Nibbler runs off for some water. Anvi leans back against the door and taps the voice-control button on her Sheath. “Call Mom,” she says. It’s instinct—she needs her best friend—but at the first ring, her stomach drops.
She slaps at her Sheath. “Cancel call!”
The icon switches to red, then dissipates. Anvi rubs at her face. That was stupid. She can’t talk to her mom about Linda without telling her who Linda is, and if she did that, it’d be all over SocialHub in minutes.
I thought your brothers should know.
Sure, Mom, but you realize you’re not telling just them, right?
It was one thing with her breakup last fall. As sucky as that was, Anvi could at least understand her mother’s thinking—that she was saving Anvi the pain of telling the rest of the family herself. Her mom promised it wouldn’t happen again. Anvi doesn’t doubt her intentions, but she’s also shown her mother at least a dozen times how to restrict posts to specific social nodes—family, bridge buddies, med school friends. It never seems to take. She still just unthinkingly clicks Post to all. Every time.
And even if she didn’t post about it, she’s getting old: She’d slip in person and tell someone who’d tell someone else, who’d tell someone else. Next thing you know, the tale of Anvi moving in across the hall from Clone Girl is a twisted bit of family lore, and cousin Greta is texting her for details to post on that trashy gossip site she keeps insisting is meaningful work.
Yes, hanging up was the right thing to do.
Anvi watches Nibbler nose his food dish as though it might have refilled itself since dinner. She smiles—she can’t talk to her mother, but at least she has him.
Her Sheath buzzes. As she glances down, Anvi gets a whiff of the sweat trapped beneath its case. She felt so cool the first time she strapped on a Sheath, but the novelty has faded. The device strikes her now as little more than a puffed-up smart watch: a trend posing as necessity. She’s heard rumors the major players are going to move away from wearables back toward devices that fit in your pocket. She can’t wait.
Anvi answers the call. “Hi, Mom.”
“What’s wrong?” Her mother’s voice is edged with worry and sleep, and Anvi remembers it’s almost midnight back home.
“Nothing’s wrong. I was just calling to say hi, but I forgot the time difference.”
“You don’t sound like nothing’s wrong.”
She shouldn’t have said nothing. Her mother knows how scared Anvi was to make this move, how hard it’s been. “I mean, nothing major,” she says. “Just feeling a little lonely.”
“Hang in there, meri rani. It’ll get better once you start work.”
My princess. Anvi’s mother has only a handful of Hindi phrases, but it’s what her own mother called her. It’s what Anvi hopes to call her own daughter someday.
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll let you get back to bed.”
“Give my grand-dog a kiss for me.”
“Will do. Good night.”
Anvi heaves herself to her feet and goes to the kitchen for a beer, randomly selecting a local brew from a sample pack. Then she sinks onto the couch and pats for Nibbler to join her. Instead of turning on the TV or checking her Sheath, she stares at the door. Every instinct she has is telling her Linda shouldn’t be alone tonight. And though it’s not her place, she aches with the need to help. She’s used to playing the cheery, chirpy friend when hard times strike others—she mastered that role in undergrad. She likes playing that role; she wishes the anxious itch of inadequacy inside her would let her play that role always.
She digs at the tiny space between Nibbler’s eyes with her index finger as his tail sweeps across the couch cushion that nearly hit Linda. Tiny hairs shed onto the pad of Anvi’s finger.
She meant to tell Linda she knew about her when they went to the grocery store. That was why she tagged along despite Linda’s obviously not wanting her there. But she saw the full-bodied flush of terror that ran through Linda when Anvi lifted her Sheath to photograph the mural. For someone who walks around like she’s wearing a full set of battle armor, Linda’s eyes are astonishingly unshielded. After that—especially once they started talking about SocialHub—Anvi couldn’t think of a way to tell her that didn’t sound like gotcha.
She tried again when Linda came over for Fury and Honor, and again the words failed to find her lips.
She’s not surprised she failed and that it ultimately came out in totally the wrong way. The last decade of her life has been about feigning bravery; she’s gotten good enough at it that most of the time it feels easy and natural, but she’s always been inept at things like this.
When she was fifteen, she researched her favorite teacher online, scouring his social-media accounts—it was less centralized back then, a smattering of platforms all competing to dominate the attention economy. She’d done it out of childish love and hero worship, but the web of his online presence eventually led her to an Instagram account overflowing with risqué photography. Woman after woman just shy of nude, one of whom looked an awful lot like Anvi’s third-grade teacher.
Anvi burned with the shame of this knowledge for weeks, until Mr. Quinn asked her to stay after class one afternoon. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Anvi cracked and told him everything.
His face flashed with horror. She still remembers the panic of his stuttered How? And then he’d offered extra credit for her silence, an uptick to her already stellar grades, a bye on any homework assignment of her choice. Whatever she wanted, just please don’t tell anyone. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, it wasn’t meant to be part of his school life, it was art, a private hobby. Private—the word suctioned into Anvi’s mind. If it was so private, then why was the account public? If it was art, why was he so ashamed?
She hated herself for knowing, hated him for being just another horny man, hated realizing that a flesh-and-blood person could never be the kind of hero she wanted. She ran from the room in a panic. She and Mr. Quinn didn’t make eye contact for the rest of the year, and she made straight A’s. She’d been making straight A’s before, but the possibility of accidental blackmail has haunted her ever since.
Her mother doesn’t know about that.
Anvi can count on one hand the meaningful secrets she hasn’t told her mother. And now here’s another. She wishes she could tell her about Linda and ask for advice. Dear Mom, how do I convince a traumatized meme I mean her no harm? Also, her house just burned down and she thinks I’m a liar.
She should let it go. Wave in the hall, hold the elevator, be a decent neighbor and nothing more.
But Linda is the first interesting person she’s met since moving, one of the most interesting people she’s met in years. Not just because she’s famous—it’s how the entirety of her demeanor begs the world not to notice her, and yet you can see her noticing everything. And she set fire to the prison cell in Fury and Honor—that never occurred to Anvi, who dismantled a bucket and used the handle to pick the lock. She likes the idea of a person who is so outwardly meek but who can also be like: Fuck it, I’m going to set this room on fire.
Anvi finishes her beer and watches Nibbler’s paw twitch in his sleep. She needs to do something. She can feel the desire to learn more about the fire, about Linda, about anything, building inside her. She’s already compiled gigs of data—articles, PDFs, podcasts, video files—about Linda and her family. Once she figured out who she was, she couldn’t help it. That tireless compulsion to know more. But it feels disrespectful—almost dirty—when she knows Linda is across the hall, mourning the loss of a place she loves.
She taps her Sheath. “Find cake,” she says. “Sort by currently open.” She scrolls through the options. “Exclude keyword marijuana.” She compares critic reviews, lay reviews, and photographs, then selects a snack shop a few blocks away. She kisses Nibbler on the top of his head. “That one’s from your grandmother.” Then she slips her coat on over her pajamas and follows the glowing blue arrow on her arm out into the night.
Linda wakes before sunrise, feeling as dreary as the early-morning sky. A sense of horrible wrongness grabs her and for a moment she can’t place it, can’t recall the reason for her panic. And then she remembers the fire and it’s as though the room around her collapses, grinding her into the worn cushion of her nest chair.
Hours pass and she doesn’t rise, doesn’t even reach for her Sheath or tablet, can’t find the energy to. Midmorning, the doorbell rings. Linda can’t find a reason to stand and answer. It’s probably Anvi, and any further interaction will just give Anvi more fuel for the SocialHub posts she’s undoubtedly authoring by the dozen:
I just moved in across the hall from #CloneGirl! She’s SO weird OMG!
#CloneGirl’s *still* just sitting in her apt. Maladjusted much?
#CloneGirlWatch continues! No new sightings. I’ll get a clump of her hair next time as proof.
Eventually, the pressure of Linda’s bladder forces her to rise. After she pees, she grabs a glass of water. Turning back to her chair, she notices a white rectangle on the floor by the door: a piece of paper with a bold arrow drawn on it. The arrow points toward the hallway. Linda’s tempted to push it back under the door with her foot. Instead, she checks the peephole. All clear. She cracks open the door to find a small cardboard box sitting on the carpet. Inside the box are two paper bags and an envelope with Linda written across it. Linda snatches the envelope and retreats inside. It’s a card: a cartoon skunk surrounded by squiggly stench lines and the words: This Stinks. She unfolds the card to find a phone number and a note:
Dear Linda,
I’m sorry your house burned down. Perhaps cookies and a distraction will help?
(Or at least not hurt.)
Let me know if you need anything.
Yours in Neighborliness,
Anvi
Linda stares at Anvi’s slanted, slender handwriting. She can’t remember the last time she read hand-inked words, and there’s an intimacy to the irregular print that makes her want to trust it. After a moment, she checks the peephole again, then opens the door and slides the cardboard box inside. One of the paper bags contains assorted cookies; Linda sets these aside—she never developed a taste for sweets. The other bag contains a small rectangular package wrapped in bright polka-dot-print paper. She slides her thumbnail through the tape and unwraps the box. Inside is a set of brainteasers, one metal, one wood. Little interlocking parts meant to be broken down and reassembled. Linda takes the card and the puzzles back to her nest chair.
She holds the card for a long time, examining the rotund, brightly colored skunk—his wide eyes and human frown—and the message within. She memorizes the number but doesn’t add it to her Sheath.
Eventually she sets aside the card, takes out her tablet, and opens SocialHub. Anvi hasn’t posted anything today—not publicly, but who knows what her two thousand friends are seeing. Linda taps the magnification-glass icon in the corner of the screen, then selects #CloneGirl from her recent searches. The most recent hit is from three minutes ago, an I-wonder-if-she-did-it post featuring video of the fire alongside an old, iconic photo from the night Linda climbed the wall: a grubby child standing in the middle of the street, recoiling from an EMT who has her hand outstretched. The girl’s ragged T-shirt is too short, revealing a concave midriff, and the frayed elastic waist of her shorts droops to display sharp hipbones. Her dark hair is a nest of snarls, sap, and thorns, and the nails of her raised hands are long and jagged, except for the left thumbnail, which is freshly torn at the base and bleeding. There’s a light shining on the girl’s freckled face. Her eyes are pure terror.
You’re right to be afraid, thinks Linda.
She recognizes now how monstrous her child-self was, with its long, craggy nails like something out of a real child’s nightmare. But she also remembers how she felt before that photo was taken. How the smudges of earth had felt as much a part of her as her freckles and she hadn’t known to be ashamed of being dirty. How she’d loved to run and leap and climb, all these motions she’d since learned aren’t part of moving from here to there in civilized life.
She scrolls past the photo, aching. If a girl like that were to emerge from the woods today, Linda too would pity her—not for her past but for her future.
Hundreds of posts speculate over the cause and meaning of the fire. An investigation is pending or has already begun. Linda sorts the posts chronologically and reads them all, even the cruel ones. Even the ones that call her a monster and openly express hope that she was caught in the flames and burned to death. Few use her legal name—it’s known, but not widely, and using it might force people to think of her as an actual person. But a man whose avatar is the sun being skewered by a rapier posts:
The creature that uses the name Linda Russell shouldn’t exist. This fire is the universe righting itself. She will be the next to burn.
Gregory T. Every time #CloneGirl trends, he’s there. He was especially vehement last year, positing that it must have been Linda who dug up Madeline’s grave. He said she was probably driven mad by her own inhumanity and seeking to usurp whatever remained of her dead sister. He even suggested she ate the fingers as part of some arcane ritual.
To which someone else replied with Linda’s address and a dare for others to go look for the bones there. That’s how Linda ended up in this apartment. She preferred the last—at least it had a dog park nearby.
Eventually Linda reaches posts she recognizes from last night. She rubs at her eyes and glances out the window at the stocky horizon and stone-colored sky. Then she navigates back to Anvi’s profile and swipes through pictures of Nibbler.
Anvi knows who she is.
Anvi knows she’s checking her public profile.
Anvi says she doesn’t want anything from her.
Add contact. The button stares at her. Linda looks toward the skunk card. Her own SocialHub profile is essentially blank. If she adds Anvi, she’ll get access to Anvi’s private posts; Anvi will gain nothing.
Fuck it, she thinks—words she’s never said aloud, but she likes the weight of the curse sitting in her throat—and she adds Anvi to her network.
It takes less than a minute for the notification to pop up: Anvi accepting her request and adding her in return. Linda’s contacts list ticks up from four to five. She reloads Anvi’s page.
It doesn’t change. She reloads again, assuming the data was cached. Nothing. She puts down her tablet and checks on her Sheath, but Anvi’s private page is still exactly the same as her public page. There isn’t a single post claiming to have run into Clone Girl in a stairwell. Nothing about leaving cookies outside her door. Nothing about what the inside of her apartment looks like or the fact that she calls her famous father by his first name.
Anvi hasn’t shared anything about their encounters.
Linda spends the rest of the day and night struggling to understand this impossibility, not quite willing to accept the most obvious explanation: that Anvi’s being sincere.
She’s still pondering possible ulterior motives the next morning, when Arthur’s assistant calls to tell her that the officer investigating the house fire is coming to speak with her. “I’ll organize a call,” chirps Victoria. “Your father wants to be there.”
The lobby attendant buzzes her a few minutes before noon to announce a visitor, and when Linda opens the door she finds a short, bulky white man in a gray suit. He flashes his badge, introducing himself as Officer Baldwin, and confirms Linda’s identity before stepping inside. In the heavy authority of his presence, Linda feels callbacks to the discomfort of her first days outside the wall—all those stern-faced men and women telling her they were there to help but not giving her access to the one thing she wanted: her home. Linda swallows this feeling and, as instructed, texts Arthur’s assistant that the officer has arrived.
“Nice place,” says Officer Baldwin, standing in the center of her sparse apartment. “I don’t usually do this in person, you know, but given who—” He stops and clears his throat. “How do you like the neighborhood? I haven’t been here much since the upzoning.”
Linda was instructed not to answer any questions until Arthur connects. She stares at her Sheath, silent. Officer Baldwin shuffles toward the couch. Victoria’s reply comes through: Turn on your TV. You should still be synced from last time. Linda presses the power button. Arthur’s assistant’s face pops up on the screen—pale skin, bright-red lips, the stark gold frames of her Augments—and the camera at the top of the TV blinks on, a little green eye telling Linda she’s being watched.
“Linda, hello!” says Victoria. “Connecting you now.”
The picture blinks to black, then to a view of a conference room. One of Arthur’s lawyers, a middle-aged Asian woman, sits next to him. Arthur looks as worn-out and stately as always. Linda even recognizes the blue paisley tie he’s wearing. It’s okay, he told her once, as they stood together before a closet he’d paid his assistant to fill. I get overwhelmed by having too many options too. That’s why I cycle through the same seven ties. And though it wasn’t so much the number of options as the presentation of those options—so clean and organized, folded and hung with purpose, whereas she was used to yanking items from a heap on the floor—that overwhelmed her, she’d loved him in that moment. A painful pull. This was before she’d been denied his surname, back when she still held out hope that the crevasse between them might be bridged.
Officer Baldwin steps up next to her. “Good afternoon, Mr. Niequist,” he says.
“Hello. Thanks for your patience. I believe you have some questions for my daughter?”
Linda prickles. He only ever calls her his daughter to other people.
Officer Baldwin turns to Linda. “Yes, but first off, I wanted to offer my condolences. Property loss is never easy, though I’m sure we’re all glad no one was hurt.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for Linda to reply. After a few seconds, he continues. “Anyway, we’ve examined the property, and it looks like it was a chimney fire that spread to the attic. There’s some trash spread around the building, which suggests people might’ve been using it for shelter, and we suspect squatters. Our best guess is it was an accident: They were trying to keep warm, but the chimney hasn’t been maintained or cleaned in years. We found a number of substantial cracks and evidence of animal infestation.”
Linda tries to envision it: Strangers crouched in the couch room, tossing logs into the fireplace, setting them aflame, then…Would it happen all at once, the chimney igniting like an explosion? Or was it slow and they didn’t notice until they felt the heat from above?
“That being said, Ms. Nie”—the correction comes smoothly—“Russell, do you have any knowledge of anyone who might have been staying at the property?”
“No.” A short, true answer, just as she’d learned to give as a girl newly thrust into this prying world. Never offer anything they don’t ask for. Regret. Emmer.
“Have you had any recent contact with your mother?”
“Lorelei? No. She—”
“Officer,” interjects Arthur. “We agreed—”
“You think it was her?” asks Linda. As the weeks turned into months and years without any sign of Lorelei, her mother had become to her like the wind: an everywhere-and-nowhere presence she would forever feel but could never touch. Most people assume she’s dead, but an irrational part of Linda can’t shake the belief that the woman might actually be immortal. It suddenly seems ridiculous she didn’t think of it herself. Lorelei’s being involved makes more sense than random transients. Cedar Lake is a small town, and its Wikipedia page doesn’t mention anything about a homeless population.
A new itch of a thought: Emmer. Maybe she’s finally reaching out after all these years. Linda feels a horrible blossom of hope that maybe she’ll get to see her sister again after all.
“We don’t have any evidence she was involved,” says Officer Baldwin.
The words wash over her thoughts of Emmer. Sometimes Linda resents that such a big part of her life is omitted from the public narrative of her childhood, but a larger part of her is glad to have kept such a substantial secret. Her true sister: the answer to the question no one has ever known to ask.
“Is there anything else?” asks Arthur. He sounds irritated. He rarely talks about Lorelei in Linda’s presence; she can recall only a handful of times in the last few years, each having to do with handling the money she inherited from that branch of her biological family.
“No, that’s all.” Officer Baldwin turns back to Linda. “I discussed this with Mr. Niequest already, but you’ll want to contact your insurance regarding cleanup.”
“I’m taking care of all that, Linda,” says Arthur.
Officer Baldwin pulls out his wallet, extracts a card, and hands it to Linda. “In case you think of anything we should know or have any questions,” he says.
That’s it? thinks Linda, relieved but also somehow disappointed.
Officer Baldwin opens the door to let himself out.
“I can go?” she blurts. He turns around, a quizzical look on his face. Linda clarifies, “To the property?”
“It’s your house, Ms. Russell. We did contact a board-up service, per protocol, and I’d advise you to be careful, but yes, you can go. Is there anything else?”
Linda shakes her head.
“Have a good day, then.”
Linda locks the door behind him.
“Linda.” Arthur is still on the TV with his silent lawyer. Linda doesn’t know if the camera’s eye can reach her at the door; she steps back to the center of the room.
“When can I go?” she asks.
“It’s still unsafe,” says Arthur. “I think it’s for the best if…” Linda stops listening. After she ends the call, all the things she didn’t say roil within her. It’s her property, her home; she should be allowed to go anytime she wants. Even the investigating officer said so.
She wonders suddenly what Arthur told Officer Baldwin while arranging the visit. She can practically hear him begging the officer not to “unsettle” her. One violent fit a decade ago, and she is forever a volatile compound to be tightly contained and tiptoed around.
Linda, I have bad news. Arthur’s tone had been so dire, it sent a full-bodied flush of alarm through Linda. After two years in the real world, she no longer held any illusions of it being a magical place, and she braced herself. But her thoughts assumed blood: Emmer had come forward and—as much as Linda wanted to see her again—Emmer was all Arthur ever wanted in a daughter, so would Linda please vacate the house? Or Lorelei had been found and—what would be worse, if Lorelei wanted her back or if she didn’t?
She was entirely unprepared for the words It’s Dr. Tambor…
She remembers shrinking into herself, pinned down by a sense of loss so deep it precluded sorrow. It was at Arthur’s It’ll be okay that she exploded. Everything from there is a blur in her memory: Her voice, loud, Arthur’s voice, rising. Wanting to hit him, kick him, harm him, and throwing herself against the wall instead. The crash of the mirror, a spray of her blood marking the birth of a scar that still hugs her elbow today.
It wasn’t the first mass shooting Linda had heard about, but it was the first she paid attention to, the first that felt real to her: A man with a rifle tucked in his coat walked into a store and started firing. It was the same store where Dr. Tambor had taken Linda on her very first excursion. The man’s ex-girlfriend worked there, but she was stocking the cereal aisles and the killer was incapacitated by a security guard before he made it that far.
But his bullets found others. Linda pictures it often: Dr. Tambor’s soft body being punctured over and over, sparks of blood puffing from her chest, bullets passing through her to shatter packs of gum and pocket-sized toys. She was lionized briefly in the media afterward—the photo from her practice’s website posted everywhere—because she used her bulk to shield a stranger and that stranger’s stroller. The young father and his infant both survived. The man and his wife shared their grateful tears with the world, called Dr. Tambor a “remarkable woman” and a “hero.”
Linda still doesn’t really understand it, any of it: the why of the shooting or Dr. Tambor’s actions. She wishes Dr. Tambor had shielded herself instead.
Her death was a lesson: Trusting isn’t worth the risk. Caring isn’t worth the risk.
The intercom buzzes; Linda jumps up and answers, wondering if Officer Baldwin forgot something.
“Ms. Russell?” says the lobby attendant. “You’ve got a work crew here, say they’re supposed to install an entertainment system.”
The diamond-plus package. It feels like a lifetime has passed since Linda ordered it. She thinks of looking down and seeing a dagger in her stomach. Of dropping a candle. Of standing on the edge of a cliff and wondering what it would feel like to step off. Of a world in which nothing could truly hurt her.
“Send them up,” she says.