“You could have—”
“And even if you were,” he said over me, “you’re not objective. You’re obviously in denial about your twisted friend.”
“And you’re objective? You’ve hated him from the beginning. You’re probably thrilled to finally have a good reason.”
“But you admit I have a good reason,” he snapped. “That’s the point.”
“The point is Ani shouldn’t be doing something like this by herself. Next time I’m going with her.”
“Well, isn’t she lucky to have such a noble protector,” Jude drawled, like he knew exactly why I was so determined to go to the Temple, and that it had nothing to do with Ani.
For once I almost wished he’d give me one of his tedious lectures about what was really going on inside my head, because I had no idea. I believed what I’d said about Ani: This wasn’t the kind of thing she could handle on her own. After seeing those vids, I wasn’t sure any of us could. But she was a big girl, and I didn’t owe her anything. So what was it, then? Was I just so desperate to see Auden and—what? Prove that he didn’t really hate me? Convince him that we could go back to the way things were?
Could I be that delusional?
“Someone set me up at that corp-town,” I said, keeping my eyes on Jude, watching—always watching—for some kind of telltale reaction. But there was nothing. “If it was the Brotherhood, I have to know. I’m not going to let Ani do all the hard work.”
And maybe that was it: the idea of doing something. Anything. Even if it meant facing what Auden had become; what I made him. If he and his Brothers wanted to take everything—my credit, my identity, my personhood—away from me, let them try. But this time, they’d have to do it to my face.
“It’s not a good idea,” Riley said.
Like it was his decision. “Don’t think I can handle it?”
“Can you?” Jude asked.
“I guess we’ll find out.” I glared at both of them, daring them to try to forbid me.
Instead, Jude raised his hands over his head, imitating Auden’s motion of victory. “We will!” he shouted in a raspy voice, sounding eerily like Auden. “You will!”
I would.
The Brotherhood of Man held a rally every Sunday.
“I still don’t see why you have to go.” Ani pulled a camo hoodie over her head. She tossed a second one to me.
“Maybe I’m curious,” I said, checking myself out in Ani’s mirror. This was less a fashion don’t than a burn-before-wearing situation. Sensors in the hoodie detected ambient color and reflected it, allowing the wearer to fade into any background, an imperfect invisibility. The thick, baggy hood cast enough of a shadow over my face that I could have been any age, any gender, I could have been some gap-toothed, pockmarked med-head from the city. I could have been alive.
The camo tech had been a military innovation before we were born, had filtered into the fashion zone when we were kids, and had quickly drifted into obscurity when it became obvious that fading away defeated the point of style. Now they were cheap novelties, just the kind of thing a tech-deprived city rat might rescue from the trash with a scavenger’s glee. We’d fit right in.
Ani strung a thin silver pendant around her neck and fumbled with the chain. Then she held the necklace out to me. “Can you?”
A glowing orb of blue lazulate dangled from the silver chain, a perfect match to the silver blue streaks that trickled down her neck and spine. I’d seen this kind of stone before—Bliss Tanzen had had one that she loved showing off, at least until it became clear she’d lied about receiving it from a dashing young heir to the SunFire fortune. It turned out that after a shocker-fueled all-night encounter, the solar energy baron had blocked her from his zone; the necklace came from Daddy. But I knew from Bliss’s incessant boasting before her secret emerged and the necklace got recycled that something like this was worth almost as much as a car. A small, cheap car with a submoronic nav-system that restricted it to preprogrammed routes and major highways, but a car nonetheless. Lazulate was almost as rare as it was useless, which meant its harmless radioactive glow had become a totem of wealth. “Pretty,” I said, fastening the chain at the nape of her neck. “New?”
Ani closed her hand around the pendant. “Quinn gave it to me.”
“Quinn Sharpe?”
She glared at me. “Surprised? What, that she’d bother? Or that she’d bother for me?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said quickly. “I just—Quinn doesn’t seem like the type to—”
Ani burst into laughter. “Joking.” She brushed her thumb across the glowing face of the lazulate. “You’re right, I guess. But Quinn’s changing.”
“People do that?” I asked, only half kidding.
“These last few weeks…” Ani shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s just getting tired of all the…”
Screwing everything that moved? “Experimenting,” I suggested, experimenting myself with a little tact.
“Right.”
“Or maybe she finally figured out who she wanted to be with,” I said. Not sure whether I believed it.
“Maybe,” Ani said, sounding like she wasn’t convinced either. “But I think it’s more than that. She never really had a chance to be anybody before, you know? She was living on the network—it wasn’t real. So after the download, it was like she had to start all over again. Figure herself out. Maybe she’s finally doing it.” She gave her wrist two sharp taps, and the glowing green numerals of a skintimer appeared. “We should go, or we’ll be late,” she said. “You sure about this? Seeing Auden like that, it could be—”
“Who knows if we’ll even get there,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could dredge up. “Could get stopped a mile from the house.” The penalty for driving without a human in the car was just a fee, for now, along with confiscation of the vehicle. But our funds were limited. Thanks to some creative accounting, we still had access to plenty of credit under a variety of fronts and assumed names, but the bulk of it had been seized—losing a car was a less than desirable eventuality. And I’d had enough of the secops for one lifetime.
“We’ll be fine,” Ani said. “They’re not enforcing the restrictions. It’s just a scare tactic.”
“Then let’s go,” I told her. “Find out if there’s anything to be scared about.”
Find out what’s going on with Auden, I thought.
If he means everything he says about us.
About me.
No, nothing to be scared of at all.
The Temple of Man wasn’t a building. It was hundreds of acres of buildings, sprawling, flat concrete blocks spiderwebbed together by tunnels and skyways. Within a mile of the Temple, the countryside gave way to an unbroken stretch of asphalt in every direction. No trees, no grass, no relief from the gray cement, the same color as the dingy sky. Only one structure violated the horizontal skyline, a narrow white tower shooting three hundred feet into the air, widening at the top for a story-high globe of windows. It reminded me of the pics I’d seen of the Middle East, after the war started but before the bombs dropped, ending the war and all the warriors in a flash of atomic fire. In the pics, tall spires had jutted from domed temples, strange, ornate lighthouses dotting the horizon, and as a kid I’d often imagined the bored but devoted keepers who might have lived up there in the sky, tending to their god. I wondered if they’d been the first to see the bombs, fire streaking through the night, and whether they’d had time to wonder or panic—or jump—before the sky exploded.