Dualed (17 page)

I thought it would be like looking into a mirror and seeing myself, but that’s not it. Not exactly. The difference is as small as how you see your own reflection, and how you really appear to everyone else—like the two halves of your face are reversed so neither view is quite right. When I see her, I think:
So that’s how others see me
.

A nose with a slight tilting up at the tip. Angled brown eyes, just a shade removed from black. Same color skin as mine, mixed undertones and all. Her hair’s the same color, too, only much longer. Black as ink, straight as a heavy waterfall, and skimming over her eye like a crow’s wing.

Facing my Alt is something I’ll never get used to. It’s like witnessing everything you both hate and fear about yourself, all of it coming to life at the same time. You can no more change the fact of their existence than they can yours. Flashes
of Ehm, of Luc, of what happened with Chord’s Alt … they spin memories behind my eyes like the worst sort of nightmare.

I duck my head low and slowly step away from the side of the fruit stands where I was eyeing the last of the fall apples, wondering if I could slip below the radar of the harried workers. I sidle the few feet over to the coffee stall next door and take in the customers waiting in line. To the left is a display rack of paper-bagged coffee, fresh off the truck from Calden Ward; to the right, a throng of customers perch at the counter, tapping their cells with short, energetic bursts.

So crowded. I move again, this time behind the rack of coffee. I hook my thumbs into the straps of my bag, tightening them out of habit. I touch the front and back pockets of my jeans to make sure the blades are still inside, then the pocket of my jacket for my third blade. I wrap my hand around my gun in my jacket’s other pocket. I keep it there, hidden, as I lean into the rack and also try to hide from view.

My heart is pounding; I feel each beat as a measured bellow in my ears. Electrified nerves, alive and charged in a moment that has me as close to death as I’ve ever been. Cold, thin sweat along my hairline. Tension coils in my arm as an acute clarity pierces all my senses. Everything else falls to the wayside: there is nothing but this
—her
.

I have to believe the gun will be enough. Though the blade is more than adequate as backup—
if
I can get close enough. Throwing is not a possibility right now.

I peer around the stand to see my Alt.

She’s making her way down the sidewalk, her face turning left, then right. Then left again. She’s not hiding the fact that
she’s searching for someone. There is no doubt at all in my mind that it’s me.

As she nears, I’m caught on a horrible threshold. Stay and finish it, one way or another? Or turn and run and stay alive a while longer? Indecision wrapped in panic has my hand around the gun going slick, trembling.

Sixty feet away.

Forty-five.

Thirty.

Fifteen.

I can see the precision of her movements. No wasted energy. No useless overswing of the arms. No sloppy looseness of the gait. Chord was right. Her eyes are very, very cold. Determined, the will to survive absolutely breathtaking and devastating—the look I should have in my eyes.

Ten feet away.

She’s got her hand tucked under her arm, as if she’s holding something that needs to be at the ready. In my pocket, my own hand twitches. It’s more a muscle spasm than a controlled action, and it makes the fear in my heart bloom. It cuts me down.

I can’t.

I can’t.

I can’t
.

I drop into a spineless crouch. The sudden whiff of coffee is overwhelming. My breath, trickling loose from my throat in silent shudders, and it’s all I can do to try to stay still. The world wavers and becomes distorted in the face of my failure.

My Alt passes by.
My Alt
. And I let her go. I’m frozen and
terrified and feeling like a child again. The confidence I knew before Luc left me continues to remain hidden. I’m floundering.

A rough hand lands on my arm, making me jump. My index finger flexes on the trigger of my gun.

“Hey, you can’t hide here.” It’s one of the workers from the coffee stall. His tag says
Market Strip Brew
. Below that, his name—
Otto
. His eyes are as hard and unfeeling as flint.

“Take it somewhere else,” he grunts out. “Assignments going down here are bad for business, and I don’t need that kind of stuff happening in my store.”

“I’m not— I’m sor—”

“Just get out of here, fast.”

I run down the street, in the opposite direction from the one she took. I don’t know where I’m going, but I need to keep moving. If I move fast enough, maybe I won’t be able to hear my thoughts anymore. My one chance, and I failed miserably—not just myself, but my family, all those who’ve ever mattered. Who still matter.

I glare at my choices on the shelf in the drugstore, wondering if it’s possible to be any more at a loss.

I never thought I’d let it get so far. Or that blond came in more than three shades.

I hiss out a sigh and grab a box that promises to turn my hair a shade called Cinderella. And with my hair so dark, I know I’m going to have to strip it first. So I snag a tube of hair bleach, too. Scissors, of course.

Impossible to miss is the sign hanging along the bottom of the shelf:
REMEMBER IDLE AND ACTIVE ALTS ARE FORBIDDEN
FROM UNDERGOING PROCEDURES INVOLVING TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT COSMETIC MODIFICATIONS PLEASE CONTACT US FOR FURTHER DETAILS THANK YOU THE BOARD
.

Until you’re a complete, facial work is off-limits: bone grafts, muscle implants, tattoos anywhere above the neck. And for actives, the temporary stuff is out, too: sunglasses, contacts, piercings.

Painting your nails is okay, as is nonopaque makeup that doesn’t alter the skin tone. Haircuts and hair dye are also permitted, since the Board decided these don’t change an Alt’s face enough to make it unrecognizable.

I’m hoping they’re wrong. I need to become someone who doesn’t look like us.

Not much cash left. And I refuse to call Chord over something that’s only going to prove he’s right—that I
am
still running.

A cold finger dances up my spine at the memory of seeing her this morning. How close she was … how I fooled myself into thinking I was ready.

After I’m done cashing out, I slip my purchases into my bag. All of it, bought time until I can regain even a bit of what I was.

It doesn’t take me long to get over to a nearby inner ward train station. I take the stairs that lead below ground level, where the public washrooms are.

The women’s room is dingy and the trains running overhead make it vibrate violently every few minutes, but it’ll do for the job. All I need is running water and a sink.

As I cut off handfuls of my near-black hair, a blend of my parents’ mixed backgrounds and what might have migrated over from my Alt’s parents, curious eyes take turns watching me.
Teenaged girls—both idles and actives—and working women on their way home. I refuse to look anyone in the eye, and I’m rewarded when no one says anything to me.

I sit in a stall, door shut, while I wait for the bleach to do its work before the dye. Every so often the whole place shakes, the flimsy handles and locks of all the stall doors rattling like loose teeth in a dirty mouth. I count the minutes in my head, the length of time it takes to become someone else.

Afterward, when the dye’s done as much as it can possibly do, I stick my head under the tap and wash out the last of the chemicals. Seeing the water slowly run clear fills me with a strange sense of sad purpose. Like I’m saying good-bye to a West Grayer that I at least understood, if not entirely liked, and am being forced to meet a new one I know for sure I won’t like but have no choice but to accept.

I stare into the mirror, fascinated. Not a stranger, but not myself, either.

No longer a skein of black but a blond cap of hair that looks like straw and feels about the same. Dry, crisp, brittle to the touch. And shorter than I’ve ever had it. It washes out my face, making it completely unremarkable. Forgettable.

It’s perfect.

Another ward train rolls by overhead, and it’s only after the sound of quickening steel blasts away that I hear the crying. A muffled kind of sobbing from the other half of the bathroom, separated from where I am by the line of sinks and mirrors.

A murmur of a woman’s voice echoes softly against the tiles and concrete. “I know, but it’s not over yet; she still has until nearly midnight.”

“No, it’s too late.” The words broken up by crying. “There’s not enough time to make up for what she’s already wasted. Running all this while.”

“Tell her she can still try.” The first woman’s voice sounds unsure even to my ears. “You’re her mother. You need to talk to her.”

“She won’t listen,” the crying mother moans. “Tell me what I should say, won’t you? Tell me what you told yours when it was their turn!”

A pause. “Just that being worthy is the only way out. No matter how she has to make it happen.”

“She says her Alt would make the better Kersh soldier.” The sobs are quieter now, resigned. “Because if she really deserves to win, she wouldn’t be this scared.”

I don’t want to hear any more. The grief in the mother’s voice is too close to mourning; she knows her daughter is about to self-detonate, that thirty-one days of denial cannot possibly be erased by a final few hours of desperate flailing.

One last glance in the mirror, and I toss my bag over my shoulder and run out of the washroom, pushing my way through a fresh wave of people coming in off the latest train. Once my feet hit the sidewalk I start walking fast, trying to put those voices behind me. I try not to imagine what
my
mother would say to me if she were here today. If she’d talk again about what it was like to meet the parents of my Alt.

It happened sixteen years ago, the day my parents went to the Board’s labs to draw up my gene map, the new baby they wanted to create. The next couple who also wanted a baby were, of course, my Alt’s parents.

“It shouldn’t have ever happened, us meeting,” my mother told me. We’d been clothes shopping, getting me ready for a new school year, and had stopped for lunch at a café in the Grid. I remember how she let me sneak bits of food off her plate, the way she always did, since we had to order from different menus.

“Why not, though?” I asked.

“The lab had had an … incident, with one mother attacking the other, trying to keep the other baby from being. Not that it would have mattered; the next set of parents coming in would have been the ones to have her baby’s Alt, then.

“It was the receptionist’s first day, and she was flustered and rushed, and … well, we all ended up being assigned to the same room. Me, your father, them. And they were … normal. Normal and nice and not like monsters at all. You have her nose, West. That slight tilting up at the tip no one else in the family has. Your chin, too, more rounded than any of ours. And you have his high cheekbones.”

My hand went up, touched my nose, chin, cheeks, all shapes and angles I’d known my entire life. I remember how they suddenly felt like a stranger’s, not mine, not the real me.

And then my mother’s face went hard. “I smiled and nodded, the four of us talking about the weather, the excellent and clean lab conditions. But the whole time, it was all I could do to not reach over and gouge her eyes out with my nails, beat him as hard as I could. Stuck in that room with those people who would give birth to and raise one of our greatest enemies, someone who could cause us to feel the greatest pain
imaginable? I understood all too well how that other mother could react the way she did.”

She never talked about it again, and I didn’t, either. Not only was she not one to question out loud the Board’s filtration system, she also felt that same sense of duty all residents of Kersh did. As for me, I didn’t want to relive that sensation. The feeling that I was made up of those I didn’t know as much as of those I did.

The first raindrops hit the top of my newly bleached head, where my scalp still feels sensitive. The electric ozone smell of rain meeting pavement fills my nose. I tilt my face up to the sky.

It’s wholly dark now, the end of another day. The clouds are thick and endless, and I know I’m not going to be able to wait out this storm. Time to find a place to sleep for the night, when the arrival of morning means it’s no longer eight but seven days left …

I dart across the street, to where the library sits. Chord’s warning about getting away from the Grid is quickly extinguished, a spark of unwanted memory in my head. I tell myself I would have listened if I hadn’t seen my Alt today. But I’m here now, and the idea of wandering for cover in the rain is far from appealing. As long as I make sure she’s not here, it should be safe enough. For this night, at least.

I pull open the front door to the library and step inside, my eyes already darting back and forth in a wide sweep. It’s always these first few minutes, this short-lived window when all things are possible, when she could actually be here, that have my
senses running on overdrive and my heart and pulse going at too fast a clip.

I’ve been here a few times since becoming active, but only for an hour or two, my visits carefully spread out so I don’t become familiar. It’s a gray area, knowing how far to push my routine and still stay safe—how to stay faceless, to be nothing more than just another Alt coming in from the cold and rain.

About two dozen students are seated at the tables, flexi-readers and tablets in front of them and cells in their hands. A handful of older people. Of the study capsules I can see, only a few are occupied. I take in the shapes of all the backs, the lines of all the shoulders, looking for any hint of danger.

There is nothing.

But the rest of the room is a mystery to me. The stacks reach nearly to the ceiling, and if she’s hidden within them she will stay that way until I start checking them to see if they’re clear.

My hands return to my jacket pockets, a motion I now make in my dreams. One grabs hold of my gun, the other my switchblade. Prepared, always.