Wired (Skinned, Book 3) by Robin Wasserman

answers some other way.
    Or just drop this altogether.
    "I must still be asleep, because obviously I'm dreaming this."
    I flinched, nearly knocking a glass picture frame off the desk. It wasn't a photo of Zo and me--since the accident, all photos of his daughters had been quietly but thoroughly expunged from the house. The face in the glass was our mother's, years younger, her smile shockingly real.
    Zo stood in the open doorway, backlit by the hall light, her shadowed face unreadable. "I know Daddy's golden girl would never sneak into his holy sanctum. Invasion of privacy? Violation of the sacred Kahn Family Law?" She shook her head. "Clearly I'm hallucinating."
    "Shhh! Please."
    "Right." She wasn't whispering. "Wouldn't want to wake him. Wonder what he'd say."
    "When I told him I caught you sneaking through his stuff? Yeah, I wonder."
    "Like he'd automatically believe you over me? Like you're so trustworthy and I'm so--"
    "That's not what I meant."
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    "Yes it is."
    Yes, it was. But I hadn't meant to mean it.
    "And you were right." She laughed. There wasn't much humor in it. "You know, you'd be a lot more tolerable if you'd just own your inner bitch." Zo stepped into the office. "Like you used to."
    "I was not a bitch!"
    Now she laughed like I really had said something funny. "Right. And neither was I."
    "Well ... I wouldn't go that far."
    "I blame genetics," she said. "Look where we came from." Zo joined me at the desk, peering down at the blank ViM screen. "So, what are we looking for?"
    I didn't answer--I was stuck on that word, "genetics," the one that seemed to imply, in her mind, some common thread linking us together.
    "Well?" Zo prodded. "Or should I call our father down to help?"
    "No!" She'd said "we." It didn't guarantee I could trust her, but it meant I could try. "There's something on there that I need to find out."
    "I'm going to need more details, if you want me to find it for you."
    "No point," I said. "He's got a thumbprint lock."
    "Of course he does," Zo said. "Which is why I"--she pulled a strip of clear adhesive off the underside of his desk--
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    "keep the nanotape imprint easily accessible. Sure you don't want to tell me what you're looking for?"
    I gaped at my sister, who, last I checked, had slept through every comp-sci class she'd been forced to take. Where had she learned about nanotape? And where had she gotten her hands on some?
    "Well?"
    "Stuff about the accident," I admitted. "Anything you can find."
    "Somehow I don't think Dad's the type to write weepy poetry about his personal tragedies, if that's what you're hoping for," Zo mumbled, but she entered in a password, pressed the nanotape to the thumb pad, and the screen flashed to life. Zo bent over the keyboard and began typing furiously, whipping through files with dizzying speed, not just the obvious news vids and porn, but locked subroutines that unleashed hidden archives and multilayered data dumps.
    "I didn't know you were so good at this stuff," I said, because it seemed easier than asking why she was helping me.
    "When did you know anything about me?" Zo said, with a flash of anger. She didn't look up until her fingers stopped flying over the keyboard. "There. Done. Everything."
    Everything included several files that my father must have thought he'd deleted. Maybe he'd slept through his comp-sci classes as well, or at least the one where they'd taught that most fundamental of rules: Nothing is ever deleted. Not for good, at least. There were dozens of memos, warnings from
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    BioMax that he was running out of time and better make his choice, references to payouts and consequences, and an ultimate response from our father, with the access code to the car's navigational system and a time his daughter was guaranteed to be in the car: 3:47 p.m. A time I recognized and remembered, because it was the time of the accident.
    There had been a day, not long after my download, when my body had frozen. In the middle of a crowd--in the middle