Strange New World

  “Waverly,” my mother says as the door closes behind Julienne 20. I blink and force myself to focus on what she’s saying. “They adhered to our original wishes, which means there’s no backup of the ink pattern.”

  I groan as her announcement sinks in. “How is that good news?”

  She settles into one of the white chairs and motions for me to take the one across from her. “The good news is that since we have access to the pattern itself, on Dahlia’s arm, they believe they can re-create it in a fraction of the time the original took. We just need to send them some close-up pictures.”

  “How long is a fraction of the time?”

  “Two months.”

  I groan again. “I cannot spend the next two months hiding out in my room while she pretends to be me.”

  “Right now, the Caruthers sisters think we’ve changed our minds and want a copy of the pattern for posterity. To be preserved in family records.” My mother cuts into her chicken breast with her knife and fork, the perfect picture of etiquette. “If I rush them any more, they’ll start to doubt that explanation.”

  “So I’m just supposed to let Dahlia play me on camera?” That seems like my only option, but…“There’s no way she can pull that off. She doesn’t understand the concept of global connectivity. Or fame. Or monetary value. She hardly understands the concept of currency. The first thing she says will make me sound like an idiot.”

  My mother blots her mouth with her napkin. “So teach her. I think we can buy you a little time for that if you go to the florist yourself tomorrow. You can wear long sleeves and put a bandage over your arm in case the cuff rides up. Hennessy will do the same.” She shrugs. “You don’t want anyone to see the pattern before the show airs anyway, right?”

  “But the show airs next Tuesday,” I say. “After that, people will expect me to show it off.”

  “That gives you just over a week to teach Dahlia to play the part on camera. And in public. Where she’ll be vulnerable to recording by anyone holding a tablet. To footage we can’t control or edit.”

  “And after that? What about the engagement party?” I lay my napkin in my lap and pick up my fork, but I’m too upset to eat. “The bridal shower? The rehearsal dinner? The ceremony? I can cancel most of my other appearances, but I am not going to miss my own wedding.”

  She arches one brow at me. “Then I hope you picked a wedding dress with long sleeves, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to appear on camera at the ceremony.”

  Hearing the words out loud makes me feel like someone’s just punched me in the chest. “Will Hennessy even be married to me, if she’s the one who says ‘I do’?” Tears fill my eyes, and my mother’s expression softens.

  “He’ll be married to you because you’ll be the one signing the marriage certificate. And if it truly comes down to this, Waverly, we can have a private ceremony here, off camera. You can already be married before the televised event. It’s all for show anyway. It’s the certificate and the official filing that matter.”

  No. It’s the memories that matter. And I don’t want to remember standing behind the scenes, watching someone else wear my dress and “marry” my husband.

  “Has she even agreed to this?”

  “Not yet, but she will.” My mother takes another bite of her pasta, and if not for her too-tight grip on her fork, I might not even know this was bothering her. “I’m sure she and Trigger 17 are discussing it right now, and when we’re done here, I’ll play back the footage from her room and we’ll know where we stand.”

  “What about the Administrator? What if she figures out it’s Dahlia on camera?”

  My mother sets her fork down and gives me a grave look from across the small table. “It is crucial that you don’t let that happen. From now on, the most important member of your audience is Amelia Locke.”

  That thought makes me feel vaguely sick.

  My gaze strays to the e-glass. It’s transparent now, but every time I look at the screen, I see dozens of girls wearing my face, milling aimlessly around a featureless concrete room. “You’re not really going to buy them all, are you?”

  My mother exhales slowly. “Waverly, I’ve already put in an offer. For the entire batch.” She hesitates. “But obviously there won’t be any clone city. I’m not buying them for Dahlia. I’m buying them for you. To keep them from ever being seen. And there’s only one way to do that.”

  “Don’t say it,” I whisper.

  My mother takes another bite of pasta, and while I try not to think about what she’s not saying, I listen to the soft sound of her chewing.

  It was one thing when I thought Sofia’s mother had killed thousands of girls who looked just like me. When it was over before I even knew about it. But knowing it’ll actually be my mother…Knowing I might be able to stop it…

  Can I really let my mother kill five thousand people to protect me?

  The whisper of the door sliding open startles me awake. Which is when I realize I fell asleep with my head on Trigger’s shoulder. And that I may have been drooling on his shirt.

  We both sit up as Lorna marches into the blue bedroom. “The audio feed from your room seems to be malfunctioning,” she announces, and though she’s clearly speaking to me, she’s looking at Trigger. “It must be another ‘glitch.’ ”

  He stands and takes up a semiformal bearing, his hands clasped at his back, but he offers no explanation or commentary. So I don’t either.

  Lorna’s irritated gaze narrows on me. “I assume, since you were both napping, that you’ve already discussed your options and come to a decision?”

  “Yes. I’ll do it.” I slide off the bed onto my feet. “But I have a couple of requests.” My pulse rushes in my ears. I’ve never made demands from an authority figure, and though Lorna is neither my instructor nor my mother, that’s very much what it feels like I’m doing.

  She crosses her arms over her blouse. “Such as?”

  “Trigger stays here. With me.”

  “No. I gave the Administrator my word.”

  “Then take your word back. If you want me on camera, Trigger stays.”

  “Here, in this house,” she concedes through gritted teeth. “Not in this room.”

  I fight not to look too pleased by my victory. “As a guest. Not as a prisoner.”

  Lorna’s left brow arches. “I can’t let either of you just wander the house. But you may take meals together, in either this room or his.”

  “I want to accompany her on appearances,” Trigger adds. “As security.”

  “No.” She offers no reason or explanation.

  “I’ll be more relaxed and better able to concentrate on my performance with him there,” I insist. “And that benefits everyone.”

  She scowls. “We’ll take that on a case-by-case basis. What else?”

  “I’d like access to the video from the facility in Valleybrook. Not just the one you showed us. I want to see all my identicals. So I know they’re still alive.”

  Lorna’s bearing relaxes, and I wonder what she thought I was going to ask for. “I’m not sure that’s possible at the moment. The Administrator isn’t one to indulge requests without being given a satisfactory reason. But I can give you that one feed now.” She pulls her tablet from her pocket, taps through a few menus, then opens the video and slides it onto the e-glass in “my” room with a flick of her wrist.

  Hesitantly, I lift my hand and poke in the direction of the video open on the screen. The border around it lights up. I poke one of the lower corners of the window and drag my finger down and out to enlarge the screen, as Trigger showed me earlier.

  The video now takes up half the wall. I can see my identicals clearly.

  “Are there any other requests?”

  I shake my head, but I’m not even looking at Lorna now. I’m watching my sisters,
wishing they could know that I’m here. That I’m doing everything I can to keep them safe.

  “So we have an agreement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Lorna extends one hand toward the door. “Waverly’s ready to teach you everything you need to know to pass for her on camera and in public.”

  We follow her into the hall, where she opens the door to the gray room and seems to expect Trigger to go inside. “Wait, can’t he come with me?”

  “It’s okay.” Trigger steps close and leaves a lingering kiss on the corner of my mouth. “You don’t need me for this part.” Then he steps into the gray room and lets the door close between us.

  Lorna’s frown says she was expecting him to put up more of an argument. As was I. Which means he’s probably planning to use the alone time to get better acquainted with the security system.

  As I follow Lorna toward the family wing, a new question occurs to me. “What’s the other anomaly?”

  “Excuse me?” Lorna doesn’t even slow down.

  “You said one of the anomalies they found in me is hormone production. What’s the other one?”

  She waves off my question. “We won’t have to worry about that for more than a decade, so we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  A decade?

  Waverly’s bedroom is empty when her mother lets me in, but the bathroom door is closed, and I hear water running. Lorna stays in the hall, and when the door closes at my back, I turn and wave one hand at it experimentally.

  It doesn’t open. So I turn and study the room, which I hardly got a look at this morning.

  Waverly’s bed is even bigger than the one in the blue room, and it’s made up with a puffy pink-and-white comforter and an entire army of coordinating pillows with elaborate stitching and buttons.

  In one corner of the room is a sitting area with furniture upholstered in white leather, peppered with yet more small, fancy pillows in colors that match the bed.

  One wall is nearly covered with an artful arrangement of frames, each showing a picture of Waverly frozen at a different moment in her life. Toddler Waverly, blowing out a tiny candle lit on top of a huge cake, has Violet’s mischievous grin. Child Waverly frozen in mid–soccer kick looks like Poppy when she’s concentrating really hard. And Laughing Waverly, with her head thrown back, one arm in the air, looks like Sorrel when she finally—

  I step closer for a better look, and Laughing Waverly begins to move, tossing her hips from side to side while she waves her arms in the air. The frame isn’t just displaying a picture; it’s playing a video. Laughing Waverly is actually Dancing Waverly.

  As the clip plays, two other girls dance into the frame, both laughing. I recognize Margo and Sofia, though they look younger in this video. All three girls are wearing shinier, shorter versions of the dresses worn at Seren’s party, and—

  “That was four years ago,” Waverly says. I spin to find her standing behind me. “It was the last day of school before the break, and we went out that night to celebrate.”

  “The break?”

  “The end of the spring term, before summer…” She frowns. “You guys didn’t get breaks, did you?”

  “We got one day off every week,” I tell her. “For organized recreation.”

  “Well, we get a lot more time off here.” She nods at the frame, where the video clip has started over. “That was the first night of filming my show.”

  “What is this show, exactly?” I’ve committed to being on camera, but I don’t really understand what that means.

  Waverly drops onto one of the chairs in the sitting area. “Yeah, I guess that’s where we should probably start. So the biggest difference between Lakeview and the rest of the world, other than the whole clone factory angle, is that Lakeview is totally socially isolated, while the rest of the world is connected through a digital network. Most of us are on it pretty much constantly. Every time we look up something we don’t know, or send a message to someone, or buy something, or order food, or read a book, or listen to a song, or watch a show. This network is our access point for just about everything. And everyone.”

  “Connected…how?”

  “The network is a series of digital signals connecting every single digital device in the world. Every tablet. Every camera. Every audio feed. In houses. Stores. Offices. Think of it like a giant spiderweb. Every signal is like one of the threads in the web. And every place they intersect is a connection. All together, it forms one massive network, through which you can communicate with anyone or anything—if you have the necessary equipment, passwords, and authority. One of the things people do on the network is watch videos, on their tablets or their wall screens.”

  “Oh. Like watching our identicals in Valleybrook,” I say, pleased to have made the connection, but Waverly flinches at my reference to them as “our” identicals.

  “Not really,” she says. “That’s just a security camera feed, which is different from livecasts and shows. Livecasts are posted spontaneously, in real time, when someone has something to say or something exciting is happening around them. People just connect to the network and start broadcasting from their tablets. But shows are filmed on professional equipment, edited, then released to the public. Some of them are fiction—made-up stories, like watching a novel play out on the screen.”

  I’m familiar with the concept of a novel, from history class, but I’ve never read one because fiction—like kissing, parties, and everything else the outside world seems to enjoy—has long been banned in Lakeview as a pointless and inefficient expenditure.

  “But others are more like documentaries,” Waverly continues. “A video record of something real. My show, for instance, is like a window into my life. Basically, a camera crew from Network 4 follows me around a few days out of the month, recording everything I do from every possible angle. Then a team of editors compiles the footage and trims it into a series of twenty-minute episodes.” She shrugs. “Any longer, and people get bored. Any shorter, and they think we’re hiding something.”

  “So the recordings from this morning are going to go on this network, for strangers to see?”

  Waverly nods. “After they’re edited.”

  This world gets stranger with every second I spend in it. “I understand people wanting to watch the ink ceremony.” Clearly that’s something special to those who already understand the custom. “But why would anyone want to watch you eat, and…do other everyday things?” Suddenly I realize I have no idea what Waverly does on a daily basis if she’s not taking classes or learning a skill.

  Another shrug. “Because I’m famous. Because I’m young, and beautiful, and I can afford a life most of them can only dream of.” She frowns. “I know my life is the only thing you’ve really seen since you got here, but this isn’t the norm. Hennessy, Margo, Sofia, and I…we’re the exception. That’s why regular people are interested in our lives.” Her frown deepens. “As weird as it sounds, now that I’m saying it out loud, people like to think they know me.”

  “But they don’t?”

  “They know the good things. The parts of my life that are funny, or glamorous, or self-deprecating in a funny or glamorous way. Everything I show them is real. It’s just…edited. To take out the parts that make me look too normal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because their own lives are normal. When they watch me, they want to see extraordinary. Which is why we usually film parties and charity events. Work I do for my official platforms. You know, feeding the homeless and reading to orphans. Stuff like that.”

  “Homeless and orphans?”

  “People who don’t have anywhere to live. And kids who don’t have parents.”

  No one I grew up with had parents. But homelessness? “Why don’t people have homes?”

  “Some people don’t have enough credits to pay rent.” r />
  “Why not?”

  Waverly looks exasperated by my questions. “Because they don’t have jobs. But they’re not, like, on the street or anything. Not in Mountainside. We have a lot of homeless shelters. Hennessy and I go there all the time to donate clothes and serve food on camera. The network mostly shows when things go wrong in a cute way—like if I drop a whole tray of peas and they roll everywhere—but I think people would watch anything we do. Everyone loves Hennessy. He has almost as many followers as I do.”

  I must look confused again, because Waverly waves an arm at the e-glass, then pokes one of the large icons. It grows to take up most of the screen. “This is my public message feed. Where people can go to see videos and messages I post.”

  Row upon row of text fills the screen, divided into colored boxes, each of which is labeled with the photo of whoever sent the message. In the left and right margins, boxes flash with images or silenced videos entreating me to buy a dress or watch a livecast, and the display is so disorienting I can’t process much of it. So I concentrate on the messages filling the main portion of the page.

  “They’re pings,” I say, relieved to recognize a similarity between her world and mine. “Though in Lakeview, only adults get pings. Mostly messages from Management.”

  “That sounds like a private inbox,” she says. “This is my public feed, and these”—Waverly swipes up with her hand, and the messages scroll up, and up, and up, too fast for me to read—“are from my followers.” She scrolls up again, and the messages roll on and on, with no end in sight.

  I stare at the screen, bewildered. “How can you ever answer all these?”

  She laughs again. “Oh, I don’t even read most of them. I just filter them, so that I only see the ones from friends, or from other famous people, and I answer those.” She pokes at a symbol at the top of the screen, and most of the messages fade until they look like shadows; then they disappear. The still-bold messages slide together to close the gaps, and though there are far fewer of them now, they still fill the huge screen. “Regular people like to see famous people interact with one another. They feel like they’ve become a part of some special relationship.” She shrugs and smiles. “It’s my job to make sure they keep feeling like that, so they keep watching my show.”