A staircase spiraled from the center of the ground-floor lobby all the way up the height of the tower, but it was only for emergency use. Elissa slid her key into the slot next to one of the elevators that stood around the outer edge of the room. “We’re floor twenty-six,” she said to the other girl, keeping her voice low. She’d never
heard
that there were security microphones in the pod-motels, but security had been getting tighter and tighter over the whole city—the whole planet—in the last few years.
Sekoia had almost none of the terrorism you heard about on other planets, but what it did have were completely strict immigration controls. Like everyone kept saying, an already-overcrowded planet couldn’t afford to let even a few illegals sli to fall and fall and fall . . .
The elevator door slid open. Elissa led her double in, dipping her head, checking that the other girl copied her, so the security camera in the ceiling corner wouldn’t get a clear scan of their faces. Would the pod-motels be a good place for illegals to stay for the one night they could get away with before they had to give ID? Or did they go somewhere else,
somewhere completely low-security, way off the radar?
The elevator shot them upward with a stomach-dropping rush. Elissa ran the keys through her fingers, staring at the numbers on the wall display as they changed—zero to sixseveneightnineten in as many seconds. She wasn’t only thinking about illegal immigrants. She wasn’t, really, thinking about immigrants at all.
Is there anywhere totally safe from cameras and mics? If there is, dare I go there? Dare I take us both into some kind of . . . criminal underworld?
She grimaced. Jeez, she didn’t even know what to call it. She was so not cut out for this.
The pod-motel was everything it was supposed to be: surgically clean, equipped with beds, nutri-machine, shower cubicle, and toilet, and so tiny there was only just room for them both to stand on the floor at the same time.
Elissa dropped the bag on the floor, scrubbed her hands across her face, and dialed two coffees from the machine. The night before, it had seemed like the worst thing in the world to go to sleep instead of staying awake to think of a way out. But now . . .
Thank God I did. If they’ve tracked us, if they know we’re here, they’ll be here in half an hour. Even if we needed to, we wouldn’t dare sleep now.
Another thought came, clamping a steel grip around her throat.
If they do come, I’ve trapped us. In this little room with one exit and one way down
.
Elissa took another gulp of coffee, feeling the unfamiliar caffeine buzz through her brain. She hadn’t had a choice. They had to get changed before they could use the morph-cards, and they had to have privacy to do it.
The other girl was perched on the edge of the lower bunk. Against the fat white quilt and pillow, she looked even grubbier, shabbier, than she had before. And in the close quarters
of the podroom, she smelled. Unwashed and sweaty, sharp with a scent Elissa identified with illness and anxiety—the smell of sickrooms and exam rooms and her own bed when she woke from a nightmare.
Oh, wait
. As Elissa moved, she caught a gust of scent from her own body.
It’s me who smells
.
She flushed, hoping that however the link between them worked, it hadn’t picked up
those
thoughts. But then, she’d never picked up that type of inconsequential thought from the girl, only flashes of emotions that came through stronger: pain, terror, rage. “You probably need some food, don’t you?”
“I found some in tu dropped it out?” The girl’s voice went up as if the sentence were a question, as if she were asking permission to have eaten a couple of snack bars. Once again something caught in Elissa’s throat. She
didn’t
feel like the girl was her sister. Despite the link with her she’d had all her life, Elissa still didn’t feel she knew her, didn’t feel the connection with her she’d once felt with Carlie and Marissa. But all the same . . .
“No, I mean real food.”
“I . . . yes. But didn’t you use all your money to pay for the room?”
“Not quite, no. And anyway, food is covered in the price. Do you know what you want—” She broke off. “No, it’s okay, ignore me. I’ll get you a standard meal.” She dialed the nutri-balanced option. The girl looked beyond thinking about what she wanted. Let the machine do the thinking for her—at least she’d get the right balance to help her recover.
A familiar covered tray slid out of the bottom of the machine. Elissa peeled the lid back and handed the tray to the girl, looking over her head out the window, alert for flashing blue lights. They’d been in the room five minutes.
Twenty-five more and I’ll believe we’re okay. For now at least
.
She dialed another coffee and a pot of cereal for herself. She wasn’t hungry, but like she’d said, food was included in the price of the room. And if they did have to run again, she could at least get some extra calories to keep her going.
The girl was eating hungrily, scooping up the basic curly grain salad and protein dressing as if Elissa had discovered some kind of secret gourmet function on the machine. Elissa squeezed herself down to sit cross-legged on the floor, eating her cereal, watching the girl for a minute.
For an instant, sitting there, she was rocked by the weirdness of it. Here in this tiny room she was on the run from her own planet’s police, with a girl who was her mirror image, her literal double, her—what had she called it?—
twin
, whom she hadn’t even known existed before today.
Then the girl—
twin
—looked up and caught Elissa’s eyes, and the weirdness vanished under the weight of a million things she had to think about.
She fished the morph-cards out of her pocket and handed one over. “We have to program these, okay? They’ll give us ID, and we won’t get anywhere without ID. And more money, too.”
The twin turned the card over in her hand. It gleamed a little in the glow of the room, the dot-eyes of its emoticon catching the light unevenly so that it looked as if it were winking. “It’s fake, right?”
“Completely fake.” A little ripple of triumph crept through Elissa’s fatigue. “It’s the one bit of good luck we’ve had, don’t you think?”
The twin’s eyes came back up to hers. “Where did you get it?”
Memory crashed over Elissa. Her father, his face in the light of the fire that had driven them from their house. The
urgency in his voice, in his hand as he pushed the morph-cards into hers.
“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.Z clhi
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, opened his mouth to saya thoughther
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.”