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“You scared me.” Her heart was banging again, and adrenaline rose back through her body, making her hands twitch and every exhausted muscle tense. The girl hadn’t been able to find her before—Elissa had had to give her the address. But now, when Elissa had managed to throw
law enforcement agents
off her trail, two minutes later, all the same, here she was?

“I’m sorry.” The girl stopped a few feet from Elissa, her stance hesitant. The bag Elissa had dropped down to her was slung across her back.

“How did you find me?” Once the words were out, she
realized they sounded like an accusation. But then, they kind of
were
an accusation. She didn’t owe the girl anything, after all. Sudden sickness swept over her.
I’ve run away from everything that matters to me for someone who’s pretty much a stranger, for someone I don’t know enough . . . really . . . to be able to trust.

“I’m . . . not sure.” The girl rubbed the side of her hand on her cheek, bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I . . . Meeting you, maybe, for real? The link between us? I just knew where you were this time. I couldn’t do it before.”

Okay. That made sense. The sickness settled into a knot of unease in Elissa’s belly. It hadn’t gone, but she was no longer taut all over, poised on the edge of fight-or-flight.

The girl unhooked the bag and dropped it to the ground, then knelt beside it. Her chest was heaving even more than Elissa’s had been, and in the faintly growing light her face showed colorless, smudged with marks like shadows where dirt had mixed with sweat. But she was kneeling upright, her shoulders straight, her eyes clear.

“You’re not so sick now,” Elissa said.

“That medicine was amazing. I slept for a while. Then I read the package and took some more—two doses—before I came to find you. The swelling on my arm has gone down.” She looked straight across at Elissa. “I know you don’t trust me. I . . . That’s okay. I get how you wouldn’t.”

“I—yeah.” It made it better, somehow, that the girl had said it. “I just . . . A few hours ago I still thought you were a hallucination.”

The corners of the girl’s mouth turned up a tiny bit. “It’s easier for me. I always knew you were real.”

Elissa had her breath back now, and she knew she had to use this place of respite, of safety, to thinkZs ctemp. They had to go
somewhere even safer, where they’d be even less likely to be pursued. But vital though that was, she
had
to ask the girl another question first.

“What is all this? Who’s doing it? And what for? And who
are
you?” Okay, so that was another four questions. But she couldn’t stand this not
knowing
any longer—if she didn’t get some information, she’d go absolutely freaking crazy.

The girl took another breath, settling her shoulders back in a way Elissa recognized as bracing herself for something unpleasant. She’d done it herself, before a doctor’s appointment, before walking into school . . .

“I’m a Spare,” the girl said.

“A what?”

“You don’t know about us? Not at all?”

“
No
. I don’t have a
clue
.” She swallowed down the frustration spilling into her voice. “What’s a spare?”

“A nonhuman human-sourced entity? You haven’t heard of that?”

The answer was even more
no
than it had been before, but Elissa didn’t say it.
“Nonhuman?”
Her voice went shrill, hovering on the edge of control. “You’re
nonhuman
?”

Over thousands of years of colonizing the known universe, no one had ever found
Alien sapiens
, life-forms with anything closer to human intelligence than Old Earth’s apes. Was that what this girl was saying she was, an alien life-form who looked like a human?

“Human-sourced nonhuman. I’m, um . . .” The girl bit her lip again, pulling it into her mouth, an anxious movement. “I’m
your
Spare. I’m genetically identical to you. I . . . come from you.”

The idea had crossed Elissa’s mind before, part of the
horror-movie stuff she’d tried not to think about. But she hadn’t really expected the girl to say it. She had to force the word out. “Cloning?”

“Not exactly . . .” The girl’s voice trailed off. Her eyes fixed, wide and anxious, on Elissa’s face, but Elissa was out of patience.

“Just freaking
tell
me. I’m trying to help you here, and you’re making me play guessing games!”

The girl flinched. Everything she’d gone through, and a raised voice could make her look as if she’d been hit? Elissa stared at her for an irritated, bewildered moment before the thought—unexpected and unwelcome—struck her.
Not just a raised voice.
My
raised voice.

“I’m your double,” the girl said. “There’s this rare abnormality, sometimes, in pregnancies. The egg, it splits into two embryos, develops into two identical fetuses.”

“
What?
No
way
—that’s impossible. Sometimes people have two babies, but they’re not from one egg, . One, two, three, four.”, cthey’re not
identical
.”

The girl shook her head. “No, really. It was a lot more common thousands of years ago. They had a whole name for them. They called them ‘twins’—it means doubles. It died out for—oh, just
forever
—until there was some kind of spontaneous mutation thirty or forty years ago. But the second fetus, it’s not human. It’s”—her eyelids flickered—“
I’m
 . . . just a replica.”

Elissa’s head was swimming. “But you—what’s
different
about you? You look the same, you feel pain. How do they decide?”

The girl lifted a shoulder. Her face was very set, Elissa noticed suddenly, held still as if it were clamped down over
pain or grief. “Our brains are different. The link, between you and me? That’s one of the differences. For you, it should have died way back, when you were still small. After the birth, once they separate the twins, it doesn’t normally last beyond the first few years—”

“Wait.
Wait.
” There was too much to take in. Elissa was only managing to grasp a tiny bit at a time, as if the normal connections in her brain were on a go-slow of information overload. But one thing suddenly got through to her in all its meaning.

“You were
born
with me? You’re my parents’ child? My . . .” Her whole brain locked up for an instant, as if it were threatening to send her a stack of error messages. “You’re my
sister
?”

The girl looked at her, her lip looking almost bruised where she’d bitten it, and a slow flush rose into her face. “I’m your Spare. I’m—I’m not legally defined as anything else. I . . .” She swallowed, the flush rising all around her eyes. “I’ve always
felt
you were my sister. Back when I was really young, I used to see into your life lots of the time. I knew what was happening to you, what you were feeling, who you were. But you—you didn’t even know I was real. You don’t feel the same way, and I’m not asking you to. I’m—really, I’m not asking you for anything.”

Elissa couldn’t speak. Something had caught in her throat.

The girl swallowed again. There were no tears in her eyes, but her mouth trembled when she tried to speak, and when she’d gathered herself and begun again, her voice quivered. “I just . . . I just wanted to see you, to see your world, and then . . .” She trailed off. She looked very tired suddenly, and years younger.

I’m supposed to believe she’s not human?
Elissa’s hands had
clenched themselves in her lap.
She’s gotten all the way over here, and she’s frightened, and still recovering, and she wants me to know she’s not asking for anything from me?

There were a million things Elissa still didn’t understand, some of which the girl might be able to explain, some of which she probably wouldn’t. Right now none of them mattered.

There were security cameras all over the city. And even where there weren’t, the girl—the twin to fall and fall and fall . . .

Where can we go? Just for an hour or so, long enough to change how we look so we’re not so easy to track?

Once more Elissa dragged her thoughts together, summoned memories of the section of the city around them.

Of course
. They were almost on the edge of the business district; it was two intersections away. Business travelers came through it every hour of the twenty-four, staying for a few hours or days in the pod-motels, one- or two-person self-service rooms. If you stayed longer than a night, there’d be ID checks, and alarms if you didn’t complete them. But for just a couple of hours . . .

She pulled the bag over and rummaged inside it for the money she’d dropped in earlier that morning. There wasn’t much, but what there was would stretch to a two-person room for a night. After that . . .

The morph-cards seemed to tingle in her pocket, and her father’s voice came to her.
Changeling. Chameleon. Camouflage
. She did remember how to use them. And she damn well would.

“Come on,” she said. “You’ve seen a
lousy
bit of my world so far. This isn’t going to be a whole lot better, but it’ll have food and a hot shower. And then we’ll think what to do.”

The girl blinked at her. “You’re—not going back home?”

For a moment it was like a mini earthquake rocking the ground beneath Elissa’s feet.
Not going home. Is that what I’m doing? Not just tonight, but ever?

She looked the other girl in the eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I—right now I can’t think beyond getting somewhere where we can get ourselves to look different. But after that I’m not going anywhere till I’ve worked out how to keep you safe.”

“You don’t have to. I didn’t—” The girl swallowed again. “I didn’t plan this. Your life—it’s so perfect, and I . . . I don’t want to wreck it for you.”

“Perfect?” Elissa could almost have laughed. “Not even close.”

“But that’s my fault, isn’t it? It’s the link, sending you echoes of . . .” The girl trailed off again, shrugged. “You know. But they’re going to do that operation, and you won’t feel it anymore. You can just go back to being normal.”

“What?”
Elissa’s voice went up, incredulous and horrified. “You think I’m still going to go through with it?
Now?
When I know what it’s for, when I know what they’re burning out of me? No
way
am I letting them do that!”

“But you . . .” The girl stopped, swallowed. “Look, I get your thoughts, okay? Not all of them, but flashes. Enough for me to know you want to be normal. Having me turning up like this, I know it’s . . . I don’t
want
to ruin things for you.”. One, two, three, four.”, c

Elissa got to her feet and picked up the bag. “My life is
nowhere near
perfect. My parents—they’ve lied and lied and
let me think there was something wrong with me, when all the time . . .” Her teeth gritted against one another. Her parents
must
have known at some point what was really going on. If the link was supposed to die off like some sort of weird psychic umbilical cord, then presumably that was what they’d been hoping for. Presumably, too, at least some of those stupid, ineffectual treatments had been meant to help kill it off.
That white-noise machine
—
was it some kind of psychic damper? The
drugs, too?
But for three years,
three years
, they’d let her struggle with misery and loneliness and attacks of pain like lightning strikes, losing her friends, losing any kind of normal life . . . and they’d let her think it was her fault, that something was wrong with
her
.

“You’re not ruining anything. All you’ve done is show me how fake my whole life has been.” Her hands had closed into fists again. She forced them to relax, drew in a breath. “It wasn’t perfect even when I thought it was. You haven’t wrecked anything, and I’m not leaving you till I’ve got you somewhere safe.”

And either the words, or her voice, or something in her face got the message across, because her double said nothing else.

The pod-motels were built around the sides of a building shaped like a giant, upright cylinder, the streetlights catching their curved windows with a smooth plastic gleam. Elissa fed money into the interface by the sealed-shut entrance, keyed in two persons for five hours—the minimum time you could stay—and waited when the display told her to, her heart suddenly thumping, hand hovering over the little tray where their room keys would be dispensed.

She was using physical money, not credit, but all the same, nightmare ideas of being traced came into her mind. You couldn’t avoid all the cameras around here. She’d told the other girl to keep her head down, and they were both wearing their hair trailing around their faces, but if an alert had gone out, if a camera picked them up and an operative was on the ball . . .

The keys, narrow slips of plastic coded to the room number on the display, slid into the tray. The pod-motel entrance sprang open.

Elissa scooped the keys up. “Come on.”