Wired (Skinned, Book 3) by Robin Wasserman Read Free Book Online Page B

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,
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    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 to dose 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
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    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 in the first place. We exhausted all the network sources without getting any closer to tracking down our target--Jude's fans were obsessed with him, but their devotion was, without exception, practiced from afar. We needed off-line help, and there was one obvious place to start: the only mech besides Riley who we knew Jude would trust--though he had every reason not to. She was out of commission, so we started with the next best thing.
    "You." Quinn Sharpe's face appeared in my ViM, unsmiling. She'd apparently missed me about as much as I'd missed her. "What?"
    "I'm fine, thanks," I said sweetly. "Life is good, and yes, I'd love to tell you all about it, thanks so much for asking, but I'd hate to interrupt what I'm sure is a busy day."
    "Then I guess you shouldn't have voiced," Quinn shot back. "Is that all?"
    I could see her reaching for the disconnect. "Wait!"
    "What?"
    I glared at Riley over the screen. This was exactly why I'd
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    wanted him to do it. But he'd been under the mistaken impression that, deep down, Quinn liked me.
    "I have a favor," I said.
    "Then I guess you don't need one from me."
    Calm, I instructed myself. Don't fight back.
    "I'm looking for Jude," I said.
    At Jude's name her mask of scorn turned into the real thing. "Why would I know where he is?" Quinn snapped. "You think he tells me anything? He hasn't even talked to me since ..."
    "Since you used him to screw over Ani?"
    "I didn't use him for