‘We’re pretty hard to find in this,’ Greta said, hopefully, but she knew that if they had been, they weren’t anymore. They were both in the messages now, working through them together, flagging some of the more urgent requests, the ones they couldn’t ignore, like the official ones requesting they turn over stuff to the authorities. The ones from the social media company asking for what they had and how well it was secured and who exactly they were being asked to turn stuff over to, and then one from a lawyer for the social media company telling them not to turn anything over until he’d talked to them. There was a very limited amount they had to turn over, he’d written, as contractors.

‘What about as citizens?’ Greta said.

‘Do we need a lawyer?’ Peggy asked.

‘It would be nice to avoid it,’ Greta said. ‘Given the whole . . .’ and she waved her hand between the two of them.

‘Argh,’ Peggy said. Pronouncing all the letters so that it sounded like the word in a comic book bubble.

‘Hm,’ Greta said.

They were only as good as each other. Neither of them would come up with anything outside the box of the other one. There was an advantage to having each other – they could talk about it. But it was like talking to a voice in your head. It was like a pond of anxiety already full to the brim. There was no fresh water, it was stagnant. So in the end there was no advantage, because neither of them had developed differently. They couldn’t get out of each other’s grip.

They both looked at the messages for a while, working their way back through the shitstorm. As they read each message it all came back to them. Settled into their body and cemented into their understanding. It was exactly like they’d thought it would be when they’d been Margaret. Yesterday they’d been congratulating themselves for getting away with it – was it yesterday? It was yesterday, when, for a moment, there’d been three of them. It was like chewing gum in hair. They were implicated, and they were being asked for documents by some scary people with official-sounding titles and they were being told not to pass the documents on by the lawyers working for the social media company. No matter how tricky it was, they would need a lawyer. That was a good thought. They were happy they’d thought of that. If they were sitting here thinking they could do it themselves, they would have trouble.

‘One of us should take this so the other one can fix that code,’ Greta said. It felt like an epiphany – surprising and inevitable at the same time. You can’t know what you don’t know, until you know it.

‘Yeah,’ said Peggy.

‘Which one of us should take this?’ Greta asked.