She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go with you.”
• • •
“It doesn’t smell like cookies,” David said.
“Is it supposed to?” They sat in a small waiting room in a ramshackle two-story house turned body-mod parlor. They’d taken two buses to get there. It smelled like antiseptic, like hospital, scents Sophie tolerated only because her brother had asked her to do this thing with him. She hated hospitals, but at least this visit wasn’t for her, and it wasn’t a hospital, not exactly.
“The BNL clinics always smell like fresh-baked cookies. I think it’s supposed to make you relax? I always found it forced. Like, hand me a cookie if there are cookies, or don’t make me think about them.”
“Maybe it works better on people whose parents bake? Hmm . . . now I’m thinking about cookies, so thanks a lot.”
They both went back to examining the room and presumably thinking about cookies. David browsed the articles and licenses on the walls. He’d been surprised to find this wasn’t some clandestine operation. Maybe even disappointed? She couldn’t tell. If she were in his shoes, she would want to know that the person working in her head had every available certificate, diploma, license, and credential. The law that had allowed BNL to open minor brain surgery clinics outside the traditional hospital setting had paved the way for places like this to legitimize as well.
“David?” A pink-wigged, blue-scrubbed woman with a Star Trek–style series of bumps embedded in her forehead stood in the doorway to the back room. “You missed a question on the intake form. Do you want the light deactivated as well as the implant?”
Sophie shot the nurse a narrow look; she wished the woman didn’t have a Pilot. “Wait—you can turn off a Pilot without turning off the light?”
The nurse nodded. “A lot of people like that option. The light is superfluous. Branding. Leaving it on gives the impression they still have Pilots, so they don’t face the pressure and questions. We don’t take them out here in either case—that’s a far more invasive surgery than just snipping the leads, with way higher risks.”
A strangled noise died in Sophie’s throat. She looked at David, daring him to keep it. He had already taken advantage of every benefit the stupid implants had to offer; it would be just like him to keep the social cachet that came with the Pilot while deactivating the Pilot itself.
He sat silent for a long minute. Sophie could tell he’d made his decision when his chin lifted right before he spoke. “Turn it off. I don’t need it anymore.”
The nurse made a notation on the form, then held it out to David to initial. “Do you want your friend to come with you?”
“My sister.” He stood, looked at Sophie, gave a shaky smile. “Nah. I’m okay knowing she’s out here. Let’s do this.”
Sophie gave him a thumbs-up, but he’d already turned to follow the nurse, so she grabbed a scrapbook off a corner table and started paging through different mods Dr. Pessoa and her staff had performed, ranging from the subtle to the freaky. She wondered what her moms would think if she came home with a septum piercing or a unicorn horn. She was old enough that it was her choice, and she’d always had a high tolerance for pain, but none of that felt like her thing. Maybe a tattoo someday; that reminded her of the art she used to hide under her bed. She went through the book categorizing mods into “maybe,” “no,” “hell no,” and “whoa.” Some categories overlapped.
She’d never have imagined she would be in a place like this with David. David was the most by-the-book person she knew: a follower of orders, a follower of order in general. She didn’t know if he’d changed and she hadn’t noticed, or if this circumstance was extreme. It felt like the latter.
David returned in less time than she’d expected, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. She studied his face. “How do you feel?”
He shrugged. “Massive headache. It was just a local anesthetic, so I’m not too out of it.”
She didn’t push him to say more. He was quiet on the ride home, too, and followed her as they switched buses, like he was trusting her rather than paying attention for himself. He took out his phone and stared at his Pilot app a couple of times. At one point, he reached out and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a brother who wasn’t the poster boy for the company she spent her life fighting. Would they be friends? Neither of her moms had siblings, and neither did Gabe, so she didn’t have any models for it other than books and television and movies.
On the second bus, she looked up to see a picture of him in his uniform staring back at them. Real David had his cap pulled low, but at least one person was pretty sure it was him, was poking her friend and whispering. How fast would BNL pick a new spokes-shill? Sophie tried to catch David’s eye, but he had his shut tight.
David sagged into the couch the second they walked in the door. No military bearing; a heap on the couch, hands over his face. His cap fell off his head, and he didn’t bother to retrieve it. He had an adhesive bandage over his shaved temple, but a blue light still shone through it.
Sophie yelped. “You didn’t do it. Why did you make me think you did?”
He dropped his hands to his cheeks and opened one eye. “I did it. This headache tells me so. Look, if you don’t believe me, I can
