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"I'm not like-- I mean . . ."
    "Not like us," I said, biting back the If you say so. " That's okay. I really do get it. Been there, done that." I traced my fingers along the silvery streaks rimming my neck. I hadn't embraced the freak-chic thing as much as the others. But to the newbie, I knew it was irrelevant. I was one of them; he wasn't--he thought. "Maybe you'll make it work."
    Maybe you'll be back.
    Absolute control, Jude always said.
    If I'd had that, I could have stopped thinking. About Jude's double. About my double. Out there somewhere with the same body I'd have until I got up the credit and the nerve to trade it in for a new one, custom-made. About whether Jude's double was right: if it was different for him and if that meant it could have been different for me. Which inevitably led where everything always led, straight back home to the damage I'd done just by being me--or, more accurately, not being me: perfect daughter, perfect sister, perfect girlfriend, perfectly breakable. The crash broke me; I broke everyone else.
    Control meant never looking back, never questioning why I had walked away. Wiping out the memory of their faces: My father, pretending he didn't look at me and see a corpse. Auden, bandaged and pale, his eyes willing me away--first from the room, then preferably from the planet. And Zo's face the last time I saw her. That was the one I kept coming back to. Tell me I'm your sister , I'd begged that last day. I kept seeing it: Zo's face when she didn't answer. And I kept wondering: What if I had waited? What if I had stayed?
    But that would have been selfish. I had accepted that. Forcing myself into my old org life, into my old org family-- it would have ruined all of us. If I'd understood that earlier, Auden would have been safe. And if I'd ignored it, if I'd stayed, given Zo a chance . . . she might have been next.
    So don't think about it, I told myself every day, all day. Forget.
    I had control, I thought, imagining Seth and Quinn writhing in the pool, locked in the shared dream that would give them a few hours of escape. I had control but not enough of it.
    My room was nearly bare: just a chest of drawers, a flat-screen ViM striping the wall, and a bed. The latter was unnecessary; I could shut down just as easily with my back against the wooden floor. All it took was an internal command, and the world went away. For a while, I'd experimented--shutting down while standing up, hanging upside down, dangling out the window. In the end, I preferred the bed.
    I lay down and took out the dreamer Jude had given me. The dreamers were nothing more than code, bits of data that overrode our neural homeostasis and threw our systems into a chaos that simulated physical and emotional response. Almost like jumping out of a plane, but more effective. Because they were just programs, they should have been reusable, but for whatever reason, no dreamer ever had much of an effect after the first few uses. Just one of the things no one, including Jude, understood about what they did to us. We all had our theories, but in the end, we just crossed our fingers and flicked the switch.
    I hadn't had a fresh one in weeks. I'd promised myself I wouldn't, not anymore. It was too easy--and it made waking life too gray. Like nothing was as real as the world inside your head.
    I flicked the switch.
    When I was alive, I dreamed in stories.
    They weren't real, of course. Org dreams are nothing but random neural firings, spurts of color and unprompted emotion. The story comes later, in that instant before waking, your muddled mind making sense of the chaos by stringing the randomness into a narrative.
    Mech dreams were different. There was no once-upon-a-time. No faces, no nightmares. No flying.
    There was:
    Rage.
    Soft.
    Wild.
    Scared.
    Bliss.
    Raw jolts of emotion as if there was no body, no bed, no Lia Kahn, only the roiling froth of joy grief terror pain joy .
    There was no "I."
    "I" was an illusion, evanescent, a null spot at