The Body Electric

Chapter 15

I wander into the kitchen, making myself a sandwich as I scroll through messages on my cuff. I widen the interface, staring at the holographic icons spinning before my eyes, thanks to my eye bots. I tap the communication box. The program bursts open, sparks of light shooting between my fingers and reforming into a video chat box hovering at eye-level.

“Contact: Akilah Xuereb,” I say.

A moment later, my best friend fills my vision.

“Hella’ Ella!” she says brightly. “Feeling better?”

“Not really,” I say. I touch the charm on my necklace—a fortune cookie locket. Inside is a digi file—Akilah and I at the Summer Festa when we were eight. The UC shipped in fireflies, and we stayed up half the night in Central Gardens, trying to catch them all. Dad gave Akilah and I both a locket—mine’s silver, hers in gold—with the digi strip inside it when her father left her family and she moved to the Foqra District.

Akilah leans forward. “What happened?” she asks.

For the first time in my life, I don’t reveal the secrets

of my heart to her. I used to tell Aks everything, but… this is the stuff of national security, of anti-terrorism. I can’t tell her about this.

“Is it your mother?” she asks.

It would be so easy for me to lie now, to tell her that everything bothering me comes back to Mom’s illness. And, of course, I’m worried that she’s worse, and the way she seems to have given up. But it’s not her ghost that haunts me.

“I’m just… I’m doing some new work at the mental spa,” I say.

“Gah, I wish I was there,” Akilah says. She applied to be an intern for her service year, just like me, but she was selected for military instead.

“Me too,” I say, my voice dropping. “But this… this job. It’s just—it’s really intense.”

“What are they having you do?”

I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t tell her that I just spied on someone’s mind—she’d never believe me, and even if she did, I don’t think I should say anything.

Akilah’s brow wrinkles in worry.

“I know you’re in the military now,” I say, “and basically the whole point of being a solider is taking orders. But… have you ever had to do something that…”

After a long pause, Akilah asks, “That what?”

“That scared you?” I say, the words rushing out. “I mean, you’re armed, and you’re trained, and it’s not like the War is still happening, but it might, and you don’t know what will happen, and you have to trust that the people higher up than you know what they’re doing, but it’s still dangerous, it’s still… scary.”

I almost roll my eyes at myself. I sound like such a moron. Scary? That’s the best word I could come up with?

“Just what is Ms. White having you do at the mental spa?” Akilah looks as frightened as I feel.

“It’s not—” I bite back the words. It’s not Ms. White. But how can I tell my best friend that I’m taking orders from the Prime Administrator of the entire freaking world?

Akilah curses. “I hate being stuck here, so far away from you!”

“I’m okay, Aks, really. Sorry to have bothered—”

“Don’t you dare, Ella Shepherd!” Akilah shoots back. “Don’t you dare try to apologize for this! Of course I want you to tell me if something’s wrong!”

I can hear the buzzing sound in my head again, and my skin jumps from the aftershocks of bombs that only went off in my mind.

“I—I’ve got to go,” I say. Akilah tries to protest, but I close the screen. I can’t tell her what’s troubling me, and that makes it even worse than if I’d not talked to her at all.

She tries to call me right back, but I block the message. I don’t have any answers—not for her, not for me.

Ms. White was right. Seeing Jack Tyler’s name in Representative Belles’s reverie made everything much more real for me. Dad’s death, the threat of war… it’s so overwhelming.

But it’s worse just sitting here, waiting for PA Young to tell me what to do next. I have only one real lead to follow, and it’s not much of one, but I’ll do what I can. I dismiss the chat box on my cuff and bring up the search icon.

“Jack Tyler,” I order.

Unfortunately, Jack Tyler is a very common name, from a prominent American politician to a British actor from the twenty-second century. I narrow the search perimeters, but still get too many hits, so I switch to an image search, plugging in his features as well as name.

Soon, I find him.

It’s a picture taken in a scientific laboratory—glittering test tubes and vials shine in front of a white tiled wall. Jack stands in the middle of a group of six men, all smiling in front of the body of something that appears to be a dead girl, except her chest is open, exposing a bundle of wires and circuits, not blood and bone. An android.

But that’s not what makes me hold my hand out to the interface screen as if I could reach through it and touch the people in the image.

The man with his arm slung around Jack’s shoulder, the one with a crooked smile and a laugh in his eyes—

Is my father.