, you get to customize. Us? We get something off the rack. We get this.” She looked down, now aiming the disgust at the body she’d been assigned. “You think I like this?” she asked. “You think I like the fact that my parents wouldn’t even recognize me, if they ever—” She choked it off. “Not like that’s going to happen.” She slipped the ViM into her pocket. “It doesn’t matter. Jude says that race is irrelevant, since it’s not like we even have skin anymore, not really. He says being a mech is like being part of a new race.” She lowered her voice. “But I know he hates it too.”
“And Riley?” I asked, thinking of the tall, silent boy who never seemed to smile.
Ani shrugged. “Who knows? Hard to tell what he’s thinking, right?”
“I guess.” I paused. “So, when you said he was healthy, before, did you mean—”
She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I guess it’s okay for you to know where I came from. I mean, that’s my business. But if you want to know about them, ask them.”
“Okay. I get it.” A lot of good it would do me, though. Jude had already made it clear he wasn’t in the question-answering business. At least not when it came to questions I actually wanted the answers to.
“I don’t even know much myself,” she said in a softer voice. “He’s serious about the whole forgetting-the-past thing. Even before the download, he and Riley didn’t talk about where they came from. Not ever.”
I thought about the picture, the boy’s body curled up in the wheelchair, his legs and arms strapped down, his neck looking too frail to support his head. And then I thought about Jude, passionate and proud. I thought about his firm grasp, and the way it had felt when his broad arms embraced me. “I guess I can maybe understand that.”
Ani gave me a shy smile that suddenly made her look about ten years old. “I’m glad you came up here, Lia. Alone, I mean.”
“Not like I had much of a choice. If Auden had set off the alarms—”
Ani laughed. “There are no alarms,” she said, like it should have been obvious. “Jude just said that.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, picturing Auden standing nervously on the curb in front of the building. Alone. Where I’d left him. “Why would he lie like that?”
“Don’t be mad,” she said quickly. “He just wanted you to see what it was like with us. You know. On your own.”
I turned to face the view again, resting my forearms on the railing, staring out and trying to imagine a city filled with lights. “It’s not so bad, I guess.”
I probably should have been mad.
But I wasn’t.
As we made our way back to the car, Auden and I hung behind the rest of the group.
“Have fun up there?” he asked, sounding a little sullen.
I shrugged. “It was okay.”
“Hope you two found some time to be alone together.”
“Us two?”
“You. Him.” He glared at Jude’s back.
I forced a laugh. “Don’t make me throw up.”
“You can’t,” Auden said flatly. “Remember?”
“Like I could forget.”
“You seem to have forgotten that he’s crazy. Dangerous.”
“You’ve got no reason to think that,” I said. “You’re just—” But that was a sentence that didn’t need finishing. “He’s not so bad.” I didn’t know why I was bothering to defend him.
No wonder Auden was freaked. I was a little freaked. But it didn’t mean something was going on. Just because I didn’t totally hate Jude, didn’t mean I—Well, it didn’t mean anything.
“You tell yourself that if it helps. If that makes it easier.”
So he was jealous, even though there was nothing to be jealous about—and even though he had no right to be. Auden didn’t own me. “Something you want to ask?”
“None of my business,” he said.
“Except you obviously think it is,” I pointed out. “Unless you’re still mad about what happened between the two of us.”
“You mean what didn’t happen.”