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“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 suffZ clhier 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 I’m electrokinetic.”Artit. “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,he bag when yo

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 turnZhe thoughtWhat are youed 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.”

Elissa hesitated, then put her hand out to lay it on the twin’s back. She didn’t have anything to say, couldn’t think of anything to help.

Under her hand the twin’s body relaxed a tiny bit. She eased her hands off her head, let them fall by her sides. “Some of us—in there, some of the other Spares . . . they burned out. The procedures were too much, and their brains couldn’t handle it.”

Elissa’s stomach clenched. If the twin was going to talk about what had happened to her, if she was going to give details . . .
If she had to go through it, I should be able to hear about it. And I can’t tell her not to tell me. But I don’t know if I can listen. I don’t know if I can bear to hear
.

“And other Spares. They just . . . went.”

Elissa swallowed. “Died?”

“No. Went. Became . . . not there. Like they were still alive,
but they weren’t.” Her hands moved to twist together in front of her. “
None
of us were people, we were told that, but when that happened to those Spares . . . before, they’d at least
seemed
like people. Afterward there was nothing there at all.”

Elissa tried to keep her hand open, comforting, on the twin’s back, but she couldn’t help the not-quite-suppressed shudder that went through her from shoulders to fingertips. “I . . . God, I’m sorry.”

“I was scared it would happen to me. I was scared. When the procedures started. But I . . . If I reached out, you were there, and I . . .” Her head dipped, her shoulders hunching. “I didn’t think about it hurting you as well. I don’t know if my reaching out is what hurt you—I don’t know if the pain would have gotten through anyway.” She was speaking fast now, as if trying to get all the words out in one big rush. “And when I did think about that, I tried to stop, but the link was too strong, I couldn’t do it. I think my reaching out to you like that—I think I made the link stronger again. I know, after the first couple of times, I started getting flashes of your memories the way I hadn’t for years. I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to wreck your life, but I think, if it hadn’t been for that, I’d have burned out—or gone—too.”

“It’s okay.” Elissa spoke automatically, but as she did, she realized it was true. The twin might have sent the pain through to Elissa, might have reestablished a connection that was on its way to dying off completely, but suddenly it didn’t seem to matter whether she had or not. What mattered was that she’d reached out to Elissa, and it had helped.
I never mattered like that to anyone before. I never helped anyone
—
not like that, not so much that it might have been me who saved her life.

She put her other arm around the twin, feeling how stiff the
other girl was, how tightly her hands were clenched around each other. For the first time it wasn’t an effort, touching the strange-familiar body, close enough that she caught the clean scent of the other girl’s hair, felt the tension in the thin shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said again. “It was
them
, not you. And we’re going to fix it so you don’t ever go back.”

In her embrace the twin’s body relaxed a little. “You don’t need to hear about it. I’m sorry.”

“Hey.” Elissa shook her a little. “You don’t need to keep saying sorry. Jeez, the whole freaking
world
should be apologizing to you!”

The twin gave a breath of laughter. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Elissa let her go, stepped away. It didn’t exactly seem like the right time to ask, but none of the other times had seemed like the right ones either. She realized she was chewing her lower lip and deliberately released it. “Do you have a name?”