Page 15 of Skyn (After the End #3)

Sounds Filthy

I fucked something up. Way up. Because in the past four days Ben has been more of a machine than usual, and that is saying something. I can’t afford to lose my only friend aboveground. God, I thought I was being so daring, so unexpected.

Just do something unexpected.

But I kissed a machine and glitched him.

Ben wanted something polite. He wanted a friendship with clear borders, no static, no crossed wires. And for once, I could have played along. He could have gotten me a job up here. I could be sending smug little comms to Josh from a tidy aboveground apartment.

Now Ben’s going to send me packing. I can feel it.

And I have nothing. Not one thing on the controlled burn.

It’s been a week and a half—ten days since I first started combing through the IS for any mention of it, ten days of searching, scanning, cross-referencing.

I spend my mornings hunched over Ben’s sleek console, the data streaming past my tired eyes.

But the shopkeeper was right—every sixty years, something wipes out about 30 percent of the population.

It looks like an accident, except that the numbers are too precise. Nature doesn’t do precision.

We are halfway through the calendar year. Sixty years since the Dark Day Mine Collapse. If anyone is keeping count, we have an appointment with the grim reaper.

Reaper.

I type it in. The screen flickers with information.

Three hundred years ago, the Iku patriarchs and matriarchs volunteered for the first implants after the Flesh Wars.

Two hundred forty years ago, the Ikus were accused of setting fire to new settlements.

Sixty years ago, the Ikus sold all their mining equipment and went into food production.

Where the Ikus go, disaster follows.

I don’t know what it means yet, but it feels like something with teeth.

Still, every night I go to bed with nothing but a stiff neck and a hollow, gnawing ache where my hope should be.

Ben doesn’t come to my room. But every day, like clockwork, the mannies pull me away from my endless search and into the world.

One day, it’s a park—a real park, not the grim underground ones filled with an LED sun and synthetic grass, but one with towering trees that rustle in the wind.

The mannies watch me closely, silently cataloging my every reaction, And I know—I know—Ben is watching too. I can feel it, like static in the air.

The next day, Victorian artist Elton, big dumb Hank, and butler-of-my-nightmares Crispen take me to a pond, the kind of idyllic place I used to hear about in romance radiocasts.

The water is still and glassy, reflecting the sky in a perfect, undisturbed mirror.

The mannies stand at the edge, and I turn to face them. To face him.

“I’m not going to jump you, Ben,” I say. The words feel stupid, but I miss him. He was good company.

I’m surprised to hear his voice clear as day casting through Elton, who unhelpfully opens and closes his mouth off cue. “I’m not sure I can say the same, Fawl. My desires are base and bottomless. You deserve better.”

What does that make me, then…? Every second, I think of the way his skin felt under my hands—too hot. And just for a moment, I thought Ben might pull me down underneath him, press me open, and slip himself slick and heavy inside me.

“I don’t know what to do with you.” Ben’s voice is so earnest, coming from Hank this time as he lifts me from the shore of the lake.

“Let’s find a library,” I say. “After you make nice with Lily and teach your family not to fuck with you, I’ll get a job. And this will be—” I swallow. “This will be a nice memory.”

Ben’s voice turns wistful. “A very nice memory.” Elton wipes my bottom free of leaves and studies them like the sickly Victorian artist he resembles. It’s such a human gesture.

“Is this you or them? Like…the way they act?” I ask.

“There is no them. They are husks; they could be birds or ice cream cones.”

“Then why make them people shaped?”

There was a pause.

“Didn’t God make us in his own image?”

“Wow…think a lot of yourself there, buddy.”

His voice is suddenly serious. “I don’t think we can be friends, Fawl. Not in the clear-cut way I thought.” His voice drifts from Crispin, who is knee-deep in the pond.

“Then don’t be my friend. Come and kiss me if you want to, just don’t leave me alone out here.”

“I didn’t think of that. How lonely it must be.” Crispin tries to open his mouth in time with Ben’s words, but he is a half-step behind, making the whole conversation seem dubbed in another language.

“You don’t have to make their mouths move,” I say, squinting at the bot. “It’s weirder than you think.”

Ben pauses. I hear the quiet flick of him adjusting something in the interface, and Crispin stills, mouth finally closing.

“Are you going to see me before the Food and Science Ball?” I ask. I try to sound casual. I do not succeed.

“Of course. I don’t trust you to dress yourself,” he says, and there’s the smallest, warmest curl of amusement in his voice. Then, quieter, “And you know how I have my hypothesis of dampeners?”

I glance up at him.

“I’ll be testing it.”

Crispin shifts his weight, and I know Ben is doing this very thing in a lab somewhere.

“I think contact can heal,” Ben says. “I think skin is more than just an appendage of pre-Burn weakness. It’s a sensor. A receiver. Maybe even a converter.”

Crispin looks at me then, and I feel no filter, no firewall. Just Ben.

“I think touch might be the last real technology we have left.”

“Good luck convincing the rest of the world of that.” I point to a street vendor, and Hank runs him down returning with a rolled caramel waffle cone with alarming speed.

“This event is a good place to test it,” he says. “Oh, I love those.” Hank pushes the cone toward his closed mouth, and the cream slides down his face. He licks the corners of his mouth before I can wipe it completely clean.

Ben likes food? I wipe the bot’s mouth with my sleeve. “I don’t really see you eat,” I say.

“I, er, used to love those,” he corrects. It’s a kind of a sad correction.

“Can you taste that?” I ask.

“I can,” he says, and Hank smiles genuinely and nods his head.

“Will Lily be there tomorrow night?”

“Yes,” he says. I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. The mannies idle for a while, and I imagine Ben lost in thought, wondering what the logical next step is.

“So, this is our first test,” I say

“The first of many,” he says.