Chapter Two

A spring wind lifted Melissa Quinn’s hair off the back of her neck and threw it over her shoulder as she walked across the quad. She smiled as she brushed the light brown tresses out of her face and thought about the cute guy who sat behind her in Eastern Civilization. He was smart, good-looking, and he had even picked up her books one time when she had dropped them. Maybe one of these days she would have enough courage to introduce herself.

Reaching her dorm, Melissa threaded her way through a crowd swarming the front steps and continued walking down the hallway. With spring break approaching, it looked like the very first day of the fall semester in the enormous building. Some students were scurrying back and forth dragging heavy suitcases while others lounged in doorways with red plastic cups in their hands.

College life had been intimidating at first. Coming all the way here had seemed like a mistake on her first day. Everyone was different from the people back home, and she didn’t know a soul. Melissa had spent the first night in her dorm room quietly crying and wishing she could be back in her bed. Going out of state to get the college experience wasn’t worth it.

But after the first week, Melissa had realized that her experience was only going to be as good or as bad as she made it. JoAnna, her roommate, was outgoing and boisterous. She dragged the poor country girl out to every party she knew of, and Melissa slowly became more and more comfortable around the crowds. Within a few weeks, she was dressing differently, using new phrases when she spoke, and staying up late with friends instead of studying.

Melissa knew that she wasn’t a completely changed person. She preferred to err on the side of caution when it came to partying, and she never put herself in a situation where she wasn’t comfortable. There was always a ride waiting for her and she had a standing policy to never to slip off alone with a boy.

“Melissa, what are you going to do for spring break? You should head down to the beach and show off your hot body!” The voice belonged to Doug, a cousin of one of the other girls in the dorm. He seemed to be everywhere and hit on anyone who passed by.

Even though he wasn’t singling her out, his comments still made Melissa blush. She could feel her cheeks burning as she walked by, looking at the floor instead of up into Doug’s handsome face. “No, I think I probably won’t go anywhere.”

“That’s cool. I was thinking about staying here myself.” He left the door he had been leaning on and followed her down the hall. “There are going to be tons of parties around here. You and I should hang out sometime.” He took a swig from a beer bottle.

Doug was following her too closely, and Melissa could feel the heat of his body. He was definitely hot - there was no question of that. She’d seen him strip off his shirt after he had consumed a couple of drinks and was eager to show off his abs. If Melissa was honest with herself, she had wanted to reach out and run her fingers down his washboard abs. But he wasn’t the kind of guy she wanted in life. To Doug, she was just another girl.

“I forgot, I think I’m going home for the week.”

“You don’t want to do that.” Doug reached out to grab her waist. He spun her around and forced her to face him. “Going home is boring. There’s no action there.” Doug pressed his body against her, ostensibly to let someone else get through the narrow hallway.

Melissa flattened her hand against his chest, trying to protect herself while simultaneously fighting to ignore the hard muscles underneath his thin t-shirt. “You’re right. There isn’t. And that’s just the way I like it.” She managed to disentangle herself from his body. His fingers brushed across her hip, but she imagined it was an accident and rushed into the sanctuary of her dorm room.

As it turned out, her room wasn’t safe either. The cute guy who sat behind her in Eastern Civilization was inside. To be more specific, he was on her bed. Melissa blinked and swallowed, wondering if what she saw was real. The image in front of her didn’t change when she opened her eyes. She had no choice but to accept it.

JoAnna was on the other side of the room on a different bed. Other students lounged around on the couch or rug. Another one sat backward in the desk chair. They were all focused on a video playing on someone’s phone.

“What are you guys watching?” Melissa’s voice sounded tentative.

JoAnna, a plump girl with thin hair that was always slicked back into a ratty ponytail, patted the mattress next to her. “What do you think? Something is happening with the cyborgs again.”

Melissa’s stomach lurched. She had heard a lot about these creations who were something more than human. She had seen the documentaries about how they had started out as donor bodies and surgeons converted them into killing machines. When her parents learned she was leaving the farm and heading for a bigger city, they started warning her about the danger of these creatures. They were intimidating and unpredictable. If she had it her way, she would never run into one.

The person broadcasting on the phone wrapped up her story. “Groups of Liberators are forming all over the country protesting the totalitarian actions of Purity Force.”

“Wow.” JoAnna’s pale eyes remained focused on the tiny screen. “That’s quite a surprise to me. Nobody has ever stood up to Purity Force before.”

“It’s about time if you ask me.” The cute guy was speaking. Melissa stiffened as she remembered that he was in the room. “It isn’t right to round up the cyborgs like cattle and kill them all. Some of them are dangerous, but there must be good ones and bad ones.”

“Melissa, you know Jake, don’t you?” JoAnna smiled and winked at her. Melissa had told her roommate about her crush many times.

Shaking inside, she tried her best to play it cool. “Oh, yeah. You’re in one of my classes, aren’t you?”

Jake nodded and stood, holding out his hand for her to shake. “Yeah, Eastern Civilization. I sit behind you.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” Melissa smiled. She was thrilled to be talking to him, but she didn’t want to be doing it in front of a group of people. “What are you doing here? I mean, not that you can’t be here. You just surprised me.”

JoAnna stood up too. “Jake and his friends are thinking about starting a local Liberation group. It sounded interesting to me, and I invited them over.”

“We all have a passion for something.” Melissa knew almost nothing about the Liberators. She’d heard her friends mention the group in passing, but she usually tuned them out when they started talking about it.

“We’re planning an official meeting tonight at the student center. You should come and hear what everyone has to say. You might be interested in it. I’ve got to go now, bye.” In a flash, he and the other students vanished, leaving Melissa and JoAnna alone in their room.

“I’m sorry about that!” JoAnna slammed the door and leaned against it. “I was talking to him about the Liberator stuff, and I was trying to figure out a way to get him over here at the same time as you. I didn’t intend for you to waltz in here and find the man of your dreams sitting on your bed.”

Melissa glanced at the spot on her mattress where Jake had been sitting less than a minute ago. It felt like it had been a dream, but she had his image burned into her mind. He had long, dark hair pulled back at the nape of his neck. The hairstyle paired perfectly with his wireframe glasses and the smart set of his mouth. He was exactly the type of guy she had imagined she would fall for if she went away to college. Not only were they on speaking terms, but he had even been into her room and touched her bed! “It’s okay,” she mumbled. “But next time, shoot me a text. I like to be prepared.”

“You might not have to worry about it.” JoAnna had a huge grin on her face. “If you start going to his meetings, you’ll see him all the time. I bet you’ll be the one inviting him over before long.”

“Do you think I should go?” Melissa finally took off her backpack and dumped it on the floor at the foot of her bed. “I don’t know anything about cyborgs.”

JoAnna shrugged as she flopped down onto her mattress. “I don’t think that matters. It’s going to be like any other club around here. Everyone wants a lot of warm bodies so they can feel important. All you have to do is show up, nod a few times, and yell when everyone else yells. It should be a piece of cake.”

Melissa decided to take her roommate’s advice and made her way across campus to the student center in the evening. Her stomach trembled from both nerves and hunger, but she couldn’t eat a thing. She passed by rows of vending machines without a second glance, knowing that whatever food she tried to force down would just be coming up again.

Judging by the size of the gathering in her dorm room, Melissa thought the meeting would be small. She imagined five or six people hanging out to talk about Liberator stuff, which meant she would get plenty of alone time with Jake. Her hands were trembling.

As she walked around the final corner and entered the meeting, Melissa stopped in her tracks. She spotted Jake immediately, sitting at a table and speaking enthusiastically to another student. But there were more than a handful of people here. There were enough to fill the entire room.

“I’m impressed,” she muttered under her breath as she looked for a seat. She hadn’t expected lots of people to be interested in cyborgs.

“Melissa! Thanks for coming. Over here!” Jake had spotted her, and he gestured for her to join him near the front of the room.

“You’ve got quite a turnout tonight.” Melissa had no idea what to say, but she needed to say something.

“Isn’t it great?” Jake rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. “I knew you and I would be here, but I never thought it would be like this. There are so many people here who believe in the cause, just like you and me.”

She tried not to grimace, unwilling to start an argument in a room full of cyborg aficionados. Melissa wasn’t sure releasing the cyborgs was a good idea. They were designed to be killing machines and would never be anything more. But she was prepared to say whatever it took to make Jake happy.

“Take a seat right up here by me.” Jake pointed at the chair adjacent to him, and Melissa obediently sat down. “We’re going to start up in a minute. Do you have anything you want to tell everyone?”

Feeling like she might pass out from the pressure of public speaking, Melissa shook her head. “No thanks. I think I’ll sit back and watch for the first meeting.”

Jake nodded. “That’s a good idea. Keep an eye on the crowd for me and see how they react. We’ll learn what we can do better next time.”

Melissa nodded dutifully, even though that hadn’t been what she had meant at all. She didn’t care about what people thought they could get out of these stupid meetings. She only wanted to watch Jake so she could see what he did and how he thought.

“All right, everyone. I’d like to get this party started. Please make sure you’ve signed the guest book. It’s right over here on this table.” He pointed to a little table near one of the doorways. “It looks like it’s just a notebook. Maybe it is for now, but if this group grows, it will become more than a collection of papers. We aren’t like everyone else. We’re not bloodthirsty assholes who think only those exactly like them should be allowed to live.”

The students turned around and watched Jake with mixed reactions. Some sat up, bright eyed and interested, while others reclined in their chairs with dull eyes. Melissa wondered if they had accidentally wandered into the room.

“What about the cyborg who raped a woman?” someone asked from the back. “Do you think he should have the same rights people do?” Several students nodded their heads in agreement.

Jake had apparently prepared for this question. “We can’t judge the cyborgs as a whole based on the actions of just one of them. Rape is not a new crime. Plenty of humans have broken the law, and in worse ways than the cyborgs.”

The student questioning him seemed satisfied with the answer, and Jake continued talking. “When I was a kid, we had a new neighbor move in down the street from us. He was a single man, and I could tell right away that he was a little bit different. I couldn’t figure out what made him so unusual. The other kids in the neighborhood didn’t want to have anything to do with him. They would run when they had to pass in front of his house, screaming things like ‘Metal Man’ or ‘Hungry Robot.’ I’m ashamed to say that I was one of them.”

Jake looked more confident the longer he spoke. His hair shone in the bright lights of the room, and he seemed at home in a university setting. Melissa could easily imagine him becoming a professor or a philosopher. She had already lost any interest in the crowd and had eyes only for Jake.

“Over time, I came to understand that my neighbor was not so strange. He mowed his lawn on the weekends like everyone else. He went to work and came home in the evening like my father. At Christmastime, he even put lights out in his yard. I started waving to him when I rode by on my bike. He always waved back. My dog escaped from the yard, and my neighbor brought him back to me. I came to understand that he was my friend.”

He started pacing in front of the table as he spoke. Melissa admired the fact that he didn’t notice if a few students weren’t listening. Jake had a story to tell, and sharing it was all that mattered to him.

“If you couldn’t guess, my neighbor was a cyborg. Last year they took him away. Purity Force showed up in the middle of the night with flashing lights and blaring sirens. They dragged my neighbor out of his home. They threw him in the back of a van, and I never saw him again.”

Melissa had heard plenty of stories about what the cyborgs did wrong, but nobody ever talked about what they did right. She had never heard about them acting like regular people. That probably wasn’t an interesting news story. She sat up in her seat, eager to hear more.

“You all know about Purity Force and the eradication project. Every day, we take cyborgs to the slaughterhouse. Their only crime is existence. They didn’t make themselves. We did this to them. We created them, and now we think we can kill them. Are we gods? I say that we should no longer support these vile acts. Who’s with me?”

The crowd had gained interest, and they started to show their support with hollers and cheers. Melissa was proud of Jake. He had taken something that hurt his heart and turned it into something good. It didn’t matter that she’d had nothing to do with the debate over cyborgs until five minutes ago. She was prepared to follow Jake, wherever the path took her.

“Thank you.” Jake bowed his head. “Your support means everything to me. I promise you that this is only the beginning.”