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Dorothy listened to this speech with wonder. What could the little woman possibly mean by calling her a sorceress, and saying she had killed the wicked Witch of the East? Dorothy was an innocent, harmless little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and she had never killed anything in all her life.
I.
Once there was a little girl who loved machines. Who loved to take apart guns and put them back together, who looked into the guts of broken-down cars and saw the universe, who heard The Wonderful Wizard of Oz once, twice, a hundred times, and knew in her heart that she was Dorothy but loved the Tin Woodman most of all.
Once there was a little girl whose mother was a machine. The little girl lay on the floor of the jungle and watched her mother sew her own wounds up by the fire. Light spit across her mother’s face, her open eyes and smoothed mouth, her mother staring down her own mortality and tucking it away into the crease of a one-day scar. Her mother greater than flesh and blood, her mother’s mechanical hands and the way they always felt wrong somehow brushing the little girl’s hair off of her forehead.
Once there was a little girl whose mother was broken; her mother was a malfunction; her mother was gone. Motorcycles let out their first breaths under the little girl’s hands. Money grew for her in the mouths of ATMs, filled her pockets and told her that she could live forever, because she was born from a machine and she had machine in her blood and it didn’t matter what her foster parents said about her because she knew how to fix her own problems, rewire her own circuits, sew her own wounds.
Once there was a little girl whose mother told her she was the future. Who believed her mother and then didn’t and then did. Who had her mother’s eyes and her father’s nose and the molten smell of her dead best friend in her nostrils and the fate of the world on her shoulders.
Once there was a little girl much smaller than Atlas.
Once there was a little girl with battered grey sneakers she pretended were silver slippers.
Once there was a little girl and the machines wanted to kill her but she loved them anyway, because they didn’t win and they don’t win and by now the girl’s held half a dozen futures in her palm and in none of them have the machines won yet.
II.
“Hey, Janey, could I, uh, discuss my intentions toward your mother?” are Charley’s exact words, is how he and Jane end up shopping for rings together.
Jane probably knows less about rings than he does. When she was in foster care, she let a friend hold her head in her hands and pierce each ear three times with a stovetop-sterilized safety pin, and she likes the metal in her body, likes to twist the backings when she thinks, but rings are different. They slip down drains, get lodged in engines, knock distractingly against guns, destroy manual dexterity, hold you back.
Charley picks her up after school; her mom is working; Jane skips chess club. They eat grease-puddled pizza in the food court of the mall. It feels like they’re going to a movie, like Charley’s early attempts to get to know her. But now he’s gonna be her stepdad. First dad. Because foster dads don’t count and dead dads (not-yet-born dads) probably don’t count, and Enrique only counts on long, hot nights when she lies awake missing the way starlight would pierce the tangled arms of the trees above.
Charley finishes her crusts, gets crumbs all over his shirt, says, “So, Janey, where do you wanna start?”
The woman in the third store they visit glares at them, her bracelets clacking together as she crosses and uncrosses her arms, and Jane doesn’t know if it’s because of her ragged fingernails on the clean glass cases or because the woman thinks Jane is Charley’s teenage bride.
Across the room, Charley studies a display of rings like he didn’t already tell Jane, “They’re all blurring together; you could throw an onion ring in there with them and I wouldn’t know the difference.” He studies the rings and nods and furrows his brow and scratches at his arm so his sleeve rides up and shows the narrow jaw of his tattoo. He studies the rings and Jane studies the rings, studies the layout of the store, studies him.
Charley doesn’t wake up screaming from dreams of fire. Charley doesn’t carry death in the valleys of his palms. For Charley, the future is a ring on her mother’s finger. So Jane picks a ring that surges upward, looks almost warped, looks the most like liquid sliding between fingertips so maybe Charley’s vision of the future and her mother’s will begin to overlap.
III.
“You meet any nice boys?” Jane’s mom asks her after her first day at the new school. Asks like they didn’t just run from a nice boy, aren’t hiding in the desert because their lives got too nice. All the boys here wear cowboy boots and shit-eating grins. They laugh when she raises her hand in computer class—no one has to know she can hack a police database, but she’s not gonna sit there and pretend to have never heard of binary.
Jane burrows her head further into the pillow, brings her discarded headphones up to one ear so she can just make out the rainstorm sound of slow guitar. Backlit by late afternoon sun, her mother looks young, looks like the photo Jane keeps of her from when she was pregnant.
The photo she accidentally left at Charley’s.
Jane raises up on her elbows and says, “What would I want with a nice boy?”
Girls like Cameron don’t talk to Jane unless they want something. Girls with big, rubber band smiles and fitted pink shirts and parents who warned them about the Connors/the Reeses/the Baums, that mother who looks like she’s on heroin, huge dark circles under her eyes, just takes your order without even asking how you are. They don’t talk to Jane unless they’re trying to score drugs or get help with their math homework or make out with her in a dark supply closet because who would believe her if she gave them up?
She’s just a nobody drowning in flannel and hair.
“I like your earrings,” Cameron says as they’re walking into class, her voice like a leaned-on doorbell. Her own earlobes are untouched, but she can’t just want someone to pierce them for her, and Cameron smiles a little too hard at Jane and Jane is tempted to believe that Cameron wants to be her friend.
Then Cameron’s a dead girl on the floor of the classroom. Then Cameron’s an outstretched hand, is Jane’s dead father’s words, is destructive metal body driving destructive metal body. Then Cameron’s wrapped in Jane’s sweatshirt, assuming Jane’s voice, blurring the line between girls like Cameron and girls who are the future. Walking to Jane’s intended death.
Girls like Cameron don’t talk to Jane because girls like Cameron don’t exist. They have all already been killed by Jane Connor’s war.
IV.
Cameron’s fingers are unusually delicate around the eyeliner pencil, smudging her strokes just enough that they look authentically teenage girl. Not like the first few times: the tight, perfect lines you could hardly tell were there.
“Hey. Do mine,” Jane says, jerking her chin up.
Silent stare, feline head tilt, and Jane’s expecting to hear that Future Jane doesn’t wear makeup. Future Jane paints her lips with the blood of her enemies and lines her eyes with the charred remains of skyscrapers. Future Jane snaps eyeliner pencils in half the way she does metal and bone.
But Cameron just says, “Close your eyes.”
The pencil’s so sharp, it catches on her skin. Incisor into tongue. “Do you have to sharpen it every time?”
“We wouldn’t want it to attract bacteria.” Cameron’s next movements are quick, two long slashes along Jane’s lids. “I could do your waterline,” she says when Jane opens her eyes.
“I think I’m good.”
“It might enhance your verisimilitude.”
“Yeah, it might enhance the chances of you stabbing me in the eye.”
“I’m very precise,” Cameron says, but stows the pencil somewhere unseen on her person, follows Jane out the door.
When Jane finds her in the bathroom after third period, Cameron has a plastic disc in her hand and is staring at herself in the mirror. Or pretending to stare at herself in the mirror as she calculates the necessary strength to pull the sink from the wall. Whatever terminators do when they’re quiet and alone. The skin above her eyes is shimmery and orange like tropical fish.
Jane slides up onto the counter, head lolling against mirror, fingers outstretched toward the disc. Cameron’s eyes don’t unlock from her reflection’s, but she lifts the disc higher in the air, a gesture that would be teasing if made by a human hand.
“It’s Rash. It was a gift from my new friend. It’s tight.” Now her eyes cut to Jane, assessing, her mouth slightly open. “Do you want me to put it on you?” She lowers the disc, opens it, coats the tiny brush inside in color and holds it in front of Jane’s face.
Jane hunches her shoulders, pulling the rest of her body up straight with the movement. Crosses one leg over the other. “It’s bright.”
“Teenage girls often wear bright colors. You’ll look tight.”
This time when Jane reaches out, Cameron doesn’t pull away. Her fingers loose and Jane takes the eyeshadow, flipping it around, thumb smoothing over where, “Rash,” is etched into the back. She slips it back into Cameron’s palm.
“Fine. But don’t be surprised if I wash it off, okay?”
“I’m very rarely surprised,” Cameron says, and leans in closer to Jane. “Close your eyes.”
Next to Jane’s hand, a sink drips, dots and dashes, the only sound in the room except Jane’s breathing. No noise from the hallway outside. No noise from Cameron’s body. The eyeshadow brush is a light pressure, makes Jane swallow involuntarily. She grips the sink, edges forward a little as Cameron switches eyelids.
Who’s your new friend? Jane thinks of asking and doesn’t. You’re only supposed to be my friend, Jane really wants to say.
Cameron places a hand on Jane’s chin to steady her, smoothes the eyeshadow with a fingertip.
She says, “You can open your eyes now,” and outside, a girl falls to her death and Jane isn’t there to stop her.
V.
The scissors break on her ponytail, cleave into two daggers that land in the sink. Jane's distracted, temporarily, trying to fit them back together, but they won’t go. When she looks up, her hair falls jagged around her face, and she considers keeping it that way. But it smells like smoke and burnt plastic/skin. But those men held it in their hands like a prize. But she already bought the clippers and when she starts, yes, they are warm against her scalp, their buzz burrowing into the grooves of her brain, and she closes her eyes and fine hairs land on her eyelids.
"This isn't flying under the radar," her mom says, running her hand against the grain of Jane's hair while Jane eats her sandwich on the floor outside the bathroom, one knee to her chest and the other bent to the side. "Some teacher or guidance counselor's going to think it means you're troubled."
"Trust me—" Her tongue presses to the peanut butter on the roof of her mouth— "They'll be more worried if they think I'm not."
She keeps expecting someone to make a G.I. Jane joke; she's opened herself up to one, if not several. But maybe kids her age haven't heard of G.I. Jane anymore. And Derek was/is a kid younger than her age this year. And she wouldn't have programmed Cameron with the knowledge to make fun of her and there are many things her mom doesn't know how to do correctly, but she does know when not to joke.
Derek doesn’t say anything, but he stares out the corners of his eyes when they’re in the same room. Math homework on the table in front of her, rows and rows of questions she could answer in minutes if the teacher didn’t want her to show the work her brain always skips right past, Jane sees Derek watching her. His teeth are together but his lips aren’t. She flicks her pencil away and sits up straighter.
"Does it make me look more like him?"
Derek looks between his knees. "Yeah." Tips his beer back. Meets her eyes. "Makes you look more like Jane Connor too."
In a shop on the pier, by a rack of manhandled magazines, Riley pets the small animal of Jane’s hair and Jane ducks her head like she still has bangs to hide behind, considers that Riley might not have talked to her in the first place if she did. Riley’s hair is moonlight spilling across the desert and Jane wants to wrap it around her own wrists, wants to lean her face into it and close her eyes.
Riley is everything soft, everything safe by some other person’s definition, and Riley definitely knows that Jane Baum likes her.
VI.
Before fire, before Cameron gone bad, before Riley climbing out the window like Wendy Darling, Jane’s mom did chin-ups on the swing set in their front yard. Did chin-ups on doorways, on bed frames, on the shower curtain rods in motel rooms. Managed to break some of those rods, leaving her and Jane to check out through the window in the ocean-wide space between midnight and sunrise.
Jane tried doing chin-ups on the swing set, got to two and saw Cameron watching her through the half-lidded eye of the window and faltered.
She looks at Cameron and sees the future, sees muscles like live wires and elbows like knives, legs hard and slender as shotguns and nails painted the color of arterial blood. She looks at Cameron and sees the vestiges of war. Sees everything she always thought she’d see in the mirror by now.
Jane Baum, like Jane Reese, like Jane Connor, is soft. There’s muscle there somewhere, but it’s buried beneath hips and thighs, the slight jut of her stomach, breasts that doubled in size in the weeks between 1999 and now, skin covered in stretch marks like time travel lightning.
She can do chin-ups, pushups, can take a gun’s recoil and hold it inside of her, can run as far as a threat demands, but when she does those things, she looks vulnerable and human. Like she’s running on pure luck and not tapping into something deep at the core of who she is.
She squeezes her thigh, rolls flesh between fingers, and tries to remind herself that Cameron is a machine. Jane lives on microwave meals and pancakes and hiding and Cameron is a machine.
And Riley likes Jane’s body. Likes to rest her head on whatever part of her is nearest, likes to slip her hands under her shirt for warmth. It’s L.A. and Jane is always wearing a layer of sweat between her shirt and leather jacket, but Riley can never seem to get warm enough, likes to keep her arms around Jane at every possible moment, takes comfort in the stillness of Jane’s body.
Maybe that will matter one day when she’s the other Jane. Being still. Being warm. Being a campfire in the depths of the night.
Riley likes Jane’s body; Riley likes Jane; Riley bleeds all over the bathroom floor; Riley likes Jane until she can’t anymore.
Jane stops pretending not to have noticed the horserace pulse in Riley’s starry wrist every time Cameron got too close, looked too ready to start a war. Jane stops pretending the war isn’t already here.
VII.
An English teacher once told Jane that the point of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was that politics and greed corrupt, so Jane wrote that in her book report and the teacher gave her an A. But the point is that Dorothy was powerful all along, that the Scarecrow was already brilliant, that the Lion was already brave. The point is that the Tin Woodman already had a heart.
Jane’s thighs bracket Cameron’s hips, the fingertips of one hand brushing her ribs. The other hand disappears beneath Cameron’s breasts; her hand is inside of Cameron, and it should feel like the wrong kind of inside, but it doesn’t. She is a part of Cameron. She is touching Cameron’s metal heart.
Her heart that’s giving Jane’s mother cancer, one machine destroying another. “Singularity” fits inside Jane’s mouth but doesn’t escape.
Beneath her, Cameron’s eyes are wide. Her lips are parted. Her breasts are breasts. Jane touches Cameron’s metal heart and no heat escapes, no radiation leaks, but Jane knows how this works.
She has to know how this works.
She loses everyone she loves in the end.
Everyone dies for Jane Connor.
Once there was a little girl who loved machines. Who was born from a machine, saved by machines, told her whole life to destroy machines before machines destroyed her.
Once there was a girl who knew machines could love her back.
Once there was a girl carried very far from home. She stood alone in a cold, dark basement with only a jacket to keep her safe. But then came light and then came ghosts and the jacket was not just a jacket but for the first time she was just a girl; Jane Connor didn’t exist.
Once there was a girl who had never killed anything in all her life.
Once there was a girl who would never believe that was true.