It’s moving back and forth, like a signal flag.

  I open my backpack as calmly as I can and pull out my survival kit.

  ‘Going for a swim,’ I say briskly, and hurl myself into the lake.

  8. FACE

  Col gazes at me, and I try to look at him too.

  I saw this new face last week, on an airscreen back in Rafi’s lair. But here in the flesh, it’s too much. Too real.

  His eyes are blue instead of brown, his skin lighter than a Victorian’s. The surgery didn’t change his nose, but his new cheeks are like mine—classic pretty, high and sharp. He’s still handsome, but in a generic way.

  Every few breaths, I have to shut my eyes to reset myself. To keep from feeling like a piece is missing from my heart.

  I’ve only ever kissed one face, and now it’s gone.

  When I open my eyes again, this new Col is still gazing at me, like an oddly intense stranger on a public train.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. ‘Did you look at yourself too soon?’

  ‘I haven’t yet, but your new face is giving me … dysmorphia by proxy.’

  Col’s wrong-colored eyes widen. ‘Points for terminology.’

  ‘Diego’s words, not mine.’ I’m thankful that the avatar has left us alone. It was messing with my head the whole time. ‘Sorry. This is hitting harder than I thought.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Col gently encourages.

  I open my mouth to explain, and even that simple motion makes the muscles of my face feel funny.

  ‘Doesn’t it feel wrong to you?’

  He shrugs. ‘I always wanted to get surge. But my mother wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t the Palafox thing to do.’

  Of course. Aribella Palafox, indomitable ruler of Victoria, wouldn’t want the first son getting frivolous surge.

  But I can’t imagine Col wanting to change himself. ‘You didn’t like your face?’

  ‘I didn’t want anything permanent. But all my friends got to look however they wanted!’

  ‘Rafi’s friends too. But Father never let her.’ I point at my eyebrow.

  ‘Except when we got this …’

  But the scar we shared, from the assassination attempt, is gone from my face.

  I have to take a few deep breaths.

  Col gently touches the place where it’s missing. ‘I used to go out into Victoria without my minders, pretending to be normal. Not someone from a famous family, with everyone always watching me. Now I get to see what that’s really like.’

  I look at him, trying to smile. ‘You do look pretty average.’

  ‘You don’t want to know what it would be like? To be two random people?’

  ‘Who live in a random dictatorship?’ I say. ‘At war with all its neighbors?’

  ‘But it won’t be our war anymore. We’re two kids who don’t care about all that. Islyn and Arav, model citizens in love.’

  I have to laugh. ‘This is a side of you I haven’t seen before.’

  ‘See? The surge is already working.’

  I turn away from Col’s—or Arav’s—enthusiasm. ‘Okay, I get it. People want to escape who they are, now and then. But being someone else was my job for sixteen years.’

  ‘Islyn is someone who never had that job,’ he says.

  I close my eyes, trying to imagine what that would feel like.

  I am Islyn, Random of Shreve.

  Nobody’s ever tried to kill me, and I don’t know how to kill anyone else.

  Nobody wants to put me in charge of a city.

  But when I open my eyes, I’m still Frey.

  Col reads my expression and laughs. ‘It might take more than ten seconds.’

  ‘But my whole body feels wrong, Col. Even my smile—the first thing I ever learned—is wrong.’

  He stares at me. ‘Wait. You learned to smile?’

  ‘Had to. Whenever Rafi went out in public, a hundred cams pointed at her. Her smile was my first impersonation. I’ve never really had one of my own.’

  ‘But you do.’ Col reaches out to trace a curve around the left side of my lips. ‘A little sly twist, right here, when you think someone’s being logic-missing. Rafia just rolls her eyes.’

  ‘Huh.’ I touch my new lips—thinner, more symmetrical, tingly and raw. ‘Rafi and I used to practice smiling for hours.’

  ‘Then maybe you weren’t impersonating her.’ Col shrugs. ‘Maybe Rafia of Shreve was a character you two made up.’

  I don’t know how to answer that.

  My sister and I learned so much side by side—dancing, walking, giving speeches. She might have borrowed some of her habits from me.

  But Rafi was my father’s heir; I was only a shadow. If I added anything to our identity, it’s because she let me.

  ‘Maybe everyone practices their smile in Shreve,’ Col says. ‘With the dust watching, you have to watch yourself.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what it’s like for regular people. I hardly ever left the tower.’

  ‘It’s still your city. Shreve is in your bones.’

  I have to laugh. ‘These don’t even feel like my bones.’

  My new frame is full of implants—the surge added a full centimeter of height. It’s a way of disrupting my movement so the Shreve AI won’t recognize my gait, my way of walking that’s as much mine as my fingerprints.

  ‘Still, you’re going home,’ Col says softly.

  And I realize—he must wish we were sneaking into Victoria.

  It’s half a year since we ran from his home city, the night my father conquered it. Col wakes up gasping from nightmares of breathing dust. A nightmare that his people are still living.

  I take his hand. ‘We’re going to save Victoria, Col. The free cities are going to end my father—Diego just promised me again.’

  ‘Let’s focus on saving Boss X,’ he says quietly.

  I look at him, forcing myself to take in his new face. To confront the strangeness of this person I love.

  This is Col, this stranger. And I owe him a promise.

  ‘When I’m in charge of Shreve,’ I say, ‘Victoria will be free.’

  He squeezes my hand, believing me.

  But then he says, ‘And what about Shreve?’

  I shrug—we’ve already had this conversation. ‘We’ll move toward some form of democracy, AI or human.’

  ‘Is managing a whole city through that transition something you want to do?’

  I don’t answer, because the answer is that what I want doesn’t matter anymore.

  The free cities don’t trust Rafi. They won’t help us topple my father if it means she’ll be in charge.

  I’m not sure if I trust her either.

  Besides, Col’s crew have always worried that I’m not a suitable match for him. Every day he’s in exile, his claim to Victoria slips away a little more. Being with me, a trained killer, an impostor, a rebel, doesn’t help.

  ‘It’s better for you and me, isn’t it?’ I ask. ‘If I’m a respectable ruler of Shreve?’

  He laughs. ‘I thought you were a rebel. Is respectability what you want now?’

  When he puts it that way, the question’s even harder.

  ‘I want to figure out who I am.’ My eyes fall to my new hands, the fingers longer, thinner. ‘Maybe getting a new body wasn’t the best idea.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He reaches out again, his fingertips following the line of my jaw. ‘You’re still in there.’

  Col’s touch tingles on my raw skin. Every pore is clean and new, like a steam bath has opened them. My muscles, stretched onto this new frame, want to test themselves.

  I take his hand, pull him closer. This unfamiliar body of mine is suddenly hungry.

  For a long, strange moment, our lips, our bodies fit together wrong. Like kissing a stranger.

  But then a trickle of certainty cuts through the alarm bells in my head. My heart knows who this boy is, even if my stomach is fluttering.

  We pull apart, staring into each other’s wrong-colored eyes.

  I try to smile, but the expression feels unbalanced. Like in that half hour after dental surge, my face half-numb.

  ‘Frey,’ Col whispers. ‘We’re still us inside.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. You’ve never been anyone else!’

  ‘Neither have you,’ he says.

  His words are logic-missing, but he says them with such certainty that for a moment I can’t speak.

  ‘You should look in the mirror, Frey. Nothing’s ever as bad as your imagination makes it.’

  He’s right. And a small, brain-missing part of me is madly curious about my new face.

  ‘There aren’t any mirrors in here.’ I turn toward the view of the city. ‘Maybe the window …’

  We walk to the wall of glass. Reflected in it, translucent against the sky, is the face I chose from the possibilities the doctors sent me.

  The small nose, the high cheeks. Nothing flashy, just boring Shreve-pretty surge. I test a few expressions.

  ‘Do you still … like my face?’ I ask Col.

  He laughs. ‘I like it on you.’

  The answer is so sense-missing, as if it’s a dress I’m not sure about.

  But it’s also exactly how Col thinks.

  We kiss again, slipping into our familiar way of holding each other. My right hand drifts along his flank, his left cradles the back of my neck. The shapes and angles have all changed, but I still recognize them, like an old dance to a new song.

  And I realize there’s something that the surgery didn’t alter.

  ‘You taste the same, Col.’

  He pulls back a little. ‘I have a taste?’

  ‘Everyone does. It’s not something I usually … except the rest of you is so different.’

  ‘Huh.’ Col ponders this a moment. ‘Let me taste you, then.’

  He folds us into another kiss, a mix of warm and familiar and unexpected and strange, but this time easier, more certain.

  Kissing is a kind of trusting. And I trust Col, whatever he looks like.

  Even with our new faces, raw skin, wrong eyes, we start to become ourselves again.

  9. COLD WATER

  I descend into the cold lake, holding my breath.

  When I force my eyes open, a steady blinking is visible through the murk.

  My fingers scramble for my light, but the crash gel is too foamy to carry a beam. I stumble and crawl along the muddy bottom. This is more like clawing through a snowbank than swimming.

  The blinking shows two silhouettes together. I’m almost there. My heart is pounding, my lungs already empty.

  Yandre’s and Col’s faces loom in the foam. Their helmets are off. They’re sharing one breather.

  Why are they still down here?

  Col shoves the breather in my mouth. As I gulp oxygen, he points at his feet.

  I kneel, shining my own light. Yandre’s boot is caught, tangled in an old plastic fishing net crowded with sticks and leaves.

  I make a fist, my thumb on the inside. The smart plastic squirms, and a moment later, the variable blade is in my hand. It cuts through the net in a stroke.

  My brain is still wavering from lack of oxygen. That’s all I can do—I turn and fight my way back toward the shore.

  For long seconds, it feels like drowning. My instincts are screaming to swim for the surface, but the crash gel is too thin to hold me. I can only stumble back up the slope of the lake bed.

  Blackness leaks across my vision, something fading inside me …

  But then strong hands grasp my arms, pull me up and out. My head bursts through the surface—I’m gasping, coughing, Zura and Lodge on either side of me. The others watch from the beach, trying not to look alarmed.

  ‘Do you need medical attention, Islyn?’ my father’s almost voice asks.

  ‘Just snorted some water, sir,’ I manage. My right hand is open, so the knife has hidden itself back in the rings. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  At least, I hope it is.

  As the Specials haul me toward the beach, I scan the lake for any signs of movement. I must have freed Yandre, but did they have enough air left?

  The water’s rippling farther down the shore. Two heads bob to the surface.

  I make my way toward them through the waist-deep gel.

  Col looks at me, like he’s about to explain what happened. But he can’t say anything with the dust listening.

  I take him in my arms. He’s shivering to his core.

  ‘I love you,’ Col says.

  For a moment, the words make me feel exposed, with the dust listening. But Islyn and Arav are registered with the city as romantic partners. We’re allowed to say these words to each other.

  The Shreve AI takes a dim view of cheating—it likes to know everyone’s relationship status.

  ‘Love you too,’ I say. ‘Let’s get you dry.’ We head up into the trees, wet and cold.

  Our new identities have homes, of course. Our helpful spy assigned us apartments near the center of town, suitable for such upright citizens. But we don’t plan to use them.

  Our cover is that we’re hiking for a few days, camping out here in the greenbelt. Security headquarters, where Boss X is imprisoned, is on the far side of the city. It’s a long walk from our landing spot, but we couldn’t risk flying past military sensor arrays.

  Besides, a camping trip is an excuse to carry makeshift weapons hidden in our equipment.

  And to build fires.

  Half a klick into the woods, we make camp next to the main greenbelt path. Our two-person tents unfold into polyhedrons while we watch and shiver.

  Zura has enough energy to gather wood and stack it into the pyramid shape we’ve all practiced.

  I want to tell Col about those awful minutes on the beach, not knowing if he and Yandre were alive or dead. Wondering how I could lose him and show the dust nothing.

  Staying silent sets the blank spot on my arm tingling. But my feels are still gone, my emotions still tangled inside me.

  Zura lights the fire, and it comes quickly to life. Col and I huddle close, and sparks fly out and singe our mylar blanket. He hasn’t stopped shivering since those long minutes in the lake.

  I hold him tight until the shudders subside.

  And finally it appears, a thermal plume of sparks and smoke rushing up from the pyramid of flame. I glance down at the badge on my lapel—a gift from Diego.

  It’s the emblem of a Shreve camping club, decorated with a tent logo, five stars in the sky. But the badge is a sensor. The dust is noisy stuff—every nanocam, every tiny microphone sends its data pulsing through a web of repeaters. The little stars above the tent show the strength of that signal.

  Right now, four of the five are subtly reflective in the firelight, the dust’s normal strength out here in the wild.

  But as Zura’s fire builds, it draws the air from around us and channels it up through the burning core, vaporizing the dust. Soon there are only three stars flickering on my badge, then two …

  When the signal is down to one wavering star, our words are being burned away before they can be transmitted. A familiar calm settles over me, like when Rafi and I would go out in a rainstorm to hide our secrets.

  ‘Thanks for the save,’ Col whispers.

  ‘How’d you find Yandre?’

  ‘Walking into shore, I saw their signal light flashing. They were almost out of air, but I had some left from turning off my oxygen.’

  I have to smile. Nothing could be more Col—saving his friend thanks to a sense-missing attempt to smell the ozone layer.

  ‘Told you Rafi’s blade would come in handy,’ I say. ‘And you thought it wasn’t worth the risk.’

  ‘Happy to be wrong.’ He’s staring at his hands, which are still shivering.

  ‘Let me.’ I gently rub his fingers, drinking in the fact that he’s still alive.

  Somehow in this new place, Col’s new face doesn’t seem as wrong. Maybe the three weeks since the surge have gotten me used to it, or maybe it was the shock of almost losing him.

  Maybe somewhere in my brain, his old face is being gradually replaced with this one. But I’m glad he’s still here, either way.

  ‘At least I got fifteen merits out of it,’ he says.

  ‘That’s weird. I got eighteen, and I wasn’t in the water as long as you.’

  Col shrugs. ‘It’s random, to keep people guessing.’

  Just like my father—one day he’d be loving to Rafi, the next day, cruel. The unpredictability of his whims kept her eager to please, always hoping that tomorrow would be better.

  Until the day she realized what he really was, of course.

  The first rush of the fire is starting to fade. The single star is solid now, which means it’ll be dangerous to talk soon.

  ‘Waiting for you was …’ My voice fades. Now that I can finally speak, finding the words is too exhausting. ‘I’m going to have drowning nightmares. I’m glad we’re past the landing.’

  Col laughs. ‘Yeah, the rest is easy. Just walk across Shreve, capture the head of Security, and stroll into her headquarters.’

  The mission has barely begun.

  ‘Sunrise isn’t far off,’ I say. ‘We should get some sleep.’

  ‘Okay, but …’ He leans closer and whispers, ‘When we were stuck down there in the dark and cold, I knew you’d come.’

  My new smile, a still unfamiliar twist of muscles, comes across my face. ‘Rescuing each other is what we’re good at.’

  The fire sparks a little, and Col smiles back. ‘Works for me.’

  On my camping badge, the second star is flickering to life.

  The dust is back.

  We crawl to our tent. But before exhaustion takes us, the voice of Shreve murmurs in my ear again.

  ‘Thirty merits for today’s exercise—hiking is healthy and fun. Minus forty for the fire. Sleep well, Islyn.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I say.

  10. SHUDDER

  The world is shaking, and my lungs are full of dust.

  I know this nightmare—it runs along well-worn channels in my brain. Buildings tumble, people spill from their heights. Dark clouds sweep across the sun, choking the sky.

  I twist awake, struggling against my sleeping bag, trying to escape.

  ‘Islyn,’ Col’s voice comes. ‘It’s okay.’

 

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