Skinned by Robin Wasserman Read Free Book Online Page A

The procedure wouldn’t work on adults—something about how their neural pathways weren’t malleable, couldn’t adjust to an artificial environment—and it hadn’t been approved for anyone younger than sixteen. If I’d had the accident a year earlier, I’d be dead right now. All dead, instead of…whatever this was.
    “So what?”
    “So I think you two have a lot in common,” Sascha said. “It might help to share your experiences, get her perspective on things. Plus she’s eager to meet you.”
    “All we have in common is this .” I looked down at the body. My body. “And you keep telling me that this doesn’t mean anything.”
    “You don’t want to meet her.”
    Sascha’s brilliant intuitive powers never ceased to amaze. “No.”
    “Maybe we should talk about why.”
    “Maybe not.”
    Sascha crossed her arms. I wondered if I’d finally managed to break through the professional placidness, if Sascha was about to prove she had an actual personality, one that could get irritated when a bitchy “client” pressed hard enough.
    Not a chance.
    “Let’s try something new,” she said with an I-have-a-secret-plan smile. “Why don’t you tell me what you want to talk about.”
    “Anything?”
    “Anything. As long as it’s something.”
    I didn’t want to talk. That was the point. Now that I had my voice back, I had nothing to say.
    “Running,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Maybe because I thought about it all the time. How it would feel to run in the new body. Whether I would be slower or faster, whether I would find a new rhythm. What it would mean to run without getting out of breath; whether I could run forever. They told me the body would simulate exhaustion before it had reached its limits, a gauge to prevent total system failure, but no one knew exactly what those limits would be.
    “You’re a runner?” Sascha asked, faux clueless. It was her default mode; at least when she wasn’t acting the all-knowing wisdom dispenser. She knew I was a runner, because she had a file that told her everything I was. Everything she thought mattered, anyway.
    Was a runner.
    I nodded.
    “Do you miss it?”
    I shrugged.
    “You run on an indoor track or…”
    “Outside,” I said immediately.
    Sascha leaned forward, as she always did when she thought she was about to crack my code. “That’s unusual,” she said. “Someone your age, spending so much time outside.”
    “It’s required.” But that wasn’t true, not really. Yes, we were all forced to spend a few hours a week outdoors, but for most people, that was the end of it. Five whiny hours shivering in the grayish cold, then back inside. It was one way I’d always been different. The only way.
    “What do you like about it?” Sascha asked. “Running.”
    “I don’t know.” I paused. She waited. “It felt good. You know. Especially a long run. You get an adrenaline high. Or whatever.”
    “Have you tried it? Since the procedure?”
    I shook my head. There was supposedly a track somewhere in the building, but I hadn’t bothered to find it.
    “Why not?”
    I looked down. The hands were sitting in my lap. I stretched one of them out along my thigh. It felt good to be able to move again. After almost a month of rehab, I didn’t even need to think about it most of the time; the hands clenched themselves into fists when I wanted them to, the fingers closed around balls and hairbrushes and tapped at keyboards just like real fingers. They registered the fabric on my legs—standard issue, hideously ugly BioMax thermo-sweats. Not that I needed thermo-regulation now, not when I had it built in, but that’s what they had, so that’s what I wore, because it was easier than buying all new clothes, and my old clothes no longer fit.
    “What would be the point?” I said finally.
    “The point would be to feel good.”
    In my head I laughed. The mouth spit out something harsh and scratchy. Laughing was tricky.
    “You