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The mall was made up of glass-fronted galleries built one on top of another within the cliff. As Elissa paid for their new clothes with her reprogrammed morph-card, tension pulled all her muscles tight, made her clumsy so that she fumbled with the card as she slid it through the scanner, and had to press cancel and do it a second time.
Phantom alarms rang in her ears, and when for a split second she met the shop assistant’s eyes, she had to force herself not to jerk her gaze guiltily away.
Lin stood quietly next to her, blond wings of hair hiding her face. The same tension held her too—an invisible aura that seemed to vibrate across the space between them.
The assistant shook the pants and tops into practiced folds, slid them into a carrier, and dropped the shoes in on top of them. “Take your card, please. D’you want a hard-copy receipt?”
“No, thanks.”
The assistant’s gaze met Elissa’s for a further moment, then moved incuriously away. “Thank you. Have a nice day.”
Elissa left the counter, new clothes safe in the carrier in her hand, Lin close behind her. The assistant had hardly seen them, hardly registered them as individuals. They’d been customers, that was all, yet more customers in a day full of them.
She won’t even remember us. If people ask, if they track us here and go around asking for sightings
. . .
They were back out in the main area of the mall, bathed in the muted sunlight coming through the glass. People wandered past them, adjusting their direction without properly looking up from phones, myGadgets, or from conversations with their companions. There were other teenage girls here and there, girls walking in twos or threes, often wearing clothes not dissimilar to Elissa’s and Lin’s, some laughing, some talking quietly, heads together.
Like me and Lin. In this whole place we’re just two more teenagers. Until it’s schooltime, no one’s going to pay us any attention, notice us any more than they’re noticing all the other girls like us
.
She looked up and caught Lin’s eye. “It’s okay,” she said, not loudly but not particularly quietly either. “No one’s noticing us. We’re just blending in.”
Lin gave a quick breath, and the almost-tangible shiver of tension in the air faded, died away. “Let’s change into the new clothes now, though.”
Elissa sent her a little grin. “Oh, completely. I feel like I’ve
been living in this outfit my whole life.” She caught herself too late, and a flush burned up into her face.
Could I sound more overprivileged? Saying that? To her?
But Lin’s lips just curled in a smile. “Yes. And think how I feel.”
“Gah. I’m
sorry
.”
Lin shrugged, dismissing it. “Let’s get change activated. Security breached at Section ed, theing to d.”
Elissa had bought clothes that were cute and fashionable enough to transform both girls into yet another pair of teenagers on a quick mall fix before school. Three-quarter-length jeans and a long floaty white top for her, loose exercise pants and a close-fitting sleeveless tee for Lin. And new sweatshirts with deep hoods.
She rolled up their old clothes in the carrier and stuffed it into one of the trash cans in the washroom they’d ducked into to get changed. As she straightened, she caught sight of one of the mirrors and almost jumped, thinking for an instant that a stranger was watching her. But it wasn’t a stranger. It was her own reflection.
It was obviously her, once she looked closer. But for that one instant she’d seen herself and thought it was someone else. And the girl standing close by, with sleek blond hair and the graceful, clinging lines of dark pants and T-shirt—she looked nothing like the desperate, dirty runaway of less than a day ago.
Once, when Elissa was six, she’d been playing hide-and-seek at a friend’s party. Running in a panic while another girl counted, she’d found a hiding place behind the one-way glass of the shower cubicle in the friend’s parents’ bathroom. She’d stood silently, hardly noticing the moisture seeping through the soles of her socks. She’d been dizzy with the
triumphant knowledge that she was invisible and the others weren’t. Even if they looked straight at where she stood, she would see them and they would never see her.
The seeker had given up in the end, and the friend’s mother had gently reminded them all that the grown-ups’ bathroom was out-of-bounds, and the game had continued with Elissa feeling chastened. But now, seeing her and Lin’s eyes looking out of unfamiliar faces, under unfamiliar hair, she remembered what it had been like, seeing but not being seen, as safe from scrutiny, discovery, as if she’d turned truly invisible.
Her shoulders relaxed as a knot she hadn’t even realized was there untied itself and slipped away.
“Where do we go now?” said Lin from behind her.
Elissa turned. “We can pick up colored contacts from a machine—we’ll do that first. Then we’ll go to one of the parks, where there aren’t many cameras, and plan our next step. I was thinking it would be a good idea to leave the city.”
But even as she spoke, other thoughts flowed up into her mind, washing through what she was saying. The first thoughts, it seemed, since she’d run from her home in the early hours of the morning, that weren’t frantic, charged with panic. Thoughts she wouldn’t have been able to have until she’d reached this new calmness.
We can leave the city. There are high-speed trains leaving all the time, and the morph-cards will pay for any tickets we like. But I don’t need to do anything that drastic just yet. Not just yet. Dad helped me escape. He went along with Mother, but it must have been just to calm her down. He can’t have meant to force me into an operation I don’t need anymore
.
And Mother
—
she was just overreacting. She was freaked out
because she thought I was running away. I’ve been gone for hours now. If I’m gone for another night, she’ll start to realize how crazy she was. I can call them. We can talk sensibly.
Then, a thought came that shot relief through her
now
.
Earlier she’d wondered what her father would do if she called him. But now it seemed dumb to have even wondered. He’d helped her escape, hadn’t he? Of course he’d help her now. Tell her where she should go, how long she needed to wait till her mother had calmed down. Think of other ways of helping Lin.
“Lissa?” Lin’s voice was a little sharp, anxious.
Elissa looked at her. “I’m going to call my dad.”
Lin’s face froze, her eyes suddenly huge. “What?”
“I’m going to call him. He gave me the cards, remember? He’s on our side.”
But Lin was shaking her head. “No, no, don’t. They’ll find us. Lissa, you
can’t
.”
“He’ll
help
us.”
“You thought they’d
both
help us, and they locked you up—”
“That was because of my mother! My dad
helped
.”
“No.
No
. It doesn’t mean he’ll help us now. He did what your mother said, he locked you in. He only gave you the cards when you were already going to escape. He’s not going to do anything else, Lissa.”
A wave of heat rose behind Elissa’s eyes. She remembered to keep her voice low, but all the same the words snapped like a crack of electricity. “Don’t you tell me what my dad’s like!”
Lin’s face went still. She opened her mouth once, then shut it again. Her shoulders hunched. “Okay.”
“Look. I don’t know what to do at this point. My dad will help us figure it out. It’s not like we have a lot of options.”
There was a little frozen moment, then Elissa picked up her bag and went out of the washroom. Silently Lin came behind her.
If you don’t like what I’m doing, you don’t have to come. Go sort things out for yourself; go do something else
.
Except even in her anger—
who the hell does she think she is, telling me about my dad?
—she knew it wasn’t true. Lin did have to come. She was dependent on Elissa to help her.
And she has nowhere else to go. She came to find me. That was all
.
It was awful to matter so much to someone.
She led the way to the nearest phone booths. They were soundproofed, which was just as well, because they stood next to a courtyard filled with chairs and coffee tables and dominated by a large newsscreen.
Elissa looked up at the screen as she went past, her stomach tightening a little, but the stories were all more or less the same as earlier that morning, and although the shelf fire was referred to again—the earlier facility fire seemed to have passed its current-news date and wasn’t mentioned at all—there were no additional details.
The tightness stayed with her, though, as she fed two of her last few coins into the slot next to the phone screen, looking at the stylized vines of the
She tapped in her father’s name, scrolled through the short list of other Ivorys that replaced the vines display, and clicked on the familiar name.
The connecting icon, a single vine stalk, drew itself across
the screen, curling out in long spirals and little tendril twists—first just dark green, then other colors as the leaves and drooping, graceful flowers began to color themselves in, outer edges first, bleeding color toward their centers.
The edge of the screen was smooth, and hard enough to push dents up into Elissa’s fingertips where they pressed against it.
Her father
had
gone along with her mother, but only to start with. Just like he’d agreed to the painful braces Elissa had worn when she was thirteen, braces that the orthodontist had said were scarcely necessary but that her mother had insisted she wear. Like he’d agreed to the summer school her mother had sent her to when she was ten, where she’d been homesick for two weeks before they’d come to take her home. He hadn’t interfered; he’d agreed that both were for Elissa’s own good.
But when the braces had given her a toothache that had woken her in the middle of the night, he’d brought her painkillers and taken her back to the orthodontist to check that the braces had been fitted correctly. And when she’d called home from the summer school, sobbing, for the third time in two days, he’d persuaded her mother she should come home early.
I know him. Not Lin. I know he’ll help me.
The connection chime sounded, the vine blew away off the screen as if a silent wind had turned it to dust, and her father’s face appeared. He was in his office—
thank God, I thought he would be
—and he only looked up as the phone connected. His eyes met Elissa’s, and his whole face seemed to jerk in shock.
After a split second, when his face was so still it might have
been no more than his photograph, his lips moved, silently, very slightly.
No
.
Suddenly Elissa was near tears. She’d been coping okay: She’d gotten them fed and washed and disguised, was on the edge of making plans for what to do next. But she wasn’t
supposed
to be doing all this. This was something that
adults
were supposed to do.
“Daddy, I need help.” Her voice wavered.
“No.” This time he said it out loud. “Cut the call. Get out.”
“Daddy . . .” Tears stung the inside of her nose. Her chin shook. “I really need help. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Her father’s eyes met hers in a long, agonizing stare. She waited for him to say something, waited for him to save her, help her, tell her what to do.
Lis
. He didn’t speak out loud, just formed her name with his lips. Then he mouthed something else she couldn’t quite pick up . . . .
help you
. . .
out of the city
. And then one final word, a word he’d said to her toward if sheing to in the gray dawn of that morning, standing outside the blaze of their burning house, pushing an illegal form of ID into her sweaty palm.
Run
.
Then his face blinked out and the
WELCOME
screen returned.
For a moment she couldn’t believe he’d cut her off, couldn’t believe that was it. Her hand went to the screen as if she could summon him back, but all that happened was that the familiar menu of choices appeared.
Would you like to make another call? Would you like information on current special offers? Would you like to end this session now?
Numbly she touched yes to end the session, and her leftover coins chinked into the tray below. She scooped them up, feeling their smooth coolness between her fingers, the way they slid together with a tiny scraping sound.
“Elissa.”
Elissa swallowed. “He told us to run. I said I needed help and he wouldn’t. He didn’t held back out of
ELISSA
was frozen no longer. Heat and adrenaline raced through every vein in her body. In a quick, reflexive movement she jerked her hood up over her hair, pushing the wild spirals of copper curls forward to shadow and conceal her face. At the same time she was mapping out routes in her head, not just the quickest ways out of the mall but also the routes where they’d meet the fewest people. The fewest kind, concerned, all-too-watchful people.
