Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman

person I had always been. I was Lia Kahn. And I was going to do what Lia Kahn always did. Get by. Get through. Work. Win.
    I wasn’t a skinner. I wasn’t a mech-head. I was Lia Kahn. And it was about time I started acting like it.
    One week later they sent me home.

FAITH
    “God made man. Who made you?”

    S omeone must have tipped them off, because when we got home, they were waiting.
    Getting into the car was hard enough. When it lurched into motion I curled myself into a corner, shut my eyes, and tried to pretend I was back in my room on the thirteenth floor, standing stil . I wasn’t afraid of going home. Lia Kahn had nothing to fear from her own house. It was just the ride—the pavement speeding underneath the tires, the sat-nav whirring along, veering us around a corner, a tree, a truck…
    I linked in, picked a new noise-metal song that I knew I would hate, turned the volume up too high, and waited for the ride to end.
    Except that when the car stopped, we stil weren’t home. The music faded out, and a new voice shrieked inside my head. “An abomination! We shal al be punished for her sins!”
    I cut the link. Opened my eyes. A sal ow face stared through the window, mouth open in a silent howl. When he saw me watching he extended his index finger, and his lips shifted, formed an unmistakable word. “You.”
    My father, behind the wheel even though he wasn’t actual y using it, pounded a fist against the dash. The horn blared. My mother stroked his arm, more a symbolic attempt to calm him down than anything that actual y had a prayer of working. “Biggest mistake they ever made,” he muttered. “Programming these things not to run people down.”
    “Honey…” That was symbolic attempt number two. Except in my mother’s mind, these things actual y worked; in the fantasy world she inhabited, her influence soothed the savage beast.
    “I should plow right through you!” he shouted at the windshield. “You want something to protest? I’l give you something to real y protest!” They crowded around the car, pressing in tight, although not too tight. The legal y required foot of space remained between us and them at al times. They planted themselves in front of the car, behind it, al around it, blocking us in, so we had no choice but to sit there, twenty yards from the entrance to our property, waiting for security to arrive and, in the meantime, reading their signs.
    “I’m sorry, Lee Lee,” my mother said, twisting around in her seat and reaching for me. I pul ed away. “I don’t know how they found out you were coming home today.” Their signs were hoisted over their shoulders, streaming in red-letter LED across their chests, pulsing on their foreheads. Jamming the network so we couldn’t cal in reinforcements.
    GOD MADE MAN. WHO MADE YOU?
    FRANKENSTEIN ALWAYS BURNS
    BREATH, NOT BATTERIES
    “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.”
    My father cursed quietly, then loudly.
    “Just close your eyes,” my mother suggested. “Ignore them.”
    “I am,” I said, eyes open.
    My favorite sign depicted a giant extended middle finger, with a neon caption:
    SKIN THIS!
    It didn’t even make sense. But it got the point across.
    My father fumed. “Goddamned Faithers.”
    “Apparently we’re the damned ones,” I pointed out. “Or I am.”
    “Don’t you listen to them.” My mother flicked her hand across her console and my window darkened, blotting out the signs. But it wasn’t the signs I’d been watching, it was the faces. I’d never seen a Faither, not up close. Before the accident, I hadn’t even seen much of them on the network. But after…Somehow my name had ended up on a Faither hit list. Until I fixed my blockers, they’d flooded my zone with al the same crap about how I was a godless perversion, I was Satan’s work, I didn’t deserve to exist. But I hadn’t expected them to come after me in person.
    Religion went out of style right after the Middle East went out in a blaze of