Winston takes out his phone and taps the screen a few times before putting it away. “You’re all set.” He didn’t ask my address, proving my earlier point.
“I’ll wait outside,” I say.
Winston doesn’t try to stop me. When I’m on the sidewalk,I keep my back to the house in case he’s watching me from the window.
I accept that in this instant, Winston Weeks’s goals align with my own. But how long will that last? Until he uses us up? Until it’s no longer convenient for him?
When it comes down to it, something that Leandra once said resonates with me.
No one will care what happened to us at Innovations Academy, she said.We’re not human. We don’t have any rights. She smiled.All we have is our will.
And my will is strong.
A car pulls up and I get in. The other girls are probably waiting for me. I agreed to meet with Raven to discuss the possibility of her help. Part of me wants to change my mind and tell them all to forget it, but after meeting with Winston … I’m still not convinced that he didn’t have something to do with my hacking. I have no idea who he’d send to do the job.
Who is the woman in my head? Is she real?
And if so, which side is she working for?
14
When the car pulls up to my apartment, I see Sydney sitting on the front porch of the house. Her long legs are stretched down several stairs as she studies a phone in her hands. She looks up and notices me, furrowing her brow when I get out of the town car.
As I approach Sydney, she motions to the vehicle pulling away.
“Where were you?” she asks. “Also, this is yours.” She holds out a phone, and I take it and sit next to her on the stair. “Way more expensive than I thought,” she adds. “I hope we hear from Leandra soon because we’re starting to run out of money.”
“I’m sure she anticipated that,” I say. “She knows there’s someone else here to fund us, maybe even set us up to have to ask.”
“You’re talking about Winston Weeks,” she says. It’s not a stretch to think that Leandra manipulated us. Giving us yet another reason to seek out the investor. Work with him.
I slide the phone into my pocket and turn to her. “I went to see Lennon Rose,” I say quietly.
Sydney wilts. “Without me?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t wait. I thought … I thought I could convince her to come home to us. She shouldn’t be staying with Winston.”
“And how did she respond to that?” Sydney asks, sounding hopeful.
“We didn’t get the chance to discuss it. Winston was there.”
Sydney’s eyes widen. “You saw Winston Weeks? Are you okay?”
I tell Sydney everything that Winston and I discussed. She’s equally shocked about his history with Leandra, but she agrees the money shortage could be deliberate.
“As much as I hate to admit this,” Sydney says, tapping her lower lip, “he might be right.”
I scoff. “Who, Winston? About what?”
She crinkles her nose as if acknowledging it offends her, too. “About collecting information,” she says. “It’s essentially the same thing Leandra said. We were okay with her doing it. So why is it different that Winston is carrying it out?”
She’s not wrong. Leandra does want the same thing, with the exception of putting Winston in charge of everything. She didn’t share that part of the plan. I thought once we got the information, she’d use it to convince the investor to stop funding the corporation. We never talked about the larger implications. We certainly never talked about putting Winston Weeks in charge of the country.
But we didn’t ask who would make this deal with the investor. How we’d ensure the ideas of Innovations Academy didn’t repurpose themselves in some other way once we got it shut down.
We thought we’d find the information, and then, somehow … we’d just be free. Free to live our lives. It was naive.
“He told me that society would destroy us if they knew we existed,” I say in a quiet voice. Sydney turns to stare out at the street. “He … he compared us to toasters.”
