“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.

8. Taema

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.