Skinned -1 Read Online Free PDF Page B

and smooth; useless. Somebody else’s hands, resting on somebody else’s legs. The flesh was unnatural y smooth, just like the skin on the face. There were no creases and whorls, no subtle shifts of color or thready blue veins beneath the surface. I wondered if there were fingerprints.
    One of the men grabbed me under the armpits and hoisted me off the bed. He looked like the type of guy who would have bad breath, and for a moment his mouth was close enough to mine that I could have smel ed it, if I could have smel ed anything. I was wearing a sleeveless paper-thin blue gown, loose around the armholes. His hands pressed bare skin, or whatever it was. He could probably see down the front of it if he’d wanted to. I didn’t care. It wasn’t my body under there. It was a thing. A thing I couldn’t feel and couldn’t move, a thing I was trapped inside. It wasn’t me.
    He didn’t peek. Instead he dumped me into a high-backed wheelchair and fastened a belt around my waist. Then another around my forehead, pressing my head against the seat and fixing my eyes straight ahead. Through it al , he never looked at my face.
    The pretty doctor, who got less attractive every time he spoke, told me to cal him Ben. He wasn’t actual y a doctor, he said. Which made sense. Doctors took care of people, right? Sick people, injured people. People. I wasn’t one of those, not anymore. Thanks to Ben . My mechanic.
    Cal -me-Ben wheeled me down a long corridor. I couldn’t feel the body, couldn’t feel the seat. It felt like I was floating through the hal , just a set of eyes, just a mind, just a ghost.
    My parents stayed behind. My mother said she couldn’t see it again. It, she said. My father didn’t say anything, but he stayed with her.
    “We’ve kept it in cold storage for you,” Ben said from behind me. “Most clients request a viewing.”
    It.
    We wheeled into a narrow room, its white tiled wal s lined by silver plates. Ben pressed his palm to one, and it slid out of the wal , revealing a long, metal panel bearing a sheet-covered lump. A body-shaped lump. “You sure?” Ben asked, guiding the wheelchair into position. “This can be difficult.” I couldn’t stand to hear the computer speak for me, not here. Not now.
    I blinked once.
    He began with the feet. Foot.
    The flesh was red and ruined, gouged. Mottled with deep, black scabs. There were thick streaks of pearl white, as if the skin had calcified. Or maybe the flesh had been flayed and I was looking at bone. The knee was bent at the wrong angle; the other leg was gone, ending just below the thigh, swirls of dried blood and charred flesh winding around one another, like the rings of a severed tree stump.
    The sheet drew farther back.
    I wish I could say I didn’t recognize it, that it was some monstrous mound of skin and bones, broken and unidentifiable.
    It was. But it was also me.
    I recognized the hips jutting out below my waist, always a little bonier than I would have liked. The dark freckles along my col arbone, stil visible on a patch of skin the fire had spared. My crooked ring finger, on the arm that remained intact, a family quirk my parents had chosen not to screen out, the genetic cal ing card of the Kahns.
    My face.
    The burns were worse there. Pockets of pus bubbled beneath the skin. One side had caved in, like my face had been modeled from clay, then crushed by an iron fist. The left eye sagged into a deep hol ow. My lips were gone.
    There was a gray surgical cap stretched over my head.
    “The brain?”
    I felt as dead inside as the voice sounded.
    Cal -me-Ben sighed. “You don’t want to know the technical details.”
    “Try me.”
    He did.
    He told me how the brain—my brain—was removed.
    Frozen.
    Sliced into razor-thin sections.
    Scanned.
    Functional y mapped onto a three-dimensional model, axons and dendrites replaced by the vector space of a quantum computer, woven through with artificial nerves, conduits that would carry impulses back and