Page 2 of Skyn (After the End #3)

The President of Iku Foods Does Not Eat People

He’s leaving. Oh my God. He’s leaving me.

His voice sounds like feedback, and I can’t hear any part of his long-practiced speech. I keep hearing holding myself back.

“But I gave you all my lottery tickets. We all did. We had a plan.” When we found out about my nickel allergy, my family pooled their lottery tickets—all of them—to increase Josh’s chances of winning.

So we could be secure aboveground. Then we would pool for my younger stepsister. That was the plan.

“And you’re holding it over my head.” Josh sighs, running a hand through his limp hair as though the act of breaking my fucking heart is exhausting him.

“You’re scamming us!” A strange, hysterical laugh bubbles up in my throat. I do this—laugh at the worst time. I want to cut to a flashback of me losing my shit at my uncle’s funeral when my aunt’s cybernetic teeth fell out, but my life is currently falling apart, so we don’t have the time.

“My family’s gonna flip. My mom, my stepmom—Josh, they’ll be crushed.”

When he seems unmoved by that argument, I switch tactics.

Going aboveground has been the only thing I’ve wanted for so long.

I can just let it go. “I just got allocated a diamond.” I snatch down my shirt collar to shoot him the angry-red, bruised skin and the diamond carved into it.

I sound crazed, and my eyes are watering.

“Do you understand what that means?” My voice cracks, but I can’t stop myself.

“I have status. We can do this together.”

Josh looks at me and shakes his head slowly like I’m not getting it, like I’m the one being unreasonable. “Who knows if they care about our useless certifications aboveground?”

Useless?

The room tilts. I grip the back of a chair. My chest is tight, so tight that it hurts to breathe. “You’re throwing us away,” I finally say.

“Fawl, I…” His voice trails off into the clanking of servers bussing trays, and the machinery in the distance. The sound of the mine is always there, like a heartbeat pulsing in the background.

All my IS coworkers warned me—men change when they get augments. They said he’d leave me for some sleek, modded girl with polished limbs and synthetic nerves that never misfire. I laughed in their faces, called them bitter, jealous, wrong.

But now I stare at his Mod—the gleaming machinery stitched into his spine, the quiet flex of chrome under skin—and I hate those bitches.

Augments are outrageously expensive, but I cashed in on a few favors, put up some of my savings, and boom—Josh has a new right shoulder and arm.

He’s doing twice his load now, the kind of productivity that gets you noticed, that puts you in line for promotions, and, finally, your first choice in the lottery.

Josh was so kind after I lost my father. I clung to that kindness. I made it the only thing I registered about him. How could he betray me this way?

The restaurant suddenly feels cramped. I grip my chest, like my throat is constricting, the low ceiling pressing on us as if the weight of the entire city above is bearing down on our ragged shoulders.

“I think you know,” he says, his tone firmer now, more resolute, “I’m up for living quarters soon.”

Did I know it? It was all I thought about.

Having a partner so close to the lottery and so young was nearly unheard of.

We’re a blended family, so pooling our resources quadrupled his chances instantly.

We have a system. Instead of using our resources for ourselves, we combine them for each member, multiplying our chances until all of us are aboveground.

We thought we were geniuses when we thought of it, and now, five years later, Josh’s number came up a full five years before average for his age group.

He’ll get a luxurious five-hundred-square-foot palace on the thirty-ninth floor aboveground—something we both dreamed of, but I never dared to hope for myself.

That is what I once loved about him: he’s never afraid to hope.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he says, cutting through my thoughts.

“Then don’t. Don’t do this,” I say.

“I’ve already accepted my placement.”

His words are a blade to my chest, and I struggle to breathe.

“For a single?” It didn’t make sense. Applying as a single man would have put him back at the bottom of a different list.

“No, we—or, um, I got my first choice,” he says.

I pretend not to hear him say we. I just power on. I can’t let him go—not when he’s my ticket out of the mines, not when I sacrificed everything for our lottery placement.

“Will we be near the Ikus? I hear they harvest skin and make handbags with it,” I say, grasping at anything to lighten the conversation.

“Fawl, don’t joke like that. I’m not joking like that anymore.” Josh’s voice is sharp, edged with something I almost think is fear. “The president of Iku Foods does not eat people nor harvest skin.”

We all live and work under the shadow of Iku Industries.

It provides 80 percent of the cloned vegetables and the slabs of lab-grown meat that make it to our ration boxes.

Not just for our region but for the entire sector.

The set the universal time and calender as well and are living calculators.

Every important Family on the council had a job.

that’s how they justify ruling aboveground.

But Iku sustains the world now, their MEAT solution make them the most powerful family in the council.

Without it, we don’t eat. It’s that simple.

The rumors of debauchery and darkness persist, however.

We tell ourselves that the Burn was a different time, that we are not those people anymore. That humanity saw its own grotesque reflection in the starving hordes, in the charred bodies, in the long, slow months when there was nothing left to eat but each other.

We tell ourselves we built something better after that.

That we learned, that we evolved, and that we would never be reduced to teeth and hunger again.

So we gave control to a council of machines—built them without greed, without emotion, without the human frailty that led us to devour our own.

They are our betters in every way, the only ones fit to govern.

Our job is to emulate them. It is all Joshua has ever wanted.

The cool detachment of the cyborg. That’s why he thinks he can do this to me.

He wants to be unemotional, loveless. He thinks it’s refined.

And yet.

There are whispers about the ghoulish machines who supposedly prowl the black markets for skin brides, their back teeth sharpened to puncture through bone.

There are stories, always just stories, about men who disappear near the factories, about shipments that arrive mislabeled, about the thin pale meat that doesn’t quite look like beef or poultry.

Machines run the world; the Ikus are machines.

“Fawl, those will be my peers now, and—”

“Look, Joshua, I’ll never say it.” I mime zipping my lips and throwing away the key. “I understand the excitement of our number coming up and how it makes you rethink your life. I do. Let’s just call this a break.”

“Fawl,” he begins, hesitation in his voice, “I should tell you something.”

“Josh, I’m telling you it’s fine.”

Another woman?

Another man?

You hate the way I chew rations? Fine, we can work it out. Nothing he says can deter me.

“Fawl,” he says, a sigh escaping his lips, “it’s your sister.”

The words hang in the air between us, heavy and suffocating. “I don’t have a sister,” I say, my voice clipped, and my shoulders rolled back.

“Fawl, that’s unfair. The daughter of the woman your mother married.”

“Dru?” I whisper. The name powers through my temple like a jackhammer. The one line I have—the one betrayal I can’t forgive.

Fucking Dru.

Dru.

Dru.

Dru.

She came into our lives three years ago like a sandstorm.

My mother, consistently drunk and inconsistently kind, fell for Dru’s mother, who is incredibly dainty with a tiny voice and rolling black hair.

Black hair! Like we don’t know a dye job when we see it.

She got a huge payout for her first husband and bought herself and her daughter outrageously expensive modifications.

She boasts a cybernetic leg that makes her able to carry 20 percent more ore.

She likes to show it off with high slits and flowy dresses.

Dru, too, has a fashionable shimmery décolletage with cool, spongy-metal breasts that every man in the mines wants to cup in their palms, including Joshua, I guess.

Dru isn’t mean. That’s what makes it all so much worse. She isn’t some evil witch dripping with malice and plotting my downfall. No, Dru is simply…thoughtless in the way that a person can be thoughtless when they’ve never had to consider anyone outside their own orbit.

I keep waiting for the tears to come, the scream to bubble up, or maybe the urge to flip the table over and storm out, but all I feel is this numbing hum. Like when you’ve been standing too close to the generators and the buzzing just fills your skull.

“Fawl.” He looks tired. “I’m not a villain, but you need to know this so you can just stop.”

“Stop what?” My voice comes out smaller than I intended.

“It’s been happening little by little, you know? I mean, I didn’t realize it at first, but…your body…the skin.” He looks away then, his eyes flitting back to the men drinking behind us. “It’s a little beneath me now.”

I try to swallow, but it feels like there’s a stick lodged in my throat. This isn’t about us. It’s about me.