Skinned -1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

much it costs, no matter how long it takes. If my mother could keep her skin looking like she was twenty-two, if Bliss Tanzen could show up with a new nose to match every new season’s shopping spoils, a few scars were nothing. Maybe I’d even keep a couple. Becca Mai had a delicate white fault line running down her cheekbone that she claimed came from a close encounter with jagged glass on some il icit venture into the city. Everyone knew Becca Mai was too prep to sneak out of the house and too petrified to sneak into the city, and Bliss had spotted one of those home tattoo kits on Becca’s shop-log, just before it mysteriously got edited out. But guys stil loved her sexy little shiver as they traced their fingers down the scar. Becca gave good shiver.
    I could do better.
    “Lia, if you want to see, you’re going to have to open your eyes.” The doctor’s voice didn’t quite match up to his pretty face. I liked voices lower, a little husky. Of course, Walker was nearly a tenor. Carved cheekbones, a tight six-pack, and a girl can get used to just about anything.
    Anything, I told myself. And then, deep breath.
    Eyes wide open.
    I didn’t know computers could scream.

NOTHING
    “I was a ghost in the machine.”

    T he lips, I thought. Focus on the lips.
    Because they were normal. Pale pink, washed out. Curved into a half pout. A glimpse of white teeth barely visible, straight and whole. It was a mouth, a normal mouth.
    Just not my mouth.
    The nose, too. It was a nose. Narrow, nearly sharp but not unpleasantly so, no bumps or hooks, delicate nostrils, a gentle slope up the face toward the—
    No, not the eyes.
    Don’t look at the eyes.
    No scars. No burns. It wasn’t the Hal oween fright mask I’d imagined. It was…perfect. The skin was unmarked, stretched taut and smooth across the face. A stranger’s face.
    And the eyes. The eyes that weren’t my eyes. Pale, watery blue, unspeckled iris; black, motionless pupil; and at the center, a pinprick circle of amber. Unblinking. Dead.
    But when I closed one eye, the eye in the mirror closed, too. Brown lashes brushed against a too-smooth cheek. I opened the eye, and the mirror eye opened. It was dead. It was mine.
    Which meant that what lay above it was mine, too. Blondish brows with a high, perfectly plucked arch, like they’d been penciled in. A wrinkle-free forehead. And above that?
    The machine.
    Scalp flayed back. A mess of circuitry, like when Zo was five and cracked open my new ViM because I wouldn’t let her use it. Wires spooling out of my head. Wires feeding into my head. Silvery filament crisscrossing a waxy, flesh-colored base.
    It wasn’t until the computer fel silent that I realized I was stil screaming. But now the screams were just inside my head.
    What else was inside my head?
    “Try to calm down,” said the first doctor, the ugly one. The mirror was gone, but I couldn’t stop seeing the face. “I’l turn the speaker back on, but you have to stay calm, for your own good. Let us explain. Can you do that?”
    As if I had any choice.
    One blink.
    I forced the screams back inside myself.
    “This is why I didn’t want you to see at this stage,” the doctor said irritably. “Cranial exposure is only necessary until we confirm neurological stability. Once the skul cap is attached and the hair—”
    “What did you do to me?”
    Dr. Handsome shot the uglier guy a look that made me realize who was real y in charge. And he was the one who final y answered. “We saved your life.”
    “What did you do?”
    No one spoke.
    My mother lifted her head from my father’s shoulder. She looked me in the eye. Not the forehead, the eye. She wasn’t crying anymore. “You know about BioMax,” she said. “You remember.”
    I knew just about as much as I cared. Which was very little. BioMax, some biotech subsidiary of my father’s corporation, hyped on the vids the year before with some freaky new tech that—
    “No.”
    I knew.
    “We had to,” my mother