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“Mother, please. She’s sick. She needs help.”

Her mother’s pale lips opened. “Edward. Call Dr. Brien.”

“Laine, is that really necessary? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Mrs. Ivory turned her head to catch her husband’s gaze. A muscle jumped in her jaw. “
Call him
. He said her condition was already deteriorating, but this is even worse. She’s having a hallucination and she thinks it’s real. He’s going to have to move the operation forward.”

Elissa had thought she was prepared to convince her parents it wasn’t just another vivid dream. She’d known she’d have to explain it—several times, maybe. But she hadn’t been prepared for this, hadn’t been prepared for her mother to completely refuse to believe her, to not even
begin
to listen, to go straight from accusing her of running away to declaring that she wasn’t in control of what she was seeing.

“
No
. I’m not hallucinating.”

Mrs. Ivory’s eyes came back to Elissa. They were wide with panic, but it was not only panic that showed on her face. She had the look of someone trying to work something out. The look, Elissa realized suddenly, of someone preparing to lie.

“Elissa.” Her voice was one of forced calm. “You
are
hallucinating. You’re sick, you have an abnormality. Dr. Brien said—”

Dr. Brien said
. Suddenly a puzzle piece fell into alarming place.

“
Dr. Brien
asked me a load of questions about her! He
knew
she was real—he was trying to find out where she was going, her clothes—”

“Elissa.” Despite the calm voice, her mother’s hand was still painfully tight on her arm. “He was asking for data about your hallucinations.”

“He was
not
.” She dragged at her arm. “Let
go
of me.”

“When you’re in this hysterical state? Absolutely not. Edward, will you call Dr. Brien?”

“Laine, come on now.” Elissa’s father moved forward. “I really don’t think calling Dr. Brien at this time of night is going to help anything. We can call him in the morning.”

“And what are we going to do if she’s gone by morning? Edward, you
know
what’s at stake here. You
know
what we signed. If she’s not here for the operation—”

Anger flashed through Elissa, swift and hot. “I’m not even
having
the operation anymore! I only ever got all that pain because of what they were doing to her. She’s escaped, I’m fine—”

Her mother’s eyes blazed into hers. “You’re
not having it
? How dare you say that to me! Do you want to be a freak your whole life? I won’t have it, Lissa. Fine, Edward. If you won’t let us call the doctor, come here and help me Zed questionget her under control.”

Under control? Like I’m a badly behaved animal?

“Let
go
of me!”

Elissa jerked her arm down, hard enough to break her mother’s grip, and flung herself away toward the door. She hadn’t planned on doing anything so drastic as walking out, but her mother was talking as if they were going to force her to have the operation whether she agreed or not. She’d accused her of running away—well, she damn well would, then. She’d call them tomorrow when they were ready to listen to her—

But then, unbelievably, her father was there, holding her instead, his fingers enclosing her upper arm. She pulled away from him, but while she’d broken out of her mother’s grip, she might as well have tried to escape a handcuff as her father’s hand. For the first time not just anger but fear rose within her. This was her
father
, he had never hurt her, he wouldn’t—

“Let go,” she said, shrill disbelief sounding in her voice. “Dad, let
go
.”

He didn’t. When she looked up at him, his face was closed, more distant than it had ever been. No trace of the man who’d come to her room earlier, who’d asked her if she was all right.

She pulled harder, beginning to panic, feeling his
fingers motionless and unyielding around her arm.
“Dad.”
Instinctively, she tried the tactic that—surely—couldn’t help but work. “Dad, stop, you’re hurting me.”

It didn’t work. “Elissa, no. Stop struggling.”

“Let go! Let
go
!” Her voice went into a shriek. This couldn’t be happening. Her mother, maybe, but not her dad, not her
dad
. He hadn’t called the doctor when her mother had told him to.
He
hadn’t said he didn’t believe her. He was on her side. Wasn’t he?
Wasn’t
he?

“Elissa, come with me.”

She struggled, but she didn’t have a hope. He half-marched, half-dragged her away from the door, up the stairs, and to her bedroom, her mother hurrying behind.

He walked her in front of him into the room, then let her go. She flung away, over to the other side of her bed, clutching her bag to her chest. Her face was wet with tears she hadn’t noticed till this minute.

Her mother followed them in. She shot Elissa a look that could have cut steel. “How dare you cry about this? It’s me who should be crying.”

Elissa stared at her. “
What?
Because I don’t want an operation I don’t need?”

“You do need it.”

“I don’t! I’m not having it!” She backed away farther, over to the wall next to the window. “I don’t consent! I’m not having it!”

“You are,” said her mother. “And you’re having it tomorrow.”

When Elissa tried to speak, the words would hardly come out, so choked were they with tears and helpless fury. “You can’t have them operate on me against my will!">Lin nodded, clhi”

“Lissa,” said her father, and she looked at him, still thinking he
couldn’t
be joining in with this, he
couldn’t
be. But his face showed nothing but grim agreement with her mother. “There are things you don’t understand. This operation—there are several reasons it’s necessary.”

Elissa’s tears dried up as suddenly as if they’d frozen. She stared at him, icy cold, seeing the familiar face but feeling as if she looked at a stranger. “You
can’t
,” she said, but her lips had frozen too, and her voice came out not sounding like hers at all. “You can’t make me have an operation I don’t want.”

“We don’t have the choice,” said the stranger standing in her father’s place, not meeting her eyes.

“No.”
It came out as a whisper, the sort of horrified whisper that was all she’d been able to manage when she was tiny and had woken in terror from bad dreams. “No, you can’t. You can’t.”

But they weren’t listening anyway. “We’re to lock her in,” said her mother, and her father nodded, a single grim movement.

“But— What?
What?
You can’t lock me in my
room
!”

They didn’t even answer. Instead her father went out of the room, and her mother made to follow him.

“No,
no
.” Elissa scrambled over the bed, went toward them, trying to look past her mother to catch her father’s eyes. She didn’t understand anything of what was going on, but she knew, beyond doubt, that her mother had lied to her. Her father, though . . . “You can’t lock me in all night!”

Her mother put her hand up to the override switch on the wall outside. “For God’s sake, Elissa. This is for your own good. If we don’t secure you now, I’ll have to call the enforcement agents to take you in. You don’t want that, do you?”

The door slid shut in Elissa’s face, and she heard the click of the internal bolts driving home. They’d done it. They’d seriously locked her in.

Driven by shock and fury, she opened her mouth to shriek through the door, then stopped as if an invisible hand had been laid across her lips.

Her mother had lied to her. And Dr. Brien had lied too. Her instinct that morning, not to tell him what the other girl was wearing, had been right.

Which meant . . . What did it mean? That they knew her pictures were real? That they’d known all along? That they . . .

Nausea turned her stomach upside down. “Oh God. Oh no.” They’d known what was happening to the other girl? They’d known about the . . . Her mind shied away from the word she needed, but it echoed in her head all the same.
Torture
. Someone had been torturing that girl, doing some kind of horrific . . .
experiments?
 . . . on her. And people, official people—doctors and ex-medical professionals like her mother and police officers like her father—other people knew about it. And did">Lin nodded, clhi nothing.

The cold spread all over Elissa’s body. This wasn’t just as simple as some kind of illegal organization that only needed someone to find out about it to get shut down.

The images of the fire came back into her mind. That building—the newscaster had called it a manufacturing plant. People knew about its existence; people knew it was there. So unless its real purpose was
unbelievably
well-disguised, it must be officially sanctioned . . . by someone.

How far does this go? Is it not illegal at all?

Her stomach turned again, and goose bumps raced all over
her body, not just from cold but from a spasm of nausea she had to fight to control.

The other girl, whom Elissa had left still sick and weak, doctored with nothing but some basic pain meds and an antibiotic spray, was in danger. She’d escaped less than twenty-four hours ago, and she didn’t have a hope of staying free much longer. They were going to find her, take her back. And Elissa, who’d promised to return, who’d promised to help her, was trapped till the morning in her freaking
bedroom
.

She went to the still-open window, and her fingers gripped the ledge. She leaned out, searching the smooth white-plastered wall for nonexistent hand- and footholds. There was nothing. If she tried it, she’d kill herself.

She was trapped, trapped until the morning, when they’d come for her and take her off to have her head cut into, to burn out the thing linking her to that other girl.

They won’t do it, surely? Surgeons, nurses
—
if I say I’ve withdrawn my consent, they won’t force it on me. They can’t. Surely, surely
.

Who was she kidding? Look what they’d done to her double. Did she really think they’d hesitate to do a little brain surgery on her, to stop her from revealing their secrets?

And her mother had said
enforcement agents
. A step up from ordinary police, enforcement agents were Special Forces, with extra powers of arrest and detention, who got their orders directly from one of the other government departments.

It’s that important, then. This thing. This link
.

What else would they do while they were in her head? Erase her memories, too? Leave her blank and happy, not remembering any of this, not knowing she’d been lied to, never finding out who the other girl even was, or why and how she looked identical to Elissa?

They could, she was sure of it. They could take away her link
and
her memory, and then that would be it.

She sagged against the wall, trying to think, her hands pressing her eyes shut. Her thoughts ran like paint in water. When her head jerked up, she realized she hadn’t been thinking, but dreaming. She was shivering, cold even in the warm air drifting through the window.

She dragged the cover from her bed, wrapping it around herself before she went back to kneel at the window. She
couldn’t
fall asleep. She had to think how she was going to get out. In the morning, when they let her out to take her to the surgery, she had to be able to get away then. If she just
ran
?hat’s what you”rt

Twice more she pulled herself awake, heart banging, dizzy with fatigue. She had to stay awake. She had to make some kind of plan. She couldn’t just fall asleep without . . .

Her thoughts dissolved again.

Elissa jumped awake, chest hammering, from a dream of someone calling her.

The lights in her room had dimmed themselves and gone out. Outside, a little gray light crept through the darkness. It was nearly morning. She’d slept half the night.

“Lissa!”

She shot upright to lean out into the semidarkness, from where the voice had come.

Down among the shrubs between the house and the edge of the shelf, a pale blur of a face showed, and a figure, a shadow among shadows. The other girl had remembered the directions. She’d come to find her.

Elissa leaned out as far as she could. She didn’t dare shout too loudly, but she cupped one hand to her mouth to try to
direct the sound only where she wanted it, and called down, “They locked me in.”

Indistinct in the dimness, the girl made an incomprehensible gesture. Elissa shook her head, spread her hands to try to signify, “I don’t understand.” Jeez, they were in this state because of a telepathic link, but their connection wasn’t good enough to let them communicate over a few feet of empty air? Not that the other girl could help even if they
could
communicate.

At least I can help her, give her the chance to get away.