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proclamations were more like bullets, hitting their target almost before you realized the gun had gone off. “He’s not like us.”
    “Not good enough for us, you mean. I know you’re thinking it, so you might as well say it.”
    At least he still cares,
I thought.
At least he still thinks I deserve the best.
    “I say what I mean.” He pressed his fingertips together, brushing the base of his chin. A shadow of beard was growing in gray. “And I mean: Be careful.”
    “Riley would never hurt me.” It had been too good to be true, I thought, this silent truce between us. If he ordered me to stop seeing Riley, I would have to choose. I would have to choose Riley. “If you would give him a chance …”
    “You mean well,” he said, “but you’re naive, with limited experience of the world—”
    “Limited experience?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw something. “In the last year I’ve been kidnapped, blackmailed, and arrested, not to mention
dead
.” He winced, and I averted my eyes. He wouldn’t want me to see the moment of weakness.
I
didn’t want me to see it. “I think I’ve got experience covered.”
    “That’s not the kind of experience I mean,” he said. I was looking down, so I didn’t see him reach for me. But I felt his hand on my shoulder, its steady weight. “You’re young. You don’t understand that there’s such a thing as too much difference. Things can be … difficult.” Then he sighed. “But I suppose you’ve earned the right to figure that out for yourself.”
    I looked up and met his gaze, surprised.
    “What were you expecting me to say?” he asked, with a hint of a smile.
    “Nothing. I was—Nothing.” Suddenly, I wanted to hug him. Not in gratitude or relief, or anything like that. But because I remembered how it used to feel, when I was five years old, when I was ten, to be walled off inside his arms, hidden and safe. “I’ll probably be home late.”
    “As long as you come home.”
    “You don’t need to say that every time I leave.”
    He hesitated. Also unlike him.
    “It’s good. Being back home,” I said, since he wasn’t going to.
    “Well, whatever happens, I hope you’ll remember that.”
    I tapped the side of my head. “Computer brain, remember? We never forget.” It wasn’t true—mech brains were no more reliable than orgs’. But as a lame joke to leaven the mood, I figured it would do.
    He didn’t laugh.
    I wanted to go back to Riley’s place, somewhere we could be alone, with walls separating us from the rest of the world. Buthe didn’t want to, and I didn’t press. You could fit twenty of his apartments into the Kahn house, and he could do that math as easily as I could.
    So we drove into one of the Sanctuaries, a wooded space guaranteed to be empty at this time of night given the late autumn chill, the rain, and the smog so thick you could barely see the trees. The patrols wouldn’t even bother hunting for trespassers; this wasn’t a night for orgs.
    Riley had a blanket in his trunk, and he laid it down in the dirt, as if our mech bodies were too delicate to sit in the damp, rocky soil. But I appreciated the effort, and I appreciated his body curling around mine, his face hidden by smog and night but still
there
. I pressed the back of my hand to his cheek. Solid. Real. All I wanted was to sit there with him and not talk, not act, for the first time in two weeks. I wanted everything to
stop
.
    “Sorry about my father,” I said. “He’s … you know.”
    “An asshole?”
    I couldn’t blame him for thinking it. “He doesn’t mean it.”
    Riley laughed.
    “Let’s just forget about it,” I said, sliding my hand down his chest. “I’ll never drag you back there. Promise.”
    He stiffened and pushed my hand away. “That’s how you want to play it?”
    “What?”
    “Like you’re doing me some kind of favor?”
    “It is a favor,” I pointed out. “You hated tonight, didn’t you?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “So why