“Don’t be shy, honey.” A woman with a round, pockmarked face opened her bulging arms and swept me into them.
I felt her muscles stiffen.
Her body pull away.
Saw her eyes sweep me up and down.
Heard her scream.
“Skinner!”
And then it was chaos. A hand yanked the hood off my face. More hands tore at my shirt, pulled me away from Ani, into a teeming mass of writhing limbs, twisted faces. And the chant, Skinner! Skinner! Skinner! shaking the room. Gobs of spit splattered against my face.
“You’re lucky you’re a girl,” a man snarled, his fingers clamped down on the back of my neck, his thick, calloused lips peeled back from rotting teeth.
“It’s not a girl,” the woman beside him snapped. And to prove the point, she drove her fist into my stomach. It didn’t hurt, but I doubled over with the impact. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me down to my knees. Behind me, someone grabbed my shoulders, held me down. I could fight back against one, against three, but not against hundreds, and I imagined myself on the ground, trampled by the herd, feet grinding my body into the floor, like my feet had stomped the corp-town bodies, and wondered if it was what I deserved.
“Stop.” Auden’s voice, amplified and quiet at the same time, somehow cutting through the storm.
At his command, the grip on my shoulders relaxed. I shrugged it off and stumbled to my feet as the crowd dropped back a few steps. A circle of empty space formed around us. Ani sat on the ground, looking dazed, her hoodie torn. Someone had ripped a small patch of blue hair out of her head. Up onstage, Auden nodded with approval. I wondered what would have happened if he’d been closer. If he’d known it was me down here, probably he’d have been happy enough to watch the crowd tear me apart.
“Let them through,” Auden commanded, and his followers fell back, opening a pathway between us and the door. Several of them spit as we passed.
Just outside the auditorium, a man greeted us, draped in an iridescent robe that shimmered like Auden’s suit. He took my arm, like a gentleman, only his grip was steel. His other hand clamped down on Ani’s bicep. “I think it’s best that you come with me,” he said.
I wrenched my arm away. “Best for who?”
“Maybe we should just go with him,” Ani said, shooting a nervous glance at the door separating us from the angry crowd.
“What do you want?” I asked the man. “We weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s a public event, right?”
“I want nothing,” he said with a weirdly serene smile. “I’m just a messenger.”
“Oh yeah? For who?”
But even as I was asking, I knew. Who else?
“For Brother Auden and Brother Savona,” he said, face lighting up at their names. “They would like to speak with you.”
“Then they can come to us,” I said, though of course they couldn’t, because that’s not how this kind of game was played.
“Brother Auden has a message for you,” the man said. His hair was blonder than mine, almost white against his ruddy face. It fell in long, wispy strands across his eyes, which had a strange, faraway look, like he was peering through me into the distance at his divine reward. “He says, ‘It’s time we talk. Unless you want to run away again, Lia.’”
“He said that?” I asked. Stalling. “Lia?” So he knew it was me. Not just some anonymous skinner.
Lia Kahn. The one responsible.
The man nodded. “Ready?”
No.
The office was sparse, with little more than a desk and an oversize ViM screen plastered on one wall. The opposite wall was a touch screen, scattered with notes and scrawlings—but it went blank a moment after we stepped into the room. The desk looked almost antique, left over from the days when they installed screens and network links into the surface of dead wood rather than just building the whole desk as an integrated ViM that knew what you wanted nearly before you’d figured it out yourself. My father had one just like it—he claimed the solidity appealed to him, the permanence, but I think it was just that he didn’t like his desk talking back to him. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Rai Savona felt the same way.
He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.
Savona cleared his throat. “Since you’ve intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for.”
“Funny how you call me Lia when you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think that’s who I am,” I said, grateful for a voice that didn’t shake. “Or do you call your toaster by name too?”
“Consider it a courtesy,” Savona said. “An undeserved one.”
“You look better than you look on the vids,” I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I’d said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.
“Some things are necessary,” he said.
It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. “You make yourself look weaker?” I asked incredulously. “For effect?”
Auden pulled himself up straighter, his expression grimly proud. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Savona bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. “He’s not as weak as he was the day you abandoned him,” he said, placing a supportive hand on Auden’s shoulder. Auden shrugged him off. “But the damage you caused is permanent. Damage to his spine, his organs, his life expectancy—”
“It was an accident,” Ani said.
I said nothing.
“But you made him stronger too,” Savona said. “You showed him the way.”
“Then why can’t he speak for himself?” I snapped. “Or is he too drugged up and brainwashed to even know I’m here?”
Auden raised his head. His eyes were paler in person, his pupils still too large. “The only drugs I’m on are for the pain.”
He raised a hand to his face, then abruptly dropped it, as if trying to adjust glasses that he’d just remembered were no longer there. Suddenly the last six months dropped away and I was back in his hospital room, standing by his bed, begging him to forgive me, because if he did—if he had—none of it would have happened, I would be home and we would be together, whole and healed, and everything else would be background noise. Something to watch on the vids, and then shut off when it got old.
“What do you want?” he asked flatly.
“Just to talk. You and me. Can’t we just go somewhere? Away from…” I glanced at Savona.
Auden shook his head.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” Savona murmured in honeyed tones.
“No,” Auden said sharply. “Not going to happen.” Savona nodded. I recognized that nod. It was the same one that Jude got from his mechs when he issued one of his edicts. It was a pledge of obedience. Savona was letting Auden believe he was in charge.
Or Auden really was.
As Auden took a few steps, it became clear that the weakened martyr onstage was less of an illusion than he would have liked to think. Slowly, with one foot dragging slightly behind the other, he lurched around the side of the desk. His gait was awkward and spasmodic, almost like mine when I’d first learned to walk in the new body. I tried not to imagine the electrical impulses shooting through his spinal cord, stimulating dead nerves to life, one painful step at a time. He sank into the desk chair with a soft sigh of relief and rested his arms on a stack of papers. It took me until that moment to realize this was his office not Savona’s. Whatever Auden was, he wasn’t zoned and he wasn’t a puppet.