“She’s twenty-four,” says Anvi, aghast.
Arthur looks up. “What?”
“You’re using parental controls.”
“Sure am.”
Anvi bites back a reply. She met Linda barely a week ago and Arthur less than an hour ago. She doesn’t know him at all beyond his public image; it’s not her place to judge their dynamic. She tells herself this, and yet the judgment is there—and sharp.
Nibbler sits at Arthur’s feet and cocks his head.
Anvi tries to imagine Arthur’s perspective, how he must be feeling. “You’re worried,” she says.
“I’m always worried.” He says it coolly. Calm as a cauliflower, as Anvi’s mother likes to say.
Anvi isn’t sure what to make of him. Arthur Niequist the Father is very different from Arthur Niequist: Computer Scientist, Philanthropist, and Public Figure. Though perhaps she shouldn’t be so surprised he’s monitoring Linda—he built his fortune on data collection and analysis.
She wonders if Linda knows how closely she’s being watched.
“Are you calling-the-police-level worried?” she asks.
Arthur sighs and looks up. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I’d rather the public not get wind of this if she’s just burning off some steam with a stroll. She must know the area by now, right? Or do you think she’s going to get lost without her Sheath?”
Anvi flattens her voice, so he knows just how ridiculous his question is. “She knows her way around.”
“Well, that’s something.” Arthur steps past Nibbler toward the door. “I’m going to wait in her apartment. Thanks for your help.” He pauses. “Will you let me know if you hear anything?”
“If you’ll do the same.”
Arthur gives her a little nod, and then he’s gone. Anvi flops onto the couch and lets Nibbler lick her face for a few seconds. Then she rolls onto her back, lifts her Sheath arm, and accesses her Clone Girl file, which is tucked away untagged several tiers beneath Side Projects. There are dozens of subfolders, including AN Confirmed and AN Rumors: everything she’s been able to find about Linda’s father. She did the easy people first, starting with the dead girl, Madeline Rose Niequist. There wasn’t much to find: A-student, so-so athlete, tragic accident. Anvi can’t help but wonder what else there would be if social media had been around back then; yearbook photos and obituaries don’t seem like the best way to get to know a teenage girl.
She scrolls through the data for a few minutes, then double-checks her alerts to make sure nothing new has surfaced. The Internet—SocialHub and otherwise—is momentarily silent on the subject of Clone Girl. She hopes it’ll stay that way. She hopes Linda will knock on her door any second and no one else will ever know about today. She considers sending Linda a direct message via SocialHub, in case she accesses the network from somewhere else, but with the level of monitoring Arthur has enabled, he probably has access to that too. Soon she’s staring at the ceiling, wallowing in a sense of worry and responsibility. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Linda about the man knocking on her door; probably she should have run after her instead of shying in the presence of Arthur Niequist. Certainly she could have made sure Linda took her Sheath with her. And wore shoes.
She thinks of Linda asking for plastic bags to cover her bleeding feet and the assumption there: that the floors of a rental apartment merited more concern than Linda’s own flesh.
She wonders how much of it is innate, if Linda would still be so deferential if her childhood was a few standard deviations closer to the mean. But Anvi’s never been able to resist outliers: people who break the mold of normality not because they choose to but because they have to. Her thoughts flash to Tasha, who—if they were still speaking—would berate her for picking up another stray. She remembers the look on her then-girlfriend’s face when Anvi stepped into their Ithaca apartment with a tiny puppy cradled to her chest. How Tasha had looked up from her dissertation notes and cocked one of her bleached eyebrows to ask, “What’s that?”
He’d come from a cardboard box in the corner of the Wegmans parking lot; some instinct had told her the way the box shook wasn’t just the wind. She remembers opening the top flaps and seeing the minuscule animal inside, how he could barely waddle around on his stubby legs. How his eyes sought her face and shone with a secret message: I’m yours.
“I’m allergic,” said Tasha.
“To cats,” Anvi replied.
“Close enough.”
That night in bed, Tasha curled up tight against her and whispered, “I want to be your only stray.” But Nibbler was named by then—and he’d lapped wet food from the palm of her hand after being startled by the noise of a bowl clattering across kitchen tile. Anvi knew she would never be able to let him go. Even if he’d already peed on the carpet twice.
A few months later, a friend texted Anvi, urging her to tune in to a livestream of an arts department Halloween party. Eager for a break and expecting some hilarious spectacle—Dr. Li was known to commandeer lab equipment in the name of a good prank—Anvi instead spied her girlfriend in the corner, her hand tucked beneath the elastic of an undergrad’s skull-and-crossbones leggings, stroking.
Nibbler licked furious tears from her face that night and many after.
After Anvi moved out, it took her weeks to fully scrub Tasha’s presence from her digital life. Untagging, unfriending, hiding all mentions—it was grueling work. That’s what inspired her to write Scrub: a program that identified all of one’s digital connections to a specified individual and made it easier to block and delete them. It was Scrub that caught SocialHub’s eye. She might not be here if not for that program. She might not be here if not for Tasha. Those skull-and-crossbones leggings.
There are days Anvi considers this new job, this new life, and is almost grateful to Tasha for her role in getting her here. There are other days this same gratitude makes her hate Tasha. She doesn’t want to feel indebted—even indirectly—to someone who hurt her so. And then there are the days when she resents that she was the one who had to get a new life, when Tasha’s the one who fucked a twenty-year-old.
Sitting on the floor to scratch Nibbler’s ears, she wonders if how Arthur feels toward Linda might be similar: simultaneously grateful to and made furious by Linda’s serving as a constant reminder of loss. Yet he’s also responsible for—and to—Linda in a way that Anvi could never be responsible for Tasha. She tries to imagine what she would have done in his place, if it’d been her half-wild, previously unknown offspring found wandering down a rural street. She doesn’t know—can’t know—but as she scratches Nibbler’s ear, she can’t help but think she would have tried her hardest to help.
I’m always worried, he said. He’s a data-driven man who’s experienced inconceivable loss. Maybe surveillance is how he tries to help. She can relate to that.
Afternoon transitions to evening, and Anvi’s stomach begins to growl. She walks over to Linda’s apartment and knocks on the door. When Arthur answers, she catches a spark of hope in his eyes that dissipates when he realizes it’s just her.
“Can I bring you some dinner?” she asks.
“No thanks, I’m good.” He lifts his hand to the doorframe and Anvi catches sight of his Sheath’s screen, which displays a quiet night-vision view of a graveyard.
Glimpsing the eerie scene, she expects some sort of otherworldly creature to erupt from the soil. She wouldn’t have pegged this as Arthur’s brand of entertainment. “What are you watching?” she asks.
Arthur snaps his hand back, and Anvi’s first thought is that it must be porn. Judging from the discomfort that flashes across Arthur’s face, he can sense what she’s thinking. “It’s a security feed,” he says.
“Of a—” Before the question’s out, she understands, and her voice drops into a soft “Oh.”
The Halloween after Madeline Niequist’s grave was disturbed, one of Anvi’s friends eschewed more-recent clickbait news to dress as the unearthed corpse. She looked more like a zombie than anything else, and it was only when she stood with a friend who was dressed as a grave-robbing Clone Girl that her costume was discernible. Anvi had done a tequila shot with them, the odd one out in her steampunk garb.
Shame rolls through her—and then a jolt of something sharper. She must have posted pictures from that night on SocialHub; it was her last Halloween at Cornell.
Were Louisa and Viv in any of the pictures? It’s all she can do to not whip out her Sheath and check. What if Linda saw them? How could she explain? Sorry, Linda, it was funny at the time.
Arthur’s looking at her, his emotions zipped away.
“Sorry,” says Anvi. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay.”
An uncomfortable pause follows, then Anvi asks, “Are you sure I can’t get you anything?”
“Thank you, but no.”
In the elevator, she scrolls feverishly through SocialHub. Louisa is in the background of one of her pictures, but Viv isn’t, and without her it’s impossible to tell Louisa’s dirty, torn costume isn’t just a zombie. Anvi deletes the photo anyway. Wandering through the lobby and outside toward the nearest neon OPEN sign, she thinks of Arthur sitting alone upstairs, watching a live feed of his daughter’s grave.
The least she can do is get him a couple of tacos.
Hands freed, Linda tries the light switch. There’s no bulb in the overhead socket. The light from the window is fading. She searches the room again, racing against the dark. There is the plastic tie that was cut off her wrists, and pawing under the bed, she finds a small glass marble hidden in the dust. She places the marble, the plastic tie, and the strip of duct tape on the bedside table and wonders how she’s supposed to manufacture an escape out of items such as these.
And why does the man want her Sheath? How long has he been watching her? He made it sound like he knew where she lived before today. Could he be the one who posted her address—but if he was planning on kidnapping her, why?
She sits on the bed, rubs her wrists, and takes a deep breath through her mouth, truly filling her lungs for the first time since she was abducted. The room grows steadily darker. When Linda can barely make out her hands on her lap, a light switches on in the hallway, illuminating the door in a thin outline.
Eventually, the man comes back. Light blares through the doorway at his entrance.
“Log in,” he says, holding out something toward Linda. Blinking against the sudden light, she sees that the object is a tablet, an old one about twice as thick as hers. Its browser is open to her bank’s website. “I need you to transfer half a million dollars into an account. If you do that, you’re free to go.”
A bubble of relief and disbelief travels through Linda. Money—could it really be so simple? She takes the tablet. He can have as much money as he wants.
The browser’s design is slightly different than she’s used to, and it takes her a few seconds to find the log-in. It needs her username and password. Of course it does. Linda’s relief dissipates. She hasn’t typed either in over a year: Her Sheath just recognizes her thumbprint and authorizes a banking app from there. She knows the username is her first and last with some punctuation between—but the password is a random combination of numbers and letters that Arthur picked. She has it written down at her apartment but hasn’t looked at the thumbprint-locked digital-password book since he helped her set up the app.
“This can all be over tonight,” says the man. Linda wants nothing more than to give him the money and go home. There’s a seven in the password, maybe two sevens.
“Go on,” says the man.
Shaking, she types Linda_Russell.
“Good girl,” says the man. “Now the password.”
There’s virtually no chance of her guessing it correctly, but she has to try. She taps out an eight-digit code—including two sevens—and hits Submit. Please, she thinks; let the luck she’s been missing all her life come together in this moment.
This username and password combination doesn’t match our records.
Even though she expected it, her heart sinks. She looks at the tiny text below: Forgotten password? But Arthur’s the primary on the account, and she can’t reset the password without his consent—and even if she could, the confirmation would go to her email, and she doesn’t know how to log in to that without her Sheath either. She stares at the tablet, feeling helpless and stupid, and her trembling grows worse.
“Calm down and try again,” says the man.
On her second attempt, she can barely tap the characters she means to. Not that it matters.
This username and password combination doesn’t match our records.
The man is silent. Linda feels his weight beside her, indenting the bed so that she has to lean away to keep from touching him.
“If you’re delaying, it’s pointless,” he says. “I’ve got the IP address masked and rerouted in so many layers, anyone tracking these attempts will need to next Christmas just to determine which hemisphere you’re in.”
This should be easy. This should be over. “I don’t remember the password,” she whispers.
“Then reset it.”
“I can’t without Arthur.”
She can’t bring herself to say my father, but he doesn’t ask who Arthur is. Whoever this man is, he knows where her money comes from. “Are you shitting me?” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
“For fuck’s sake, Maddy, I—”
Any scrap of warmth and hope that was lingering in Linda flushes away, replaced by unadulterated horror.
Maddy.
This isn’t about money. Not if he’s calling her by that name.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, wanting more than ever to avoid angering the man.
After a few beats of tense silence, she dares to glance at him. For the first time since he abducted her, their eyes meet; the intensity she sees there is terrifying.
The man snatches the tablet and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The hallway light flicks off, leaving Linda in pure darkness.
Minutes pass, then hours. There are intermittent footsteps in the hallway. Linda curls up under the covers and stares at the pitch-black door. Her throat aches with thirst and she has to pee. When the urge to urinate grows painful, she goes to the door, feeling her way in the dark.
She knocks—an act of desperation, not courage. There’s no response. She knocks a little harder as a cramp runs through her midsection.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she says. Her voice is a dry whisper. She clears her throat and tries again, louder. “I need to use the bathroom, please.”
She doesn’t hear a single footstep, any sound or motion at all. Linda leans her forehead against the door.
“I tried to do what you wanted,” she whispers. A rush of anger overcomes her, and she bangs her fist against the door, loud. She doesn’t deserve to be left in here like this, nothing to drink, nothing to eat, nowhere to relieve herself. She tried.
It’s taking all her control not to wet herself. She bangs on the door again. And again. She bashes her fists against the wood until the flats of her hands feel swollen and raw. She’s never made so much noise in her life.
But no one comes, and as her anger fades back to fear, she knows that no one will.
She staggers over to the corner of the room farthest from the bed, then pulls down her pants and squats against the wall, low. As she lets her bladder release, a sob catches in her throat. This isn’t like peeing in the woods as a girl. This is unlike anything she’s ever experienced. Urine splashes her bare feet, warm and shaming. Her only other choice was to piss herself at the door—knowing this should help, but it doesn’t.
When she’s done, she dries her feet on her pant legs and goes back to the bed. The acrid scent of her urine follows her, and she buries her head under the pillow to escape it. There, burrowed like an animal, she somehow, eventually, falls asleep.
Deep in the night, she wakes, groggy and cold—and registers a clammy pressure against her right calf. A brief instant of confusion, then flooding terror: The man, he’s here, holding her leg. She kicks wildly, throwing off the blanket and flailing at the dark. He lets go, but she doesn’t strike him, doesn’t see or hear him—there’s nothing, no one, in the room. She doesn’t understand: Where did he go? Then the agonizing pinpricking of rushing blood wakes her left foot. As she shifts against the pain, her waking foot flops against her right leg, and Linda realizes that was all she felt—not the man but her own limb, asleep, lying against her like a foreign body. The tingling spikes in intensity, and Linda bites her lip against the pain. But it soon fades, and her foot is again just that—part of her. The room, the house, everything but her own shaking breath is silence. She can still smell her urine.
She moves to her opposite side, to face the room rather than the wall, and curls up even tighter. The skittering of a rodent in the ceiling crosses above her, then all is again silent. After a moment, she reaches out to pat along the bedside table. She finds the marble and clutches it to her chest, just to have something to hold.
She lies there, curled in the bed, shivering and sleepless, until she hears a wooden groan and the clunk of footsteps passing her door. It’s still dark out, and she can hear the man moving around the main room. A metallic screech, another thunk. More footsteps and the occasional gap of silence. Linda sits up. She’s so thirsty she can barely feel her fear. She’s still clutching the marble. Eventually, the footsteps come closer, then the key is in the lock and the door swings open.
“Christ, it’s cold in here,” says the man.
There’s a lidless mason jar in his hand. It’s filled with water.
The man sniffs. “Did you piss on the floor?”
Linda feels his disgust, but she doesn’t care. All she cares about is the water. She can’t take her eyes off the jar. She lets the marble fall to the mattress.
And then, magically, he’s holding out the jar to her. She grabs it, so eager the jar tilts and spills—just a splash, but Linda nearly cries out, seeing the water run over the side. Then she’s drinking. The water is so cold it makes her teeth ache. She drinks it all.
“Do you remember the password?” asks the man.
Linda clutches the jar. She can feel the tightness in her head loosening. She needs to think. Now that she’s had water, she can think.
“I don’t know it,” she says. “But if you let me go, I’ll transfer the money as soon as I have my Sheath.”
She means it, but the man laughs. “Come on.” He takes her by the arm and leads her out of the room, directing her through a door across the hall into a small, dirty bathroom. “You have three minutes,” he says. Then he takes the mason jar from her and closes the door.
Three minutes. Linda moves to lock the door, but the knob doesn’t have a lock. The tile floor is frigid against her bare feet. There’s a window, but it’s boarded shut just like the bedroom’s. There’s a wet toothbrush and a goopy uncapped tube of toothpaste on the sink. She thinks of the tube being pressed to the brush, the brush traversing the interior of her abductor’s mouth. It’s all she can do to not swipe the items to the floor. She pushes aside a moldy green curtain to find an old tub and shower with cracked tiles. A bar of soap, a crusty bottle of shampoo.
She has to pee again; it’s like the water flooded straight through her. She relieves herself quickly, watching the door. Her exhausted mind is running in circles, looking for something in the room she can use. She’s heard of prisoners making knives out of toothbrushes, but she doesn’t know how it’s done. She could break the mirror and slash at the man with a shard, but he would hear her. He would be prepared. And then he really wouldn’t believe she’s being honest about wanting to cooperate.
She flushes, then rinses her hands and face and drinks more water from the sink. Rubbing her wet face, she looks into the mirror. The surface is fogged with age and chalky flecks of toothpaste, and her reflection is more shadow than woman. This room, this house—it feels like some nameless nowhere separate from the rest of the world. It feels like she should be able to pull a headset from her eyes and be back home.
The door opens. The longest and shortest three minutes of her life. The man nods for her to follow him to the house’s main room, then directs her to sit on the couch. Linda sinks into its worn cushions, and the man falls into a plush chair. He places his hands on the chair’s stained arms and stares at her. A woodstove crackles behind him; Linda didn’t notice it before. Much of the noise she heard earlier must have been him adding fuel.
“We need that money,” says the man.
Linda swallows a new bubble of unease. First he called her Maddy and now he’s saying we. His words seethe with complications.
“You can have the money,” she says. “All I want is to go home.”
The man nods. Yesterday he could barely look at her and today he won’t stop staring.
“You look so much more like her in person than in the photos,” he says.
Linda pulls away. Her skin prickles with danger. This man wants more from her than money; she can feel it. He must be a Madeline junkie. They pop up in discussion circles, and she received letters from a few while living at Arthur’s—men who form attachments to dead girls on the Internet, who masturbate to old photos and croon about innocence.
The front door is maybe fifteen feet away.
He’s faster than her. Less beat-up.
Thinking about running, Linda realizes something. “You’re the man I saw at the pond,” she says.
He blinks at her. His silence might as well be a nod.
Everything clicks into place: He is a Madeline junkie, but his obsession couldn’t be contained online, even before now. He visited the Cedar Lake house, who knows how many times—Officer Baldwin’s squatters. It wasn’t coincidence that he was there when Linda saw him; Linda was the unusual factor.
He must have followed her home from Cedar Lake.
Maybe he even started the fire. To draw her to him. A gamble, but it worked.
Dread and certainty: The money’s a ruse. It doesn’t matter if she gives him every cent in her account—he will never let her go.
She bursts up and sprints for the door.
Her hand is on the latch when he grabs her by the waist. She fumbles with the lock and flails backward with her elbow. She feels it connect with his chin, hard, and he stumbles, swearing. The lock clicks, and Linda yanks the door open.
The man tackles her to the floor and kicks the door closed.
Linda rolls over, punching and clawing. The man pins her wrists. She thrusts her knee toward his crotch. He sits on her legs, trapping her. She snaps at his forearm and catches heavy flannel between her teeth.
“Stop it,” he says.
She struggles to heave his weight off her.
“Stop it now.” His voice is different, higher.
The man’s weight shifts and stills, then lessens: an opportunity. Linda squirms out from under him. As she scrambles to her knees, she sees that the man is looking at the stairs. Her eyes snap to follow.
There’s a woman a few steps from the top, watching the two of them.
Confusion coalesces as Linda realizes the voice calling for her—for them—to stop wasn’t the man’s. We, he said.
Linda’s on her hands and knees in a hunched, feral position, processing the newcomer. White-gray hair falls nearly to the woman’s waist, and static electricity suspends a handful of strands about her frail frame like a shroud. The woman is older, smaller, and she’s wearing a long gray robe instead of a white sweater, but everything else about her screams of the familiar. Linda even recognizes the way her fingers curl around the bannister.
Impossibility crashes around Linda, sucking away her air, her pain, leaving her stunned and stupid and so overwhelmed she forgets every fear and thought that was coursing through her just seconds ago.
She understands nothing, feels nothing.
All she can do is stare as Lorelei takes another step down the stairs.