Call-me-Ben wheeled me down a long corridor. I couldn’t feel the body, couldn’t feel the seat. It felt like I was floating through the hall, just a set of eyes, just a mind, just a ghost. My parents stayed behind. My mother said she couldn’t see it again. It, she said. My father didn’t say anything, but he stayed with her.
“We’ve kept it in cold storage for you,” Ben said from behind me. “Most clients request a viewing.”
It.
We wheeled into a narrow room, its white tiled walls lined by silver plates. Ben pressed his palm to one, and it slid out of the wall, revealing a long, metal panel bearing a sheet-covered lump. A body-shaped lump.
“You sure?” Ben asked, guiding the wheelchair into position. “This can be difficult.”
I couldn’t stand to hear the computer speak for me, not here. Not now.
I blinked once.
He began with the feet. Foot.
The flesh was red and ruined, gouged. Mottled with deep, black scabs. There were thick streaks of pearl white, as if the skin had calcified. Or maybe the flesh had been flayed and I was looking at bone. The knee was bent at the wrong angle; the other leg was gone, ending just below the thigh, swirls of dried blood and charred flesh winding around one another, like the rings of a severed tree stump.
The sheet drew farther back.
I wish I could say I didn’t recognize it, that it was some monstrous mound of skin and bones, broken and unidentifiable.
It was. But it was also me.
I recognized the hips jutting out below my waist, always a little bonier than I would have liked. The dark freckles along my collarbone, still visible on a patch of skin the fire had spared. My crooked ring finger, on the arm that remained intact, a family quirk my parents had chosen not to screen out, the genetic calling card of the Kahns.
My face.
The burns were worse there. Pockets of pus bubbled beneath the skin. One side had caved in, like my face had been modeled from clay, then crushed by an iron fist. The left eye sagged into a deep hollow. My lips were gone.
There was a gray surgical cap stretched over my head.
“The brain?”
I felt as dead inside as the voice sounded.
Call-me-Ben sighed. “You don’t want to know the technical details.”
“Try me.”
He did.
He told me how the brain—my brain—was removed.
Frozen.
Sliced into razor-thin sections.
Scanned.
Functionally mapped onto a three-dimensional model, axons and dendrites replaced by the vector space of a quantum computer, woven through with artificial nerves, conduits that would carry impulses back and forth from an artificial body, simulating all the pains and pleasures of life. In theory.
He told me how the frozen leftovers were discarded. Because that’s what you do with medical waste.
Now I understood: Skinner was the wrong word after all. I wasn’t the thief. I hadn’t stolen an identity; I hadn’t stolen anything. They were the ones who stole from me. They flayed back my skin, reached inside and dug up whatever secret, essential quality made me who I was.
Then they ripped it out.
They ripped it out—ripped me out—and left me exposed, a naked brain, a mind without a body. Because this thing they’d stuck me in, it wasn’t a body—a sculpted face, dead eyes, and synthetic flesh couldn’t make it anything but a hollow shell. Maybe I hadn’t lost the essential thing that made me Lia Kahn, but I’d lost everything else, everything that made me human.
I wasn’t a skinner.
I was the one who’d been skinned.
When we were kids, Zo and I used to fight. Not argue. Fight. Hair-pulling, skin-pinching, wrist-burning, arm-twisting, squealing, spitting, punching, shrieking fight. And once—it wasn’t our worst fight or our last one—after she kneed me in the stomach, I punched her in the face. Her nose spurted blood all over both of us. She threw up. I passed out. It’s the one thing we’d always had in common: Fear of blood. Fear of doctors. Fear of hospitals. Fear of anything that stinks of sick.
But here I was, inches from a dead body. My dead body. Inches from flesh that looked like raw meat, a crumpled face, an empty skull cavity. Listening to a stranger describe, in detail, all the ways he’d torn me to pieces. And I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel anything.
I don’t just mean on the outside, like the chair under my ass or my ass or the straps digging into my waist and forehead or call-me-Ben’s hand on my shoulder, the same hand he’d used to pull back the body’s sheet. It was that, but it wasn’t just that. I couldn’t feel anything on the inside, either. I wasn’t nauseated; I wasn’t dizzy. My stomach wasn’t clenched; there was no hollowness at the base of my throat, warning me I was about to explode into tears. I wasn’t breathing quickly. I wasn’t breathing at all. I wasn’t trembling, although even if I had been, I wouldn’t have known.
My brain—or whatever was up there—told me I was horrified. And furious. And terrified. And disgusted. I knew I was all of those things. But I couldn’t feel it. They were just words. Adjectives pertaining to emotional affect that modified nouns pertaining to organic life-forms.
I no longer qualified.
4. MOUTH CLOSED
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Translation: “I don’t want to think about it.”
It didn’t matter how much crap they spewed about adjustment pains and emotional connection and statistically probable results of repression, there was no way in hell some random middle-aged loser was milking me for intimate details of my daily life in hell, aka rehab. No matter how many times she asked.
“It’s okay if you don’t feel ready.” Sascha leaned back in her chair, her head almost touching the window. “You may never feel ready. Sometimes we need to just take a risk, have faith in our own strength.”
She had a corner office on the thirteenth floor, which meant a 180-degree view of the woods surrounding the BioMax building. I’d only seen one other floor: the ninth. That was where they stored the bodies until it was time to destroy them. Mine wasn’t there anymore. I knew, because I’d asked Sascha. They burn the bodies. They don’t bury them—You only bury people who are dead. The bodies are just medical waste. I told Sascha, no, I didn’t want the ashes. She said it was a positive sign.
“I don’t need faith,” I said. “I know my own strength. I do fifty push-ups every morning. Sit-ups, too. It’s in your report.” It was easier to talk than to sit there for an hour in silence, although I’d tried that, too. I’d probably try it again. One thing about my new life, or whatever I was supposed to call it: I had plenty of time.
She frowned, then templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips. “I think you know I’m not talking about that kind of strength.”
I shrugged.
“It’s natural to be concerned about how your family will react to the new you,” she said.
“They’ve seen the new me.”
“It’s been a month, Lia. You’ve made remarkable progress since then. Don’t you want to show off a little?”
“Show off what? That I learned how to take a few steps without falling on my face? That I figured out how to make actual words with this thing in my throat?” I gave her one of the smiles I’d been working on, knowing—from the hours I’d spent practicing in the mirror—that it looked more like a grimace. “Yay, me. I’m finally better off than a two-year-old.”