When Colonel Dawson walked into the meeting room where Marie and I were sitting on uncomfortable stools, he was clearly really, really pissed off, and just as clearly trying not to show it.
He pulled his computer out of his pocket, shook it rigid, and looked at me. “Tegan, you broke our agreement.” His voice was tightly controlled.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry may not be good enough,” he said, and twisted his fingers at the computer. My face filled the screen, and I winced. My hair looked terrible. Almost two months’ growth had turned it into shaggy black waves standing out in all directions, unstyled except for my amateur snips in front of the mirror. The little caption across the bottom of the screen named me as TEGAN OGLIETTI: LIVING DEAD GIRL.
“That is an awful nickname,” I muttered.
Dawson tapped his finger in the air twice. “—person, not property,” my voice snarled.
“A stirring statement from Tegan Oglietti in this exclusive interview,” Hurfest’s voice said.
I stiffened. I hadn’t given him an interview.
A caption flashed under an image of an older woman in a military uniform, identifying her as Keiko Nakamura-Chang, president of the Returned and Services League. “Ms. Oglietti has performed a great service to the armed forces of Australia,” she said solemnly. “The RSL has seen too many of our fellow soldiers die and be suspended in the hope of eventual revival. Ms. Oglietti is a symbol of that hope, so soon to be realized. We thank Ms. Oglietti for her sacrifices and for her commitment to the principles of comradeship and loyalty that all Australians hold dear.”
That didn’t seem so bad to me. What was Dawson worried about?
A new face flashed on the screen, and a man with long dark curls was identified as Charla Flamdt of Second Chances. He was beaming at the camera, tears gleaming in his eyes. “As I’ve been saying for weeks, Tegan’s amazing recovery is an inspiration to all of us who work in cryonics advocacy. I’m so glad to hear from her own mouth that she’s a firm believer in the inherent personhood of cryonic survivors. Companies that are funding the suspension process in return for an agreed term of labor after revival are engaged in indentured labor. Australians are entitled to the basic human right of a second life.”
Huh. The politics of cryonics were obviously a little more complicated than I’d thought.
“But not all commenters are so pleased by Tegan’s revival,” Hurfest interrupted, and a third face flashed on the screen, identified as THE FATHER. Unlike the others, he was speaking from an outside location, face partly shaded by a wide-brimmed hat. I could make out dark eyes on a pale face, and a strong jawline. “This poor girl is a victim,” he said. “She is a victim of humanity’s godlessness, of its meddling in matters it was not meant to touch. Death is a divine mystery, not a medical conundrum. The real Tegan Oglietti is dead. Her husk may proclaim that she is a person, but she has been separated from her soul, and her body is desecrated by this supposed resurrection.”
I gasped.
The Father stared out of the screen, dark eyes appearing to fix on my own. “Tegan, if you are watching this broadcast, I’m praying for you. I pray that you have the courage to return to God, and to the death and everlasting life he decreed for you.”
“The Father of the Inheritors of the Earth,” Hurfest said. “Well, there you have it. Three people, three opinions. What do you think? Leave your thoughts and tubecasts in the comments.”
The picture froze on the Father’s serene face, a small smile lightening those deep-set eyes.
Of course I had given the state of my soul some thought. If you grow up thinking that your soul is going to heaven and eternal happiness, where you get to help and guide your loved ones left behind, the whole New Beginning thing was a shock. Like, where was my soul when I was dead? Was it waiting with my body all that time? Was it in heaven and then it came back when I started breathing again? Had it been in some sort of not-quite-real place?
I wrestled with the idea for a bit, and then I decided it was probably one of God’s mysteries that I wasn’t meant to actually understand, like how exactly bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ or how a virgin conception worked.
Until the Father, I’d never considered the idea that my soul and I might now be separated.
I knew that it wasn’t true. But I didn’t know how I could prove it.
I stared at the Father’s face, thinking about arguments I might make, until Dawson pulled my attention back to more worldly matters.
“The ’cast has millions of views already,” he said quietly. “Most of the comments are assuming you’re aligned with their cause and are praising you. The rest are… not so kind. This is exactly the kind of situation we were hoping to avoid by controlling your media presence very tightly, Tegan. But you broke the contract with this interview.”
I jumped to my feet, no longer concerned with concealing my fear. “I didn’t do an interview! I said that one thing, and the rest was all no comment. Ask Marie if you don’t believe me. It was just one thing! It wasn’t even about the project!”
“It only takes one thing,” Dawson said. “I didn’t place a media ban on you only to protect the project. These people will twist anything, and they jump on any weakness. You’ll find yourself saying things you never intended and could never have meant. I’m getting a lot of pressure from my superiors to bring you back inside.”
“You can’t,” I said frantically. “I just got out. I’ll go crazy. You can’t—please, please. I am a person; I’m not property. You promised me.”
“My lawyer—” Marie started.
“Dr. Carmen, lawyers won’t be necessary. I managed to get Tegan a second chance.”
I sucked in a deep breath and sat down again.
“Tegan is starting school next Thursday,” Marie said anxiously.
“And if I didn’t think boredom was a trigger for trouble, that wouldn’t be happening,” Dawson said. “But I imagine the Elisabeth Murdoch Academy will keep you busy. Your alma mater, I believe, Dr. Carmen?” He didn’t wait for Marie to reply but waved a finger in my face. “And from now on, you’ll have a bodyguard with you at all times whenever you leave the house. No more waiting in the parking lot.”
I opened my mouth, but Marie gripped my shoulder tightly.
“That’s nonnegotiable,” Dawson said. “You’re a public figure—a largely celebrated one—but we’ve received threats, and we’re going to take them seriously.”
“We didn’t want to scare you,” Marie said.
“But I think you can handle it,” Dawson said. He folded his arms and stared down at me. “Am I wrong?”
I knew he was manipulating me. But I couldn’t stop the automatic surge of pricked pride. “Of course I can.”
“Good. Then you’ll do what your bodyguards tell you. And no more surprises.”
Which just went to show, he still didn’t know me very well.
Still, with only a few days left before I started school, Dawson didn’t need to worry about unscheduled trips to the supermarket. I didn’t have the time. I had never worked so hard in my life.
It helped that Koko automatically recorded and organized everything into searchable mind maps and knowledge trees, but it was still a lot to cram into my head. Marie started teaching me slang along with the history and customs lessons, but I was more dubious about that. A mum-aged person teaching a teenager slang?
On the final day, I got a security seminar from Zaneisha, who put me through protocols (never walk through doors first, basically), communication codes, and a dangers briefing. The Inheritors of the Earth weren’t on that list—as Marie had said, they were counted as low-risk.
High-risk groups included the Australia for Australians crew, who had also taken exception to my claim that I was a person. They’d decided I was an immigrant from the past, and therefore, according to Australia’s No Migrant policy, an illegal immigrant, who they didn’t seem to think were people at all. They were campaigning to get me deported. Working out where I should get deported to didn’t seem to have bothered A4A; “anywhere but here” was their guiding principle. They were armed and fanatical, and had killed at least two dozen “foreigners” in the Northern Territory this year alone. Two of the victims had legal visas for short-term visits. Three of them had been Australian-born.
A4A wore black masks in their tubecasts and ranted on-screen about how I was a fake Australian, taking up resources that real Australians couldn’t spare. And they scared the shit out of me.
Zaneisha finished the afternoon with a pop quiz, including a couple of questions she hadn’t actually covered in the session.
“If anyone threatens you with a weapon and tells you to get into a vehicle, what would you do?” she asked.
I thought back to the one compulsory self-defense class I’d taken at school. You were supposed to give someone your wallet if you were mugged—your money wasn’t worth your life. “Cooperate,” I said confidently.
“No. Scream. Run in a zigzag. Draw as much attention to yourself as possible.”
“Uh,” I said, “what if they shoot me?”
“Anyone who wants to get you into a vehicle probably wants you alive, so they won’t risk it. Or they want to get you somewhere quiet where they can kill you very slowly. At least if it happens on the street, it’ll be fast.”
My eyes bugged out so hard it actually hurt.
Zaneisha nodded soberly, and then her EarRing chimed. “Ah. Ms. Miyahputri is here. I wanted to teach you some self-defense, but we’ve run out of time. After you start school, inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” I echoed weakly. Self-defense sounded like a really, really good idea. Why had I spent all that time practicing guitar instead of taking up boxing, like Alex? “Are you sure you can’t just show me a few—”
Marie bustled in. “All done?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Zaneisha told her. No matter what Marie said, she couldn’t get Zaneisha to call her anything but ma’am or Dr. Carmen.
“Well, Bethari’s here, Tegan. Let’s go and say hello.” She smiled. “Or geya.”
We went upstairs, Zaneisha trailing us unobtrusively, and found a girl my age sitting at Marie’s big golden table, a cup of tea steaming gently in front of her.
Bethari Miyahputri was the daughter of one of Colonel Dawson’s army colleagues, and she also went to Elisabeth Murdoch. She was supposed to be my guide to the school.
I hesitated in the doorway. Marie, who could be ruthless when she wanted, nudged me through.
“Geya,” I said, the slang greeting sitting awkwardly on my tongue. “I’m Tegan.” They were the first words I’d spoken to someone my own age since I woke up.
“Hello,” she replied, turning toward me. Bethari was a really pretty girl with light brown skin and a few dark freckles sprinkled over her cheeks. Her nose was long and turned up at the end. She was wearing a flowing dress made of purple memory fabric and a gorgeous yellow-patterned headscarf. “I’m Bethari.”
I scrubbed my hands on my linen drawstring pants, wishing I’d had a chance to do some shopping.
“Um, so, thanks for agreeing to do this,” I said. “It’s really kooshy of you.”
Bethari’s thin eyebrows jumped, but her face returned to polite blankness. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Marie beamed. “Why don’t you show Bethari your room, Tegan, and I’ll prepare a snack? You girls don’t need us old ladies standing about.”
Zaneisha’s expression remained absolutely impassive, but I had the feeling she disagreed with this assessment. “Sure,” I said. “Come downstairs.”
We walked down the spiral staircase in absolute silence. My skin was crawling all over with embarrassment.
“So, this is my room,” I said.
Bethari barely glanced around. “It’s nice,” she said, sitting carefully on the edge of my bed.
It was nice, though I still wasn’t used to having no windows. A skyshaft to the surface let in natural light, but it wasn’t the same.
Still, the decor was good. The furniture was all matching blond wood. Marie had let me choose prints to make and hang, and I’d mostly gone with landscapes of urban decay that reminded me of clambering through old buildings with Alex. On the nightstand was an iron statue of a stylized woman standing half submerged in a cresting wave, long hair hanging down her back and flowing over her breasts to become the sea. Her features were obscured by rust, and it was hard to tell whether she was rising from the ocean or falling into it, but I liked the shape of her head, and the strength in her outstretched hands. I’d seen the statue on the tubes when Marie was teaching me how to use Koko, and she’d bought it as a surprise.
The prints of my family were tucked in my nightstand drawer. I didn’t want them on display.
Bethari was just sitting there, like a breathing statue, eyes fixed unwaveringly on my face.
“Uh,” I said. What did people talk about in the future? Well, school was standard. “What’s your specialty at Elisabeth Murdoch?”
The school was one for talented students, and everyone was supposed to have a specialty that they trained in. Marie’s had been biology, and she’d assured me that I’d love the training and attention from the specialty teacher.
“Journalism,” Bethari said, and pinched her mouth closed again, as if every word was costing her money.
I had no idea why Marie thought I’d be friends with this snobby, closed-off girl, but I hadn’t had high hopes to start with. Most friend setups, in my experience, turned out pretty badly. It was the people you met by accident who worked out.
I met Alex when she was the girl in the seat opposite me on the train, crying behind her tattered book.
I ignored her sniffs for a little while, and then I put my hand out flat in front of her, palm up. I didn’t touch her. That didn’t seem right, somehow.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The girl lowered the book, and for the first time I saw what had been done to her face. She had a big purple bruise right up her jaw, and half hidden behind her tangled fringe, her left eyebrow had a cut that was crusted over with red-black blood.
The fresh marks stood out over a pattern of pale yellow-and-brown bruises, like the ones I built up over soccer season. Someone had been beating her for a long time.
“No,” she said. She was so direct about it, looking me straight in the eye, that I just let the next words spill out of my mouth.
“Who did that?” I asked.
“Foster parents,” she said. “Do you have any painkillers?”
I rummaged around in my backpack, fighting the sway of the car as we went under the West Gate Bridge, and found some ibuprofen. She swallowed two of the pills dry. When she tipped them into her mouth, her long sleeve rode back, and I saw the sores wrapped around her wrist, red and raw.
I gasped.
“Oh yeah,” she said, and looked absently at the marks. “They tied me up the first time I ran away.”
“Where are you going now?”
“Anywhere.”
“Come home with me,” I said. I was twelve years old, and I’d just started taking the train home from soccer practice by myself. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say in the face of something this awful. But I was horrified, by the cruelty, by her matter-of-fact reaction to it, and I wanted to fix it. “You can stay with us. My mum’s really nice.”
She looked me over, taking her time, assessing the threat, and happy to let me know she was doing it.
“Okay,” she said finally, and put the book on the seat beside her. “I’m Alex.”
“Tegan,” I said, and from then on—even though she didn’t stay with us long and went to live with a different, much better set of foster parents, even though we argued and teased each other a lot, even though she grew up and got political and hated soldiers and dragged me to rallies when I would much rather have been home with my guitar—we were friends.
I didn’t think things with Bethari would go so well.
“That’s a pretty headscarf,” I blurted, grasping for any topic at all.
But that, of all things, got a reaction. Bethari’s hand rose protectively to her head. “I wear this as a symbol of my faith,” she announced. “I’m Muslim.”
I nodded.
“And no matter what my mother said, I need to know right away. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Of course not,” I said.
She was still watching me, and I realized that she wasn’t being unfriendly. She was being careful.
“A hundred years ago,” she said, “not many of your people were very accepting of Islam.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s so good that that’s changed.”
Bethari’s eyebrow popped up.
“No, I mean it!” I said. “My boyfriend was Sunni Muslim. People always assumed stuff about him. They said things—he hated it. It was awful.”
“You had a Muslim boyfriend?” she asked, probably not meaning to sound so disbelieving. “What was his name?”
“Dalmar,” I said. “He’d just… he’d be so happy things are better now. I wish he could see it.” And then I had to stop and duck my head to hide the tears, my face burning with just how stupid I must look. Upset over a guy who had been dead for forty-six years, who’d had a long and successful political career, and who married a woman he’d described as “the true love of my life.”
A woman who wasn’t me.
Okay.
I totally lied to you about not looking up my friends and family. It was the first thing I did as soon as I knew how to use Koko. I searched for everything on record, and I regret that more than almost anything else.
I wish I had chosen to remember them as they had been.
It’s just hard, all right? It’s hard, even when they had really great lives, like Dalmar and Alex did. Because they had those great lives without me—and feeling that way is stupid and petty and gross, but it’s still hard.
It was much, much worse when I found out about Owen. But that’s not relevant, and I don’t want to talk about it.
But I’ll tell you the truth from now on. I really will.
“Were you with Dalmar long?” Bethari asked after a strained moment.
“One day.” I gulped.
“Oh.” In my peripheral vision, I could see her hands twisting, the first nervous motion she’d made. “Well, was he pretty?”
My head came up. She was smiling, looking as uncertain and uncomfortable as I did.
“Yes,” I said, and a great big bubble of laughter rose from my stomach and out my throat, shattering into high-pitched giggles. “He was so pretty!”
She blinked at me, but it was the kind of infectious laughter you can’t resist, and she started giggling, too. “I can’t believe you said kooshy,” she snorted. “That’s what people were saying when I was a ween.”
“A ween?” I cackled. “What’s a ween?”
“A child! A wee one!”
“A kid?”
“Kid!” she howled, and we collapsed on my bed. Every time one of us started to slow down, the other would whisper “kooshy!” or “ween!” and we’d be off again.
Finally, I sat up, wiping tears from my eyes. “You have to teach me some better slang.”
“I will, if you teach me yours,” Bethari said. “Hey, who’s that?”
I followed her eyes.
On the back of my door was a print of that famous picture of John and Yoko. She’s wearing a black top and blue jeans, lying on her back with one arm raised. He’s totally naked, and curled up around her like a comma to her exclamation mark. Her expression is calm, unsmiling. His is passionate as he presses a kiss to her cheekbone. Her eyes are open. His are closed. But they curve into each other; her arm is around his back, her hand just visible at his side; his leg is lifted over her body, his arm wrapped around her head. The photo emphasizes their differences and their connection.
John was murdered on the day that photo was taken, and Rolling Stone put it on the cover of their next issue.
After I died, I was on some covers, too.
“It’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” I said.
“Were they friends of yours, too?”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “No. John was in the Beatles. You know the Beatles?”
“Is that a… oh! A band, right?”
“Right,” I said, relieved.
“They had the song about the daydream believer?”
My relief vanished. “That was the Monkees. Totally different. Imitators put together to capitalize on the Beatles’ success—do people really not know about the Beatles anymore?”
Bethari shrugged. “How much do you know about the music a hundred years before your time?”
I buffed my nails on my boring pants. “1927? That was the year of one of Stravinsky’s operas. Oedipus Rex, I think. It was the year The Jazz Singer was released, the first talking movie ever, and it was about music. Al Johnson? No, Jolson. And it was the year Funny Face first played in New York; it had opened in Philadelphia earlier, to terrible reviews, but the revised version ran on Broadway for two hundred and fifty shows.”
Bethari began to laugh again. “I think I can guess your specialty.”
“Music is universal,” I said. “And thank god. Um… about the journalism…”
“Don’t worry. Mami told me you’re under a lock clause. She made me sign one, too. I won’t ’cast a thing.” She sighed mockingly, her face suddenly alive with self-deprecation. “Kept away from the biggest scoop of my career. It’s so facebreaking.”
“Oooh,” I said. “New word.”
“Right! Let’s see. You don’t want to break your face—um, do something embarrassing or humiliating. If you break someone else’s face and they deserve it, that’s cool, but they’ll probably be angry, like, ‘That bazza broke my face. I’ll get him.’ And if people know something embarrassing about you, that’s facebreaking.”
“Like you not being able to scoop everyone with the Living Dead Girl because your mum said so,” I said, filing bazza away for later.
“Is that really what you call yourself?”
“God, no. I’m Tegan. Teeg.”
“Teeg,” Bethari said. “Okay. Tell me more about these Beatles, Teeg, and then I’ll give you the ontedy on everyone at Elisa M.”
“Ontedy?”
“Oh-en-tee-dee. News. Gossip.” She frowned. “And I think you could do with some education. Not everything has changed for the better.”
I rolled off the bed and snapped Koko open. “Sounds like a plan. Prepare yourself for a musical awakening.”
When Marie came in with a tray of sliced apples and carrot sticks, I was showing Bethari pictures of my family while we worked our way through the Red Album.
For the first time in a lifetime, I was truly happy.