Wired (Skinned, Book 3) by Robin Wasserman

anything but screwing," Quinn said. "Ani had nothing to do with it."
    "I'm sure that would be a huge relief to her."
    "Drop the act, Lia. It's not like you care about her any more than I do."
    I could hardly care less. There'd been a time when I thought Quinn might actually have loved Ani, or at least whatever the Quinn-world equivalent of that emotion might be. But she'd done an excellent job convincing me otherwise.
    "I care," I said.
    "Then why are you wasting your time asking me about Jude, when you could be asking her?"
    "You know I can't do that."
    "Actually, you can. Which you would know too, if you gave a shit."
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    "You're saying she's--"
    "Awake," Quinn said. "New body, healed brain, totally compos mentis. Figured you'd know that. Seeing how close the two of you are."
    I couldn't believe it. BioMax had been studying her brain, searching for signs of what the Brotherhood had done to it and what they might have learned. They said the research would last "indefinitely," which I'd started to believe meant forever. "I didn't know."
    "Obviously."
    "Where's she staying?"
    "Still in rehab," Quinn said. "The luxurious accommodations where you and I began our own beautiful friendship."
    "So have you ... talked to her?"
    There was a pause. Long enough for me to imagine a whole series of unanswered calls and texts, unheard apologies, aborted visits. But maybe I was giving her too much credit.
    "Ani's old news," Quinn said. "I've got better things to do. And that goes for this conversation, too."
    She hung up.
    "Sure you don't want me to come in with you?" Riley asked.
    We stared up at the cement monolith.
    I shook my head. "I'll be fine." Some lies were necessary, even kind.
    The download and rehab facility sat at the heart of a
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    hundred acres of carefully cultivated wilderness, hidden from prying org eyes and nosy BioMax investors alike. Its location wasn't secret--but it was sixty miles away from the complex that housed BioMax's corporate headquarters. That was a sculpted swirl of glass and steel molded into the corp logo, but its existence was largely symbolic, a concrete manifestation of BioMax's presence in the world, to prove to anyone who saw it--on the network, at least--exactly how much power the corp wielded. This building, the faceless stone fortress, was the power itself. All the labs, the devices, the networks, the brains that made BioMax the second largest biotech corp in the world, were here.
    Also here: an icy storage room of lifeless, broken bodies awaiting disposal, their grinning skulls hollow as jack-o'-lanterns, their brains scooped out, sliced, scanned, tossed away. Down the hall a new machine, its eyes fluttering behind closed lids, its body rigid, wires feeding in and out of its exposed skull, monitors flashing, a family standing by, worrying, waiting. Or maybe no family, no visitors, just the thing , about to wake up and discover what it meant to no longer be human. To be an it.
    To be a skinner.
    The thirteenth floor would be filled with them--though not as full as it had been a year ago, before public sentiment had turned so sharply against us. Download was now exclusively for the desperate. But I supposed those were in constant supply. Accident victims, sufferers of incurable diseases, they'd all be
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    there, healed , defective husk of a body traded for a model in full working condition. Twitchy mechs with spasmodic limbs, their brains learning to control the machine, their tongues learning to maneuver around porcelain teeth, their fake lungs forcing air through a fake larynx, mechs learning to walk and speak and pretend to smile. Every mech needed rehab, although it was a much shorter hell if you'd been there before and your downloaded brain had already formed the pathways needed to control a mechanical body. I hadn't been back for more than a year, since I'd walked out, stiff and new but hopeful-- stupid. Expecting things to be like they'd been before.
    I could understand why Riley wanted to