Torn (Cold Awakening) by Robin Wasserman Read Free Book Online Page B

… different.
    Someone, something had died in that fire. But I wasn’t allowed to mourn him. I wondered if Riley did. I would never ask. Questions like that hung in the space between us, the silence we pretended wasn’t there.
    “If he’s back, he must want our help,” Riley said.
    “He didn’t look like he wanted help.” I hadn’t repeated the cryptic words Jude had offered me.
You’ll know where to find me,
he’d said, certain I could solve his riddle, and certain I would want to. “He looked like he wanted a party.”
    “If he’s back, why not tell me?” Riley sounded hurt.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t think he blames me?”
    “He can’t,” I said, because it was too late to tell him the truth: that Jude most certainly blamed Riley, for shootinghim, for setting the secops on him, for betraying him, for choosing me.
    “If he’s been hiding from us, he has a good reason.”
    “Probably.”
    It was another gift to him, this pristine version of Jude, who deep down, despite all evidence to the contrary, was a good guy. An imaginary Jude deserving of Riley’s imaginary friendship. The fairy tale was real to Riley, and who was I to say that didn’t matter? Maybe real was a matter of perspective.
    Maybe I would tell myself anything to justify keeping my mouth shut.
    “You think we should let this go?” he asked.
    It occurred to me that
he
should let this go while
I
did everything I could to track down Jude before he could track down whatever petty revenge scheme he was surely plotting. But all I could say was, “Probably.”
    It wasn’t enough.
    “Maybe. But I can’t. I’ve got to know if he’s okay.”
    So we started our hunt.
    Searching for him by name proved useless, as expected. But there were cryptic references to a mystery mech popping up at certain elite gatherings, turns of phrase I recognized from my own days as Jude’s dummy—“the past is irrelevant,” “natural is weak,” “natural is hell”—that pointed us in the right direction, underground zones devoted to tracking his sightings. And once we knew where to look, he was everywhere. There he was bobbing in the background of a vidlife; there he was pretending todose with a pack of zoners; there he was posing with a bunch of skinnerheads, their eyes large with longing. And he’d been noticed. Probably by BioMax, who had apparently decided to ignore the issue as long as he kept his mouth shut and didn’t blow up anything else; definitely by a slow-growing cult of net-fans, orgs and mechs alike, who’d established stalker zones that went crazy every time there was a new sighting. Theories flew about who he was, what he wanted, whether he was some kind of messianic figure determined to save us all or the skinner manifestation of original sin, weaseling his way into the org world so he could tear it down from within. The persona and its attendant mysteries were so carefully crafted that I could only assume Jude had cultivated them himself.
    Not that Riley could see that, or would have cared if he did. All he saw was confirmation that Jude hadn’t disappeared forever. Thus: “We have to find him,” again and again, until there was nothing I could do but pretend I agreed. It was like he’d conveniently forgotten the way things had been with the three of us. The arguments. The sniping. The way Jude had held Riley hostage to the mistakes he’d made in the past, and the debt he owed Jude for things he’d done when he was too young to know better. The way Jude had sometimes looked at me like I was nothing, a passing phase, some toy that Riley would eventually get bored with. And then the other times, when he’d looked at me like … like he could see straight through me, into the secret at my center, one that I didn’t even know myself. Like he and I were the same, and, stuck on the outside, Riley would never understand.
    But Riley and I were the only unit that mattered, which was why I went along with him on the search