Dissolution

Chapter 21 - Sold

We both froze. I looked up into his eyes. His breath was like rust. He hesitated for a moment and I twisted away from him, swiping my screen and turning it to speaker, feeding it back into the frequencies Cam had tuned for me.

"Hello?" I said.

The voice on the other side was not the voice I remembered from interviews, from Ads, or even from our Auctioning speech. It was a human voice, one that dipped and shook with fury, that rang out across Unilox and echoed in the sudden silence of the Promenade. "What do you want?"

"I want you to sign their licenses over to me, and I want a meeting," I said immediately. "Face to face."

There was an incredulous pause. "What?" the First Shareholder demanded.

I hardened my voice. "It's pretty simple. Yes, and I come. No, and I show the citizens of Unilox exactly what this body can do. It's your choice."

Another pause. I felt each second like a cut, like wire twisting around and around my neck. I struggled to breathe. Mr. Sharp's eyes glinted in the sun. He raised a hand. I saw the needle nestled in his palm and I almost lost it right there and then, almost split and lost everything.

And then John Whittaker Charles Anron's voice rolled through the city. "Fine," it snarled. "Yes." And the line went dead.

I had no time to celebrate my victory. Mr. Sharp's hand clamped around my arm again. "Get in the car," he said shortly. The words tasted bitten off, chewed. "We'll take you there."

I didn't want to get in the car. I could imagine just how easily a needle could be slipped in, how quickly I'd be destroyed. I gritted my teeth and pulled away with half my strength. He stumbled, almost fell, and let go. I took a moment to enjoy the shock on his face. "Thanks," I said politely. "But I'll walk." And before anyone even thought about stopping me, I had started the short stroll to ANRON Tower.

The last walk of my life was like a circus. The suits pulled up around me in formation, but not too close, because they also wanted to watch the crowd following us. The people in the Promenade had turned out in force, eagerly watching this new drama unfolding before them, uploading images and text so furiously to their profiles that I was sure the connection speeds across Unilox took a temporary dive. Only Mr. Sharp stayed at my shoulder, my shadow. He felt like repressed words now, a quivering gun in its holster. But his presence alone made the rats inside eat away at my stomach and start on my liver. I tried to focus on other things. The way the air tasted. The buzzing of my implants. The rush of being alive, of hearing my own breath expand my lungs and knowing that my blood was still steadily pumping through my veins. And when the shadow of ANRON Tower brushed against me like a living person, when it blocked out the sun and made me cold, I was no longer afraid.

We entered the foyer. I walked past the great columns and still water pooling inside marble basins. I walked past the wall-length paintings and the shadows of statutes reaching out for the sky. Mr. Sharp tried to shepherd me toward the client lifts. I'd never been inside them before. When they opened up they were rich and red, like the smooth inside of a blood vessel. I walked straight past their open mouths to the stairs, enjoying this one last act of mini-rebellion. I had never, in all of my eighteen years, seen anybody use these stairs. They were ornamental, beautiful, built like two strands of DNA twisting around each other. I gripped the rail and used the cold to center myself. Behind me, I heard Mr. Sharp's indrawn breath. I waited for him to say something, to object. But he didn't. He just hesitated, and then his footsteps dogged mine again, following at my heels like death, and the rest of the suits scrambled to follow.

We went around in circles, in silence. Up and up. I watched every floor slip past me in a burst of glass and color. I wondered if anyone else had ever experienced ANRON this way before, as a biological being, circling around its ankles, up through its guts, climbing to its cranium. After the wonder of the foyer there were huge machines that I only glimpsed the outlines of, gleaming in the lowlight. The laboratories came next, lined with rows and rows of greyed-out windows and security scanners. I wondered what I would see if I could look through them. Whether I would see bodies, parts of bodies, blank eyes, roving hands with scalpels. Mr. Sharp's breathing grew harsher. We were at the thirtieth floor now. I felt each spring and contraction of my muscles, the pulling of my lungs as they drew in air, my body working like a machine. My fingers fluttered on my own arms and for a moment, I hugged myself. I would miss this body, which I had never appreciated. I would miss everything.