“So who’s next?” the largest of the men barked.
Next was Brahm, without warning. A different guard, barely pausing to aim, flicking his gun at Brahm like he was making a conversational point. Brahm collapsed, his body shuddering and shaking for several moments before going still. His eyes were open. I knelt, wanting to… I didn’t even know. Cradle his head, maybe. Just touch him. Make sure he was still alive.
Not that there would have been any way to prove it. No pulse. No breath. Just a body with a deactivated brain.
“I wouldn’t,” the guard closest to me said. “Charge might still be live. And it’s not your turn yet.”
At his words, Ty lunged at her guard, fist making contact with the guy’s bulbous nose. She made it about ten steps before the shock took her down.
Unlike the other two, she screamed.
“I’m not going to run,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.
“Not her,” Ani said. “That was part of the deal.”
She wasn’t talking to me.
“What deal?” But as I looked back and forth between them, as I took in the expression on Ani’s face—nervous but not scared and not surprised—the way the guards parted to make way for her, the way they lowered their weapons, all except the one who kept pointing his gun at me, I got my answer. Guess you’ll finally have to admit you were wrong, I said silently to Jude. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to hear it. “Stupid question, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Ani said, not particularly sounding it. “I didn’t think you’d volunteer to come. You didn’t even think this was a good idea.”
“Imagine that.” I wanted to shake her. I thought I’d been suspicious, but now I knew I hadn’t doubted her, not really. I’d thought the Brotherhood was setting her up. The thought of her working with them disgusted me. It was inconceivable that she’d changed this much, equally unlikely that this had been the real her all along. There was no reality palatable enough to accept.
I was no better than Jude, I thought. Blind.
“Is this really worth it? You hate Jude this much?”
“This isn’t about him,” she snapped.
“Right.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then make me.” I glared over her at the guard holding the gun. It was strange, how many of these I’d faced since becoming a mech. Before the download, guns were just something slummers played with in cities and whatever random countries were still playing their ridiculous war games. Now I could stare at one and pretend not to care.
“What we’re doing is wrong,” Ani said. “What we are is wrong. It’s not our fault—we didn’t ask to be this way. But we have to accept the truth. We don’t belong here. We’re wrong.”
“Don’t tell me you actually buy that bullshit.”
I shouldn’t have let her come back here, I thought. Not by herself.
Quinn and Jude left her broken—and I left her alone. Too busy with Riley to see that she was getting sucked in. Too busy, too obliviously happy to notice that she was drifting away.
“I told you before,” she said. “Brother Savona, Auden, Jude, they’re all saying the same thing. We’re machines. But that’s what Jude doesn’t get—what none of you get. Machines are supposed to be things. Not people. We don’t belong.”
And there it was, the answer to the question she’d fired at us before, the difference between Jude and Savona. Both of them believed we were machines. Both of them believed we shouldn’t pretend to be human. But Jude believed we were something new, something of value, something alive. Savona didn’t.
“You can’t actually believe that about yourself,” I argued. “These people think you don’t really think for yourself, or feel. You know that’s wrong.”
Ani smiled sadly. “They programmed us well,” she said. “They fooled us into believing we were real. But we’re not. We’re computers. Copies of dead people. Everything about us is a lie.”
“It’s not too late,” I said, VM. Knowing it was. “We can still get out of here.” Knowing we couldn’t.
“Enough,” she said, nodding at the guard aiming at me. I braced for the shock. Nothing to fear. Just a little pain, and not very far to fall.
I’m not afraid of the dark.
But he didn’t fire. Instead he grabbed my shoulder.
“He’ll take you outside,” Ani said. “Go back to Jude, tell him that if he cares about the others, he’ll stay away from us. Tell him that even if he doesn’t care, he’d better stay away. This is just a taste. He can’t beat us.”
“Us?” I asked incredulously. “You think you’re one of them? These orgs are just using you!”
“I’m a machine,” Ani said flatly. “That’s what I’m built for. And besides, I’m used to it.”
“Come on, skinner,” the guard grunted. As he yanked my arm, the hood slipped from his head. And I saw his face for the first time.
I knew that face.
At the Brotherhood rally, I had seen them in the crowd, faces of the corp-town dead, the old woman, the mother. The child. And I had assumed I was imagining it. Like I’d imagined Zo—except Zo’s face had turned out to be real.
But here was the guard, with the same shaggy eyebrows, bulbous nose, scruffy chin, a face I’d seen only for a second in real life—but I’d watched those vids over and over again. I’d memorized the faces of the victims.
I knew that face.
“I know you.”
He turned his face away and let go, jerking his head. Two of the other guards flanked me and seized my arms, holding me in place. I kicked at them, no longer caring about their guns or the electric charge that could leave me twitching on the ground with my friends. I drove my foot into a shin, slammed my knee into a groin, and the grip on my left arm loosened. I yanked my arm free, whacking the guy in the face. Something hard and sharp cracked across my shoulder blades, and as I lurched forward, a fist caught me across the chin. I went flying backward, my head slamming back against the wall. “Stay down!” the guard shouted as I slumped to the floor. “Last chance. Then we shock you and dump you on the highway.”
The man, the one who was supposed to be dead, stood frozen a few feet away, watching.
There was pain—in my head, in my back, on my face—artificial nerves alerting me to damage, neural impulses flashing a message that radiated across my body: Broken.
But it was the kind of damage that would heal, and it wasn’t the kind of pain that made anything clearer. Instead, the opposite: Everything faded away, blotted out, everything but the face of the dead man. “You were there,” I said quietly. Then again, shouting. “At the corp-town. You’re supposed to be dead.” But he was finally backing away from me, into the darkness.
I didn’t follow. Because I was on the ground. Because even if the pain was all fake, as fake as everything else, it hurt. Because of the guns.
The gun that slashed through the air, so fast I hadn’t seen the guard raise his arm, only saw it coming at me, then felt it smash my face, smash my head back into the wall with another resounding crack. I raised my hands over my head, squeezed my eyes shut. Couldn’t stop the next blow, striking the side of my head, knocking me flat. I curled tight in a ball, knees drawn in, head hunched against my chest, fetal and helpless against the kicks and blows. A boot driven into my stomach, my skull, the soft exposed flesh at the nape of my neck, crunching against my spine.