Newsletter Signup • Alicia Ellis

CLASH OF FLESH AND METAL

CHAPTER 1

“This won’t hurt. It just looks like it does.” The technician held my metal arm out to one side and flicked on the laser.

Two weeks after removing all unauthorized data from my artificial intelligence, CyberCorp—otherwise known as my parents—had granted me the skin I wanted. Then it took only twelve minutes to custom cut a skin sheet and fit fingernails to the fingers. It felt like a lifetime.

“Almost done,” the tech said.

I willed my feet to stop their nervous taps beneath my chair.

Mounted from the ceiling, the laser emitted a red light as the tech guided it down my arm. Its heat warmed my face. When he reached my fingertips, the bright light went off, immediately cooling the room and my nerves.

The tech released me. “Well?” He shifted in his seat before setting his hands down in his lap. “Are you happy?”

When I flexed both hands, they bent in unison. Matching light-brown fingers, wrists, elbows. The new one was perfect—except for being artificially intelligent. “It’s good.”

“I followed all your parents’ instructions exactly.” He reached for the laser. “But we can redo it if you want.”

“It’s great. Thank you.”

His shoulders relaxed. “You’re good to go unless there’s anything else I can do for you.”

I hopped to my feet. The skin moved with me as if it had always been there.

That meant I could get out of here. I could run to the elevator and out the front doors while waving both middle fingers in farewell to CyberCorp Tower.

But then I’d be all over the news again, and I’d never hear the end of it from my mother. So instead, I thanked him again and left at a reasonable pace.

“Lena, how are you?”

I jumped when the voice assaulted me from the side as soon as I stepped into the hallway.

Dr. Athena Fisher fell into step on my left. Her blond hair was pulled into a bun with a pen sticking out of it, and her long legs moved more slowly than mine to match my pace. “Everything go okay?”

“I have skin.” My tone was flat. I stepped onto the moving walkway that stretched down the middle of the hallway.

“And that’s what you wanted.”

What I wanted was my original arm back, but this would do—as long as I could keep people from hacking into it to make me sleepwalk and strangle my friends. “Yes,” was all I said though. “That’s what I wanted.”

“Good.” She beamed. “You have a second chance—a new start that not a lot of people with injuries like yours would get.” She was keeping up fine even off the automated walkway. Still, she stepped onto it next to me and squeezed in close so we fit side by side. “And you and I have a second chance to become friends.”

Once upon a time, the doctor wanted nothing to do with me, preferring to spend her time perfecting the Model One androids. But life-threatening situations tended to bond people.

As we reached the set of three elevators and stepped off the walkway, I waved my left wrist in front of a small black plate on the wall. A soft beep confirmed the scanner read my ID chip.

“You had them install your chip.” It was a statement with a question behind it.

I turned to meet her eyes. “I need to know where I am at all times.” It would be a ridiculous thing to say for most people. But for a deadly sleepwalker, it made perfect sense.

With the chip embedded in my arm, I could use a chip-tracking application to make sure I stayed in bed when I was supposed to. The alternative of not knowing where I was—that was worse.

Technology wasn’t the only devil. Humanity was full of monsters too.

Dr. Fisher nodded, but her gaze went over my head. I could tell she’d gone to the dark place. I went there myself when I thought about what happened. It was better not to think about it, but for better or worse, thoughts were one thing CyberCorp had not yet developed a machine to control.

“I needed it to—” I started.

A too-familiar sound of metal clomping against tile issued behind me, and I whirled, every muscle in my body winding up to spring. A Model One had just stepped into the hall. Its humanoid shape was designed to look like us, but its metal form reflected the white lights shining down from the ceiling. Red eyes stared straight ahead.

An automatic door opened on the opposite side of the hallway, and the android’s metal feet clanged as it stepped through. The door hissed shut behind it.

“You were saying?” Dr. Fisher asked.

“It just made sense.” I kept my focus down the hall, just in case that thing came back out. The elevator door next to us closed, and I hadn’t even noticed it had opened. I waved my wrist to call another one.

“I wanted to apologize for how I treated you and thank you for saving me after that android went crazy when . . .” Broad-shouldered and six feet tall in flat shoes, Dr. Fisher tended to intimidate on first meetings. But now, uncertainty pinched her features. She licked her lips as she reached for more words.

“It’s nothing. We’re good.” The elevator opened again, and I got in. One step closer to leaving CyberCorp Tower.

After a pause, Dr. Fisher stepped inside too. “It wasn’t your fault that you needed help, and Ron . . . you saved me and—”

“I have a lot to account for.” To the elevator, I added, “Lobby.” Then I raised my hands, palms out. “Whether I meant to or not, these hands killed three people. One life is a start, but that’s all it is.”

“Speaking as someone whose life you saved, I think it’s plenty.” She placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Give yourself a break. No good can come from dwelling on past actions that you had no control over.”

The elevator doors slid open, and I slipped out from under her grasp and into the lobby. Dr. Fisher’s footsteps followed me, slower than mine but eating up more space with each step.

In the afternoon sun that streamed through a wall of windows, the white-and-silver tile floor of the lobby shone as if it had just been cleaned. I hurried across the tiles to the single elevator that would take me down to the VIP parking garage.

Around me, people stood in small clusters around invisible displays that I couldn’t see. The displays were virtual, presenting CyberCorp’s most exciting new tech as virtual objects on top of the real world.

I didn’t have the networked contact lenses needed to see them. Technically, the chip in my head was capable of displaying virtual objects to me, but I’d made them turn that feature off.

Movement in the corner of my vision made me turn my head, and my gaze locked on a dark-skinned man with closely cropped hair and a straight back. Detective Johnson.

I stopped.

Dr. Fisher stepped on my heel.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She followed that with a string of profuse apologies that I blocked out.

The detective stood next to another man and a small kid, facing what I assumed was a virtual display. But while the dad and kid were smiling and waving their arms to interact with whatever they were seeing, the detective watched me.

His arms stayed folded over his chest. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth pressed into a tight line. He wasn’t wearing the chest holster he’d worn the last time I saw him, but the bulk near his hip told me he was still carrying a gun.

“You know him?” Dr. Fisher asked.

“Detective Johnson. He’s one of the detectives who tried to arrest me.” I cringed. “I slammed him pretty hard in the shin.”

“Your arm was reacting in a moment of stress, thanks in part to all the data Ron loaded onto you.” She paused. “He looks pissed. Maybe I should talk to him.”

Before I could answer, she was striding in that direction, and the detective’s attention switched from me to the large blonde woman. He dropped his arms to his sides and stood up straighter, although he wasn’t much taller than she was.

I hurried for the garage elevator. When I peeked over my shoulder, Dr. Fisher was gesturing wildly while Johnson watched me.

But he didn’t make a move to follow. Crisis averted.

For now.

CHAPTER 2

In the VIP garage under CyberCorp Tower, Olivia and Claire waited on opposite sides of my car. Modern vehicles tended to look like bullets with sleek, uninterrupted curves. Mine was not one of those.

As far as I was concerned, though, my cherry-red sedan found its beauty in its lack of high-tech features. No automated doors that slid upward. No rotating front seats. And most importantly, no auto-drive.

Liv stood on the driver’s side with her face tilted upward and away from Claire. She’d given up the cropped blue hairstyle, and today, she had it plaited into two long cornrows that extended halfway down her back.

Claire stood on the other side of the vehicle, both hands on top of it, shooting a glare so sharp it threatened to slice Liv in two. She towered several inches above the other girl, and her short dark hair showed off cheekbones so defined they could cut.

“You waited?” I said. “I told you I’d call when I got done.”

“We were leaving—” Liv started, her voice loud and abrupt.

“She wouldn’t stop arguing with me.” Claire jabbed a finger in Liv’s direction.

My attention jumped back and forth between them. “You couldn’t drive and argue?”

“You don’t have auto-drive,” Claire said. “That makes it harder.”

“To drive and argue?”

“I told her to drive,” Claire continued.

Liv spun on her. “You don’t tell me what to do!”

“I see.” I waved my left hand at the back door of the car, and the locks clicked on all four doors. “You’ve been out here arguing for twenty minutes.” I pulled it open and gestured for Liv to get inside. Then I opened the driver’s side and dropped into my seat before beckoning Claire inside as well.

Claire opened the passenger door and ducked in beside me.

“I’m not a chauffeur,” Liv said, still standing outside behind my seat.

I tapped the steering wheel. Sensing my ID chip, the lights on the dashboard lit as the car started in complete silence. More modern electric vehicles had an artificial hum added by the manufacturers to warn pedestrians. But since my model was introduced early in the era of electrics, its engine ran in silence.

“Are we going or what?” I shouted.

Liv finally got in.

I backed out of the parking space and directed the car to the exit. At the edge of the garage, a metal gate rolled to the side as we approached, and I drove into the Thursday afternoon sun.

After a minute of silence, Claire shifted to face me. “Which boy do you like?”

“Excuse me?” I braked at a red light. My gaze flicked from the road to Claire and then to Liv in the rearview mirror. Liv leaned forward in her seat. I returned my attention to the road.

“Jackson has basically been your boyfriend since you were six,” Claire said.

“That’s . . . not true. I’ve just known him that long.”

“I said basically.”

“How often is someone’s first love also their true love, though?” Liv said, nodding with each word, as though what she was saying should be obvious.

“Not often?”

“Like never.”

“My parents have been a couple since they were fifteen,” Claire said. “They always talk about loyalty being what kept them together. You have to give people second chances when they’ve had your back forever.”

“You don’t just keep people around because they’ve been around,” Liv said. “People change and grow apart. You have to know who you can trust right now, not when you were six.”

“What is this about?” I asked.

“Jackson!” Claire said.

At the same time, Liv shouted, “Hunter!”

“Uh-huh.”

“You can’t leave him on the hook like this,” Liv said. “He’s a great guy. He was your shoulder to cry on right after the accident.”

“If we’re getting technical, I don’t think I ever cried on his—”

“He listened to all your rants about Jackson and the sleep-walking.”

“Well, he—”

“But you were wrong about Jackson never listening to you and about him expecting you to run CyberCorp,” Claire cut in.

“Can y’all just stop?” I shouted.

In front of us, the traffic light turned green, and I rotated the wheel toward my house. Both girls continued to stare at me, Claire from beside me and Liv in the rearview mirror.

“It’s only been a couple months since I lost an entire arm and had it replaced with a robot. And—”

“It looks great, by the way,” Claire said, but she clamped her mouth shut when I glared at her.

“Someone hacked into my brain and forced me to kill people—and I may or may not have contributed to that by hating CyberCorp and the Model Ones to begin with.”

“You didn’t,” they said in unison.

“I was an easy target, though, because of how I felt. Either way, believe it or not, deciding which boy I like better is not at the top of my priority list. Mostly, I’m just trying to stay upright.”

Claire turned toward the front of the vehicle and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Liv muffled a giggle and then slapped her on the shoulder.

“Glad y’all are getting along at my expense.”

I turned the car into a posh area of town where shops lined both sides of the street. As per architectural regulation in this neighborhood, the building facades sported white-toned stone that matched sidewalks so bright they might have just been poured. Flowering trees marked the walkways on the street side.

“Hold on.” Claire tapped the back of her ear to activate her micro-comm, a small device that sat right behind it. “Yeah?” Her gaze went blank as she listened to someone on the other end of the connection. “I really can’t right now.” She stole a quick glance at me. “Because I don’t want to.”

“Is everything okay?” I whispered.

Claire shifted away from me. “Fine. Give me ten minutes.” She tapped her ear again.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m sorry. I still want to hang out, but I have to do something for my parents first. Drop me home?”

“You can’t,” Liv said. “We have the . . . thing.”

“What thing?” I asked. When no one answered, I asked, “Are you coming by when you’re done?”

“Definitely.” She turned in her seat to look at Liv. “I’ll be there.”

“What’s going on?” My friends were the least subtle people on the planet.

“Lena’s car,” Claire said, her tone overly cheerful, “navigate to Claire’s house.”

“Navigating,” came the reply through the speakers in a low feminine voice. A map appeared on the screen of the dashboard to redirect me.

“I know where you live.” I pointed at the steering wheel with one hand. “And I’m driving manually. The car doesn’t need to know the way.”

“Right.” She raised her voice. “Lena’s car, end navigation.” She lowered it again. “I don’t know why you don’t just use auto-drive.”

“How long will you be?” I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I had been looking forward to a return to ordinary life. Or at least an imitation of it. Three friends hanging out after school seemed like a perfect start.

“Less than an hour—probably only half that. I promise.”

I took the next right and circled back the way we came. Five minutes later, we pulled into a tree-lined neighborhood with sidewalks that curved lazily up both sides of the street. Claire’s neighborhood fancied itself high-end traditional. Each house had its own character—one light yellow, the next blue, then gray, then pale green. But manicured trees and bushes fronted each one, not a single leaf out of place.

I eased the car to a stop at the end of Claire’s driveway.

“I’ll see you at your place. I won’t be long.” She stepped out, slammed my door, and ran to her front porch.

Liv opened her door as well and switched to the passenger side.

As we took off back the way we came, Liv crossed her arms over her chest. “She just bailed on us.”

“You don’t even like her.”

“I don’t dislike her. But that’s not the point. We had a plan. You don’t bail on plans.”

I fixed my face into a false smile because, as disappointed as I was, it was important that Claire and Liv be friends. My dance card wasn’t exactly overflowing these days, thanks to three murders and having broken up with Jackson. In their own ways, these two had stuck with me, and they were going to love each other if it killed all of us.

“She’ll be right back,” I said, my tone so bright that Liv narrowed her eyes at me.

“What do you think that was all about?”

I shrugged. “Dunno. Girlfriend stuff maybe. I haven’t seen Brianna lately. I hope they’re okay.”

Liv smirked. “Oh, she has problems in her relationship, so she has to meddle in yours.”

I stared at her until she took my point.

“I’m not meddling. You’re already with Hunter. I’m not the one trying to blow up your thing to relive ancient relationship history.”

“I am not with Hunter.”

“So Jacks—”

“I’m not with anyone. I lost my arm, had someone control me in my sleep, and then killed three people. I’m . . . on hiatus.” I slowed the car as we approached our next turn.

“Does Hunter know that?”

I jerked the wheel too far. Liv stared at me as I straightened up and set my car in the right traffic lane. “I’ll tell him next time we talk.”

Outside, the city rolled past my window. We’d gone to CyberCorp right after school, but now, rush hour was picking up. Cars packed the road on both sides, and the occasional drone whizzed overhead carrying packages and messages across the city.

Since it was February and the days were short, the sun crept below the horizon, streaking the sky in yellows and oranges. Digital billboards flashed to life on the sides of buildings and mounted on stands to tower high above.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Liv said.

“I know.” We drove past a building whose side sported a billboard showing me, a light-skinned biracial black girl with untameable dark curls, wearing a pair of red platform heels. The digital version of me skipped across the building in a way that I definitely would not if I wore anything that high. The real me would have face-planted on step two.

“Lena?”

I recited the mantra I’d been telling myself—and everyone else had been telling me—for the past two weeks. “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

It sounded more robotic than my arm. My fault or not, Debbie was still dead. And Kevin. And Harmony. Debbie’s face remained a grotesque image seared in my memory.

Maybe I hadn’t chosen to kill them, but I’d allowed it to happen. I’d refused to let my car take me home on auto-drive the night of my accident. I was fiddling with the controls instead of watching the road, and it cost me my arm. After the arm, I didn’t work hard enough to discover the source of my sleepwalking and to stay awake when I suspected myself.

Ron programmed my AI to kill, but I opened all the doors and windows and invited him in.

This was on me.

“Lena?”

Somehow, I’d stopped at a light, and it was now green. I eased my foot onto the accelerator and put the car back in motion.

We rode in comfortable silence for half the remaining ride home before I put her on the spot. “What’s the deal with Ron?”

Liv’s body went rigid.

“You don’t have to talk about it.” I held my breath because, yes, she did have to talk about.

She stared straight ahead through the windshield. Her left knee started a steady bounce. “He made bail.”

“What!” My foot fell too hard on the accelerator, and I had to will myself to ease off so I wouldn’t ram the car in front of us.

Liv kept her attention on the road, even though I was the one driving. Her knee picked up speed like she was winding up for takeoff.

I softened my tone. “Who paid it? He’s not exactly rolling in money.”

“We always suspected he had a backer, right? Someone else provided the equipment he used. Outside of CyberCorp, he didn’t have access to a machine powerful enough to hack the EyeNet to send you the data that made you do what you did. Inside CyberCorp, it would have been too risky since everything is logged.”

“Everything except my arm.” For privacy and because my arm wasn’t exactly part of their standard manufacturing chain, my parents and doctors had stored its log only on the chip embedded at the base of my skull. Lucky for Ron, though, he was on my team and had access to everything he needed. “He contacted you?”

“Do we have to talk about this?” Liv’s voice was high-pitched with more than a hint of whine. But one glance at my face—which was as neutral as I could make it—and she continued in a mutter. “He called me.”

“He’s allowed a phone?”

“He said he dug up an old one. Just a standard smartphone. He can’t have anything high-tech. Definitely no computers. But his counsel insisted he be allowed a low-tech phone to facilitate his defense.”

“His defense!” Again, I had to calm myself with long breaths. “What defense could he possibly have?” I kept my tone low even though my nerves were stretched so thin and tight they’d snap at any minute.

She shrugged.

My hand-screen buzzed from the inside of my jacket. I stopped at a light and extracted it to check the new notification. It said Philip Pollock was streaming live audio.

Liv peeked at my hand and wrinkled her nose. “You’re still listening to him? I thought you were over that.”

“If you mean I no longer think tech is the source of all our problems—yes. But in the wrong hands . . . people died, and I still think Pollock was the money behind Ron.”

“Have they found him?”

“He’s long gone—more proof that he’s guilty. I keep hoping he’ll give something about his location away when he broadcasts. The police can’t get a warrant to track his ID chip because there’s no real evidence. It’s just speculation.”

Since my hand-screen was already paired with my vehicle, Pollock’s voice burst through the car speakers as I streamed the audio.

“They are so threatened by me—by our movement against their machines—that they have conspired to bring me down. Make no mistake: they don’t want you to hear the truth.”

“Can you tell where he is?” I leaned toward the speakers, trying to pick out any distinctive background noise. There was a slight static, but that was normal in his broadcasts.

The audio volume dipped as my car detected conversation.

“I can’t—” Liv started.

“Shh. I need to hear this.”

The audio rose again. “They prefer you smiling and nodding and integrating each new piece of technology into your lives so they can know you better, track you better. Your lives are not your own. They belong to CyberCorp . . .”

Even when I closed my eyes and strained my ears, nothing in the background noise gave any hints about where he might be. This was hopeless.

“You’re not still into him, right?” I asked Liv. “Ron, I mean.” The audio volume dipped again, but Pollock continued his rant.

Liv didn’t answer.

“Please tell me you’re not.”

“I’m not.” Her mouth stayed open as if there were more to say.

I held my breath and waited for her to speak on her own terms.

“I feel sorry for him.” Her words tumbled out into the open in a rush now. “All of this was because of what CyberCorp did to his family. His father just died. He already lost his mother. You and I have these perfect families with two parents and siblings, and everyone loves each other.”

I couldn’t argue with that. My parents betrayed me by replacing my arm, but they did it because they thought it was their best option at the time. That was more than a lot of people had. “A rough life is not an excuse for murder.”

She chewed her lower lip. “I know that.”

After a few seconds without talking, the audio volume increased automatically again, and by now Pollock was on a roll.

“You may think these machines are good for humanity. They’re convenient. They make life easier. Perhaps. But with each new product launch, they grip more tightly onto your lives. With each new product, you lose touch with other people. You make a phone call instead of visiting. Then you text instead of calling . . . Soon, you will just have a Model One stand in for the people you love. Eventually, there will be no point in loving at all. Your entire life will be automated without human contact.”

His voice struck a discordant note right in my chest, sending my entire body vibrating off-key. I used to hang on this man’s every word. He believed his teachings, and so had I. I still did in a lot of ways. But his existence was too convenient—too aligned with everything that happened.

He was the perfect backer for Ron. Moneyed. Passionate. Driven.

We couldn’t pin any of it on him. There were no contact records between him and Ron, and of course he had an alibi for every murder. Why wouldn’t he, since I’d been the unwitting assassin?

As Pollock’s voice rose in passion and volume, my fists clenched, and my teeth ground together.

“Lena?” Liv was staring at me, her face close to mine, her brows pinched together.

“Sorry, what?”

She tipped her head toward the windshield, and somehow, I’d managed to get us to my house. One hand still gripped the steering wheel, but I’d stopped the car at the end of the long driveway.

“Oh.”

She jabbed a finger down at my left hand, which held my hand-screen. The point right under my thumb was bent, and I was clutching it like it was a lifeline.

“Crap.” I pulled the two halves of the hand-screen apart, and the center screen snapped together into a larger display like it was designed to. Good, not broken. I closed it and set it on top of my dashboard.

Pollock’s voice stopped abruptly, but soft static continued to come through the speakers.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, before the static stopped.

Silence filled the car where Pollock’s voice had been, and my blood pressure dived back to a semi-normal level.

Liv tapped my shoulder. “You’re spacing out a lot these days.”

“I’m fine.”

Mine was the only home sitting at the end of this cul-de-sac, since my parents bought up two lots on each side of us to ensure privacy and security. A sidewalk split off toward the top of the driveway and led up to a pair of doors that extended at least two people high. The solid-wood entry was stained deep red, contrasting with the white facade and wrought-iron accents.

Today, cars blocked the garage where I usually parked. They filled the driveway from the top of the small slope on which my house stood, all the way down to the street. I’d parked just behind an oversized black sport utility vehicle that was shaped like most other cars here but with one large back door in addition to the usual two side ones.

“I didn’t realize my mom had an event tonight,” I told Liv. “We can go to your place instead.”

“This is good.” Liv popped her door open and stepped out before I could put the car into reverse.

She beckoned for me to join her, so I opened my door and stepped onto the driveway.

She came around the car and gave me a quick hug. “Can we try to enjoy ourselves?” Then she spun and walked to the front door, with me hurrying behind her.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s a party. Try to relax.”

I hadn’t relaxed in months, and I doubted I would start now. Still, I followed Liv up the driveway and into the house for whatever torture my mother had planned.

CHAPTER 3

A loud bang sounded as I stepped into the two-story foyer. I grabbed the back of Liv’s shirt and flung her behind me.

My arms were up in front of me, hands balled into fists, before I registered the crowd of people standing in the large foyer and even spilling into the sitting room beyond.

“Surprise!” Balloons released from hands. A plastic-and-helium wave of purple, metallic white, and gold floated upward to slide across the wrought-iron chandelier and dance on the thirty-foot ceiling above.

The decorator would have a hell of a time fetching those down later.

In the middle of it all, my mother stood in a pair of black pencil-leg pants that stopped at the ankle to frame bright-pink pumps with pointed toes. Her silky mauve blouse contrasted against her dark skin, adding a touch of softness to the businesslike look. Today, she’d worked product into her hair, and it poofed around her head in tight, kinky curls.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a party, honey.” My mother hurried toward me, her brow tight with concern. Before I could tell her I was fine and just startled, she was past me and pulling Liv to her feet. “Lena, you have to be more careful.”

“I’m so sorry.” I grabbed Liv’s other arm and helped to haul her up. “I still don’t know my own strength.”

My mother’s attention flitted across our crowd of guests. There were about thirty of them, wearing a mix of expectant looks and concerned frowns. Through a too-tight smile, she whispered, “Do we need to reevaluate your strength variables?”

“I’m fine,” I told her, my face holding a smile so carefully manufactured that I hoped it matched hers. Louder, I added to everyone. “What’s going on? I mean, this is amazing but . . . What is it?”

“It’s a skin party,” a familiar voice called. “A celebration of skin.” At the sound of his voice, delicious tingles inched up my spine and settled at the base of my neck until I shook them away. I scanned the crowd until I found him. Hunter.

Today, a plain black shirt hugged his lean muscle—the physical therapy was treating him well. His hair fell a touch too long across his forehead, and by now, I had to assume he cut it that way on purpose. It worked. The dark color brought out the light-green flecks in his mostly brown eyes.

My breath caught, and I physically worked to get it moving again. “Hey. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

What a stupid thing to say about a surprise party. When had I turned into a rambling idiot, and where was my off switch?

In my peripheral vision, my mother wrapped an arm around Liv’s shoulders. “It’s good to see you. Your shirt is torn, dear.”

“It’s—what?” Liv looked down at her collar, and it was indeed split down the middle, just low enough to show cleavage. “Aw.” She fingered the tear. “I liked this one.”

“Oh no!” I said, my voice way more dramatic than intended. “Let’s get you something else to wear.” I grasped her wrist and tried to drag her in the direction of our curved staircase—anything to get away from this “party.”

I’d been here two minutes, and so far, I’d thrown my friend to the ground and embarrassed myself in front of a cute boy I was already conflicted about.

Our housekeeper and nanny, Marcy, appeared out of nowhere and pulled Liv from my grip before embracing her in a tight hug. Today, Marcy’s white-blond hair was pulled back into a dignified French twist held in place with a matching white plastic comb. Her sixty-year-old face was just beginning to show age lines around the mouth and eyes, where it scrunched most when she smiled.

Liv’s expression brightened by a hundred watts. “Ms. Marcy!” Although she and I first became friends back in middle school, we went on a long hiatus for the past few years. She hadn’t seen Marcy since freshman year. Liv had two amazing dads, but Marcy was the one she’d gone to about things like bras and first periods.

“I missed you too, dear. Let’s go upstairs and find something of Lena’s for you to wear.” To me, she added in a whisper, “It’s just a party. This, too, shall pass.”

She missed the pleading in my eyes that begged for her to take me with her. I really needed to work on my telepathy.

Liv and Marcy chatted excitedly with animated faces as they walked side by side up the stairs—leaving me stranded in this sea of staring people.

My mother’s smile was impenetrable—a veritable weapon of war. “Let’s all give Lena a moment to recover,” she called in a voice both loud and sweet. Two sharp claps had everyone following her out of the foyer and into the space past the staircase.

We called it a sitting room, but it was more like a miniature ballroom. The ivory tile of the floor gleamed as if freshly waxed. Hanging from the high-domed ceiling, the large wrought-iron chandelier was turned on today. Each of its three overlapping circles gave off a ring of white light. Combined with the rays streaming in from a circular skylight above, it created a halo around the room.

For the festivities, our furniture had been replaced with high-top cocktail tables covered in white cloths with just enough metallic threads to catch the light. A long table spanned the far wall, and at one end, plates entirely too small for food sat next to silver forks.

A server appeared out of nowhere and offered me a tray of drinks in champagne flutes. He pointed at the three clustered on one side. “Sparkling cider, Miss Hayes.”

I started to reach for a glass on the other side. He chuckled and ducked away before I could grasp a flute of actual champagne.

When everyone else was safely out of earshot, my mother turned back toward me. Her tone softened. “How did it go?”

“It’s fine.” I held my left arm behind me, angled away from her. We would not be making any more changes to it except on my say-so.

She searched my face. “Please don’t keep things from me, Lena. I thought I’d proven to you that, despite my many imperfections, all I want is for you to be alive and well.”

“And happy?”

“That was implied. Speaking of which . . .” She grasped my wrist before I could get away. “Your father and I think it’s time we gave you more responsibility. Someday, we hope you’ll be a partner at CyberCorp, so it’s important that we start now with garnering one another’s trust.”

I narrowed my eyes.

She tipped back her head and laughed. When she stopped, the edges of her mouth still danced upward. “Don’t be so suspicious. Your father and I understand that we had some responsibility in what happened, and we want you to feel you can talk to us without judgment. In return, we will trust you to make good decisions and not to hide things or lie to us.”

“And more responsibility means what?”

“For starters, we’ll be away for the long holiday weekend, starting tomorrow. It’s Presidents’ Day, and officially, the company will be closed. Marcy will be here, but we expect you’ll take care of your sister as much as needed.”

“I’m always here for Allie. That’s not new.”

She licked her lips. “Also, moving forward, we will never track your ID chip without permission.”

“Okay . . .” I waited for more because a promise not to violate my privacy didn’t amount to much either.

“We will never control or track your car or other devices that are yours.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’ll have nearly the same access to CyberCorp Tower as your father and I do. After all, you will be a partial owner come your twenty-fifth birthday, so you might as well get used to the responsibilities that come with that.”

“Seriously?” I took a step backward. “You mean I don’t have to check in at reception anymore?”

“You do not.”

“I can go up to see the Model Ones on the seventieth floor whenever I want?”

“I’m not sure why you’d want to, but yes, if you like.”

“I can see the new inventions on the draft floors?”

“Of course.”

“And . . .” I searched my mind for what else I might want to do. “I can eat lunch in your office with my feet on the desk?”

Her lips curled. “Please do not.”

“Can I streak through the hallways?”

Her eyes widened.

“How about just the lobby?”

She dropped her head and covered her face with one hand.

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

The kitchen door opened to my right, and a line of servers stepped through and headed to the long table on the far wall. Each carried a metal tray of food. One by one, they set their trays down and spun on their heels like soldiers before marching back to the kitchen.

“When did you do this?” I asked my mother.

I’d been in school all day and gone to CyberCorp Tower to get my skin right afterward. My parents left the house before I did in the mornings and returned much later. They’d been working even longer hours lately due to the Model One launch.

She kissed me on the cheek. “I will always find time for my babies.” She started to turn away but stopped mid-movement. “I almost forgot. I need to introduce you to someone.”

Hunter caught my attention from across the room. Now, he sat in a window seat in the corner, sipping from a glass of soda. He kept glancing toward the front door, and I could empathize a hundred percent with the desire to escape one of my mother’s parties.

“Can you give me three minutes, and then we can do the whole social thing?”

My mom nodded and then whirled away, a beaming smile on her face as she went to greet her guests.

I recognized most people here as acquaintances from school and—I was guessing—their parents. My guidance counselor sipped a glass of champagne while intensely nodding while a parent spoke.

Upward of twenty people filled our sitting room right now, and I didn’t have nearly that many real friends. My mother’s events were like that—it wouldn’t be a party without network opportunities.

I took a step in Hunter’s direction and realized he was the only one of my close friends here. Claire had said she would catch up. Liv was upstairs. Melody wasn’t talking to me at the moment—not that I blamed her. And Jackson . . .

I fished my hand-screen from my jacket pocket and placed a call. The line rang once, twice, three times. I was just about to end the call when it connected.

“Hey.” Jackson’s voice was low and quick. “What’s up?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“My mom’s having this party.” What was my point? “And you’re not here.” I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t even know why I’d called him. To ask him to come? To ask him why he hadn’t? My mom must have invited him—the fact that we broke up would never stop her from bowing to social niceties, and Jackson’s family’s old money meant he got invitations everywhere.

“I didn’t think you’d want me there. Do you?”

“I . . .” My breath was short, and so was my capacity for words apparently. “I just thought you would be.”

“Give me ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Can’t wait to see you.” The call disconnected, leaving my mouth hanging agape on a dead line.

As I slipped my hand-screen back in my pocket, my mother caught my eye and beckoned with one finger. Next to her stood a girl about my age with olive skin and dark hair that fell to her shoulder blades in luxurious waves.

“This is Nina Ortiz.”

Nina stuck out a hand with long fingers that looked like they belonged playing piano. The move was so natural that it made it seem totally normal for teenagers to shake hands. So I did.

“Nina’s family moved here five months ago. Hanover didn’t have space for her in your class at the time, but we’ve made room. She’ll start next week.”

“There are three months left in the school year.”

“And then Nina will be a Hanover graduate, with all the privileges that come with that diploma.”

Nina flashed me a smile of mauve lips around perfectly aligned white teeth. Nina might be a lovely person, but introducing her to everyone in the room was not at the top of my want-to-do list right now.

I faced my mom fully. “Can we not do this right now?”

Her lips pressed together, and I could see her brain cogs turning, trying to decide whether to spoil the mood. She smiled, but her eyes were dead. “Why don’t you and Nina”—she placed a hand on the girl’s back and pushed her toward me—“go greet your guests.”

Obediently, I fixed my best business smile on my face and led Nina away.

I steered her in the direction opposite Hunter, offering him a wave and a shrug as I jerked my head toward the new girl. I’d much rather be talking to him, but if I led Nina over there, my mother would come right over and drag us away.

Hunter and I needed to have a real conversation anyway, not one in a room full of people I half knew.

I needed to tell him that everything had changed now—that I wasn’t the girl who was angry about the new arm but still in possession a whole soul. Now, I was the broken girl, the one who woke up over corpses.

That was not what he signed on for.

Luckily, Nina was everything I wasn’t, and she carried the conversation with a tall boy and his mother whose names I couldn’t recall. I’d seen him at sporting events, so likely, the boy went to a high school in the same athletic league as mine.

With Nina occupied and my mother busying herself with straightening food trays into perfect alignment, I escaped to Hunter’s corner of the room. He looked up from his soda when I approached, and his face cracked into that perfectly imperfect smile with one side higher than the other.

“Hey.” His voice was low and gruff, like liquid chocolate.

“Hey.”

He pulled me into a warm hug that smelled like springtime soap. For a split second, I remembered what it felt like to have little problems—like an English essay that required an all-nighter. Little problems like my parents tracking my location. Little problems like CyberCorp hospital and physical therapy. And Hunter—there to make it all better.

Unfortunately, my little problems had grown legs and arms and sharp teeth.

The sort that made you wonder if you were the person you thought you were. The sort that changed you. The sort that broke you.

I stepped back from his embrace and straightened up.

“I called you this morning. I wanted to wish you luck.” He gestured toward the room. “And warn you.”

I laughed and held out my metal arm, now fully encased in skin the same light brown as the rest of me. “Mission accomplished.” I gestured toward the room. “And I wouldn’t have been able to escape anyway.”

He laughed. “Your mom is a force of nature. How did she even get my number?”

I pointed at his knee, which CyberCorp had rebuilt. “She’s got your records.” My smile fell away after a few seconds, leaving silence in the space between us.

“So . . .” His gaze flitted around and landed back on my face. “I was thinking—”

My jacket pocket vibrated, and I fished my hand-screen out, expecting to see Jackson’s name on the display. Instead, a message from Claire popped up. “Claire’s on her way.” I shifted my attention back to him. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“We should hang out.” He pointed back and forth between the two of us. “It’s been weeks since we’ve been alone, and I thought we could catch up.” His volume petered out toward the end, and I had to lean in to hear him.

“We should definitely talk. How about tomorrow after school?”

“I was thinking Sunday.”

Now that we were making plans, I needed to have this conversation sooner rather than later. I didn’t want to wait two extra days. “Friday would be better, please.”

“That’s great then. I’ll pick you up here at six.”

“Perfect.”

The doorbell rang, and I bolted for it, realizing almost to the door that I was nearly running and had left Hunter at the mercy of party pleasantries.

I yanked it open without checking the live video from our doorbell camera. On the other side stood Detective Johnson.

“Miss Hayes.” His voice was all southern drawl, and like earlier, he was dressed casually in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. The impression was different from how I remembered him from a couple weeks back—in a suit, his back straight, and accent minimized. This version of him came off as less controlled.

“What can I do for you, Detective Johnson?”

“It’s Jermaine or Mr. Johnson while I’m on suspension.” He stepped forward with a slight limp, favoring his right leg. I’d hit him in that leg the last time we met.

“What’s this?” Hunter appeared behind me.

“Suspension?” I sidestepped in front of Hunter to block him from the conversation. I didn’t need to drag him into another of my problems. He’d been my go-to for venting over the last few weeks, and he deserved a break.

“That’s right. When they took my badge, they said something about harassing the city’s most important benefactors.” He gestured toward me. “I assume that means your family. Having a party?” Despite the casual words, the question under the question hung in the air.

Three people dead, and I was having a party?

“My mother is.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized that didn’t look any better. After all, I may have been the weapon, but the real perpetrator was a CyberCorp employee who manipulated a CyberCorp product.

He moved closer.

I swung the door toward its frame, leaving it open only a foot. I might be just a high school kid, but my family had multiple teams of lawyers, some of whom had been around since I was in diapers. I knew my rights. “Can I help you?”

He craned his neck to see deeper into the house. “Seems an odd time to celebrate.”

I pushed the door to shut it.

It caught on his foot. He reached a hand through the remaining crack and held out a card with his name and contact information.

“Why would I want that?”

“You’re just a kid. Maybe you want an easy way out of something bigger happening inside your parents’ company. I take confessions.” He shook the card at me. “Take it and I’ll leave.”

I snatched it from his hand and immediately crumpled it into a ball.

He withdrew his foot, and I slammed the door closed.

CHAPTER 4

“You can’t just slam the door in cops’ faces.” Hunter stared at me, mouth agape.

“Not multiple cops,” I said. “Just the one.”

Liv bounded down the stairs in a scoop-necked fuchsia top that looked amazing next to her brown skin. She stopped and looked back and forth between the two of us. “What?”

“Lena just slammed the door on a cop.”

“Former cop.”

“Did he have a warrant?”

“Nope.” I gestured toward the closed door. “Hence, the door.”

“Works for me. What did he want?”

“He’s very upset that I hurt his leg and got him suspended. Now, he wants to make sure I’m brought to justice or something. It’s all very cliché.”

Hunter tried to reach around me for the door, but I blocked his path.

“Not a good idea.”

The humor drained from Liv’s face. “Did you tell your parents? Your mother was just here.” She spun and searched the space.

“No!” I shouted. Luckily, all the other guests were too far away and too involved in their conversations to notice. “I don’t want a hundred lawyers making this go away. I just . . . want it to go away on its own.”

“Honey, I don’t think it’s going to work that way.” Her voice had turned soothing, like how I’d imagine she’d sound if trying to reason with a crazy person.

“I prefer to live in complete denial.”

To Hunter, she said, “Can you give us a minute? Girl talk.”

He rolled his eyes and then retreated back to his corner. On the way, he grabbed a glass of soda from a server with a drink tray.

Liv started to speak again, but I cut her off before any words made it out.

“If Detective Johnson is still hanging around in a few days, I’ll tell someone. I promise. I want to handle my own problems from now on. CyberCorp hasn’t exactly fixed things for me lately.”

“Your parents are not CyberCorp.”

“That’s an arguable point.” I checked my hand-screen again. No new messages. It had been over fifteen minutes since Jackson said he was coming, and it wasn’t like him to be unreliable. Cocky and needy and hard-headed—yes. Unreliable—no. “Give me a second.” I held up a finger toward Liv and shifted slightly so I wouldn’t be staring right at her.

I placed the call, and it rang on the other end. Liv scooted closer to try to see my hand-screen, but I rotated to put her on my other side.

At the fourth ring, I disconnected with a growl.

Liv made a show of scanning the room. Hunter was here. Melody and I weren’t exactly tight these days. That left two people I could be calling. “Tell me you’re calling Claire.”

“She’s on her way.”

“So you weren’t calling her just now?”

“He’s not picking up. He should be here by now.”

“Lena!”

I peeked over Liv’s shoulder to find everyone engaged in mingling. Nina’s popularity had shot off like a nuclear-powered rocket, and she was now surrounded by two teenage boys I vaguely knew and an older woman, all of whom were leaning toward her as if she were magnetic.

Of everyone in the room, only Hunter stared this way. I waved at him.

Liv shot a glance that way and then back to me. “I wanted to talk to you about something else.” She lowered her voice. “Did he ask you out?”

“We broke up.”

“Hunter.” She tilted her head in that direction.

“We’re going out tomorrow, but it’s not a date. Just some alone time to talk.”

“Not Sunday?”

I tucked my hand-screen away and finally looked her in the eye, sighing loudly and purposely because I didn’t need to be drilled about my love life—or lack thereof. “Something wrong with Friday?”

“You do know that Sunday is Valentine’s Day?”

I cursed. “Are you kidding me? That’s why he asked to go out then?”

“And you suggested tomorrow.”

“And now he thinks I’m going out of my way to avoid spending Valentine’s with him.”

“Are you?”

“No . . . not specifically.”

“Then what specifically?”

“I’m not in a good place for him.”

“What place are you in?”

“I don’t even know, and that’s kind of the point. I can’t commit to anything until the world starts making sense again.” I inhaled a long breath. “So it’s probably a good thing we’re meeting up tomorrow instead. I don’t want to give him the wrong impression.”

“You don’t want to give him the wrong impression . . . and so you agreed to a date?”

“I agreed to some alone time to talk and hang out.”

“You think that’s what he meant?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Liv. Once again, I handled something badly. It’s kind of what I do n—” The weight that lived in my chest pressed down harder. I gasped and let out a short, shallow breath before sucking in another long one. The room wobbled.

Liv’s hand was on my shoulder. “Breathe.” She took in an audible breath and then released it, gesturing for me to do the same. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that would upset you so much. Breathe, Lena.”

The weight lessened, and after a few seconds, the room stood still.

“You don’t have to make any decisions right now. Your mental health comes first.”

My hand-screen vibrated against my waist. I ripped it from my jacket and answered without checking the display. “Hello? Jackson?”

No response.

“Hello?” I checked the display—a number my hand-screen didn’t recognize.

“Who is this?” The line disconnected, and I lowered the device.

“What was that?” Liv asked.

“Unknown number.” I shook my hand-screen at her. “Jackson said he would be here by now, and he’s not answering.”

“So what?”

“So I should go over there.” My chest was tight with nerves. Maybe because of Detective Johnson or maybe because Jackson had never not called me back in all my years of knowing him—even post-breakup. But an alarm in the back of my head was banging like a gong.

Liv shot a glance across the room at Hunter and then back at me.

I couldn’t leave him at the mercy of one of my mother’s events, so I beckoned him over. The two of them followed me out. I hurried toward my car. My feet itched for a full-on sprint while my head knew I might be overreacting.

Sometimes, people didn’t return calls. They got caught up in other things.

But unfortunately, my life wasn’t that lucky these days. I’d already almost lost Jackson in a car accident.

Just as I reached my car, Claire’s sleek black vehicle pulled up behind it. She stepped out and waited as we hurried toward her.

I spun my finger at her to indicate she needed to turn around. “We’re leaving.”

“Why? What did I miss?”

“The cops were here—for starters,” Liv said.

“The cops?”

“Just one cop.” I tossed Johnson’s card at her since I still had it in my hand. She caught it and uncrumpled it.

Liv shook her head. “You keep saying that like it makes things better.”

“Jermaine Johnson?” Claire asked, reading from the card. She turned it over to see the blank back. The card had no logos, nothing official about it. Just his name and contact information. “This doesn’t look very official.”

“He’s on suspension. I’ll explain later.” I yanked my car door open. “Right now, I’m worried about Jackson.”

“Is he okay?” Claire asked, already moving back toward the door of her own vehicle.

“I have a bad feeling. That’s all.”

“Is that where we’re going?” Hunter asked. He’d stopped behind me, and now he took two steps backward. “I’m out.”

Liv shot me a wide-eyed glare, but I ignored it. I didn’t have time to massage Hunter’s ego right now. I jabbed my finger at her and then at my car. “You coming?”

She glanced back and forth between Hunter and me. “Please get in the car,” she said to him as she climbed into the passenger seat.

He stared at her for a few seconds before reaching for the back door and getting in behind her.

Jackson’s house was less than a ten-minute drive away, and for once, I wished I had auto-drive. My hands trembled on the steering while. Twice, Liv had to shout at me to get me to stop at red lights before accidentally blowing through them.

Despite being so close by, Jackson’s neighborhood and mine were like different worlds. My parents were the new kind of rich, the contemporary kind that left their suit jackets open and opted not to wear ties. Jackson’s money was older.

Houses near mine featured large blocks of white stone with black accents in straight lines while Jackson’s was the picture of old money. The homes here took up acre-sized lots, and most sat back from the road with long driveways lined by landscaped trees or bushes.

There were no sidewalks, sending a clear message of exclusivity. This was not a place for visitors to take a stroll.

I wasn’t sure whether all of that made it more pretentious than mine or less.

Jackson’s house had a facade of whitewashed brick. Pendant lights hung from a steepled awning over the front door. A tall iron fence kept the world out, and on it perched a telltale white box that housed a chip scanner.

The scanner recognized me, and the gate swung open as my car approached, with Claire’s right behind me.

We bounced as the car hit the cobblestone driveway without slowing down. It forked in one direction toward the eight-car garage. We veered the other way toward the main entrance. The heavy oak door held an oversized metal door knocker that was entirely for show.

“Lena?” Liv’s nails dug into her leg as I kept up a steady speed.

I jammed my foot on the brake and stopped a few feet from the house. A second later, I was out and running for the door. Liv stayed close behind me. Like the gate, the tall oak door unlocked when it detected me, and I pushed it open.

“Jackson!” I shouted.

All the lights were off. In my house, the rooms brightened automatically when someone was present. But here, Mr. and Mrs. Watts liked to feel in control.

“Lights,” I said, and they came on overhead.

They illuminated the marble floor of the three-story foyer. Crystals of the chandelier overhead shone as the light hit them. Two levels of balconies rose overhead, one for the second floor and another for the third. Gold-tinted iron railings fronted each balcony.

“Jackson!” Liv shouted, her tone steadier than mine.

“His room is up there.” I pointed to the top balcony that marked the third floor and aimed my next shout in that direction. “Jacks!” A note of panic creeped into my voice, and it fueled the roil of energy in my gut.

Liv opened her mouth again. “Jacks—”

I shushed her and strained for any sounds. There was nothing except the faint hum of electricity.

A shout cut through the silence from above, followed by a thud. I ran for the stairs.

CHAPTER 5

I took the steps two at a time. At the landing between the second and third floors, I didn’t pause for a breath and bounded up the next flight. Liv stayed close on my heels. Her footsteps pounded after mine.

“Jackson!”

His room was the only one on the third floor, a large suite accessed by a door at the top of the stairs. The door now hung on a single hinge. Inside, steady grunts were followed by loud clanks that sounded like metal hitting something solid.

A silver android had Jackson pinned to the ground. Each time it punched, Jackson grunted and dodged his head to one side. Each fist whizzed past an ear and slammed into the hardwood floor.

Its red eyes glowed, emotionless, inhuman.

“Shit!” I lunged toward them and yanked the robot off him with my left hand.

It stumbled backward. While I had it off guard, I wrapped my arm around its neck and yanked it down to my height.

Jackson didn’t miss a beat. He jumped to his feet and slammed his fist into the thing’s gut. He wrenched out its battery cell, and the android slumped in my grasp.

I released it and let it slide to the floor. It landed with a clang and a clunk.

Its red eyes, now dark, stared up at us.

Jackson slumped to the ground beside it, his chest heaving and his breath thin. A purple bruise covered most of the left side of his face. His upper lip had split, revealing shining metal underneath.

“What just happened?” Liv asked. She stood outside the broken door, eyes wide as she glanced back and forth between the downed android and Jackson.

Hunter reached the landing behind her and surveyed the room.

“The Model Ones,” I said, enunciating each word, “are dangerous.”

“It’s hard to disagree at the moment,” Jackson said between pants. His tone held more humor than I could muster.

I offered Jackson my left hand and hauled him to his feet. “What happened?”

He turned a full circle to scan the space from the busted door to the disabled android to the brand-new cracks in the hardwood floor. “I heard it coming up the stairs, fast. Running. It sounds different from my parents.” He pointed at his feet. “Metal.”

I waved my hand to move the story along.

“I shouted through the door that it should go away. My parents have it doing chores and stuff, but I didn’t need its help with anything right then.”

“What about Kim?” Claire stepped around Hunter and into the room.

Kim was their housekeeper.

Jackson shrugged. “Not here.”

Claire walked a circle around the Model One, shuddered, and then returned to the doorway.

I gritted my teeth because this was one of the problems with Model Ones—they replaced humans—and they were dangerous. Poor Kim, who’d enjoyed a job here for the past two years, was probably trying to figure out how to feed her kids.

“Does she have kids?” I asked.

“No, why?”

“Forget it. So then what?”

“It knocked the door off the hinges, which is such a waste because it was unlocked.” He paused, as if I was meant to laugh.

I didn’t.

“It froze at first after it got through the door. I thought it was busted, so I got closer, and the damn thing sucker-punched me.”

“Why?” Liv asked.

“Who knows? We fought for maybe a minute or two before you guys got here.”

The bruise on his cheek was already fading into its usual tan, and his split lip was in the process of knitting itself up. Fleshy strands reached out from one side of the cut and grabbed the other side, pulling itself together like a zipper.

“Maybe it was jealous that I’m higher tech than it.” He grinned, revealing perfectly white teeth—half of which had been built by CyberCorp.

Liv’s lip curled, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off Jackson’s face.

I refocused my attention on his bright-blue eyes, which were still all Jackson. The same ones I’d stared into on a very regular basis since we were small. Most of the rest of him had been upgraded, but I could always find him in the eyes. “Be serious, please. This isn’t a joke.”

“And it’s impossible,” Liv said. “Isn’t it? The Model Ones are learning machines, but they’re pre-programmed to learn specific tasks. Those don’t include . . .” She gestured toward the entire room. “Right?” She looked to me for confirmation.

“They’re programmed for self-defense.” Jackson felt his still-healing lip, as if checking its progress.

“Did you attack it?” Hunter asked. He stepped through the door and into the room. “Or did you attack someone else? Who was it defending?”

“Were you listening at all?” Jackson glanced over at Hunter, irritation painting his features.

“To your bullshit story, yeah, I heard it. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“I’m just saying the facts don’t add up.”

“Can we not fight?” Claire said, stepping between the boys, who had been steadily inching closer to each other—and definitely not for a hug.

“Maybe the truth is something in between,” Liv said. She paused, and I could tell she was searching for a way to lower the temperature. “Maybe Jackson’s upgrades prompted it.”

Jackson tilted his head to the side. “It saw me as a threat?”

“I guess that’s possible,” Hunter said.

“Or,” I said, “the Model Ones are dangerous and unpredictable. The only thing predictable about them is that, if you give a machine the ability to think but don’t give it human empathy, it goes off the rails.” I gestured toward the android still crumpled on the floor. “Like so.”

Jackson waved a dismissive hand. “Liv’s explanation makes sense though.” He grinned, loving the idea of being the apex predator in the room, even above a human-sized robot. “And either way, no harm, no foul.”

“I guess so.” Liv’s expression looked a lot more doubtful than her tone.

As if to make his point about the lack of harm, Jackson’s lip was now fully healed. The bruise was long gone. His face was once again pristine.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.” Still, it wouldn’t hurt to dig a little deeper. “Can you help me roll it onto its stomach? I want to check the log.”

Jackson helped me roll the Model One over, and I popped the back cover to check the display underneath. I frowned when it didn’t light up.

Jackson swept up the battery cell from the floor and waved it in front of me.

Right. I couldn’t read its log if the android was dead.

“Can you power it?” I asked him.

“The charging plate is downstairs, but it has to stand on top of it.”

I grimaced at the android, with its stomach open and metal guts falling out. “Can it stand?”

“I probably have a power cord we can use instead. More importantly, you want to turn that thing back on?”

I thought about it for a second and then grasped the android’s right leg and yanked, twisting as I did. With a screech of metal that scratched against my eardrums, the leg tore free. I kept pulling until all the cables that connected it internally to the torso popped loose.

Jackson grabbed the other leg and did the same while I worked on an arm. As we dismembered the robot, Liv pressed her teeth together.

“It’s not alive,” I told her as I gripped the arm and yanked. The last of my words were drowned out by the screech of metal and the sound of the other arm clanking against the hardwood where Jackson tossed it.

She cringed again.

Jackson went to his desk and opened the bottom drawer, which was full of all kinds of controllers and cables—mostly for game systems he’d acquired and discarded over the years. He began rifling through its contents.

Farther into the room, a king-size bed sat on a low, black wooden platform. Although Jackson’s parents preferred a traditional look, Jackson was all clean lines and contemporary, and his parents let him decorate his own room. Or technically, they let him work with their interior designer.

The pale blue wall behind the bed contrasted with the charcoal paint on the other walls. Over the bed, a modern black chandelier hung, composed of three black circles, growing smaller in a way that formed a triangle pointing to the center of his giant bed. A dark-gray comforter was folded down at the head to reveal ice-blue sheets.

“Hey.” Hunter brushed up against me, his shoulder touching mine. “How are you?”

I breathed in deeply and let air stream out through my mouth. “I’m good. He’s okay, so nothing to worry about?” I intoned my voice upward at the end like a question, and when I turned to Hunter, he nodded although his brow remained knitted.

Jackson closed the drawer he was searching and spun a circle before locking onto his closed closet door. He opened it and disappeared into the cavern where he stored his clothes.

“Got it!” Jackson shouted from the depths within and emerged with a long black cable raised above his head.

I grabbed one end and checked the plug. It was a standard CyberCorp power cable. “Is this going to work?”

“Let’s see.” He plugged it into the wall and then searched the back of the android before flipping up a small plastic cover and revealing a matching outlet for the other end. “Good old CyberCorp is still using the same power cords for every device.”

Both he and I knelt next to it while Claire, Hunter, and Liv retreated to the doorway.

The android hummed to life. Its eye lights glowed, casting red onto the floor it faced. They flickered a couple times, and the robot’s midsection sizzled and sparked. Jackson and I both leaned backward, wound up to spring and run away if this went wrong.

The android’s midsection issued a series of clicks, and then the eyes went out. But a second later, they bloomed to life again, and the display on its back flickered on.

“Malfunction,” it said as the slit acting as its mouth opened and closed. The torso rocked as if trying to move and stand, but its legs lay several feet away. “Malfunction.”

Its eyelids clicked closed and then open. A stamp in the metal of its skull identified this particular android as M1A312.

“A312,” I said.

Its head rotated toward me, and the torso rocked back and forth on the floor again.

“Stop moving.”

“Not authorized,” it said in an electronic voice.

I gestured toward Jackson.

“Don’t move, Theo,” he said, and the android froze.

“You named it?”

He shrugged. “You know how my parents are.”

I leaned forward toward the display on the android’s back. Lines of information filled the screen, and several rectangles acted as touch buttons at the bottom. And at the top—the version date. Before I could read anything, the display flickered.

The word REVERTING filled the screen for less than a second.

And then again, the text and touch buttons were back.

I blinked and pointed.

“What?” Jackson leaned over me. “This one is running software from a week and a half ago. That’s after they fixed the EyeNet bug that caused . . .” He gestured toward me but didn’t voice it. “Right?”

“That should be a good version. But did you see that a second ago—the reverting thing?”

“The what thing?”

I jabbed a finger at the display. “The screen cleared for an second, and the word reverting popped up, and then all of this came back.”

He scratched his chin. “Are you sure?”

Liv inched her way closer and stared down at the android before sliding back to her spot by the door.

“No one else saw that?” I scanned the faces of my friends, but all of them looked as blank as Jackson’s.

“If it reverted to an older version of its software—that doesn’t even make sense. The newest version would be the best version. Why would it go back?”

“Malfunction,” the android said again in its eerie electronic voice.

“Maybe because you guys tore off its arms and legs,” Claire offered.

“Good point.” Jackson held up one of the android’s arms and waved it in my face. Its metal cables swung beneath it. They clacked against each other with each swing, as if to make his point. “It’s not exactly in peak condition. Not everything is a conspiracy.”

“It’s just malfunctioning, Lena.” Liv placed her arm on my shoulder as I continued to glare at the android’s display. “That’s why it attacked Jackson in the first place. It doesn’t mean anything.”

No one said it, but we all knew she meant it didn’t mean someone had hacked this android the way I was hacked.

As far I was concerned, though, the Model Ones couldn’t be trusted.

How It Works

After you click the button to buy directly from me, the author, this is what happens next:

1. You enter your payment details, which are processed by Payhip, my e-commerce platform. Your receipt is from Payhip. I never see your payment information.

2. You are automatically redirected to BookFunnel, where you can access your book. You may need to wait thirty seconds after the redirect before the system recognizes your purchase. BookFunnel can guide you through downloading your book or sending it to your e-reader.

3. If something goes wrong with the redirect or if you need to access your book later, follow the instructions in the email you receive from BookFunnel, or just go here: https://writeralicia.com/purchases.

I truly believe that buying and selling direct results in the best value for both you and me. Thank you for considering this option.

GIRL OF FLESH AND METAL

CHAPTER 1

CyberCorp Tower, and all its evils, stretched seventy-two stories into the sky.

There it stood, beyond the narrow window of the nightclub where I sat. It was a mile away, but still, it dwarfed every other building in the city—a constant reminder that I couldn’t escape it.

I kept trying though.

I sucked down half the cocktail in my glass. My boyfriend Jackson sat beside me on a black loveseat. He pulled a flask from his pocket and added more alcohol to my drink.

“You okay, Lena?” He tipped his head toward the tower looming outside the window.

“It’s fine.” A thrill tiptoed up my spine and burrowed at the base of my neck. Maybe from his touch, which always made me giddy, or maybe from the alcohol. The more I drank, the less I thought about CyberCorp staring down at me, and that could never be a bad thing.

The first semester of our senior year in high school had wrapped today, and my friends insisted we celebrate by hitting the city’s hottest new nightclub. This nightclub.

Lit from below, the glass floor revealed a hollow space beneath where drinks and food zipped under our feet on white conveyer belts. Flashing red-and-blue tiles formed the ceiling. The colors winked off each black bar top and table.

Jackson fit in perfectly among the bright lights and the black decor, with his deep-blue eyes and night-dark hair. He lounged across the cushions with a liquid grin like he belonged here, like he belonged everywhere.

The club’s manager ambled past as Jackson tucked the flask away, but her gaze stayed straight forward. My parents owned CyberCorp. And one of the few perks of being their daughter was that, despite my age, no one questioned my right to be here—or my right to drink. That extended to my friends too.

Melody raised her bright-yellow drink into the air. “Cheers to winter break and being almost done with high school.”

We hooted our approval. Melody, her twin sister Harmony, and Jackson clinked their glasses together.

“What are you guys doing with your time off?” I asked.

“Absolutely nothing.” Melody reclined back into the couch cushions. “And looking forward to every minute of it.”

Harmony glowered down at her now-empty glass. “We can’t go on vacation because Daddy’s working on the Model One androids. Lena’s father calls every ten minutes.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said. “If I could get my folks to scrap the whole project, I would. Trust me.”

In fact, if I heard the term Model One one more time, I would scream.

CyberCorp’s androids would ship in less than two months. They’d be the first humanoid, artificially intelligent androids for household use. Every other word out of my parents’ mouths these days was about their precious creation.

Melody rubbed her sister’s back. “Only two more months.”

Harmony raised her arms and gestured in the air. Her brown eyes darkened as shadows moved over the irises. The shadows shifted each time she waved a hand. Thanks to her networked contact lenses, she saw a virtual drink menu floating in front of her. I didn’t understand the point of seeing things that weren’t there, so I’d never bothered to get lenses of my own.

“I don’t get your problem with CyberCorp,” Harmony said, attention back on me. “I’m mad right now, sure, but when Daddy gets his free time back, that’ll change. Tech or no tech—it’s where the money comes from.”

Jackson chuckled, more to himself than to us. He came from old money that had nothing to do with CyberCorp. The twins’ dad and my parents, on the other hand, had made theirs more recently. Specifically, the twins’ family had made its money by working for mine.

“Lena’s been listening to those anti-tech programs again.” He jabbed me in the ribs. He meant it as teasing, but instead, it riled me up.

“Believe it or not, I can form my own opinions. Machines are replacing living, breathing people. We’re forgetting how important it is to be human and interact with other living things. Humanity is sacred.” I pointed at Harmony, who was still waving through the menu. “Would it be so bad if someone had to come over and take your order?”

“Yes.” She swiped to select a menu item and dropped her hands. “It would take longer to get my next drink.”

“And we’d spend that time talking to each other. And when the waitress came over, maybe we would talk to her too.”

“No fighting,” Melody shouted, before Harmony or I could speak another word. “We’re celebrating.”

“We’re not fighting,” I said. “We’re discussing.”

“Call it what you want, but I’m stopping it before the yelling starts. Now, hug it out.”

Harmony and I had heard this demand from Melody enough in the past that we didn’t argue anymore. We both stood, removed the space between us, and embraced. Harmony squeezed me around the waist, eyes pressed together in mock emotion. I shoved her away, laughing. I had to admit that Melody’s peacemaking was effective—necessary or not.

Harmony flopped back onto the couch, and Jackson pulled me onto his lap.

A blond boy came toward us from a nearby table and stopped in front of Harmony and Melody. He held out a hand to them and cocked his head toward the dance floor. He didn’t care which gorgeous redheaded twin he danced with. Either one would do.

Harmony wrinkled her nose.

Melody shrugged and let him pull her to her feet.

Jackson ushered me to the dance floor after them. The techno music beat harder against my eardrums, and as usual he smelled of cinnamon and vanilla and something else I couldn’t pinpoint. His fingers pressed into my lower back and moved me to the rhythm. I breathed it all in and let myself drown in it. His mouth moved to make words, but the music swallowed up all other sound, and I was okay with that.

My arms curled under Jackson’s shoulders and around to his back, where tight muscles marked his shoulder blades. I let the rhythms and Jackson’s arms at my waist transport me somewhere else. Somewhere that tower didn’t exist, and my parents didn’t exist, and the Model Ones didn’t exist.

Three hours later, the four of us stumbled out of the club, well past my curfew. It had rained while we were inside. Shallow puddles in the parking lot reflected the bright colors of digital billboards nearby.

I’d stopped drinking hours ago, but my head still buzzed from the alcohol. It felt light, no longer stuffed with papers and homework and my parents’ robots. I danced in a circle before grinning at my friends.

Harmony pouted at a moving display on a building across the street. “Why do the ads always pick you?”

The fifty-foot-high commercial on the building’s side showed an image of me dressed in a pair of designer jeans. The other me twisted and flounced to show off every angle of my ass. The jeans’ brand logo filled the space to the right of my head.

The ads usually featured me over the twins because my parents made more money than theirs, which made me a better advertising target. I didn’t say that to Harmony though.

Harmony slid between me and the ad. She waved her right arm, to force the billboard’s sensor to read the identification chip buried in the flesh of her wrist. The girl in the ad morphed into a waify redhead, still pictured in the same pair of jeans. Harmony stuck her hands on her hips, triumphant.

Jackson nodded toward Melody. “How do you know it’s not her?”

“Easy. I’m the pretty one.” Harmony flashed a smug smile.

Melody stuck up her middle finger.

Jackson propped himself against the glossy wall of the club’s exterior. Next to him, the surface blended into another billboard, this one displaying an alcohol ad. None of us appeared in it—because we were all underage. The glowing images illuminated Jackson’s drooping eyelids in technicolor.

“You ready to head home?” I asked him.

“Nah, I’m good. I didn’t even finish my flask.” He pushed himself off the wall, wobbled, then fell back against it. “Oops.” He laughed and tried again. This time, he managed to keep his balance. “See. I’m good.”

Even wasted, he attracted flirty glances from the twins. I had known him most of my life, and we’d dated for the past three years. My friends knew he was off limits. But with the deep-bronze skin of his mother’s family and the bold blue eyes of his father, Jackson had an entrancing effect on people. His broad shoulders from competitive swimming didn’t hurt either.

He caught me admiring him and tossed me a grin that could set the polar ice caps sizzling. Inside, I melted.

Melody stumbled toward the wall space next to Jackson. The nose-wrinkling scent of alcohol, flowery perfume, and other people’s sweat trailed after her. “I finished my flask,” she said. “And I’m going to sleep now.”

Harmony grabbed her sister around the waist and held her in place. “Time to go.”

My handbag buzzed, and I opened it. Inside, my hand-screen vibrated with a missed call. “I bet that’s my mom.”

My parents would freak about my missing curfew, and judging from the way my hand-screen was vibrating and blinking its little notification light, the freaking out was already in progress.

I pulled the small metal rectangle from my purse and slid its halves away from each other. The collapsible screen snapped into place between them. The display showed two messages and a missed call, all from my mother. I deleted the messages and touched the screen to call her back.

“Hold on,” I told my friends. I took a couple steps away from them to give myself space to talk without their overhearing.

As soon as Harmony no longer blocked the line of sight between me and the ad across the street, the image of her switched back to me. A couple inches shorter, more hips, and dark hair.

In the ad, my hair looked perfect, the curls falling into place around my shoulders—in precisely the way they never did in real life. In real life, my dark mass of frizz grew bigger by the minute, thanks to this post-rain humidity.

My mother answered on the first ring. “Lena, you’re downtown? It’s the middle of the night.” She’d tracked me. I scowled down at my wrist—like it had betrayed me by housing my trackable ID chip.

“I’m out with Jackson and the twins.” I braced myself for a lecture. I hadn’t intended to stay out this late, but my friends hadn’t wanted to leave until now, and part of me loved the thought of making my mother squirm. She never had time for me, so why did it matter where I was?

“The Model Ones ship in less than two months, and I need to focus on that. I can’t be up worrying about where you are and whether you’re safe . . .” With gritted teeth, I let her go on about her greatest creation—the Model Ones.

“I’m fine, Marissa,” I said, when she paused for a breath.

“You wouldn’t miss my calls if you wore a micro-comm. And don’t call me that.”

I resisted the urge to tell her that was a reason not to get a micro-comm. The tiny electronic device, a quarter inch on each side, adhered to the side of a person’s head behind the ear. While people nearby couldn’t hear it ring, a comm’s owner couldn’t escape it.

“I’ll think about it,” I told her.

“You still have the one I got for your birthday. Why don’t we put it on you tomorrow?”

“Sure. And then you can get back to your machines.” As soon as I got home, I would have to lose that comm down the bathroom sink. “I’m on my way now. See you soon.”

“I want you home in fifteen minutes.” She disconnected before I could respond.

“Are you in trouble?” Melody asked, her brows tweaked with concern.

“Didn’t you tell her the semester ended today?” Harmony asked. “We spent the last week buried in that English paper. We deserve a break.”

“Marissa doesn’t believe in breaks,” I said. “They’re against her religion.”

Jackson pulled me toward himself and hooked an arm around my waist. “She just wants you to be successful.” His breath smelled of fruit and alcohol, and the heat of it against my neck made my insides simmer.

“Mm-hmm.” I leaned into his touch. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“She’s prepping you for the future.” His eyelids drifted shut and then open again, and I wondered whether he knew what he was saying. Maybe the alcohol was talking for him. “CyberCorp’s going to be all yours one day.” He slurred his words.

“What about what I want? That doesn’t matter?” I fumbled my efforts to get my hand-screen back into my purse, and it clattered to the pavement. I swept it up and shoved it in the bag.

Oblivious to my mounting discomfort, Jackson went on. “Imagine what it’ll be like to have all that power.”

No matter how good he looked, or smelled, or felt—if he didn’t stop talking, there was going to be an argument. A big one. “I’m not going to work there, Jacks.”

“But it will be all yours.”

I clamped my mouth shut. It seemed pointless to explain my feelings to a drunk boy—feelings I’d told him a hundred times already, and each time, he nodded and smiled and insisted I would change my mind.

Harmony leaned on the wall next to Jackson. He poked her on the shoulder and laughed when she squirmed away from him. He poked her again.

“Better get home before you two fall asleep,” I told both twins.

“I’m good,” Harmony said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

She pushed off the wall, yanked Melody upright, and trudged across the parking lot. When they reached their brick-red car, the doors slid upward automatically. Harmony dumped her sister into the passenger seat and climbed in on the driver’s side.

They both looked too drunk to drive, but the auto-drive would do all the work. With a loud honk of the horn, the vehicle pulled out of its parking space and sped onto the road.

Jackson somehow managed to support his own weight and trailed behind me to my pale-yellow car. Its hood, top, and trunk formed an uninterrupted arc, with doors flush against the rest of the smooth exterior. Sensing the presence of my ID chip, the door whirred upward. It revealed two rotatable front seats with a small open space between them and the long backseat.

Jackson’s usually tan face had gone pale. “I think I need to lie down.”

“Are you going to throw up?”

“Not if I lie down. Can I ride in the back?”

I tried to ease Jackson across the floor space, but he flopped into the backseat. His eyes closed before I even slid into the seat in front of him.

“Welcome, Lena,” the car said in a silky female voice. The door slammed shut to secure us inside, and the motor started with a low, artificial hum. Despite the natural silence of electric motors, car companies added the hum to alert pedestrians of oncoming traffic. “Your mother instructed me to take you straight home.”

The word AUTO-DRIVE lit up on the dashboard’s display.

I reached for the door handle to get out. I’d planned to go straight home, after dropping Jackson at his place, but that didn’t give my mother the right to make decisions for me.

The door didn’t budge.

“I’m sorry, Lena. I cannot open. Your mother instructed me to take you straight home.”

“Are you kidding me?” I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, as if that might somehow change the car’s mind.

“What?” Jackson jerked into a sitting position. “You say something?”

I spun my seat around, so I could confront Jackson face to face. “You really think I would want to own CyberCorp?” I couldn’t help myself. This conversation would make more sense if we had it tomorrow, when Jackson sobered up and I felt less like killing my car. But my irritation bubbled at the surface, like water in a tea kettle on the verge of screaming. “Do you even listen to me when I talk?”

“Sure, babe. It’ll be perfect. You’ll see.”

“I’ll see? Anti-technology isn’t a phase for me. People aren’t connecting anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” His words agreed with me, but his indifference said otherwise.

The conversation struck a familiar chord. He knew the words to this exchange just as well as I did because he had listened every time I told him how I felt. But as far as he was concerned, his picture of our future meant more than my feelings. And that wasn’t something I could live with.

“I want to break up,” I said. The words flew from my mouth on their own. But once they were out there, I meant them.

“No you don’t, babe.” His eyes drifted shut.

“Go back to sleep.” I spun my chair to face forward again. In the morning, we’d have a serious talk.

Obediently, he leaned against the window behind me and, ten seconds later, started snoring.

The car steered itself toward the road, and I figured I’d try my luck at a detour. I yanked the wheel left at the edge of the parking lot, but it locked.

Groaning, I hung my head while the wheel rotated to the right on its own and pulled onto the street in the direction of the fastest route home. When we hit the highway, the car shot into the night, zooming past the white dashes that marked the lanes to my left and right. The needle on my speedometer inched upward until it pointed straight at the line between sixty and seventy.

Winter break had just begun, but the night held barely any chill. I pressed the control to roll down my window, and the wind whipped across my face so hard it stung.

Outside the window lay a starless sky. When I was small, there had been stars visible overhead, instead of this matte gray covering a city too bright for them. The city’s lights hid them now. I missed the stars.

I pressed my foot hard on the accelerator.

“The speed limit is sixty-five miles per hour,” came the car’s syrupy voice.

“Oh, come on,” I muttered.

At the precise speed of sixty-five, the car took me to my side of town, while I sat in the driver’s seat with my arms crossed over my chest. I ripped the glove compartment open and extracted my emergency bag of gummy candies. Too frustrated to fumble with the tie, I tore the bag open and stuffed three in my mouth.

A mile from my house, the car stopped at a red light. For the hell of it, I slammed my foot on the accelerator again, but the car ignored me.

There was an emergency manual override somewhere. My dad had pointed it out on the day he bought this vehicle to replace my older one, only a week ago. I squinted at the controls between the driver and passenger seats. Manual controls for navigation and music, but nothing for switching to manual drive.

My hand brushed against a button under the steering wheel. I slammed it, and the word AUTO-DRIVE disappeared from the dash. I pumped my fist into the air in celebration.

The movement tipped the bag of candies off my lap and onto the floor.

“Crap.” I ducked beneath the dash to retrieve the bag, muttering a curse for the lost gummies strewn across the vehicle floor.

“Collision imminent,” the car said. “In three . . . two . . .”

“What?” I sat straight up.

A silver vehicle streaked along the cross street, angled toward me. My stomach shrank into a tight ball.

This time, when I slammed my foot on the accelerator, the car jumped forward. For an instant, I squealed. But the other vehicle slammed into the side of my car, and my celebration morphed into a throat-tearing roar. Metal crunched and folded against more metal.

Numb.

Time slowed and skipped ahead in tiny blips.

To my left, someone moved in the silver car. A man stumbled out. He stood beside my window, his face painted with concern and panic.

The rush of adrenaline passed, and pain ripped through my arm. It burned, like it had been ripped apart, seared in two. The crushed car door hid most of the limb from view, and what I could see of it was only the smashed, bloody flesh of my shoulder.

I yanked to free it. Sobs mingled with my screams, and darkness crept inward until nothing else existed.

CHAPTER 2

“Lena.”

I wasn’t dead. I knew that for certain because, if I were, my body wouldn’t feel like it was being crushed under a giant boulder.

“Lena.” I recognized my mother’s voice now. Doused with concern, it sounded hollow and far away. Yet I smelled her rich, flowery scent as if she sat right beside me.

A steady bip, bip, bip sounded from my right. I tore my eyelids open, but squeezed them shut when fluorescent light stung my eyes. Still, I sensed the brightness on the other side.

“Can we lower the lights in here?” My father had a way of making his requests sound like commands.

A moment later, the room dimmed enough that I risked opening my eyes again.

Seated on the side of my white-sheeted bed, my mother stared down at me. Concern swam in eyes the same dark-brown as mine. For once, her tight curls poofed around her head and fell to the top of her shoulders, instead of being tied into a tight knot. An ivory tunic contrasted against her dark-brown skin. Puffy red eyelids surrounded her eyes.

“Mom.” My voice came out ragged, rough against my raw throat. My tongue somehow got in the way of speech instead of helping it. I swallowed the saliva in my mouth and tried again. “Where am . . .”

“Shh.” She stroked my hair in a vaguely familiar way—something she hadn’t done for many years. “You’re going to be fine. Your father’s here too.” She gestured to my right.

With an effort that made me grimace, I turned my head. Clad in a dark-gray suit, Thomas Hayes sat in a leather armchair, one ankle propped up on the other knee. His tan skin looked paler than usual, and tired eyes stared back at me. But he said nothing, only offered an encouraging smile.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had both my parents’ attention, without either of them rushing off to work. And all it took was me almost dying. I would have laughed if I didn’t hurt so much.

Details of the accident came spinning back to me. The road twirled around me. The door crushed into my mangled arm. My own screams—and nothing but silence from the backseat.

“Jackson,” I said, trying to sit up. “Is he okay?”

My mother covered my right hand with hers. “He’s here, in another room. With his own doctors.”

“How is he?”

“He’s not awake yet. He . . . needed a little more work than you.” She nodded toward my left arm. A white sheet covered the limb from shoulder to fingertips.

“We have a lot to tell you,” came an unfamiliar female voice from the doorway.

Its owner stepped into my oversize hospital room—at least I guessed it was a hospital room, or a cross between one and an office. The beep I was hearing belonged to a heart monitor, attached by a clasp to my right forefinger. A metal stand held a bag of liquid, from which a clear solution flowed through the needle stuck into the crook of my right arm.

But most hospital rooms didn’t contain so many robotic parts.

What looked like an array of robotic arms and hands littered a long table stretched across the left side of the room. Some were partly disassembled, with wires attaching the hand to the arm or the fingers to the hand.

Something about them struck me as odd—something other than the fact that they were arms with no torsos, legs, or other body parts. But my head felt cloudy, groggy. My thoughts moved slowly. I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about them.

The least hospital-like thing about the room was the walls. Four giant vid-screens surrounded me from floor to ceiling. They displayed a panoramic beach scene in such high resolution that I could almost believe I was lying on the sand.

Waves lapped against the shore in a calming rhythm. Whisper-thin clouds drifted across a blue sky. Faint seagull calls sounded, as if from a distance. The images contrasted sharply with the sterile machines and robotic parts around the room.

The woman who’d spoken wore a white lab coat with the name CyberCorp stitched on it in blocky red letters. A pen stuck out of her light-blond hair, which was twisted back into a knot. She stood at about six feet, broad-shouldered, with a nice padding around the waist.

She held a tan folder about an inch thick. The folder’s cover had my name, Lena Hayes, printed in large letters.

“I’m Dr. Fisher,” she said, her tone clipped and businesslike. “I work for CyberCorp.”

So it wasn’t a hospital after all. I glanced over at my mom, praying she could see the pleading in my eyes. The pleading to escape this place as soon as possible.

“There’s nothing to worry about now,” my mother said. “You’re at CyberCorp.”

I groaned, then flinched when the groan bit deep into my chest. “Allie,” I said. “Is she here?” It hurt to talk—like gravel rubbing inside my throat.

“Allison’s at home. I didn’t want her to see you like this.”

At four years old, my sister had a way of looking at the world that I envied. She saw the good in everything. And with the grim faces peering down at me, I could use some of that spirit right now.

“These are my college interns, Ron and Simon.” Dr. Fisher nodded toward two young men behind her, both brown-haired and dark-eyed, but only one wore glasses. They couldn’t have been much older than me. “You were in an accident.”

Ron or Simon—I didn’t know which was which—hurried to my side to check the readouts on the machine tracking my vitals. The other boy stayed locked to Fisher’s side as she moved farther into the room.

“I want to go home,” I said. My words stumbled all over each other, flipping and sliding. But somehow, my mother understood them.

“Not yet, honey.”

Dr. Fisher cleared her throat and moved to the foot of my bed, where she was impossible to ignore. “Miss Hayes.” She cleared her throat loudly.

“Lena,” I mumbled.

She continued with barely a pause. “You were in an accident three weeks ago. Your arm was—”

Without thinking, I jerked my body to try to sit upright. Pain shot through me like a blanket of needles shoved into every inch of my body. I lay back against the pillow. “Was I in a coma?” I asked.

“Yes. A medically induced one.”

I opened my mouth to ask why they’d induce a coma, but the doctor continued talking without giving me the opportunity.

“We induced the coma to allow us to operate on your arm, and then to give you time to heal after the operation. You might not remember that it was injured in the crash.”

Of course, I remembered. Feeling like my arm was being twisted and seared and burned all at once was not something I would forget. For the second time in a span of five minutes, I tried to see my left arm. It wasn’t my bedsheet covering the arm. A second sheet lay over one side, and its sole purpose seemed to be hiding the limb.

It suddenly hit me what was odd about the robotic parts in the room: every one of them belonged to a left arm.

“We tried to save your arm at first, but it would never have been the same again,” Dr. Fisher said. “At your parents’ request”—my parents rarely made requests, which explained this woman’s distaste at being here—“I fitted you with a cybernetic limb.”

“A cyber—what?” My right fist clenched. I’d lived with my parents long enough to be computer savvy, and if that word meant what I thought it meant, I wasn’t about to like whatever Dr. Fisher said next.

“A cybernetic limb. It’s coupled directly to your nervous system and to the chip we installed in your brain. Once your body becomes accustomed to it, you’ll be able to use it just like the arm you were born with. At first, you’ll have to explicitly think about it to make it move. But eventually, thanks to advanced AI—artificial intelligence—the arm will learn how your brain works, and it will react more naturally.”

I understood each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment for me to recognize their meaning when strung together like that. Cybernetic arm. Chip in my brain.

My parents knew how much I valued humanity and human interaction, and despite that, they’d cut off my arm and replaced it with a machine. For the rest of my life, everything I did would involve a computer.

The artificial intelligence only made it worse. I wouldn’t be operating the arm—a machine would do that job. Part of my body had been replaced by a whole different entity.

“You installed hardware inside my body?”

“Yes,” Dr. Fisher said, “and software too, or else the hardware would be rather useless.”

“There’s a chip in my brain?”

“Yes.”

I blinked at her, mutely. I should have had a hundred different questions, but I had none. None that would rip the chip out of my head or reattach my flesh-and-bone arm. I didn’t care how destroyed it was. It was mine. It was human, not an artificially intelligent machine.

“I want to see the arm.”

My mother shifted in her seat, and in response, I could practically feel my blood pressure catapult through the roof. She’d already seen the arm, and she was nervous.

I resisted the urge to ask her to leave the room. I was wrecked enough without her making it worse.

Without ceremony, the doctor strode to my side and lifted the sheet. My mouth fell open.

The corner of my shoulder—where it began to curve downward—was still me, but scarred. My olive-toned skin wore a mess of raised scars. The flesh there was all ragged patches, still healing, in an array of shades approximating my usual skin tone. Lines of scarred skin extended upward to the top of my shoulder and over my collarbone.

Just below the curve of my shoulder, the flesh stopped abruptly, melded to silver metal with a slight yellow tint.

I had seen the material before, in news reports and in my dad’s home office. CyberCorp called it Flexim, a flexible metal. It had just a touch of elasticity, which made it difficult to break, but it could bend over and over again. The elbow and fingers were made of a series of narrow metal pieces layered to slide over one another in joints.

I reached across my body and touched the connection between flesh and metal. The metal extended even beneath the skin, which felt rigid and stiff overtop it. Inching the fingers of my other hand up along the shoulder, I kept pressing until I hit soft flesh near my collarbone. They’d replaced the entire arm and most of the shoulder.

I tried to raise the arm to get a closer look, but it wouldn’t move. I tensed my whole body and concentrated on moving it, but it just lay there like the hunk of metal it was. Like the machine it was. Like the lifeless, heartless, inanimate thing it was.

“It’s thinner than my right one,” I said. The statement sounded ridiculous, even to my own ears. But it seemed strange that CyberCorp would work so hard to make me a new arm, and then make it narrower than the other one. If I was going to be artificial, at least I could be well-proportioned.

“After we’re sure it’s working okay, we’ll add a layer of skin we’ve grown in the lab,” Dr. Fisher said. “It’ll look and behave just like skin you’ve grown yourself. It will even be able to experience pain. And once it’s on there, your arms will be the same size.”

“Why would I want pain?”

“Pain lets you know something’s wrong. Just think. If you were shot with a bullet and felt nothing, you wouldn’t know to go to an emergency room. You’d bleed to death.”

“Okay. So when am I going to get the skin?” I cringed at the thought of walking into school with a robotic limb. I’d attract attention, and not in a good way.

“When you’re mostly healed from the surgeries and the arm works as well as your other one. Then we’ll know everything’s operating as it should. I expect that’ll happen by the time we send you home.” Dr. Fisher reached into her breast pocket and withdrew a clear disc-like container. It held a tiny black chip, no more than a third of an inch on each side. “We recovered your ID chip. There’s a slit for it in your new wrist, but it won’t stay put there until we install your skin.” She passed the chip to one of her assistants—Simon or Ron—I still didn’t know which.

In my original arm—the one I’d lost—the chip was surgically installed. Most people had them installed in their right arms, but my left arm was dominant, so that’s where they put my ID chip when I was a toddler.

Fisher’s assistant reached over my left arm, which lay limp at my side, and pressed a spot between my bicep and shoulder. A small compartment door slid open. He pushed the chip into the compartment, which slid closed again. “For now, let’s keep it here. We’ll get it properly installed when we put the final touches on your arm.” Unlike Dr. Fisher, this guy was grinning like crazy. He walked with an excited bounce.

It was only after the assistant stepped back that I realized I hadn’t felt anything when he’d opened my arm.

“How come I didn’t feel that?”

“Right now,” Dr. Fisher said, “the arm is just metal, programming, and circuitry. It won’t feel touch until we add the skin.”

For the second time, I tried to lift my hand to my face, but it refused to budge. “I can’t move it.”

“You’re going to need physical therapy, but not nearly as much as you would with a traditional prosthetic. It will react more naturally over time. Eventually, you’ll regain full function, which is more than you could ask for with any other prosthetic. Soon, you won’t even have to think about moving it to do so—just like your other arm.”

“About that physical therapy,” my mother said to the doctor. “I realize most of your work on the arm is behind you, but please remain actively involved in Lena’s treatment going forward as well.”

“My assistants—”

My mother broke in before Fisher could finish. “I’m sure your assistants are very capable, but I want you overseeing every step of her therapy.”

“Of course. I’m sure I can find time to spend with both the Model Ones and your daughter. She’s a high priority.”

“She’s your only priority.”

Dr. Fisher nodded, but the way her jaw tensed told me she had a lot more to say on the subject.

My father pushed up from his seat. When he stood right next to me, legs brushing the bed, I had to crane my neck back to see his face. At six feet tall, in his impeccable suit with straight dark hair and prematurely gray strands, my dad struck an imposing figure. Even now, with his face ashen instead of its usual tan, his presence commanded respect. I held back the rest of my questions and waited for him to speak.

“You’re going to be fine.” His voice held so much confidence that, for once, I was grateful he was in control. “You’ll work with the doctors here. Soon, you’ll be as good as new.”

Despite his words, I would never be as good as new. From this point forward, I’d never again be a complete me.

CHAPTER 3

“Is it always going to jerk around like that?” I asked Ron.

I’d been awake for a few days, and by now, I had learned which of Dr. Fisher’s assistants was which. Ron was the one who wore glasses, black plastic ones that looked simultaneously cool and nerdy. I suspected Dr. Fisher still hadn’t figured out that mystery, because I had yet to hear her call either of them by name.

“You’re making great progress,” Ron said. “Each time you move it, the arm is learning how your brain impulses translate into action. You’ll be up and running in no time.”

My nose wrinkled at his words—up and running. They made it sound like I was some kind of machine.

I gritted my teeth and bent my elbow. My hand jumped toward me. I dodged to one side to avoid hitting myself in the face. Ron snorted, barely containing his laughter. When I shot him a glare, the resistance fell, and he let out a loud guffaw.

Under Ron’s watchful eye, I sat on a cushioned weight bench in CyberCorp’s makeshift physical-therapy room. The place looked like a cross between a gym and an office. It held the usual gym equipment: weight benches, free weights lining a mirrored wall, and a few adjustable workout machines. A desk occupied one corner of the room, and a small vid-screen faced the chair behind it.

Just like in my assigned room, vid-screens covered every wall. Today, the screens showed a snowy terrain with tall mountains in the distance. I didn’t think it was the best choice to create a calming atmosphere. Mostly, it made me feel cold.

I’d spent the first hour of this physical-therapy session staring down at my arm and willing it to move, only to have it ignore me. At first, my elbow wouldn’t bend, and the fingers wouldn’t curl. As thanks for all my hard work, my shoulder throbbed, but I’d managed to get the arm to move.

My most recent attempt brought the day’s total to six bicep curls—meaning six times I had almost hit myself in the face. Lucky for me, I succeeded in actual impact only the first time, and I was too busy celebrating having moved my arm to be upset that I nearly skewered an eye.

“You have my pills?” I let my arm hang at my side. The pain in my shoulder worsened by the second, and a headache was blooming at the base of my neck.

He extracted a bottle of pills from his pocket and tapped one into my right hand. I popped it in my mouth and swallowed without water. The pain never went away, but in a few minutes, it would lessen to a dull ache. I looked forward to that.

“You’re doing great.” Ron’s face lit up with sincerity.

I figured the enthusiasm was meant to keep me motivated. Mostly, it just reminded me that six reps with zero pounds was now a reason for excitement. Lucky me.

“Is your mom still coming by?” He shot a look at the closed door leading into the physical-therapy room. “Weren’t you expecting her about ten minutes ago?”

“She wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it, so I told her not to worry.” Despite my words, I glanced at the door too.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and Ron handed me a water bottle. By instinct, I gripped it in my left, my dominant hand. It took me a second to realize what I’d done, and I couldn’t help the smile from spreading across my face.

“I’m holding the bottle!” Now it was me who sounded too enthusiastic about minimal progress. My smile withered and died when I tried to raise the water to my mouth. With a frustrated grunt, I passed it to my right hand and took a swig.

“I promise you,” Ron said, “this will get better. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“What about Jackson? Is he going to be fine too?” My chest constricted every time I thought of him stuck in that coma—where I’d put him.

“I checked on him for you this morning. Still asleep. Sorry.” He patted my shoulder, but his sympathy did nothing to ease the guilt.

I took another gulp of water. “Can’t we just modify my arm’s programming to make this easier?”

“Yes, but we’re not going to. It’s calibrated based on your height, weight, and muscle mass. Once it learns how you operate, it will be just as strong as your right arm. If we change the strength specs, eventually the arm will get too strong. This is a learning process. Be patient.”

I hated patience. “How often does CyberCorp do this medical-type stuff?”

“It used to be pretty rare, but they’re doing it more and more often now. Mostly charity cases because low-income patients are happy to try out early models. It’s more aggressive treatment than their insurance would cover, but from us, it’s free.”

“So you guys have done a lot of arms like mine?”

“Not that I know of. Up until now, we’ve dealt with smaller medical devices. Replacement joints—that kind of thing, none of them artificially intelligent.” Ron paused and licked his lips. “My mother had treatment here four years ago. Cancer. They used nanobots—incredibly tiny devices—to attack the cancerous cells.”

“Really?” I leaned forward in my seat. “Is she . . . How did the surgery go?”

His jaw tightened. “Not well. She died soon after.”

My eyes widened.

He gave an awkward laugh and a smile that looked like the edges were glued upright. “The bots didn’t kill her. Cancer did.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. My dad took her death really hard. The nanobots got his hopes up.”

The sound of a door opening came from behind me. I twisted in my seat, expecting to find my mother there. Instead, Dr. Fisher stood in the doorway. She waved Ron toward her. Her other assistant, Simon, stood at her side, his hand-screen open at his fingertips and tilted toward the doctor. Her gaze settled on me briefly before shifting back to Ron, without even a nod of recognition.

“I’ll be right back.” Ron hurried toward Dr. Fisher and Simon.

While I waited for him to return, I picked up my own hand-screen. An alert blinked in the corner, informing me that Philip Pollock had posted a new audio program online. An anti-technology activist, Pollock kept his listeners in the know about happenings at CyberCorp and other tech companies.

I pressed a button on the side of the device, and an earpiece popped out. I stuck it in my ear, so I could hear the program without subjecting everyone in the room to the noise.

“. . . contrary to nature. Not only is technology in direct opposition with nature, but it has evolved to bring out the worst in us. It makes us greedy and selfish, makes us tear down natural forests, build atop natural deserts. We are the destroyers of this world. I’m not saying we should get rid of it completely and return to the dark ages. But a medium needs to be found—a balance between progress and nature . . .”

I found myself nodding along with Pollock’s words. Historically, I didn’t agree with everything he said. He’d introduced me to issues that came along with advancing technology, and I respected the man—idolized him, really. But these days, he seemed just as concerned with smearing tech enthusiasts as he did with promoting his cause.

Today, though, his words hit the mark. We are the destroyers of this world. CyberCorp had certainly managed to destroy my world, first with its auto-drive technology and now with my atrocity of an arm. Sure, I’d played a role in the accident too, but it would never have happened without CyberCorp’s tech.

“My sources have confirmed that Lena Hayes, daughter of CyberCorp moguls Tom and Marissa Hayes, was in a serious car accident several weeks ago . . .”

My breath caught as I waited for him to tell the world about my cybernetic arm. He would make me an outcast, a target of the anti-tech community I respected so much.

“I want to know why the Model One rollout has not been postponed in light of this accident. Lena Hayes was in a coma for weeks, presumably on the edge of life and death. Yet her parents carry on business as usual. Why? Because technology is more important than humanity, more important than their own child. When I tell you, time after time, that one of the many evils of technology is its ability to push us farther and farther apart, this is what I mean: technology over humanity.”

I exhaled. He hadn’t mentioned my arm, and it didn’t sound like he knew. CyberCorp employees all signed strict confidentiality agreements, and it looked like the staff I worked with kept their word. No one would know about my arm—until I rejoined the world outside this building.

When this got out, Pollock would have a lot more to say about my accident and how my parents were handling it. He would make me a target of anti-tech fanatics just to make my parents look bad. As a girl who was now part machine, I represented everything Pollock—and I—hated about technology.

The conversation between Ron, Dr. Fisher, and Simon went on longer than I expected, still in progress when the audio program ended five minutes later. The doctor was now pointing back and forth between Simon’s hand-screen and me. I couldn’t hear her words.

Only one other patient shared the gym with us this morning. A boy with longish dark hair, badly in need of a cut. He sat on a weight machine, working his right leg. In long gym shorts, most of the leg remained hidden. And most of it looked human, unlike my new arm. But a small metal square graced the side of his right knee.

Each time the boy kicked his foot to extend the leg, a thirty-pound stack of weights lifted on the machine. Sweat popped out on his forehead.

With each kick, he murmured a number. When he reached fifteen, he stopped, and his body slumped. The leg hung beneath him, and the stack of weights slammed back into place. The boy swiped up a bottle of water from the floor. He took a series of long gulps and then tossed the bottle back on the floor, where it rolled before stopping.

His gaze followed it and then kept going until it landed on me. He caught me staring at him.

He squinted while he examined my left arm. I wished I’d worn long sleeves. I still couldn’t imagine going out in the world and showing it off. Part of me wanted to insist they keep me here until they deemed me ready for new skin, but a louder part of me wanted to get as far away from this cursed building as possible.

Undeterred by my scowl, the boy sauntered toward me.

“I’m Hunter,” he said.

Despite his dark hair, he had a fair complexion, the kind that probably burned if he got too much sun. A royal blue T-shirt sporting the Superman emblem draped his lean frame. His lopsided smile revealed a dimple on only his right cheek.

I’d lost my arm, and this boy couldn’t seem to stop himself from grinning.

I kept my expression placid. “Lena.”

“I know who you are.” I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but the smile got wider. He had great teeth, straight and white but way too happy.

“Do I know you?”

“I transferred to Hanover on scholarship last semester. I sat in front of you in Calculus.” He spun around to offer me a view of the back of his head. “Recognize me now?” he asked after turning to face me again.

My mouth twitched downward. “Still no.”

“They fitted you for a new arm?” He pointed at my left hand, which hung motionless at my side.

“Yep.” Why did he bother to phrase it like a question when the answer was obvious?

“What happened?”

“Don’t you know it’s rude to just ask people about their injuries?” I pushed all the scorn I could manage into my tone. If I was lucky, he’d go back to his side of room, and I could get on with my daily torture ritual without his incessant glee making it worse.

No such luck.

“I got a new knee.” He pointed—proudly—at the metal plates on the sides of his right knee. “I was hit by a car when I was ten, been through four different surgeries and a couple years in a wheelchair since then. This was my first procedure with CyberCorp.” He bounced up and down, flexing his legs. “Feels fantastic. What your parents do is amazing.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Amazing.”

I envied his knee. It improved his life without artificial intelligence. His head had no chip in it, eavesdropping on his brain signals and sending signals of its own. I fully supported the use of prosthetics, but I wanted to be the one in control—not artificial intelligence. The AI in my arm changed a useful thing into something unhuman.

“I guess I should get back to my rehab,” I added.

“I’m done for the day. But I’m a pro at this rehab thing, so if you want to talk . . .” He withdrew a pen from his pocket and lifted my right arm—the one that was still human. His grip around my palm came with surprising confidence.

I yanked my hand away and clutched it close to my stomach. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry.” He mumbled something unintelligible and then added, “I was just going to write my phone number.”

He finally dropped the silly smile, and somehow, I preferred him with it. So I stuck my hand back out toward him. “It’s fine.”

He touched my wrist more lightly this time, like he feared he’d spook me. On my palm, he wrote out the digits while I ransacked my head for words to shatter the silence.

“Call me if you want to talk,” he said as he returned my hand. “See you around.”

He ambled toward the door, his steps deliberate, favoring his right leg. Just before he exited, he glanced over his shoulder at me. I silently cursed myself that he caught me staring for a second time. He gave me that tilted grin again, then limped out of view.

Ron finished his conversation with Dr. Fisher, who nodded her goodbye and escaped the room with Simon. Before returning to our torture session, Ron pulled a hand-screen from his pocket and stretched the display to its full size.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

With my right index finger, I pointed at my left shoulder. “Missing an arm.”

He ignored my snark. “Dr. Fisher suggested we make a few tweaks to your programming.”

He reached to the interior side of my bicep and pressed the small button there. The compartment slid open below it. Ron gestured for me to lift my arm, so he could access it. My ID chip still sat in the interior storage space. Next to it was a small outlet for a rectangular plug.

“Dr. Fisher said your mom’s not going to make it down.” He slid a cable from his hand-screen into the outlet.

“Yeah, of course.” I bit my lip and bobbed my head up and down, so he’d know I was fine. Of course, I couldn’t have expected my mom to drop everything to check on me. I’d see her late tonight, when she wrapped up her work for the day.

Now connected to my arm, Ron’s hand-screen displayed bold letters reading PROTOTYPE INTERFACE, with the smaller words Enter Password below them. He angled the device away from me while he typed the password. The image on the screen changed to a list of file names. They filled the screen, and Ron scrolled down to find the one he was looking for.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Dr. Fisher agrees with you that your arm should be stronger than it is. Since we’ve never produced anything like this before, there’s going to be a little trial and error. It’ll still take hard work from you to get it to full strength. But since your left is your dominant side, we can up the power a little and see how that goes.”

“So it’ll be easier to lift things after you do this?”

“After this modification, I think we can bump you up from no weight to two-pound free weights.”

“Oh wow,” I mumbled. “Lucky me.”

He pressed the surface of the hand-screen to open one of the files. The display filled with program code that made my arm operate—or not operate given how useless it was at the moment. He changed a few lines in that file, paused, and then deleted several lines in another.

The word COMPILING popped onto the screen with a progress bar beneath it. A few seconds later, the display switched to INSTALLING and a new progress bar.

A small red light lit up on my palm. Surprised, I tried to jerk the arm toward me, but it didn’t budge. It had shut down.

Panic tore a path through my insides. As much as I hated having this thing attached to me, the thought of the alternative—having no arm—terrified me.

The hand-screen beeped when the progress bar reached a hundred percent, and the red light went out. I tried to move the arm again. It whipped up toward me and slammed into my left cheekbone. I shrieked and, instinctively, went to cover the spot—succeeding in slamming myself in the face a second time.

“Whoa, whoa.” Ron grabbed my wrist to stop me from pummeling myself a third time. “Relax.”

I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He released the limb, and it dropped to my side.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s get back to work. Grab those.” He pointed to a pair of bright-pink two-pounders that sat atop the row of free weights lining the wall.

I didn’t move. “Why does Dr. Fisher hate me so much?”

“She doesn’t hate you. And this isn’t relevant to your therapy.”

“Sure it is. Most of my therapy is mental. You’ve said that like five times today. You can improve my mental state by telling me why Dr. Fisher looks like I’m wasting her time.”

“She doesn’t hate you.” He gestured toward the weights a second time. When I still didn’t move, he added, “She doesn’t appreciate having to work on you when she could be focused on troubleshooting the Model Ones for the upcoming rollout.”

“What’s she got to do with it? She’s a doctor, and the Model Ones are androids. It’s not like they need annual physicals.”

“She’s a medical doctor and a PhD. Until you showed up, she spent her time tweaking the psychological programming of the Model Ones. She’s been working all her life for this. But your dad insisted on CyberCorp’s best scientists being transferred to your case.”

“And you?” I asked. “You’re her assistant, which means you were pulled off the Model Ones too. Does it bother you?”

“It did, but not anymore. You’re just as fascinating. Dr. Fisher can’t see your potential.” His eyes lit with excitement. “Tech companies have worked for decades to elevate humankind with technology. You’re the culmination of that. Man—or girl—plus machine. You’re exactly the project I want to work on right now.” He passed me one of the pink, two-pound weights. “But I need you to work harder.”

I grabbed the weight with my right hand and set it in my left. The hand refused to grip it, but Ron closed my metal fingers around the weight. I clenched my jaw and willed my arm to move.

CHAPTER 4

The CyberCorp staff had tried to help me pack up my sparse belongings—the textbooks and clothing our housekeeper Marcy had brought, and the things my friends had delivered. Harmony and Melody had both tried to visit, but I’d refused. I didn’t want them to see me like this—helpless. So I’d told them CyberCorp didn’t allow me to have visitors.

Now, after three weeks in a drug-induced coma and another two of therapy, my new arm worked almost as well as the old one. So when the staff tried to pack me up, I told them—in the nicest way possible—to go to hell. They’d waited on me for the past two weeks, and Lena Hayes didn’t need anyone’s help.

Ron stood in the doorway watching me, arms folded across his chest.

“Can’t we do the skin transplant before I leave?” I glared down at my shining silver arm.

“When you’re at full strength and we’re sure the programming is perfect, we’ll do the transplant. As long as you’re still having bad headaches, we have to wait. They should have lessened by now, but since they haven’t, it’s hard to predict when Fisher will feel comfortable taking that step.” I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off with a laugh. “And no, you can’t stay here until then. Your mother says today’s the day you go home, so today’s the day.”

I scowled but said nothing more. Not that I wanted to spend another minute in this building, but if the alternative was to show the world my cybernetic arm, I couldn’t decide which fate was worse.

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait for her?” Ron asked. “She said to expect her around noon.”

“You mean like how she waited for my approval before attaching a computer to my head?” I’d spent a lifetime obeying my parents, and this was how they repaid me. I took pleasure in this small rebellion.

I knelt to peer under the bed for any stray belongings and grasped—in my right hand—a small, pink Teddy bear Melody had sent me. I placed the bear in the corner of my suitcase and zipped the thing closed.

Although naturally left-handed, I’d resolved to use my right arm as much as possible. I could do nothing about having this metal limb, but I could minimize my use of it. In that small way, I could take back control of my life.

Ron stepped onto one of the moving walkways in the hallway, and I got on behind him. With its glossy white walkways and floors, the halls had an institutional feel, reduced somewhat by the colorful vid-screens. Here, the screens covering the walls didn’t stick with a single scene. Their text and images changed constantly.

Part of one wall displayed company announcements, while another section displayed the status of various projects—the Model Ones, several new micro-comms and hand-screens, and a new line of networked contact lenses. A section to my left held a moving image of a creek flowing over rocks in a forest. It was the same image on my room’s displays today.

Despite the pain medication, my left shoulder and head still ached. Each glimpse of the constantly moving images across the walls left my head spinning. I kept my gaze locked straight ahead.

Ron led me off the walkway and pointed to one of the white doors interspersed among the screens. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Jackson lay shirtless on a twin-sized hospital bed like the one in my room. Also like my room, the walls displayed the moving image of a creek, with a soft bubbling sound filling the background. They’d told me he’d had more extensive surgery than I had, and that he was still asleep, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

While only my left arm had been injured, the entire left side of Jackson’s body, and some of his right, appeared to have undergone surgery. A sheet and blanket covered him up to the waist, but his arms lay atop the coverings. His left arm had been replaced, up to and including his collarbone. The flesh of his neck melded into metal, which stretched across the left edge of his chest and over his entire arm.

Metal covered the left side of his ribcage and stomach as well, disappearing under the blankets. The right arm hadn’t been spared either, but its work was less extensive. The upper arm remained flesh, changing to metal at the elbow.

I could barely stand to look at his face. His silver cheek and jaw reflected the overhead fluorescent lights. Except for its metallic glow, he looked just like the faces of those fake skeletons they had at the front of Biology class freshman year. The flesh on the left side was gone, leaving his jaw visible all the way to the back teeth.

What remained of his original face was pale now, no longer full of humor and life. Still, on the right, he’d kept one perfect eyelid with long dark lashes and one model-worthy cheekbone.

I swallowed hard to keep myself from getting sick all over the floor. Ron’s hand on my back was the only thing keeping me upright. Barely.

I’d been so angry with Jackson the night of the accident, but I didn’t want this. I didn’t want his body ripped to pieces, turned into some kind of experiment. Regardless of where he and I stood romantically, I loved him. I’d known him most of my life, and I wanted to continue knowing him for the rest of it.

But not like this.

I stepped deeper into the room.

Ron gripped my bicep before I reached Jackson’s side. “You can’t touch him.”

But I wanted to. I wanted to feel his hands at my waist, his breath on my neck, his heart next to mine. “How long is he going to be . . . ?” My voice cracked.

“It’s hard to say. They’re doing the same healing treatments on him that they did on you, but as you can imagine, those will be a lot more extensive with Jackson. Plus, he has more hardware, and the team working on him is trying to iron out the kinks with the parts being used.”

If I could go back five weeks, I’d promise to reconsider working for CyberCorp someday. We could talk about the future he planned for us, but first, he had to wake up. Whatever he wanted—as long as he looked at me with blue eyes that had searched me a thousand times before, held me with arms that had squeezed me a thousand times before.

But first, he had to wake up.

My hand-screen vibrated in the pocket of my leather jacket, and I jumped, startled. I opened it and held it to my ear without checking the caller-identification display.

“Hello.” If I hadn’t moved my lips to make the words, I wouldn’t have recognized my own voice, broken as it was.

“Lena,” my mother said, “where are you? I’m in your room. We said noon.”

“Sorry. I stopped by to see Jackson. Meet me out front.”

“Fine. Five minutes. Lionel is outside waiting for us, and it’s a madhouse out there. The police have already threatened to arrest some people for attacking my employees. I don’t feel comfortable leaving him and the car there for long.”

“Mm-hmm.” My attention had strayed to Jackson’s face again, and I was half listening. It took me a full five seconds before her words registered. “Wait, what? Who’s getting arrested?”

“Some protesters outside the building.”

“But they’re harmless.”

“The usual bunch of two or three are harmless, yes. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

“Yeah, of course,” I lied.

The truth was I’d been otherwise occupied—mostly watching every other kind of television show, when not in physical-therapy sessions or trying to keep up with my schoolwork. Soap operas, prime-time dramas, and even some cartoons. Anything to keep me from self-pity. But I avoided the news.

Every time I flipped it on, they went on and on about the upcoming Model Ones. CyberCorp was about to introduce the first publicly available android. Soon, the whole country would own them and blah, blah, blah.

I’d seen enough of CyberCorp over the past two weeks, every time I opened my eyes. I didn’t need to hear about it on the news too.

“Is Allie with you?” I hadn’t seen my sister in weeks. The thought of getting home to her had kept me motivated in my physical therapy. I’d talked to her on the phone almost every day, but that wasn’t enough. Thanks to their high-profile jobs, my parents were hardly ever home, and I didn’t want Allie thinking I’d abandoned her too.

“No, but she can’t wait to see you. It’s all she’s talked about for the last few days.”

“The feeling’s mutual. See you in a minute.”

In the mirror attached to the inside of Jackson’s door, I double-checked the left sleeve of my leather jacket to make sure it fully covered my new limb. With my hand in my pocket, I could hide all but a sliver of metal at my wrist.

“Ready to go?” Ron tapped his wrist at the spot where a watch would have been if he wore one.

“No one asked you to walk me out.” I nudged past him into the hallway, dragging my roller bag behind me.

“But you want me to.” His smile reached up to a pair of striking amber eyes hiding behind his glasses—an odd color I hadn’t noticed before. He grabbed the bag handle from me, threw an arm over my shoulder, and led me in the direction of the elevators.

“Maybe a little,” I said.

“Have you heard from your so-called friends?”

“I spoke to them last night. And what do you mean by so-called?”

“I don’t get how they haven’t visited you at all. If I were them, you wouldn’t have been able to keep me away.”

“I didn’t know how to explain the whole arm thing to them—so I didn’t. They tried to visit, but I told them not to.”

He shrugged but said nothing.

“What?” I asked.

“I would have insisted until you agreed to let me.”

“They did insist. I insisted harder.”

“I would have stopped by unannounced.”

“They wouldn’t have gotten past security. I told them last night I was going home today, and they’re thrilled.”

“But you’re not thrilled.” He made it sound like a statement, instead of a question.

I watched the tiles of the floor pass by next to our moving walkway. A minute later, we stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed us inside.

“Lobby,” Ron instructed it. The elevator zipped down to the building’s main level, and the doors opened to the grand lobby.

I gasped as I stepped onto the matte silver floor. Apparently, in my time here, they’d redecorated. Multiple display stations were scattered throughout the space.

One station showed a few new hand-screens and small vid-screens. Another displayed a set of networked contact lenses, which allowed the wearer to see virtual objects as if they existed in the real world. Most people already had lenses like those, but these were the newest model. The last station displayed what looked like a cross between an oven, a microwave, and a refrigerator.

A robotic puppy leaped around the remaining space. It yipped and wagged its little metal tail. Giggling, a small boy of about five years old ran after it on stubby legs.

Much like the walls on the hospital floor, the walls to my left and right contained vid-screens that covered their entire surfaces. These didn’t include calming nature scenes or important CyberCorp announcements. At the left wall, an older man and two small girls stood in front of the screen, waving their arms and touching the display here and there. In response, it flashed vibrant colors. One of the girls jumped up and down and clapped her hands together, thrilled at the reaction.

Some things hadn’t changed—the matte silver floor, a wall of windows across from the elevators, and a long, curved black-and-chrome reception desk in front of the windows. Only now, next to the desk stood a Model One android, the first I’d seen in real life. Its dull red eyes stared back at me, sending pinpricks of ice down my back.

The room was so bright with activity that I needed to blink a few times to adjust. The back of my head pulsed.

“You okay?” Ron asked.

“I just wasn’t prepared for all the stuff in here.”

He laughed. “The head of public relations insists we keep the lobby user-friendly. It’s a lot though, I admit.”

“I’ll say.” I turned my face toward his, mostly so I wouldn’t have look at the bright room anymore. “What does the rest of your day look like? Back to the Model Ones?”

“Yeah. Dr. Fisher actually just left a message on my micro-comm that I’m to report to her office after I see you out. She’s psych-testing Model Ones this afternoon, and I’ll assist her with that.”

“How thrilled is she to get rid of me?” I failed at keeping the bitterness from my voice.

All the frustration I felt over the past weeks came bubbling to the surface. With rare exception, everyone I’d worked with here looked at me as if they blamed me for taking them away from something more important. They spent half the time grunting and scowling. When I passed them in the hallways, they hurried along, as if afraid they would get dragged into the Lena Project.

I wanted to let it go, to step outside those doors and leave all the bitterness here in this building. But it wasn’t that simple, because the worst part of this nightmare was coming with me—attached to my shoulder.

Ron gave me a reassuring pat on the back and handed my roller bag to me. “Call us if you have any trouble with the arm.” He strode back to the elevators.

I heard the chaos as soon as I opened the nearly soundproofed double doors to the outside. Shouts and chants rose up from a picket line standing at the other end of the circular driveway. Now, I saw what my mother was talking about when she’d said this wasn’t the usual two or three protesters.

Over the past month, the anti-tech community had grown metaphorical balls, and they were showing them right now. Lucky for me, CyberCorp had a sizable circular driveway, all of which counted as private property on which the protesters couldn’t set foot. I had a clear path to my parents’ black car, which idled only about twenty yards away.

The protesters continued to shout as I stepped off the curb and onto the driveway. Most hefted signs that vilified the Model Ones and the people who made them: Intelligence Is Not Artificial. God Created Man Not Android. Humans Are God’s Model One. Remember Skynet.

One sign in particular made me slow and squint, convinced I hadn’t read it right, but I had. Death to the Spawn of CyberCorp. The man who held that one stood taller than the rest, towering over everyone in his vicinity by at least a couple inches. Long, stringy blond hair hung to his shoulders, matching the beginnings of an unkempt beard.

“To hell with all of you and your spawn,” he shouted. “You cannot create intelligence. Repent or be destroyed.”

I picked up my pace. Our driver Lionel waited for me beside the open door. I was still twenty feet from the car when the large protester broke through the security line and bolted toward the front doors.

The two guards who’d blocked his path a moment ago were too slow. Two more guards shot out from inside the building. The protester spotted them and hooked a sharp left. He headed straight toward me.

My vision narrowed to a pinpoint. All I saw was the man barreling forward, arms and legs pumping. I froze. Lionel’s voice shouted my name. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Lionel moving toward me. I tore my gaze away from the sweaty, growling protester and toward the car, but too late.

The man hit me hard in the chest, and air whooshed from my lungs. An instant later, I lay on the ground.

White spots danced in my vision. Pain exploded in the back of my head, where it had slammed into the concrete beneath me. It had ached a moment ago, from the surgery, but now my eyes swam with tears, and the world seesawed beneath me.

“We must stop this,” the man shouted. He crouched over me, his legs straddling mine. Beefy hands gripped my upper arms and held me firmly to the ground. As he shouted, saliva sprayed across my face. “The Model Ones mean death for humanity!”

I thrashed from side to side to free myself. Together, Lionel and a guard yanked the massive man off me. As soon as he was on his feet, and I no longer feared for my life, my next thought was of my arm. While I was on the ground, my hand had slipped from my pocket, and now the silver metal shone in the sunlight. I stuffed it back into my pocket.

The security guards dragged the man away. It took all four of them to control him, but none of them could stop his mouth. “Intelligence isn’t artificial. It evolves. It learns. You cannot control what you’ve created!” His shouts continued until they dragged him inside the building, and the doors finally muffled the sound.

“Are you okay?” Lionel asked me. Concern filled his blue eyes.

Before I could answer, my mother hurried across the driveway, high heels clacking against the pavement. Lionel stepped aside to make way for her.

“Are you okay?” She straightened my clothing and smoothed my hair—because heaven forbid I not look camera-ready after being tackled to the ground.

I batted her hands away. “I’m fine, Marissa.”

Still numb, I allowed her to usher me into the vehicle. She slid into the car after me. Lionel climbed into the front seat, and we pulled out of the driveway.

“Lunatics,” my mother muttered. Her gaze followed the line of protesters as we drove away.

But the man’s words echoed in my head. You cannot create intelligence. The Model Ones mean death for humanity. I couldn’t help thinking he might be right.

Newsletter

CHOOSE A FREE STORY WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE

DREAMS OF FLESH AND METAL

Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Series: Flesh and Metal Prequel

SCARLET LETTERS

Genre: Contemporary Mystery
Series: Gray Girls (coming soon)

SUBSCRIBE TO DOWNLOAD

SUBSCRIBE TO DOWNLOAD

DREAMS OF FLESH AND METAL

Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Series: Flesh and Metal Prequel

Newsletter

CHOOSE A FREE STORY WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE

DREAMS OF FLESH AND METAL

Genre: Young Adult Science FictionSeries: Flesh and Metal Prequel

SCARLET LETTERS

Genre: Contemporary MysterySeries: Gray Girls (coming soon)

SUBSCRIBE TO DOWNLOAD

SUBSCRIBE TO DOWNLOAD

DREAMS OF FLESH AND METAL

Genre: Young Adult Science FictionSeries: Flesh and Metal Prequel

Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Series: Flesh and Metal Prequel

Genre: Contemporary Mystery
Series: Gray Girls (coming soon)

Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Series: Flesh and Metal Prequel