False Hearts (11 page)

It fast-forwards her drawing, but I stare at her furrowed brow and the way her hair obscures half her face. How many times have I watched her draw?

When she finishes, she holds up the paper. I drift closer, examining the names and the faces. Even sketched in haste, her drawings are beautiful. Dispassionately, Tila gives each name, a short description, and a few key personal details about each person. I feel the information sink into the deep recesses of my brain. As soon as I see these faces in the real world, I’ll recognize them.

Officer Oloyu asks her to then sketch and describe the most common clients to frequent the club, especially those she’s worked with most often.

At this she finally starts to look concerned. She hides it well enough. But not from me. “This
is
for Taema. You’re putting her undercover, aren’t you?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“When you first took me in, you told me you were putting her in protective custody. You can’t do this. Going undercover is too dangerous for her.”

I can’t help but bristle. She thinks I’m soft.

Oloyu’s mouth twists. “Why? Because of what you’ve done as part of the Ratel?”

She scoffs. “Nice try. No confessions.”

“We already know irrefutably you worked with them. There’s no need to be coy. So why isn’t your sister allowed to go undercover?”

“So she is undercover.” Her eyes are bright with triumph.

Oloyu’s mouth twists as he bites down a curse.

“Gotcha.” Tila smirks and bends over the paper. Again, the strange fast-forwarding as she draws, me unable to turn my “eyes” away from the quick movements of her fingers holding the pencil. Again, the sketches of men and women appear, their names, their habits, their dreams and desires find a place deep within my mind. I won’t forget any of them, even though, if I’d been awake, I’d probably forget about a third of the names.

Officer Oloyu asks my sister more questions, ones that I suspect Nazarin has given him. What is the layout of the club? What sort of food is served? Music played? Cocktail menu? Most popular liquor? A lot of it seems unnecessary. I’m only going to be at the club for an hour or two at most, speaking to the owner, Sal, and to Leylani, the girl who was meant to be entertaining Vuk that night. Still, everything goes into my memory bank.

At the beginning my sister fights back, toying with Oloyu and giving flippant answers. Then she seems to tire of the game and gives him the answers he asks for. By the time the questions end, Tila’s visibly wilted, her voice hoarse. Officer Oloyu thanks her for her time. But before she leaves, she looks at the camera.

It seems like she’s looking right at me.

“I don’t need saving, Taema,” she says. “You don’t
have
to do this for me. And maybe you shouldn’t.”

I can’t read her, and it hurts.

She turns and leaves, the door clanging shut behind her. The scene goes dark.

*   *   *

When he returns sometime in the night, Nazarin turns off the brainload long enough for me to have a few hours of real sleep. I wake up to the information having settled better within my mind. I still feel tired, as though I’ve been doing calculus for hours. Brain gymnastics, Tila always called it.

I’ve had nightmares about my sister. Over and over, I saw her saying that maybe I shouldn’t do this. Drawing away from me, her eyes calculating, weighing me up. Maybe she didn’t believe I could be her, do whatever she did. Maybe she didn’t trust me, that my mind couldn’t handle it.

Even despite her manipulations, her games, I couldn’t let her go. I could never let her go into stasis without even trying to set her free. She knows that. So why try to warn me away?

Maybe this is even more dangerous than I thought.

I say nothing as I sip my ersatz coffee in the morning. Despite the nightmares, I haven’t changed my mind.

The first thing I have to do is send the Ratel a message. Tila is evidently meant to work a shift at the Verve lounge tonight. Nazarin walks me through it. They have untraceable methods of contact. There’s a portal on an untracked website where Ratel members can check in. Nazarin knows the code, and he tells me just what to say. I’ll miss two shifts: next Tuesday and Thursday.

A message comes back confirming it, and I sign off. The SFPD have changed my VeriChip to show my location as Tila’s apartment whenever I’m at the safe house, so if the Ratel do look up my whereabouts, it won’t arouse suspicion. Today is Sunday—by next Tuesday, I’ll have to go in. It’s not nearly enough time to get through all we need to, but it’s all the time we’ll get.

I go through more brainloading and more physical practice with Nazarin, honing my body and my mind. They give me facial recognition software, to help me recall the faces Tila told me about in last night’s session, as well as another program which will help give me instructions if I do get into a physical altercation. I hope I don’t have to use it.

Over Chinese takeout ordered from the replicator, Nazarin tells me more about his experiences in the Ratel, though he skitters away from a lot of the explicit details. After two intensive days, I feel more ready than I ever thought I could in such a short span of time.

It’s not enough, though.

I still have to change my face.

*   *   *

We go to a flesh parlor out of the city entirely.

It was the easiest way to avoid people who might have known me or Tila. The SFPD, the Ratel, Zenith clients, my co-workers—none of them would bother traveling fifteen miles to change their features when there’s a flesh parlor on every doorstep.

We take a hovercar over the Golden Gate Bridge flightpath. It’s been over a year since I left the city, unless it was for work. I always mean to explore more, but I’ve been too busy, usually working on VivaFog machines even on the weekends. When we were younger, Tila and I would take so many day trips from the city. We went up to Monterey, to Santa Cruz, to Berkeley. We’d pack picnics and laze on the beach or in a park, Tila sketching and me reading a book before exploring the shops and the markets. I miss those days.

Nazarin takes us up to Marin, the affluent area where tech workers commute in and out on the underwater high-speed BART. He looks tired. Working for the Ratel by night and training me by day means he’s functioning on too little sleep. Rejuvs help, but they’re not a substitute for proper sleep. The flesh parlor he’s chosen is one of the best in the nation. When the hovercar touches down, my nerves refuse to behave, no matter how much of Mana-ma’s training I use.

They’re going to change my face.

Not much, but enough. I keep trailing my fingertips along the lines of my brows, my nose, my cheekbones. Nazarin notices but does not say anything. I swallow, putting my hands down. It’s not much of a change. And I can always change it back.

We sit in the waiting room. I press my nails so hard into my palms that they leave marks. I’m shaking and I can’t seem to stop. Nazarin lifts his hand, pauses as if tempted to take it away, and then rests his hand on top of mine. He gives me a look out of the corner of his eye as if to say:
is this too much? Should I not?
His hand is warm, the palms callused. I can see the small scars, pale against his skin, which is only a little lighter than mine. I put my other hand over his and squeeze, grateful for the comfort, before taking both hands away.

A nurse pokes his head into the hallway, his scrubs white and crisp, and makes eye contact.

“I’ll be right here,” Nazarin says.

I give a sharp nod. I follow the nurse through the bright, white walls and into a room. There’s another Chair within. I’ve had my fill of these things the last few days. They’ll knock me out, and through gene therapy and a scalpel, I’ll wake up with a different face.

“The doctor will be with you in a moment,” the nurse says, helping me into the Chair and plugging the wires and electrodes into me. I’m still shaking. He gives me something to calm me, until I feel as if I am floating. I listen to the beeps of the monitors and my mechanical heartbeat. It reminds me of that first day I awoke from surgery.

The door opens. In my addled state, for a moment I wonder if it’s Tila, coming in to find me, IV trailing behind her.

It’s only the doctor, coming to change my face to molten wax and mold me into my sister. The SFPD doctored the files, to make it seem like “Tila” went back to her original face, and has now changed her mind yet again.

He comes forward and asks if I’m all right. I nod. I’m floating, high above myself. He sends me to sleep, and my last thought is that actually, I don’t mind this. My face will change, but I’ll look exactly like my sister again.

EIGHT

TAEMA

I’m wearing Tila’s clothes.

They’re nothing like my usual attire—a coverall for scurrying up a VivaFog antenna, listening to its gentle hum as it draws the fog into its whirring machines, or a dress similar to the ones we wore in the Hearth on weekends, plain, comfortable, unremarkable. All the things this dress is not.

I have never cared much for fashion. We both experimented when we first arrived in the city, excited by the freedom of being able to choose our own clothes; of not having to make everything and alter the torsos; of wearing different clothes from one another. We had fun peacocking ourselves and dyeing our hair, having moving tattoos inked on our skin, playing with materials of strange textures and cuts. I soon grew bored of it, erasing the tattoos, letting my hair return to its brown corkscrew curls, giving the fancy clothes away and buying things that felt more familiar.

Tila erased all the tattoos but one, a stylized broken heart on her thigh in a Polynesian style (we are part Samoan, as well as black and white), the two pieces not quite connecting. Doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out the symbolism of that. The waxworker gave the same one to me this afternoon, and it twines from my upper thigh down to my knee.

I swallow, tugging the dress down over my hips. It’s a slinky number, the skintight material shimmering purple in one light and midnight blue in another. The boots I wear have thin, faux-leather ribbons that wrap around my legs until they reach where the tattoo begins. I’ve rubbed lotion with small gold specks all over my legs and arms (the tattoo is already completely healed, along with my face; the marvels of modern medicine), and my limbs glow.

My hair is gone, chopped short, the texture changed from curly to straight and the color to bright blue. They’ve mapped the color to my genes, so I don’t have to worry about roots. My nose is shorter and wider, and turns up at the end. My cheekbones are slightly higher, my lips a little fuller, my chin a little pointier. It’s subtle, very subtle, but I don’t like it. It makes me more conventionally pretty, and more anonymous in this city of perfect faces.

I paint my lips dark purple and outline my eyes in blue. I tip the ends of my eyelashes with silver dust. I have dressed like midnight to go to Zenith. That’s me in the mirror, but I can’t see myself. Tila looks back at me, but it blurs. Tila. Me. Someone in between. A stranger. I turn away from the reflection.

I slip on a coat and leave the safe house, the door snapping shut behind me. I take the MUNI, like Tila would have. As I enter the station, in the corner of my vision I see Tila’s name and the amount of the fare deducted from her account. It’s true. I am officially my sister.

I step on the train and it takes off. I stare at the strangers, lit green by the algae of the tunnels. I feel like people are watching me, but perhaps it is merely because I am showing more leg than I usually do, and humans are biologically programmed to stare at bare flesh.

I’m nervous about meeting the owner, Sal, and Leylani. I fear what they will say, what I might find out. I fear I will disappoint Nazarin and be a poor undercover agent. More than that, I fear I will fail to find out what they need to know to free Tila, and she will go into stasis. Or worse, that I’ll find out things about her that I’ll never be able to forget or forgive. This is the point of no return. For both of us.

I leave at the correct stop and walk along Montgomery Street, the mica in the sidewalk sparkling.

I feel very alone as I look up at the TransAm Pyramid dwarfing the surrounding buildings. It was rebuilt a century ago, based on the original Transamerica Pyramid but twice the size, all glass and quartz-concrete. Evidently in the foundations, echoing the original, there are thousands of dollars’ worth of credit chips instead of coins, thrown in for good luck as the concrete was poured over it. I hope I can take a bit of the luck, though evidently it didn’t work for my sister.

I take a deep breath and enter the lobby, nodding at the doormen before making my way to the glass elevator.

I have to let Taema fall away again. I have to become Tila.

I’m alone in the elevator—most of the other hosts and hostesses won’t arrive until later. I rise above San Francisco, staring down at the sparkling lights in the growing darkness.

“Hey, Echo,” the hostess at reception greets me. Too brightly. I fight the urge to narrow my eyes. Does she know? Does everyone know what actually happened in the back room three nights ago? Are they all being bribed a king’s ransom to keep quiet, or did the SFPD really manage to keep it under the radar?

I nod to her, and the brainload intel tells me her nickname is Pallua. All the hostesses choose nicknames. Psychological distancing, I guess. I was touched when I found out Tila’s was Echo. Now I’m the echo, a thin replica of Tila. Even my serviceable walk in heels is different from her feline prowl.

Through my VeriChip I’m able to bring up Tila’s employee file, but Nazarin had the owner expand my access. I bring up internal communications from the club over the last few days into my ocular implant overlay. Since the incident, nobody’s used the back room where the crime scene was. Everyone’s been told that a high roller’s rented it out for a long, exclusive Zeal trip.

I’ve been staring blankly into the distance for too long. Pallua looks down at her bright red nails. She’s a prototypical hostess—perfect features, perfect body, golden-brown skin, her hair a riot of purple, blue, and green. Tattoos of peacock feathers glow around one shoulder, snaking toward her breasts, which are on display in her low-cut gown.