Wired (Skinned, Book 3) by Robin Wasserman Page A

wait outside.
    "I shouldn't blame her," he said.
    I didn't argue, or agree. I could tell he was working up to something.
    "But I guess I do," he continued, after a long pause. "I get that she was mad, but to turn on him like that? After everything?"
    Jude and Riley had met Ani in BioMax's experimental facility when the three of them were selected for the first download procedures. The first successful procedures, Jude would have reminded me. I could only imagine what he thought of me helping BioMax. Riley claimed to understand--that I was doing what was necessary. That you didn't always get to choose your allies. But I hadn't been there with the three of them; I didn't know what had happened, or what BioMax had done
    65
    to them. So I knew only what little I'd been told, and what I could guess from the unspoken promises and debts that had bound them together. Until Jude slept with Quinn and blew the whole thing apart.
    "It wasn't everything," I reminded him. "It was after one specific thing."
    Riley scanned the distant windows, as if he could find Ani through the shaded glass. "One thing," he said. "One time. It shouldn't be the only thing that matters."
    I knocked.
    There was a muffled sound, something that could have been "Come in," so I did.
    It wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Ani was sitting up, wearing normal clothes--which I took as a sign that she was past the days when a perky caretaker would roll her over every morning and dump her into shapeless BioMax sweats, maneuvering rigid limbs through armholes and legholes, resolutely ignoring any and all bare skin. She'd gotten enough control of her body to dress herself. When she saw me, her face didn't move. Which meant either she hadn't remastered her emotional responses--or she was choosing to keep them to herself.
    "Who told you I was here?" she said.
    "Quinn." I waited for a wince that never came. Her face was empty.
    66
    "I didn't want anyone to come," she said. But she nodded at the bed. "You're here. Might as well stay. Sit down."
    The room looked exactly like the one I'd had. Featureless white walls, but Ani had posted no pics to remind her of the people waiting for her in the outside world. Before, she'd been one of the most avid zoneheads I knew, taking pics of everything, posting them to all of our zones and guilting us into pretending we cared. But now there wasn't even a ViM screen in sight. It was just the bed, the chair, the desk, and her. She sat so still, she could have been another piece of furniture.
    "So, are you ... doing okay?" I didn't know what to say. But stupid seemed better than silent.
    "Would you be?" she asked dully.
    "I'm sorry."
    "Why?"
    "For, you know. All this."
    "Why do people do that?"
    "What?"
    "Apologize for crap they didn't do. I'm the one who should be sorry, right?"
    "Are you?
    She shrugged.
    When I'd found her in the hidden lab, she'd been stretched out on a gurney, naked, her skull peeled back, her eyes staring at nothing, her lips forming a constant stream of nonsense syllables. Sloane and the others had been in the same condition--
    67
    because of Ani , I reminded myself--but they'd long since been downloaded into new bodies. Only Ani had stayed trapped in the strange digital limbo, a fugue state that call-me-Ben had assured me was painless. Probably.
    "So ... how bad was it?" I asked. "Did it hurt?"
    "Which part?" Her face twisted into a scornful un-Ani-like expression she could only have picked up from Quinn. "The Brotherhood experimenting on my brain? Or BioMax experimenting on my brain? Or dying all over again and coming back to life?"
    "Any of it," I said lamely. "All of it."
    "None of it," Ani said. "Unfortunately."
    I didn't ask what that meant.
    "Last time I uploaded a backup was at Quinn's estate," she said, and I knew what that meant, at least: that when they'd rebooted her in a new body, they'd used Ani's last stored memory. One she'd uploaded before the ambush at the Brotherhood. "But they told me what happened. And I