Now

Eden's arms fly around me as my legs buckle. She's too small to hold my weight, and my knees crack against the tile as she sags to the floor with me.

"Julia!" she cries.

With a groan, I clutch my chest, then pitch forward. The fever is cresting. I can't speak. I can't breathe. I think I'm dying. And for the first time in my life, death sounds like good news.

Annaleigh, something inside me screams. You can't leave her! You have to survive!

But I'm no longer in control of what happens.

I pass out. When I come to, I'm in a fetal position on the floor. Eden is shoving my shoulder, and I roll onto my back. The ceiling is stunningly bright.

Her voice is scared, intense. "I'm going to give you CPR, Julia."

I think about that billboard.

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."

I'm about to ask if she's sanitized the meat thermometer, but I realize it doesn't matter. Once my dampers are off, infection won't be a risk anymore.

"Here, open," she says, putting a long wooden spoon between my teeth. "Bite if you have to." She takes a deep breath, and stabs the back of my neck. A shriek peels out of me like ripping skin, dissolving into a long whimper. Blood pours down the sides of my neck.

"God," I swear, the word distorted by the spoon. I blubber saliva and tears together as my shoulders convulse. I never want to feel anything like that again.

"Fuck," says Eden, agitated. "Fuck. Okay, I'm trying again. I'm sorry, Julia. I'm sorry. Hold still!"

Another stabbing pain pulls a scream from my throat as I bite into the soft wood. My hands clench the edge of the towel even as I feel a sickening click. It doesn't stop hurting, though. A hundred times worse than the fever. A thousand. The pain is a mallet, slamming my skull to pieces. My moan turns into a growl. I can't bear it. I can't.

Eden talks fast, and there's rapid typing. "I'm looking for your pain damper. I'm going to reduce it as soon as possible, okay, Julia? First I have to get past all the fucking security. I'm going as fast as I can."

The next minutes may as well be hours. My teeth grind against the spoon. It's torture holding still and letting it continue when I want to reach back and rip the meat thermometer out of my skull and then stab Eden with it. Type faster, I want to scream. Make this stop.

And then, suddenly, a cool feeling washes over me. Like a wave rushing over a beach cluttered with seaweed and broken shells, then retreating, leaving clean sand behind.

"Did you feel that?" Eden says, breathless, and I know that despite her strong reservations, she's excited, too. Excited about what I can be without the garbage that was littered all throughout what could have been perfection.

"Yes," I say, and exhale. The pain is gone. Completely. And not just the excruciating fire in the back of my head, but the fever. Gone are the spots in my vision, the swollen throbbing in my ankle, the pain in my breast. Even the memory of it all is gentling. I shift on the towels. "What did you do?"

"I shut off your pain receptors. I'm not going to leave them off for long, okay? That would actually be more dangerous for you, long-term. Some pain is a necessary warning system. But I'll keep the volume low."

"Make me strong, Eden," I say, nearly weeping from gratitude.

"Synthetic skin can self-heal within seconds. That damper's coming off next." There's more furious typing. Eden mutters, "You're going to be a fucking superhero when we're done."

I let her work.

The sensations are strange and wonderful. I wiggle my fingers and I can already feel the difference. It's hard to describe, because my fingers weren't particularly in pain before she adjusted me, but now they feel...purposeful. Clear. Even my thoughts are clicking faster.

I think about the Julia I've been these past days—hunted, dirty, confused. Sloppy with exhaustion, foggy with pain, hounded not only by Mitchell but by her own physical needs, her weakness like an enemy living inside her body. I feel like I'm stepping out of her. Not like I'm someone different, exactly. I'm still the Julia who loved and lost Josh, still the Julia who's going to give her everything to protect Annaleigh—but that old Julia has become someone to be pitied. A girl wearing a costume of thorns she couldn't find the zipper for.

I think of every time my weakness held me back, and I want to cry, because it shouldn't have held me back. I think back to The Proposal. It took me so many watch-throughs, but I found the fault line. The moment that everything went wrong.

It was the attack. After they saw me bleed—that's when they came close. Not before. Not when I was strong. I had to be damaged to make everyone else feel safe. I had to be diminished for them to love me. For Josh to love me. That's when I should have tasted the poison in the well, but instead, I drank it down and called it sweet.

It was implied at every turn that this pain was what made me a person instead of a machine. What made me worthy of acceptance, of love. But they were wrong. I feel just as much like a person now as I did minutes ago. I've merely been unshackled from the lie that has plagued my entire existence. The haters, in a way, were right. I was never a real woman, because my reality was an imitation of what humans feel. Like my pain during childbirth. Unnecessary. I told myself I am what I am. But that wasn't true. A thousand dampers were stopping me from being what I am.

A deep, joyous thrill runs through me. I want so badly to move—to stretch—to feel this strength running through me, the strength that was there all along, just muffled, crippled. This is me. Humanity was a pipe dream, and I could only ever be an imperfect imitation. This is my reality.

"You're fidgeting," says Eden sharply.

A sudden bleep cuts through the silence.

"What was that?" I say, suddenly terrified Eden will hit a security wall and all of this will go away. I can't return to the dark place I just left. I won't be dragged back, I won't—

"Blue alert," says Eden. "Is this your license plate number?" She moves her phone so it's right in front of my face.

"I think so." I guess I'm not driving Christi's car again. But a setback that might have seemed crushing just a little while ago, now doesn't seem to matter.

What matters now is making sure I can defend myself against Andy when I confront him.

"I need you to override my No Harm coding," I say.

Eden makes a deep mmm sound. "Can't. The coding is provided directly by the government. It's like a brick wall. If we so much as breathe on it, your entire system shuts down."

I bite my lip and try to hold still, even as questions explode in my brain. If my No Harm coding is intact, how was I supposed to kill Josh? And how did I hurt Eden?

I sink back into the moment when I grabbed Eden's arm and squeezed. What was I thinking? My baby, helpless...

Of course. The key to everything.

Annaleigh.

It's amazing how the removal of these dampers has freed up my thinking. I feel like I've been wearing blinders my whole life.

"It was the Leighton Clause, wasn't it?" I find myself saying. "The part of my coding that was going to trigger me to kill Josh." I could almost laugh at the simplicity of it.

"Yes," Eden says, obviously impressed. "No Harm is black-and-white. But the Leighton Clause is an ethical algorithm. There's a lot more flexibility to ethical decisions. We got authorization to update it for you, since you're the first Synth who can procreate. Basically, the new piece we wrote for your algorithm feeds off the intensity of your love for your baby. If Josh was abusive, you would truly feel as if Josh was personally attacking Annaleigh, and whether or not she was present, you'd kill him under the guise of defending one human from another."

"But the first time it happened, I didn't do anything," I say.

"Right. We had to pass a lot of testing. We couldn't have you react that first time."

Or the second.

"It was supposed to be the third time, wasn't it?" I say.

"Yes," says Eden. "It also felt more, like, fair. To give Josh multiple chances."

And yet...there was never a third time. Andy killed Josh before that happened.

But why? If one more instance of abuse would have made me kill Josh, why wouldn't Andy just wait patiently? Why not let me be the murderer he designed me to be?

A very small doubt pricks at me, and I find that suddenly, I'm not entirely certain that Andy did kill Josh. I have the blue gel pen in Josh's tent and a history of deceit. But Andy the liar, even Andy my designer who wanted to avenge his sister, isn't the same as Andy personally murdering Josh, lopping off his arm, and disposing of his body.

If I'm going to exact justice, I have to be fucking certain I'm right, lest I become the very monster Andy made me to be.

When Eden is done, the kitchen is an oasis of light in the dark condo, and a glance at the microwave clock tells me it's close to eight. Rising from the kitchen floor is a revelation. I never knew my body could feel this way. I wash the blood off in the bathroom sink and make a fresh ponytail. It's strange to see myself looking so healthy, so beautiful. The bags under my eyes are gone, my cheeks are rosy, my gaze sharp. I'm the picture of strength, and I absolutely love it, because this is the mother Annaleigh deserves.

She doesn't need me to be weak to love me. And for her, all I want to be is strong.

"What now?" says Eden when I come out of the bathroom.

"I find Andy," I say.

Eden pulls a set of car keys from a hook by the door and tosses them to me. I catch them.

"He's still on campus. Take his car." She crosses her arms over her torso. "And, Julia—this has to be temporary, okay? Removing the dampers, I mean. It's just to get you through tonight. Then they have to go back on. Okay?"

We look at each other. I don't answer.

Then I step close to her and kiss her cheek. She's soft and smells like pot. Earthy and alive. She really was a wonderful babysitter for Annaleigh, and we'll both miss her.

I squeeze her arm and give her one last smile. "Goodbye, Eden."