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.