He looked down at his arm, and I realized I was still holding on. I let go.
“Jude’s the one who forced us to go to the corp-town,” I reminded him. Forced me, specifically. No one else would do.
“So?”
“So if someone’s setting us up, it hasn’t occurred to you that Jude—”
He stood up abruptly. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not saying—”
“You better not. Or I’m out of here.”
“Fine. I don’t think he would ever do something like that.” So I didn’t want him to go; so I lied.
“Good. Because he wouldn’t.” Riley kept his eyes fixed on a low-hanging branch. There were still enough leaves clinging to the trees to block out most of the dim sunlight. The first night had been hard, huddling in the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar chitterings and hoots of the Sanctuary’s protected species, wondering if there were wolves or bears or some other fanged predator of an earlier age prowling for fresh blood. Nothing seemed quite as dire once the sun came up, but after two days trapped in the trees, all I wanted was some sunlight and an open sky.
“I just said that, didn’t I?” Best friends was one thing, but it was like Riley thought if he said one bad thing about Jude—or let anyone else release a single criticism into the universe—he’d be struck by lightning.
Jude’s not God, I wanted to remind Riley.
But not as much as I wanted not to be left alone.
“The point is we shouldn’t bring anyone else into this,” I said. Thinking: Jude sent us to Synapsis Corp. Sent me. To meet a mysterious contact who never showed up. Thinking you’d have to be a moron not to wonder. Or an acolyte, blinded by faith. Same difference. “You said yourself, they could track us through the network—and now we know they’re looking for us.” Looking for me. “If we get in touch with Jude, we’d only make him look guilty. Bring down the secops on everyone.”
“I don’t know…”
“It’s my life, right?” I said. Only one mech had turned her face to the camera. A few shots had caught Riley running away, but he’d been the smart one, covering his face with his shirt. No one was looking for him. “If we’re going to take a risk, it should be my decision.”
“And you don’t trust him,” Riley said sourly.
“Right now I don’t trust anyone.”
“Including me.” It wasn’t a question.
He’s Jude’s best friend, I thought. Riley would do anything for him. But not this.
I had no way of knowing; I knew. He’d stepped over the bodies with me. He’d been there. And he was here now. Probably I should have suspected him. But I didn’t want to.
“If you’re out to get me, you’re not doing a very good job of it,” I pointed out, only partly for his benefit. “And you’re already stuck with what happened. Jude isn’t.”
Riley dropped down to the ground again, looking a little lost. “You’re right. Just us, then.”
I didn’t want to say it. The old Lia Kahn would never have said it. But she was dead. “They’re looking for me, not you.”
“So far,” he said darkly.
“I mean, this doesn’t have to be your problem.”
“You want me to go?” he asked.
I hesitated. Then shook my head. “But you can. If you want.”
He hesitated too, longer than I had. “I’m in this.”
“But you don’t have to be.”
“Yes. I do.”
We needed somewhere that no one would bother to look for us, where no one bothered to look at all. “I know a place,” Riley said, “but…”
There were plenty of buts.
But I haven’t been back since the download.
But it’s not safe.
But I don’t know if you can handle it.
“I can handle anything,” I told him.
It’s not that I convinced him. It’s just that we couldn’t come up with a better option. So we went with the last resort.
Riley’s city was a day’s walk—a day and a half by back roads, which was how we went. We walked through the night, navigating by the dim glow of our ViM screens and occasionally switching to infrared. We reached the city’s crumbling edge just as the sun was peeking through the jagged skyline. I’d been there before, but only at night, when the dead buildings were just ragged shadows, the city people all hidden away, in bed or in shadow. At night, the sky’s dim red glow gave the place a weird dignity. Maybe it was the illusion that the city wasn’t dead after all but just a sleeping monster that would wake when the lights switched on.
Now that the lights were on, it was easy to see that the monster wasn’t sleeping; it was dead. Unlike most of the cities on the eastern seaboard, this one was still habitable, but just barely. The streets were paved with rubble and dogshit, lined with broken cars so old they still ran on gasoline (or would have, if they ran at all). Small clumps of orgs—their teeth rotting, their faces pockmarked, their insides and outsides racing each other toward decay—gathered in burnt-out buildings with broken windows, staring slack jawed at vids playing across giant screens. None of them noticed us as we passed.
“The vids play all day,” Riley explained. “When you’re a kid, you’re supposed to watch the ed ones, learn to read and all that. After, you can do whatever you want. But there’s nothing else to do.”
There was no wireless web of energy here, which meant no one had ViMs to watch the vids of their own choosing. It also meant our mechanical bodies would be powering themselves on stored energy, good enough to last three days, four if we pushed it. Riley was convinced that would be enough. And if it wasn’t, we could always sneak back to the Sanctuary for a quick recharge. There was no network either, at least no wireless access—they jammed the signal in the cities. Instead, communal ViMs let residents link into the network for a few minutes each day. According to Riley, most never bothered.
“How did you live here?” I asked as Riley led us down widening streets. The squat, brick structures gradually gave way to cement monoliths, their faces the color of ash.
“What was the other option?” He slowed down, his eyes tracking the broken windows we passed. Once he knelt to pluck a glittering scrap of metal from a small pile of trash. He held it out to me, proud of the find. “A real coin,” he said. “You can find them all over if you know what you’re looking for.”
“So?” I didn’t need him playing tour guide. “It’s not like they have any value anymore.”
He slipped it into his pocket. “Maybe not to you.”
Shadows flickered behind the glass. I turned my face to the ground. We’d agreed we shouldn’t bother trying to disguise ourselves—no disguise would hide what we were. Even if my picture hadn’t been all over the vids, two mechs traipsing through a city was a dead giveaway we were doing something we shouldn’t. Riley had claimed it didn’t matter. “There’s no law in the city, not really. You just do what you can until someone stops you.” Meaning no law but the unspoken kind, expressed only in the native language you absorbed growing up in the city, in favors and blackmail and protection money, in the unforgiving thresher of Darwinian selection. You either figured out how to survive, or you went extinct.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked now as we passed building after building, all of them identical except for the designs sprayed in black and gold across their faces. Sensing our presence, the graffiti rippled and swirled, occasionally emitting a piercing blast of noise, the artist’s primal scream embedded in the electropaint. “Can’t we just pick one and get off the street?”