Page 107 of Made for You
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...