Page 106 of Made for You

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Page 106 of Made for You

What will happen to me when my body stops working?

Do I have a soul? Will it rise?

Or will WekTech just turn me back on again? Override the system failure and force me back into this burning skin, this ruined body with its goddamn weakness tattooed deep like an evil spell?

Eden is leaning her small hands on my chest, pumping, but I barely feel the pressure. Tears slip down my cheeks as she tries to drive the life back into me. But I don’t want to be kept alive just to keep feeling this pain. How can I make Eden understand I don’t want this anymore?

On her heels by my side, she looks like a child. Affectionate and endearing and hapless—my sweet babysitter whose biggest fault was that she liked weed a little too much.

But not everything is as it seems.

An anguished spark lights inside me.

A final, desperate thought.

“Dampers,” I gasp.

“What?” says Eden, stopping her efforts.

“D—” I’m shaking so hard. My teeth feel like an avalanche of rocks in my head. “D-dampers.”

“I can’t. You don’t understand what would happen—”

I hiss through my teeth. I want to tell her that she owes me. That this is her chance to redeem herself by undoing the nightmares she wrote into me. But all I can manage is, “Help.”

“You don’t understand, Julia. It’s not like you’re online and I can just get in there. It would be...invasive. Painful. Not to mention there are walls and walls of security.”

“Alca—” I whisper. It feels like my eyes are burning holes in my own sockets, that’s how hard I’m looking at Eden. “Alcatraz.”

The meaning washes over her face and I know she knows what I’m talking about. Alcatraz, sci-fi version. If anyone can hack into me, it’s her.

“That was years ago...that was just his cell phone...”

Hot tears are rolling down my cheeks, blurring the world even further—this beautiful, horrible world I didn’t choose to wake up in.

My final plea is another single word. All I can manage. My very heart, spoken. “Annaleigh.”

There’s a moment of silence. I can see the scales between us, reflected in Eden’s tortured expression—and the moment they tip in my favor.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, we’ll try.”

I blink my eyes once. I think she knows I mean Thank you.

Then Eden’s demeanor changes. All of a sudden, she’s not a kid anymore.

“There’s a connection point to your programming at the base of your skull. That’s the best place to go in. It wasn’t ever supposed to be accessed—it was just a precaution. And I don’t have anesthetic, Julia, it’s going to be really—” She hesitates. “Painful.”

“Andy,” I croak.

“He’ll be on campus until late, but we still need to hurry. This isn’t a button I can push, okay? We’re talking about layers and layers of extremely complex coding. This is hours of work, and I’m not even promising—” She stops herself. “I’ll get towels.”

She turns on all the lights in the kitchen and lays towels down, with a pillow to drape my head over. My fever is still raging, and the world swims as Eden pulls my hair off my neck. She has her laptop on the floor next to the towels, scissors, and a computer cord with one side snipped off. Next, she strips the plastic around the cord’s cables with a paring knife. There’s a meat thermometer next to her, too, and I can’t seem to avert my eyes from how fucking big that metal stick is. I watch as she threads the stripped cable to the stick so that when the stick pokes through, the wires will be coiled at the tip. Shoved into me—and connected to the invisible parts that both make me who I am and have prevented me from being who I could be.

“Ready,” Eden says, plugging the USB end of the cord into her computer.

She takes a minute to steady herself. Then she rolls me over onto my stomach. Her fingers explore the back of my neck, and I feel the cool tip of a marker making a tiny X.

“I’m going to need you to hold really fucking still, Julia.”


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