Skinned. - Skinned. Part 9
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Skinned. Part 9

"Yeah. Of course." If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.

I held out a hand, palm up. "Do you want to...? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want."

He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.

He touched it. Me.

Shuddered. Snatched his hand away.

Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.

"You can really feel that?" he asked.

"Yes."

"So what's it feel like?"

"Like it always does." A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring the temperature, the pressure per square inch, the duration, and all of it translated, somehow, into something resembling a sensation. "It feels good." I paused. "What does it feel like to you?"

"You mean...?"

"The skin."

"It's..." He scrunched his eyebrows together. "Not the same as before. But not...weird. It feels like skin." He let go.

I brushed the back of my hand across his cheek. This time he didn't move away. "You need to shave."

"I like it like this," he said, giving me a half smile. It was the same thing he always said.

"You're the only one." That was the standard response. We'd had the fight that wasn't a fight so often it was like we were following a script, one that always ended the same way. And if I acted like everything was the same, maybe...

"It looks good," he argued, the half smile widening into a full grin.

"It doesn't feel good. So unless you want to scratch half my face off when-" I stopped.

Nothing was the same.

The coarse bristles sprinkling his face wouldn't hurt when he kissed me.

If he kissed me.

"Lia, when you were gone all that time, I..."

"What?"

A pause.

"Nothing. I'm just...I'm glad you didn't, you know. Die."

It was what he had to say, and I gave him the answer I had to give. "Me too." For the first time, sitting there with him, I could almost believe it was true.

Another pause, longer this time.

"When you were in that place...I should have come to visit."

"You were busy," I said.

"I should have come."

"Yeah."

Not that I would have let him see me like that, spasmodic limbs jerking without warning, muscles clenching and unclenching at random, the mouth spitting out those strangled animal noises, the tinny speaker speaking for me until I could control the tongue, moderate the airflow, train the mechanism to impersonate human speech. If he'd seen me like that, he would never have been able to see me any other way. He would never see that I was Lia.

"I should go," he said. "You must be...Do you get tired?"

I shook the head. "I sleep, but it's not...I don't dream or anything. I just..." There was no other way to say it. "Shut down."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry," I said suddenly.

"What?" He scrunched his eyebrows together again. "Why?"

"I don't know." There were no mechanical tear ducts embedded in the dead eyes. No saltwater deposits hidden behind the unblinking lids. Add it to the list of things I wouldn't do again: cry. "I just am. I'm sorry that I'm...like this."

I admit it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to tell me that he wasn't sorry. That I was beautiful. That the hair felt like real hair and the skin felt like real skin and the body felt like a real body and he wasn't weirded out by the thought of touching it. That he saw me.

He stood up. I didn't. "You going back to school soon?"

"Monday."

"So I guess I'll see you there." He backed toward the door. When he opened it, Zo was on the other side. Like she'd been there the whole time, waiting, as she'd done when Walker and I had first gotten together, and she'd been a kid, annoying, always around, hovering outside with her ear pressed to the door, giggling every time we were about to kiss.

"Guess so."

He hesitated, like he was waiting for my permission to leave. The old Walker had waited for my permission to do everything.

"Aren't you going to kiss her good-bye?" Zo asked, sounding so sweet, so helpful, so hopelessly ignorant, and then she smiled, and the smile was none of those things.

Walker didn't move. Not until she gave him a gentle push, digging her fists into the shallow concavity beneath his rib cage. He lurched across the room, and I felt frozen again, like I had that first day, locked inside the body.

Blink, I reminded myself. But when I shut the lids, I didn't open them again.

He didn't taste like anything. Nothing did anymore. His lips feathered across mine. I registered the touch, and then it was gone.

"Bye, Lia."

I kept my eyes shut as his footsteps crossed the room. The door closed.

Bye.

SOBERED UP.

"Survival of the fittest. And we were the fittest."

It began Monday at six a.m., when the bed whispered me awake-or would have if an inner alert hadn't already forced my eyes open and my brain back to full-scale conscious dread. It began as I picked through a stack of clothes in disgust, rejecting favorites-the mood dress useless, its temperature-activated swooshes and swirls requiring fluctuations in body temperature which themselves required an actual body; the sonicsilk with its harmonic rippling just another reminder of the music I'd lost; the LBD, a linked-in black dress whose net-knit flared neon with every voice or text, too sensational; the soundproofed hoodie functional and cozy but not sensational enough, blah and gray, like I planned to fade into the background, scenery instead of the star-and finally being forced to resort to jeans and an old print-shirt that snatched random phrases from the network and scrolled them across the fabric. The look had been very hot, and then quickly very not, but it had settled into a neutral acceptability, and it was the best I could do.

It began-my official return to school and an officially normal life-with breakfast, another meal I could no longer eat. Or maybe with the sound of the car door slamming shut, Zo and me tucked inside, or with the hills giving way to a long, flat stretch of familiar green, the castle of brick and stone rising above the horizon.

In that old, normal life, it began after every break-whether two days or two months-with a squeal in stereo, Cass and Terra catching sight of me, fashionably late, pulling into the lot. It began with a rocket-launched embrace, arms locked, shoulders encircled, styles critiqued, stories spilled, all, it seemed, released in a single, shared breath. This time I had no stories, at least none I was willing to share. This time nothing was normal. But as the car pulled into the lot, I saw them bounce off the steps in front of the school. I opened the door and heard the squeal.

It begins now.

The first thing that registered were their clothes. Loose, ill-fitting, dull-colors, Cass in a T-shirt with a printed, unchanging slogan, Terra in jeans that sagged on her ass and a black shirt too loose and too worn, without any visible tech, like something you'd find in a city, or from one of those thrift zones Zo was always haunting for new retro rags.

The second thing: "Zo Zo!"

That was Cass's squeal, Cass's wide grin-and then she saw me, and both of them faded away.

She'd cut her black hair short and spiky, cropping it with a dusting of pink. "Lia?" Cass narrowed her eyes as if squinting would squeeze my features back to their familiar shape-or maybe block them out altogether. "Is that...you?"

"It's me." I didn't dare try a smile. "In the flesh."

No one laughed. Terra looked sick. She hip-bumped Zo.

"Zo Zo, why didn't you tell us that your sister was coming back today?" she asked with a determined perk. "We would have...done something special. To celebrate."

Terra's hair was the same, but she was actually-it didn't seem possible-wearing lipstick. And some kind of purple glitter above her eyes. Which didn't make sense, because no one wore makeup anymore, except the wrinkled poor who couldn't afford gen-tech or lift-tucks, and trashy retro slummers who thought it was cool to pretend they fit in to the first group. Oh, and seniles, who didn't count, since they didn't even know what year it was and so couldn't be expected to remember that makeup had gone out with TVs and artificial preservatives. Why spend all that credit on the perfect face if any random could match the effect with a black marker and some pinkish paint? Zo was wearing lipstick too, of course, but that was nothing new.

"I asked, uh, Zo Zo"-I shot Zo a look. She ignored it-"not to say anything." A lie. Like I could ever have imagined Zo talking to my friends. "Don't blame her."

"Doesn't matter now," Cass chirped. "You're back!"

"Tell us everything," Terra said. "Everything."

"Zo Zo wouldn't spill," Cass said, thwapping Zo's shoulder. "No matter how many times we asked. And, of course, someone has been totally zoned out forever."

"Yeah..." I didn't want to explain how I'd been lurking on the network in stealth mode, peeking over everyone's shoulders, or why I hadn't texted anyone back. Especially not with Zo-excuse me, Zo Zo-standing right there, listening to every word. "Sorry about that. I had a lot to, you know, deal with. For a while."

"We can imagine," Cass said.

"No, we can't." Terra sounded pissed. "Because we don't know anything."

"But we want to." Cass touched my shoulder. "We do."

Zo flicked a finger across her inner wrist, and the small screen she'd temp-adhered flashed twice. "Time, ladies."

"Oh!" Cass blushed. "Right. We're late. So, info dump later? Lunch?"

"Uh, sure-Wait, no, it's Monday." When it came to ruling the pack, lunch was key, but that was Tuesday through Friday. Mondays belonged to Walker. That had always been the deal, from the beginning.

"You and Walker?" Terra asked. "You mean he didn't-"

"Walker will deal," Cass cut in.

He didn't what? I thought. But didn't ask.

"It'll be fine," Cass said. "Trust me. Lunch."

"Lunch," I agreed. Walker could wait. "But where are you going?"

"Too complicated." Cass giggled as Terra tugged her away. "Later. Lunch."

"Right. Later. Lunch." I grabbed Zo before she could follow them. "So?"

She shook me off. "So what?"

"So since when do you steal my best friends?"

She smirked. "Maybe they stole me."

"And where are you all going?"

"They're your best friends. Shouldn't you already know?"

"You know I haven't talked to them in months," I said.

"Exactly."

"Zo!"

"I'm late." She spun away, pausing only to shoot back the last word. "And at school it's Zoie. Or Zo Zo."

I was used to people watching me. I just wasn't used to them gawking, then twisting away as soon as I caught them at it. The hallways were the worst. Conversation died as soon as I got close-sometimes tapering off, like a seeping wound that finally, as the heart stops pumping, runs out of blood, and sometimes cut off in its prime, a gunshot victim dropped by eight grams of lead. I knew the conversations that reached a violent, abrupt end were the ones about me, the machine roaming the halls claiming to be Lia Kahn. The other ones-the stumbling, mumbling trailings off into awkward silence-were just the result of nobody knowing what to say. That was at least better than the randoms who came up to me all day knowing exactly what to say, and this-no matter which words they used to disguise it-boiled down to "smile for the camera" as they aimed their ViMs at my face, zooming in for a close-up, pumping me for details they could post on their zone or a local stalker site and turn us both into fame whores.

I didn't smile.

In class, even the teachers stared, not like they had much else to do beyond babysit us while we got our real education from the network. Which meant I watched my ViM screen while the rest of them watched me. The only relief came in biotech, usually the worst of all possible evils, but hidden behind the thick plastic face mask, hunched over my splicing kit, I could almost pass for normal.

Walker didn't respond to my text about lunch, and when I showed up in the cafeteria, he wasn't there. So I sat with the usual suspects-plus Zo-at the usual table in the front of the room, where everyone could look as much as they wanted. Surrounded by my friends, it was almost possible to pretend they were staring for the old reasons, wondering what we had that they didn't, where they'd gone wrong between then-the half-remembered, better-forgotten days of all-men-are-created-equal playdates and birthday parties when no one cared how loud you were, how rude you were, how ugly you were, how stupid you were, how lame you were, because we were all too young and so too dumb to notice-and now, when how you looked and how you talked mattered as much as it should.

The Helmsley School was built three hundred years ago, for people who were almost as rich as we were, and the cafeteria, with its wood panels, floor-to-ceiling windows, and scalloped ceiling, was a suitably regal match for the exterior, all stone columns and brick arches. Thanks to the population crash and the upswing in linked ed, only half the tables were filled, but any group larger than three is enough for an us/them divide. After all, that was-as we'd learned in kindergarten-the key to civilization and the survival of the species. Finite supply plus infinite demand equaled conflict, battle, nature red in tooth and claw; bloody struggle for turf, status, sex equaled survival of the fittest. And we were the fittest.

Staying at the top meant defying expectations and reversing the norm, because there was nothing exclusive about acting like everyone else. Which meant that if the rest of the school was gaping at my new face and freakish body, my friends, not to mention the people I counted as friends by virtue of social proximity, would ignore the obvious, forgo the questions, and act as if they ate with a skinner every day-as, from now on, they would. Except for the fact that the skinner wasn't eating.

Which wasn't as awkward as the fact that my sister was. And was doing so at my table.

Or the fact that everyone else was tricked out in retro slum gear, just like her. I was the only person wearing anything with visible tech-the only person at the table, at least. I was dressed exactly like everyone else in the room. Normal.