Free Torn (Cold Awakening) by Robin Wasserman Page A

without protective gear and a significant risk of fatal exposure. It’s all ours.”
    “Ours, as in you’re asking us to move in?” I said. “
Here?
Generous as always, Jude. But there’s no way in hell.”
    “And you’re the boss, right?”
    If he’d been hoping to bruise Riley’s masculinity, he was disappointed. Riley just looped an arm around me and grinned. “What else is new?”
    So Jude took a different tack. “We don’t have to talk about the future now. There’s still plenty of ground to cover in the past.”
    This was it, then. Jude was going to blast us for betraying him. He’d lured us to this heap of ruins so he could toss us into some abandoned bomb shelter, lock us up, throw away the key, move on with what passed for his life. And Riley and I, never aging, never dying, would spend the rest of eternity locked up together—how many days and years of apologizing would it take for him to forgive me, out of sheer boredom if nothing else?
    But it was Jude who apologized, to Riley. “I didn’t expect you to get caught in the explosion.”
    Riley shook his head. “Not your fault. I’m the one who wired most of the explosives. My fault I did it wrong.”
    I watched Jude’s face carefully, but of course he was no helpless org, hostage to unconscious emotional responses. No eyebrow lifting, no eyes widening, no dropped jaw. Whateveremotion he did reveal would be intentional, theatrics. For now he stayed blank. “Wrong?” he echoed.
    “I’m just glad no one got hurt,” Riley said.
    “You got hurt,” Jude said.
    “I mean orgs.”
    Now Jude did lift an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that the point?”
    Riley looked uncomfortable. “You wouldn’t have done it.”
    Jude nodded, slowly. “Because you would have stopped me. That was the plan, right?”
    “There was no plan,” I said quickly.
    “I would have stopped you,” Riley admitted.
    “Lucky that it didn’t come to that,” Jude said, watching me. “That would be awkward, wouldn’t it. If
you’d
set the secops on me. You’d probably be standing here wondering exactly how much I hated you. Whether I’d spent the last six months plotting my revenge, or some such melodramatic scenario.”
    Riley gripped Jude’s arm. “You know I always have your back. Like you’ve got mine.”
    “Always,” Jude said, and disengaged himself, gently but firmly. “Must be strange, not remembering.”
    “Yeah.”
    It was something else I’d never asked him. I’d waited for him to bring it up in his own time; he hadn’t.
    “Feels like another person, you know?” Riley lifted a hand in front of his face, turned it slowly like he was searching for cracks in the synthetic flesh. “Guess it kind of was.”
    “Nice model.” Jude gave Riley another slow once-over. “Expensive.”
    “Worth it,” I said, curling an arm around Riley’s waist. He didn’t shrug me off, but he looked like he wanted to.
    “Too expensive,” Riley said.
    We never talked about the fact that his new body had been bought with my father’s money. Not since he’d first found out, and freaked.
It doesn’t mean he owns you,
I’d told him.
    But now he owns
you,
doesn’t he?
Riley had said.
Was that worth it?
    After that, we put it on the ever-expanding list of Subjects Not to Be Discussed.
    “So the last thing you remember … ,” Jude prompted.
    “That night before we went to the temple,” Riley said. “We went over the plan one last time, then I uploaded, and then—it’s blank. But Lia filled me in on everything else.”
    Jude’s smile had turned predatory. “I bet she did.”
    “Something you want to say, Jude?” It popped out, though I knew better. That happened around him.
    “Nothing I haven’t already said. Welcome.” He rubbed his hands together, disposing of the unseemly business. “Let me show you around.”
    He guided us through the dark wonderland of gutted buildings and shattered glass; it made Riley’s city look like a paradise. Leave it to Jude to