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The twin shook her head. “We had numbers.”

After everything else Elissa knew about what her double had gone through, that shouldn’t have been a shock. But it was, all the same.
Numbers
.

“Well, you have to have a name now.” Her voice came out with an edge to it, an edge she instantly tried to soften. “At least you get to choose your own!”

“I . . .” The twin wound another piece of hair around the brush, pulled it out straight. “I already did . . .”

“Oh?”

“I can’t use it. I know I can’t. I . . . In there, once they told us what we were, I only managed to believe I was a real person because I knew
you
were a real person. I took your name.”

“You—oh.” Elissa didn’t know what to do with that. Her instinct was to say,
No. You’re not doing that. I’m already sharing my face with you
—
I’m not sharing my name
. But she had no right. Their whole lives, she’d had everything and the other girl had had nothing. “Um . . . so you want to be called Elissa?”

“No. No, that’s not what I meant. I thought of you as Lissa—that’s the name everyone calls you, that’s the name you have in my head. And I”—she hesitated, head dipping lower, not looking at Elissa—“I thought of myself as Lissa’s twin.”

After a moment Elissa put her hand out, touched the girl’s arm. “That’s okay.”

“I know I shouldn’t have. But I never thought I’d actually see you, and I—”

“I said it’s okay.” Elissa paused a moment, hand staying reassuringly on the girl’s—
my twin’s
—arm. “But it’s no good for the morph-cards. We need to think of something. Something that still means the same thing, but that sounds like a real name for the cards.” She chewed on her thumbnail, thinking out loud. “Lissa’s twin. Lissatwin. Letwin. Etwin. Satwin. Satin? Satin’s a real name. It’s kind of dumb, but it’s real.”ed, sitting cross-leggedArt

“Okay.” But the muscles around her twin’s eyes had tightened. It wasn’t okay. She’d been told she was nothing but a number, a human-sourced nonhuman, and she’d fought back by choosing her own name. It wasn’t just a name—it was the thing that had kept her human. Kept her alive.

“Oh! How about Lin? That could be short for Lissa’s twin, and it starts with the same letter. And
also
, for if we need to keep changing our IDs, we could change it just a tiny bit, to Lynette or Linda. Or, um, Linnet, or Lindsey . . .” She trailed off, watching her twin’s face.

“Lin. Lynette.” The other girl said the words slowly, as if feeling the shape they made. “Lin.”

“I mean, you don’t have to have that. We can think of something else.”

Her twin smiled, a sudden bright flash of . . . Elissa couldn’t think of the right word. It was more than happiness, more than pleasure.
It’s
—
oh
. It was a flash of what looked, for the first time, like joy.

“Yes. I’ll be Lin.”

Elissa found herself grinning back at her twin, her own smile so wide, it hurt.
We’re doing it. We’re getting her away from those people and what they did to her. We’re declaring that she’s as human as I am. Her own person.

“All right,” she said. “Now let’s finish up so we can do the morph-cards.”

Twenty minutes later the cards showed Rissa White and Lynette May, one a milk-pale curly haired redhead, one a blonde whose sleek hair brushed cheeks that glowed with a faint golden tan.

Thank God they were done. Now they could grab some colored contacts and different clothes, check into another pod-motel, and think about where to go next.

Elissa shoveled all the debris of their disguises—empty tubes and sachets, disposable hairbrushes—into the disposal and recycling chutes, checked around for anything they might have left or that might be useful, then zipped shut the bag she had brought from home.

As she did so, a phrase from the screen, only half-heard, caught her attention. “ . . . say the residential fire was caused by an electrical fault . . .”

She looked up, and the shelf where her house stood was
showing on the screen. The grass outside it had been trampled into the ground, squashed and muddy, and the glass fronts of the houses nearby were opaque, not because of privacy settings but because of the blackened scorch marks streaked all over them.

She leaned over and turned the volume up.

“Despite the extensive damage caused, fortunately no lives were lost in the fire that last night raged through eleven houses of a residential shelf in Sector Seven-West.” The news presenter, as news presenters did, was repeating more or less the same information over and over, a soundtrack to the images flashing on the screen. “The firefighters who were on the scene within minutes have suggested that the blaze may have been caused by an electrical circuit overheating in the house where the fire began, number twelve. Extensive damage has been caused, and all residents were forced to evacuate . . . .”

Elissa glanceded, sitting cross-leggedArt over at Lin, who was sitting on the edge of the lower bunk. “That fire—look, they’re saying it started in my house. It was completely the weirdest thing. You must have seen it. It started so
fast
. And it was the only thing that could have gotten me out of the house. I’d almost forgotten about it, but jeez, talk about miracles!”

The corners of Lin’s mouth curled up a tiny bit. “It wasn’t a miracle. It was me.”

“What? What do you mean? How could it be you?”

“You don’t know? You couldn’t tell—through the link?”

“Tell
what
?”

“It’s one of the things about my brain that’s different. I’m electrokinetic.”

“Electrokinetic?”

“I can control electrical currents.”

“
You
started that fire?”

Lin’s face froze, as if Elissa’s tone had shocked her. “Yes.”

“And that—oh my God, is
that
how you escaped? The fire the other night—you did that, too?”

“Yes.”

“And they didn’t know? They didn’t know you could do that kind of thing? They didn’t have safety precautions?”

Lin shrugged a shoulder. “They knew several of us had a level of psychokinesis from when we were quite young. They kept track of how it matured. But mine, it kept developing, even after the procedures started, and by that time—” Lin’s face went hard, acquired a shut-in look. “I knew not to let them know how strong it was. I kept practicing, and I got good enough, finally, to push up the current supplying the whole complex. I got it to leap the fuses, and it set the place on fire.” She grinned, a flash of triumph. “So then, when you said you were locked in your room—all these doors, they have the same safety thing built into them.”

There was an awful feeling in Elissa’s stomach. “You started a fire. In a housing complex.”

Lin frowned. “Yes.”

“But”—Elissa took a breath—“it was people’s houses. They were
sleeping
in them—it was the middle of the night. And you— It was a
massive
fire, it went up like an explosion.”

“I know. Like the one in the facility.”

Elissa swallowed. “You could have killed someone.”

Her twin stared at her. “I knew the sensors would pick it up before it got anywhere near you.”

“I don’t mean me!
Other
people! There are other people in that building. There’s safety measures and all that stuff, but
people die in house fires all the time. You could have killed them!”

Her heart was thumping as she looked at Lin, waiting for her to register what she’d done, waiting for her to look as stricken with guilt as Elissa felt. She’d put all those people in danger—people who had nothing to do with what was happening to them, people who hadn’t even known activated. Security breached at Section ed, theing to Elissa was locked up.

Lin did look distressed now, biting her lip, her eyes fixed on Elissa’s. But her words weren’t anything like the ones Elissa wanted her to say.

“Why should I care about that?” she said. “Why are you upset? No one’s dead. The fire services were on their way when you escaped.”

“Because
you could have
—” Elissa broke off. “I can’t explain. If you can’t see why there’s a problem, I can’t make you understand.”

“Lissa . . .”

“Stop it! I can’t— If you don’t see how awful it is to put all those people in danger and not even think about it, not even care, I can’t talk to you. I don’t know what to do with you.”

“Don’t. Lissa, don’t, don’t.” Even under the fake tan Lin’s face showed white. “Don’t not talk to me. Tell me. I don’t understand. I was saving
you
. I don’t know any of those people. I only know you. Why are you saying I should care about them?”

Despite Elissa’s horror, Lin’s distress caught at her. Elissa frowned, staring at her, feeling as if they were speaking two different languages. “You . . . ,” she spoke slowly, feeling her way. “You weren’t
trying
—you didn’t actually
want
to kill them?”

“I didn’t
want
to, no.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s me who’s not understanding. You didn’t
want
to kill them, but you didn’t care if you did?”

Lin opened her hands in front of her and stared down at the palms. “I guess. I mean, I wouldn’t have
enjoyed
killing them, but . . . them dying or not, it’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t know any of them. You’re my twin, but they’re just . . . nobody.”

“But
why
? I don’t get why that makes a difference. They’re other
people.
”

Lin flicked a glance upward, her hands still open on her lap. She looked suddenly exposed. “Not to me.”

“Not— Oh.”
Right
. Lin had been raised like a lab animal in a facility, intended to be used for the benefit of legally declared humans, creatures different from her. Maybe Elissa couldn’t expect her to have Elissa’s own automatic connection with the species that was biologically hers. To the rest of the world, Lin was nothing more than property. So, to Lin, what were
they
? What were other people to her? Not the ones who’d held her prisoner, but others, outside the facility, neutral and uninvolved?

After a hesitant moment Elissa asked the question out loud. She’d expected Lin to fumble for an answer, but she didn’t. “They’re not anything.”

“None of them?”

Lin tugged at an end of her hair. “Well, not you.”

“But . . . ?”

“All the rest. Yes. I saw some of them, when I was coming through the city to find you. I saw people who were looking after their children, and people who thought I was one of them, and they smiled at me.” She looked at the screen,
where the news presenter had moved on to an earthquake over at the other side of the continent. “But every single one of them, if they knew what I was . . .”

“They’d want you sent back?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t
know
that . . .” But Lin looked at her, her face blank, and Elissa’s words trailed away.

She’s not a psychopath. She’s
not.
She cares about what I think. Psychopaths
—
sociopaths?
—
they don’t care about other people’s feelings
.

But Elissa’s stomach was churning, her chest as tight as if there were a weight on it. Inside her head, flames roared, the impossible, out-of-control flames that had torn through her family’s house just a few hours ago.
Lin
could have killed so many people. She was doing it to save me, I know why she did it, but to not even care what might have happened
 . . .

As Elissa turned off the screen, and then as they went out of the room and down in the elevator, the arguments beat at her. Lin had sounded beyond callous, but it wasn’t her fault. There was no
reason
she should care about any of the people in the whole city, on the whole planet.
Look what we
—
our government
—
did to her. She’s entitled not to care about any of us
.

But what if that’s it? What if what they did, what if it’s broken something inside her? What if I’ve run away with
—
what if I’m protecting
—
someone who really is a sociopath
—
a dangerous, electro-kinetic sociopath?

What if there’s a very good reason they kept her locked up?

They stepped out of the motel into a glare of sunlight. It was early still, the city lying half-drowsing in the pre–rush hour calm, but the sun was already hot, promising a boiling day to come.

“Where are we going first?” said Lin.

The sunlight showed her clothes to be even shabbier, even dirtier, than they’d looked under artificial lights, her bare feet peeking out under the hems of her pants. The sleek blond hair, the flawless sheen to her face, made her look quite unlike the girl of yesterday. But she didn’t look as if she belonged in Elissa’s world either. Elissa’s clothes weren’t exactly shiny and clean, and they smelled of sweat, but they still looked a lot more expensive and cared for than Lin’s. She hitched the bag farther up onto her shoulder.

“Clothes and shoes first,” she said.

She led the way onto a slidewalk, heading toward the nearest twenty-four-hour mall. Lin followed her obediently, the unquestioning trust in her face making her look like a little girl. ed, sitting cross-leggedArt
She’s not a sociopath. She’s damaged, that’s all
.

Elissa shook her hair back, hitched the bag up again.
And anyway, I can’t think about that now. Right now we just have to think about disguise.