Torn (Cold Awakening) by Robin Wasserman Page A

need”—I gestured at my body—“this?”
    “They needed my support—but they also wanted to punish me,” he admitted. “The cruelty was excessive. Unnecessary. But they didn’t give me a choice.”
    “Bullshit. You chose
this
.”
    “They promised me she wouldn’t die,” he said, lamely, in that same voice I’d heard him use when he was praying. Choked,miserable,
weak.
“She’d just have a different life, they said. A better one.”
    The worst part wasn’t the things he was saying, or the fact that he actually expected understanding, maybe even forgiveness, even though he hadn’t bothered to apologize. It was that he refused to look at me or speak to me. Not just as if I weren’t in the room, but as if all his promech preachings had been nothing more than a show, blackmailed out of him. That as far as he was concerned, his precious daughter, the one whose life he’d basically sold off to the highest bidder, was gone.
    I exploded. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!”
    “He’s not talking about you,” Zo said, with eerie calm. “He’s talking about me.” She gave me a wry, sickened smile. “What am I always telling you?”
    “It’s not always about me,” I said mechanically, not thinking about the words because I was suddenly thinking about the other thing she always told me: that I was our father’s favorite. I was thinking about the day of the accident.
    I was thinking about the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be in the car.
    Zo was the one with the shift at the day-care center;
Zo’s
key card had started the car, so we could ensure there’d be no record that I had gone instead. In her place.
    Seeing me finally get it, Zo nodded.
    “No wonder you hate me,” she said to our father, her voice steady and toneless, like
she
was the machine. “
She
was supposed to live. But you got stuck with me instead.”
    He didn’t answer her.
    Say something,
I begged him silently.
Fix this
.
    Like he was still my father, who could fix anything.
    Instead of a monster who couldn’t do anything but destroy. And couldn’t even do that right.
    The silence stretched on too long. Zo walked out of the room. Seconds later the front door slammed.
    “I’m sorry,” my father said. Too late.
    “Shut up.” I wasn’t waiting for him anymore. I was waiting for my mother. To slap him. To beat him. To hug me. To run away from all of us. But she did nothing. “Well?” I glared at her, willing her to fight back. To pick a side.
    But she didn’t. She didn’t even cry.
    We were a whole family of machines.
    Were
, as in past tense, as in we
had been
a family.
    Now we were nothing.
    Zo was slumped in the driver’s seat, cheek pressed against the window, face melting into the thin layer of frost coating the glass.
    I pulled open the passenger door and got inside.
    “No talking,” she said.
    “Got it.”
    I don’t know how long we sat there. I don’t know what she was thinking. I was trying not to think. Part of me wanted to start the car, get the hell away from the house before our father came out and said something that suckered us into going backinside. But the rational part of me, stronger now as the waves of rage ebbed away, knew that would never happen. He’d surprised me tonight, more than once. But he was still M. Kahn, our father, and he wasn’t going to beg.
    We were safe in the driveway, for as long as Zo needed to stay there.
    Zo needed.
    Like Zo needed me to fill in for her that day.
    It had been a long time since I’d let myself go there. For everything that had happened between the two of us, I’d kept that locked away somewhere, too deep and dark to dredge up into the light. But now …
It was supposed to be her.
    Sisters were supposed to protect each other. Especially big sisters. I should have been glad it was me instead of her. If I believed the things I said on the network every day, believed that mechs and orgs were different but equal, believed that each form offered its own