It was dark by the time I got home. If it had been cold before, the air now was like breathing frost. I bumped up the lighting in my eye implants as I hopped off the board and locked both it and my bag into its security bracket with a quick scan. I didn't honestly think the corpless would make it all the way out here without being caught by our patrols, but my mother had always been worried about living outside the CBD.

I took a few slow breaths. Despite the cold, I was sweating. My body knew what was coming, even if I'd been trying to ignore it. Both of them would be home by now. It was going to be ugly. The Auctioning would hit them just as hard as it had hit me. And then, on top of that, I'd have to tell them I was leaving ANRON. That I was going to try to sell myself to MERCE.

I strode up the short path quickly so I couldn't think about hopping back on my skimboard and programming it to go anywhere but here, this small innocuous house with its thin walls and its empty silences. The scan read me before I could knock. The door slid open and I heard my mother's steps hurrying down. She was close. She must have been tracking my UConn.

"Maddie!" she exclaimed, as if in surprise. A rush of artificial warmth swept in from behind her. She took my face in her rough, cracked hands and I felt the fragility of her skin pressed against my cheeks. "How much did you go for?"

I opened my mouth . . . and nothing came out.

Luckily—and as she was very good at doing—my mother completely misinterpreted my silence. "Oh, of course," she laughed. "You want to tell us at the same time. Well, hurry up then! Your father's waiting."

She floated away, giddy with excitement. I followed her through the hallway and into the kitchen like I was going to my execution. I paused at the edge of the dining room and waited for it to connect to my UConn. It was currently dark to me: I could barely see the outline of my father sitting at the table, waiting for us. And then suddenly it synced. The room lit up in whites and blues—ANRON colors—and the scent of roasted chicken hit my senses like a punch to the mouth.

Dad rose. "Maddness!" he laughed. The nickname was enough to make me suddenly feel three years old again. I hugged him, pressing my face briefly into the rough fabric of his vest. I felt his fingers shaking lightly across my back. He pulled away and grinned. "I hope you're hungry. We bought your favorite."

I was starving. But I was also nervous, and the combination made me feel nauseous. One glance told me that my mother had splurged on PERCO's premium range. My heart sank. I loaded up my plate and gamely shoved a whole spoonful of the paste into my mouth. The moment it hit my taste implants, I closed my eyes.

"Thank you," I said, and I could only hope that she could tell how much I meant it. "It's delicious."

Mom relaxed, smiling. For a while, it felt like the sound of spoons scraping plates was all there was in the world. And the taste brought me right back to the time I'd scored at the top of the Experimental leaderboard for six months running. Dad had taken me skimming—I'd laughed as he'd tried to gamely outrace me. Mom had bought dinner and we'd eaten it overlooking the river.

I swallowed past the buttery thickness now and felt the knot in my chest ease. Maybe everything would be all right. Maybe the food would work its magic and put us into that pleasant, sated state where we didn't have the energy to argue, and I'd just tell them and they'd nod and accept, and then everything would be . . .

"So, how was your Auctioning?" Dad blurted out.

My daydream imploded. I put my fork down, took a breath, and then choked for a moment as the taste of herbed butter threatened to come back up.

"Honey?" Mom frowned. "Are you all right?"

I coughed. "No," I said, and the honesty felt good: like puncturing a blister. "It was terrible," I said flatly. "I didn't even get called."

I took another breath. Dad stared back at me, stunned. Every part of him was still except for his shaking hands. I didn't even want to look at my mother. I could already see her wide, reddened eyes, her pale lips working as the words fought each other to get out first. I forced the rest of mine out to stop her. "So I'm going to put myself up for private sale tomorrow. To MERCE."

Silence.

Dad lowered his spoon slowly. It shook as it went down, crashing against the plate and the table. Mom clasped her hands together and looked down at them, like she was praying. I gaped at the both of them. I'd run this scenario over and over in my head for the last ten years. I'd expected yelling. Pleading. Stunned silence, followed by blistering lectures on how I didn't know what was best for me, how I'd never understood, how ANRON would save us all. But not this. Never this. Not this limp, useless grief and this feeling of unshed tears thickening the space between us.

"What?" I asked. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. I could almost taste the meager scrapings of hope I'd managed to gather together die at the back of my mouth. "What is it?"

It was my mother who spoke. Each word came out as if she were dragging it behind her, a corpse. "I'm sorry, sweetheart," she said. And I knew immediately that whatever it was, it was worse than I'd thought. "I'm sorry, sweetheart," she said again. "But you can't sell yourself. Ever."

She said it with such finality that it floored me. I couldn't let it go. "Why not?" I demanded. "What's stopping me?"

Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd used glasses for years, until he'd gotten promoted and ANRON had installed him with their inbuilt lens technology. But he still pushed up into empty air as if expecting to find something he could adjust to make the world look better. "Your license," he said heavily. He didn't look at me, unlike my mother, who looked as if she wanted to transfix me with her bitter eyes and her grief and her absolute conviction that nothing was wrong. "We . . . we couldn't have you. We tried for years. And then, because we'd been with the Family so long, ANRON offered us a special program."

At the back of my mind, a lot of things clicked into place. The extra tests. The way my scratches and the injections healed in an hour. I'd known it was odd that I healed that fast, but I'd just put it down to whatever they'd been injecting me with and then forgotten about it.

But that was at the back of my mind. At the front, there was something more insistent, more horrified, and more betrayed.

"How could you?" I whispered. The chair didn't feel real below me. I stood up. I loomed over them. I didn't care. "What about me? What if I'd . . . you should have left me that choice! You should have known that I might not want to be a walking lab rat for the rest of my life!"

"Is that what you think we are?" My mother trailed off, like she couldn't bear to even voice the words. There was horror in her voice, buried underneath the shock, and it made me cold and ashamed all at once. She raised a shaking finger. "Do you remember what that collar means, Madeline? You have a duty to ANRON. To this city. ANRON's working to save us, to keep Unilox alive, and you want to play with machines?" Her voice failed again. She shook her head, her eyes growing brighter. It gave me time to take a breath, to transmute the shame to fury and the cold to rage. I heard her through a hollow cave. "You can't run away from what you are, Madeline. You're special. This was an opportunity that we . . ."

I cut her off. I had no control of my mouth. The words just spilled out like barbed wire. My father disappeared. I almost didn't notice him go. My world was my mother's face and the conviction shining from her eyes.

"An opportunity?" I snarled. "An opportunity for what? To be experimented on until I end up like you and Dad? Too broken for them to use, so I'm left to rot in admin until I die and they can dissect me?"

I knew even as I said it that I was being hateful. That the words were hitting too close to home because they were true. But my mother had never let the truth get in the way of anything. "So would you have rather been sold to DRAYTH?" she snapped, standing up as well. "Picking dirt off the streets or, ANRON forbid, being sent down to the mines?" Her tearless eyes just made it worse. "Or would you rather be a corpless? Living off trash and taking charity from PERCO?" She stopped and took a breath. I had to look away from her. She was still dressed in her ANRON uniform, and the DNA brand gleamed in the light "If you ever get hurt, ANRON will look after you. No other Corporation can say that. And we couldn't . . . . Can't you see? We wanted you. We wanted the best for you."

There was a roar at the back of my skull. I felt like I was fighting the wind. Suddenly I was more tired than angry. They'd meant well. They'd always meant well. I couldn't look at her anymore, so I buried my face in my hands. "Then why even bother?" I whispered. "Why make me go through the Auctioning at all? The tests?"

"It's still the moment you become a full citizen, Madeline," she said. "It's still how they value you. Just because there was only ever going to be one bidder . . ."

I shook my head. "But I wasn't even on the list."

For once, my mother didn't have an answer. The silence thickened around us. I squeezed my eyes shut. It didn't make any sense. Nothing made any sense . . .

Except that maybe I'd never been meant to get to Unilox Hall.

I sat up.

"What is it, Madeline?"

My mouth worked. I couldn't say the words. I could only see the pieces falling together, even though I still couldn't see the picture they made. The extra injection. The way the Testers had kept me running, long after everyone had left. Dr. Yulisa waiting for me. "Once you're cleaned up," she'd said, "I need you to go to room 538." Why?

My father came back. I only noticed when something heavy thudded on the table in front of me, jolting me from my thoughts. "Here, Maddie," he said. He sounded broken, defeated by the yelling. "Your license."

I forgot what I'd been thinking. I stared at the thick mountain of paper, almost afraid to touch it. I'd never seen my license before, even though I guess part of me must have known that it existed. Just like I'd never seen my birth certificate, but I still knew that I was alive.

Or at least I thought I did.

I read. The pages were full of thick, legal jargon that hurt my eyes. Jake probably could have told me what it all meant after about two minutes of skimming. But not me. I held it in my hands and felt the weight. I could have killed somebody with it. And as I flipped pages and saw black text eating up almost every single inch of white space, I felt the shivers start. Words sprang out at me like titles: The Infant Product. Product Education. Product Nutrition. Product Management Regime. Product Maintenance. It felt like I was reading a MERCE manual, like I was learning how to assemble myself. Bits of my life spun out at me, regulated and planned from before I was born. I checked the date printed neatly on the right hand corner of the page and it took me a second to calculate. It was a good two and a half years before my first birthday. They had been planning this—planning me—for a while.

My hands felt cold. My supposedly special body fumbled with the pages. The sheer volume of the text and the blank incomprehension with which I read it was overwhelming. I flipped back and forth uselessly, scanning over the same words but not seeing them, trying to find something that confirmed what my parents were telling me. That I couldn't escape. That I was bound to ANRON forever.

It was only by sheer luck that my eyes fell on the small print. It was just after the indecipherable table of contents, running across the bottom of the page in tiny, precise lettering: The Product shall remain the property of ANRON Life Limited at all times. The receivers of the contract—including the Product once it is of age—are mere licensees. No resale of the Product is authorized under any circumstances.

No resale of the Product is authorized under any circumstances.

I put the contract down gently on the dining room table, turned around, and walked out.

Nobody came out after me.

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