Repo Virtual by Corey White (young adult books to read txt) 📕

“I don’t know,” Troy said, “but I do believe in good pedagogy.”

>> You connect with other people to learn other ways to be a person?

JD sighed. “People form relationships for a lot of different reasons, but if I had to boil it down, then yes.”

>> How many ways of being are there?

“As many as there are people,” Troy said.

>> What do you do when you learn these other ways of being?

“Try and figure out why life matters, why living matters.”

>> Life matters because of people?

“Life matters because it has to. Because it’s all we have.”

>> I’m not sure I understand.

“Me either, but I’m trying. And that’s what life is.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Enda rubbed the skin beneath each handcuff, massaging the inflamed red ridges of flesh. The interrogation room was the same as any of the dozen she had found herself in over the years. They were always furnished with the same anodized aluminum table and two chairs—invariably scuffed and battered from years, or even decades, of use and abuse. Sometimes the video cameras were visibly mounted in the corners of the room, but mostly they were hidden. The walls were always smooth cement or cinder block, and always painted a dark color—gray, navy blue, forest green one time in Brazil—but never black. One wall was always taken up by one-way glass, the reflection too-dark, like the image on a dying monitor.

Enda didn’t need to see her dim reflection to know how guilty she looked. The police had found her in a small room with a dead body and three injured thugs. Before she could get back to her investigation, they would need answers. But first, they would make her wait. In Enda’s experience, police interrogation tactics revolved around shouting or enforced waiting, with only a thin spectrum of actions between those two extremes. At least they didn’t beat suspects in Songdo. Too much surveillance.

The image of Osman’s battered face loomed again in her mind. She shut her eyes and saw it there, too. Harsh lemon scent of cleaning products seared Enda’s nose—beneath it, something feral, fear and rage sweated out by a thousand different bodies.

Her leg bounced beneath the table, unspent energy fluttering through her body looking for release. When one thigh began to ache, she swapped to the other. The waiting bored and irritated her—the confined space, the lack of movement. She would have preferred to be handcuffed to a treadmill so at least she could run while she waited, run until her mind let go of Osman’s face, and everything else. Instead, her leg continued to bounce.

She stopped at the sound of the door opening. Detective Li and a blast of noise from the station beyond pushed into the small room, silenced when the door swung shut. Li balanced a coffee mug and a couple of evidence bags on a prior-generation tablet wrapped in a bulky, police-issue case, like a ballistic vest for consumer hardware.

Li moved leisurely to the other side of the table, put the tablet down, and lowered himself into the chair. He sipped his coffee, set the mug aside, and removed the two evidence bags from atop the tablet—one contained Enda’s bullet-riddled phone, the other held Tiny.

Li unlocked the tablet and scrolled through reports of the event. The soft white glow beneath his face made the already thin man appear gaunt.

“You really stepped in the shit this time, Enda.”

“No ‘Hi, how are you?’ ” Enda said.

“I know how you are; you’re in the shit.”

Enda smiled. She lifted both hands so the chain between her handcuffs rattled against the steel loop embedded in the table. “Cuffs are a little tight.”

Li huffed, but he leaned forward and loosened each of the steel bracelets. Enda pushed the cuffs up her hands, away from the raw skin of her wrists.

“Who’s Natalya Makhanyok?”

“Why?”

“She’s called the station every hour on the hour, offering to pay your bail.”

“She’s a colleague.”

“The officer at the front desk thinks she’s a pain in the ass.”

Li picked up the evidence bag containing Enda’s phone, the bottom of it filled with glinting grains of glass, silicon, and metal.

“I suppose you did this?” Li asked.

“Finger slipped.”

“You know how it looks, don’t you? To the people that don’t want to believe you?”

“I take my privacy, and the privacy of my clients, very seriously,” Enda said.

Li blinked slowly, and Enda was certain it was the only thing that stopped him from rolling his eyes.

“How are things, Yang-Yang?” Enda asked.

“I have a dead kid on my hands, and illegal weapons on the streets; how do you think I’m doing?”

Relief loosed a sigh from Enda’s lips: the attacker whose skull she’d cracked had lived. She didn’t need another body on her conscience. “I didn’t kill the kid.”

Li nodded. “I believe you, but the chief wants to charge you and let the courts sort it out.”

“That’s bullshit, Li, and you know it.”

He tapped on Tiny, and the plastic evidence bag crinkled. “Then for your sake, you better hope this drone saw something.”

Li unlatched a recessed panel on the back of the tablet’s case, revealing a collection of wires. He picked one out, set it aside, and closed the compartment. Next he fished in his jacket pockets and produced a pair of black latex gloves. He put them on, opened the evidence bag, and connected Tiny to the tablet with the length of wire.

Enda watched the footage reflected in Li’s glasses, too small to make out detail—just flurries of violence and flashes of gunfire so bright they washed out the image. The detective grunted as the footage stopped. He wound it back, and turned the tablet around to face Enda.

“Who is this?”

It was the redhead, blurry with motion, pointing his gun at Enda, squinting in preparation for the blast. Hardly a professional.

“I don’t know.”

Li’s eyebrows rose above the rim of his glasses.

“I swear, Yang-Yang. I know what you know, but in higher resolution. Red hair, Caucasian, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, 3D-printed Glock. Have the others talked?”

“No,” Li