Wired (Skinned, Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

people, I believed her.
    "Are we done here?" I asked.
    "The vidlife techs are waiting next door to remove the implant and give you a once-over," call-me-Ben said. "Under my supervision, of course."
    "And then--"
    "And then, yes, you're free to go."
    "I'll wait for you at the car?" my father said.
    It was new, this habit of asking instead of telling--or rather, an unconvincing hybrid of the two.
    I shook my head. "I'm meeting Riley."
    "Oh. Of course." No amateur would pick up on the disapproval behind the curt response, because all of my father's responses were curt. But when it came to deciphering the stormy moods of M. Kahn, I was a pro.
    "Don't forget it's Thursday," he added.
    "I won't," I said, though I had. "But maybe this once ..."
    Someone else's father might have brushed it off with a smile and given her a free pass out of the weekly family dinner, just this once. My father, in the old days, would have shaken his head and forbidden it. Now? The worst of both worlds: "It's entirely up to you whether you choose to keep your word."
    Checkmate. "I'll see you tonight."
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    * * *
    One last door between me and freedom, between the bowels of BioMax and the great outdoors. But I stopped before pushing through it, preparing myself.
    He won't be there, I thought. He saw everything I did, and he won't care that it was fake.
    Or he'll believe that it was real. He'll think that was me.
    Or Jude got to him first.
    If he wasn't out there, I would deal. Riley wouldn't be the first thing I'd lost. If I could survive without my friends, without my sister, without my body, I could certainly survive without him. That's what I told myself.
    Please, I thought.
    And I stepped through the door.
    Here's the thing about perfect kisses.
    They're worth crap.
    Fun, maybe. But it's not like they mean anything. All that melting into another person, lips fusing, souls meeting, romantic garbage? Trust me, your soul is not sitting in your tongue, waiting to take an all-expenses-paid vacation into some loser's mouth.
    You want a metric that matters, a way to measure exactly how much of a person belongs to you?
    Try the perfect hug.
    Riley's arms were around me before my feet hit pavement.
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    He lifted me off the ground, his arms strong and steady at my waist. I locked mine around his neck and lodged my face in the hollow of his neck and shoulder. For the first time since the vidlife began, I relaxed, went limp in body and brain, and let someone hold me up.
    "Miss me?" he whispered, and just like that, Jude's words in Riley's mouth, it was over.
    I stiffened; he let go.
    I searched his face for some sign that he was playing me, that he'd talked to Jude. But there was nothing lurking in his expression. Which maybe meant he was asking if I'd missed him because he honestly wanted to know.
    "You have no idea." It sounded like a lie. So I kissed him. Kissing Riley was rarely electric or breathless or heart-stopping or any of the criteria I'd used to catalog kisses back in my org days. It didn't make me forget myself. But it helped me remember him, and all the ways his body curved to fit against mine. Kissing Riley wasn't just about the mechanics of it, the probing and nibbling and sucking--it was about building a wall between us and the world. It was proof that we still made sense.
    But it couldn't last.
    "It's Thursday night," I said, flicking my eyes at the ViM temp-tattooed to my left forearm. My newest toy, the razor-thin virtual machine could access the network three times faster than any of my other ViM interfaces, but so far it had
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    mostly proved useful for surreptitiously telling the time. "If I don't go soon, I'll be late."
    Riley dropped my hand. "I thought we were going to hang out?"
    "I can't skip dinner. You know that's part of the deal."
    I could have broken my word, run away. Riley had his new body, and my father couldn't take it away. Riley had--only once--suggested I could come live with him, in the former servants' quarters he was