Read Online Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman - Free Book Online Page B

exposed by her backless shirt. I didn’t know how she could stand it. Even at night I tried to cover up as much as possible. The more of me I could hide under the clothes, the less there was for others—for me—to see. Beneath the clothes I could imagine myself normal. Quinn, on the other hand, left very little to the imagination. She stalked out of the room, but paused in the doorway, tapping her fingers against the wal console. Lights off, lights on. Lights off. “You coming?”
    I was.
    “What are you doing?” I whispered as we waited at the elevators. “It’s not like they’l work for us.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because…” Wasn’t it obvious? “We’re not supposed to leave here. The elevators are probably programmed.”
    “Have you actual y tried?” Quinn sounded bored, like she already knew the answer.
    “No, but—”
    “I have.” The elevator door opened, and as I hesitated, she asked again. “You coming?”
    It had never occurred to me that I would be al owed to leave floor thirteen. Of course, it had never occurred to me to want to.
    “The other floors are biorestricted,” Quinn said, nodding toward the skimmer that would col ect and analyze our DNA samples. If, that is, we’d had any to give. “But the ground floor’s al ours.”
    “Where are we going?” It felt strange to be talking to someone new after al this time. I had no reason to trust her. But I did.
    It’s because she’s like me, I thought. She knows.
    But I pushed the thought away. It was like I’d told Sascha. Quinn and I had nothing in common but circuitry and some layers of flesh-colored polymer.
    “Field trip.” She smiled, and, again, it kil ed me how much better her expressions were than mine, how much more natural. In the dark it had been easy to mistake her for someone real. No one would make that mistake about me. “Don’t get too excited.”

    The grassy stretch bounding the woods was larger than it had looked from the lounge window. The grass was beaded with dew, cold drops that seeped through the thin BioMax pajamas, but that didn’t bother me. Just like the brutal wind raking across us didn’t matter.
    “Can you imagine actual y seeing the stars?” Quinn asked. She’d selected a dark swath of grass sandwiched between the floodlit puddles of light, then stripped off her clothes and let herself fal backward, naked against the brush. I kept my clothes on my body and my feet on the ground.
    At least at first.
    “Get down here,” Quinn had commanded.
    “Look, Quinn, it’s okay if you…but I don’t—”
    She laughed. “You think I brought you out here for that ?” She stretched her arms out to her sides and down again, stick wings flapping through the grass. “Shirts or skins, I don’t care. Just lie down.”
    I wasn’t about to take orders from her .
    But I lay down.
    “You used to be able to see them. Stars and planets and a moon,” she said now, pointing at the reddish sky.
    The back of my neck was already smeared with dew. But she’d been right. It felt good to lie there in the grass, in the dark. The sky felt closer.
    “You can stil see the moon.” The tel tale white haze was hanging low, making the clouds shimmer.
    “Not like that,” Quinn said. “A bright white circle cut out of pure black. And stars like diamonds, everywhere.”
    “I know. I’ve seen.”
    “Not on the vids,” she said. “That doesn’t count.”
    “It’s the same thing.”
    “If you say so.”
    We were quiet for a minute. I stared up, trying to imagine it, a clear sky, a mil ion stars. Most of the vids I’d seen came from just before the war turned the atmosphere into a planet-size atomic dust bal . The dust was mostly gone—along with the people who’d built the nukes and the nut jobs who’d launched them and the thousands who’d gone up in smoke in the first attacks and the mil ions who’d been dead by the end of that year or the next. Along with the place cal ed Mecca and the place cal ed Jerusalem