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by Imogen Howson

  “My dad,” she said. Then, “He knew. He knew about you. He told me to run.”

  The twin’s face was blank with incomprehension. “He knew about me? But the hosts—they don’t know. They’re not told.”

  “He knew. He said ‘Go find her.’ And my mother—both of them, they both knew. Once I told them I’d seen you for real—”

  “You told them?” The twin’s voice jumped.

  Too late Elissa remembered she’d said she wouldn’t tell anyone. “Look, I’m sorry. It was completely the wrong thing to do. But I—honestly, I thought they’d help you—us.”

  “So they—” The twin swallowed. There was a pulse beating in the side of her throat. Her eyes seemed all pupil. “The—the people chasing you—they know I’m with you?”

  “I guess. I mean, they won’t know for sure, will they? They didn’t see us together. They didn’t know you’d come after me and find me.” The twin’s eyes were on her, the pupils still huge, blackly dilated. “But . . . yes, they’re after both of us.”

  “We won’t be able to stay here.” The words sounded spiky with panic.

  “I know. I know. It’s just for now, while we change how we look and I work out what to do. With the morph-cards we can figure out our fake IDs, find somewhere else to stay for tonight.”

  She looked at her watch. Another fifteen minutes to go. The sky outside their window was full of lights, from beetle-cars, flyers, and distant spaceships taking off. But no emergency blue flashes, no sound of sirens. She rose to her knees so she could see the nutri-machine’s display and began scrolling through the menu. “We need hair dye, makeup. Colored contacts. Sometimes these machines have a toiletries option for the stuff you might run out of or need suddenly.” She kept scrolling. “Okay. Hm. No colored contacts, but there’s hair dye and false eyelashes and a whole pile of makeup. That’ll do till I can go out and—”

  The twin had leaned sideways so she could see the list of products. “But all those—they’re not included in the room, are they?”

  “No. I’ll have to pay for them separately. It’s okay, we’ve got enough money for that.”

  Two minutes later Elissa had a double handful of almost everything she’d been able to think of—and the sky was still empty of blue lights. She pulled open the door of the tiny shower cubicle at the end of the room and climbed onto the top bunk so she could see her reflection.

  She’d found Freckle-Fade, which lightened her already-pale skin to the color of milk, wiping out her freckles as if they’d never existed. And a sachet of copper-colored Curlio. She’d never used it before; it was banned at school, and she hadn’t exactly felt like using makeup or hair color for fun, rather than camouflage, for the last few years. But now it couldn’t have been more welcome.

  She unrolled the protective gloves, slid her hands into them, and then squeezed the Curlio out of its tube and rubbed it into her hair. It slid over her soft dark locks like liquid metal, giving them a shine that seemed to reflect every scrap of light in the room, tightening them into copper ringlets. Amid the blaze of hair, her face seemed even paler and narrower than before, although her eyes still stared out from it, familiarly dark, betraying her. She needed colored contacts. After they were both disguised, she’d take them to the nearest mall and get contacts for each of them, as well as different clothes.

  She unscrewed the tube of lip-plump lipstick and applied it carefully over her lips, watching their shape and color change and become more pouty, redder. They tingled momentarily, then stung. Once she was done, Elissa stared into the mirror. Well, her parents would probably still recognize her, but she looked a long way from her normal ID picture. And with a new name and a matching ID card . . .

  Now that she was no longer kneeling, gasping for breath in a shadowy playground, remembering what her father had showed her before was completely easy. Elissa held the card up to her face, thinking of the first random names that came to mind. “Changeling. Chameleon. Camouflage. Rissa White. R-I-S-S-A space W-H-I-T-E. One, two, three, four.”

  The surface of the card rippled, the zeroes changing to a line of random numbers. The identipic became a tiny face with wild red curls, white skin, and a pouty, bee-stung mouth, and the name across the center of the card read RISSA WHITE.

  She tipped the card so the twin could look at it, watching her eyes widen. “Okay, now I’ll use my card to buy the stuff you need. We’ll have to get to a mall to get colored contacts, but we can change your hair and skin at least.”

  Outside, a siren gave a sudden wail, wrenching open the quiet, coming nearer. Every cell in Elissa’s body jumped. She froze, eyes fixed on the window, waiting for blue lights to flash across the glass, for flyers to descend . . .

  The siren noise crescendoed until it was almost on top of them, then wailed itself away into the distance. All of Elissa’s breath left her body so fast, she went dizzy. Not us. They weren’t after us. It’s an emergency call, that’s all. It could have just been an ambulance, not even the police.

  She leaned down from the bunk and turned on the screen set in the wall just above the nutri-machine, her heart stuttering, ready to race. The siren had awoken a new fear. She’d run from her home, been chased by law enforcement agents. They could accuse her of a crime and put out a public alert for her.

  But there was nothing. Elissa skimmed through the news channels, ending up on Breaking News, and neither her nor the twin’s face appeared on the screen.

  From the bunk below, the twin was watching her, her face pale and tight. Elissa sent her a smile that she hoped was reassuring. “They’re not making any public announcements. As long as we fix the identicalness, people won’t be paying us any attention.”

  The twin nodded. “I didn’t think they’d say anything about me. I’m not supposed to exist. But you . . .”

  “Well, there’s nothing—even if it’s only nothing yet. I guess if they can’t acknowledge you even exist, they can’t exactly accuse me of committing a crime.”

  “They’ll be looking for us, though.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Elissa said. She didn’t need to make any effort to remember the emergency flyers, government emblems on their sides, gliding down onto her residential shelf. The armed men who’d arrived in them. They hadn’t even hesitated. Just taken straight off after her. And it was my mother who called them.

  She couldn’t think about that yet. Earlier that morning it had been all a blur of fear, panic, and needing to get away. But now, thinking back, knowing her mother had called the police on her . . .

  The twin was still looking up at her. “Your parents,” she said.

  Elissa reached out to adjust the volume control next to the screen. For a moment she couldn’t answer, couldn’t look down to meet the twin’s eyes. Don’t ask me about them. Don’t talk about them. Don’t reach into my mind and see what I’m feeling.

  “You said they knew?”

  Elissa nodded, head turned away.

  “Do you . . .” The twin’s voice was hesitant, as if she knew Elissa didn’t want to answer. “Do you know how they knew? At the facility they told us we had no connection with them, they didn’t even know we existed. I . . . Maybe they were lying, but I don’t see why they would.”

  Elissa shrugged. “They must have been, though. My parents”—again the memory returned—“they definitely knew.”

  “They’re not government officials or something?”

  “My dad’s in the police. But they wouldn’t be an exception, not to something like this.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and dropped onto the floor, paying excessive attention to her movements so it would seem natural not to meet the other girl’s eyes. “My mother used to be a medical lab technician. But you said you weren’t supposed to exist. They can’t go around telling everyone who’s police or medical about all this if they want it to stay that way.”

  “How long ago?”

  Although Elissa didn’t look at the twin, she felt the gaze of the other girl on her
back. “How long ago was she a technician, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “She stopped when she was pregnant with—” Elissa hesitated. “With us.”

  “When she was pregnant? Not after you were born? I thought people normally worked most of their pregnancies?”

  “I guess they do. She said she had complications. She’d had Bruce, my br—our brother—with no problems, but when she was pregnant again, they wouldn’t let her go into labor naturally . . . . Oh.” Now Elissa did look at the twin, her eyes wide. “I guess that was because of you. Is that what they do? Take women in for surgery so they can drug them and take their baby without them ever knowing?”

  “I think so.”

  “But how do they ever cover that up? And how often are they doing it? They must have to falsify records and everything, and all it would take is one person to find out.”

  “That’s why I wondered if maybe, being a medical worker, your mother did find out.”

  Cold settled like a weight in Elissa’s stomach. The knowledge hit her afresh. Her mother had known a lot more than Elissa. How much had she known? Had she not been drugged into unconsenting unawareness of what they were doing to her? Had she known all along? And then, when I started to suffer the consequences . . .

  She couldn’t think about that now. She didn’t have time. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice low. “It doesn’t matter now. Let’s just get you disguised, okay?”

  Using the morph-card for the first time made the muscles all down each side of her spine tighten, made her skin prickle, her whole body going on alert for the sound of alarms shrilling. She told the twin to open the door and stand in the doorway in case some kind of auto-security setting jumped to red alert and locked them in.

  But it was fine. She scrolled through and made her selections, seeing the total cost growing on the screen. She tapped in the new number—1, 2, 3, 4—and watched the items shower into the dispenser.

  Elissa scooped them up and dumped them onto the lower bunk. “It’s okay. You can let the door shut now.”

  The twin moved away from the door, and it sprang softly closed behind her. “It worked?”

  Elissa tilted the card, watching glints of reflected light swim across and through it. “Yes.”

  Run, her dad had said, pushing the card into her hand. Giving her the means to escape—and to save her twin. But earlier that night he’d helped her mother shut her in her room, told her she had no choice about the operation.

  He’d known, like her mother had. But whereas her mother had been intent on complying with whatever the doctors demanded of them, her father had . . . what? Only conformed when he had to, when he couldn’t get away with anything else?

  If I could ask him, if I could get in touch with him when my mother’s not there. With everything that had gone on, would he go to work today, like normal? If she called him when he was there, with no one else around, would he tell her what was happening? Would he make sense of it all for her?

  She picked up the hair dye. “Are you okay with going blond?”

  “Yes.”

  Elissa flicked a glance at the other girl. She’d known she would say that. Elissa certainly didn’t want to bleach her own hair. The copper color was only temporary, but bleach wouldn’t wash out. Since yesterday her life had turned into something she didn’t recognize, and if she had to lose her real hair as well—

  She caught up with herself then, and shame washed over her, a hot, stinging wave. Like bleaching your hair was the worst thing that could happen?

  “You don’t have to,” she said, and was ashamed all over again when it was an effort to say the words. “If you want to keep your hair, it’s no big deal—we can do mine and use more of the copper stuff on you instead.”

  The twin’s eyes met hers. Silence hung between them for a split second. “Honestly. I don’t care. And those curls”—she grinned, a sudden flash of amusement that made her look, for the first time, like any normal girl who’d led a normal life, with school and friends and parents—“they’re pretty. Let’s not get rid of them yet.”

  Elissa grinned back at her, suddenly warm with a flicker of something familiar, something she’d always taken for granted until she’d had to do without it. “Okay. I’ll sort myself out while you shower, then we’ll dye your hair and get your face done too. If we fake-tan your skin and leave me pale, and straighten your hair as well as bleaching it, that’ll make us look really different. I think, anyway—”

  The girl turned to the shower cubicle, then paused in the middle of unzipping her hooded top. “I can put the dye on myself, can’t I?”

  Elissa blinked at the sudden tight sound to the words. “Yeah, of course. It’ll be easy enough.”

  “Okay.” The girl didn’t glance back, just resumed undressing, but the tension had gone from her voice.

  Elissa turned away to dial another drink from the machine, then sat on the edge of the lower bunk. She’d changed in the same room as other girls before, but this girl’s body would be identical to her own, familiar and strange all at once, and she didn’t want to look. Once she heard the water come on behind her, she turned back. The other girl obviously hadn’t had any trouble working out the control panel. Well, I guess they must have had showers at the . . . whatever it was where they kept her. In the pictures it always seemed completely clean.

  The scent of orange blossom drifted out on steam into the room, momentarily fogging the air, before fans whirred softly into life. Then the drying program came on with a soft roar of air. In the cubicle the twin shook her head, water spraying from her hair and evaporating before it hit the walls.

  Tension was coiling inside Elissa again. We need to get this done. We have to move on.

  She didn’t even know where yet. Over to the other side of the city? Or should they catch one of the high-speed trains that cut across the desert to other cities? And if I call my dad, will he help us? Or . . .

  The cubicle opened to let the twin step out, and Elissa looked quickly away from what felt suddenly, disorientingly, as if she were seeing a come-to-life reflection of herself.

  In the periphery of her vision, she saw the twin pull her clothes back on, then hesitate, watching Elissa.

  Elissa looked up, then patted the edge of the upper bunk. “If you sit up there, you’ll be able to see yourself in the mirror. Once you’ve got it all applied, the instructions say it only takes ten minutes.” She smiled. Unlike before, it felt like an effort, and the thought came, sliding through her like poison. What have I done? Tied myself to looking after this girl who I don’t know, who’s not even a friend, let alone a sister. Is this what I’m going to be doing forever, sharing rooms with her, finding new places to hide, new people to be?

  The hair dye did only take ten minutes. When the other girl washed it off in the shower, her hair showed blond through the foam, then under the heat of the dryers it turned pale, a soft curly drift the color of cream.

  As she stepped back out of the shower cubicle and pulled her clothes on once more, Elissa handed her the straightening serum. “Here. If you use this, you can go straight as well. You don’t need much, just a couple of blobs.” She watched for a minute as the girl squeezed some of the faintly shimmering serum into her palm and reached up to rub it through her hair. “No, smooth it through right to the ends. Look, if you turn the ends around the hairbrush, you can hold it straight while it sets.” She stepped up to the other girl, reached out to take control of the brush.

  The twin flinched, jerked away, then froze, fingers clamped over the back of her head, not speaking, not looking up.

  And now Elissa knew why. The other girl had moved fast, but not fast enough. In that moment when Elissa had touched the hairbrush, she’d also touched the back of her double’s head. And she’d felt something through the hair. Something that wasn’t identical to Elissa’s head. Something that shouldn’t be there.

  It was a hole. A neat, smooth-edged hole, hidden under the hair that fell over
it, just at the base of the girl’s skull. The flesh all over the back of Elissa’s neck tightened with an instant of agonizing memory. That’s where the pain had come from, rocketing out from the base of her skull, spreading bruises all around her jawline and up the back of her head. Not just from a clamp they’d put on her skull, but something they’d inserted into it.

  WHEN ELISSA could control her voice, she said, “Is that what they did to you?”

  The twin nodded, an infinitesimal quiver.

  “You don’t want me to see?”

  Another quiver of her head, this one a sideways shake.

  “It’s . . .” Elissa bit her lip, trying to think of anything close to the right words. “You know it’s not your fault, right? You don’t need to be . . . ashamed. They did that to you. They just randomly decided to take you—”

  “It’s not random.” The twin’s voice was hardly audible. “It’s my brain, it’s different.”

  “Yeah, but both our brains are different. It’s not like the link goes just one way. And even if it is different . . . This whole not-human thing—I don’t believe it. I felt what you were feeling. You look just like me. You feel the same kind of things. Being able to do something different—it doesn’t make you not human.”

  The twin didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then her voice came, muffled. “I always felt human. When they told us we weren’t . . . I was around thirteen. It was when we reached puberty. Before then they brought us up like normal children. They have to do that—it has to do with our brains developing properly. But when they told us, it felt wrong. It felt like a lie.”

  She shifted where she stood, leaning against the side of the bed, her fingers still white on the back of her head, her face still turned away. “Maybe it was the link with you that made me think that too. Even though it didn’t stay as strong as when we were small, I think it still lasted way longer than it was supposed to. And like you said, I felt what you were feeling. And they said you were human—real, declared-legal human—so it kind of felt to me that if you were, I was too.”