“Well, it works,” Brent said.

“Turn it off,” Jeremiah told him. “Put it back.”

“It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?” Brent began moving the camera slowly back and forth, making the image on the wall—and all of its infinite reflections—waver, until Jeremiah thought he might actually get sick.

“Knock it off, Brent.” Jeremiah hit the button on the remote.

The wall monitor went black and Jeremiah sat down while Brent put everything back to where it had been. When he was finished, there was no indication anything had been tampered with.

“So, what do we do now?” he asked when Brent sat down on the couch. “Now that we know it’s real?”

“Nothing,” Brent told him. “Like I said, we just be careful. We be ourselves and we do our jobs. That’s all.”

“Easy for you to say. But I actually live here.”

“Well,” Brent said with a smirk, “then I wouldn’t dance naked in front of the painting if I were you, difficult as that may be.”

A few minutes later, the monitor switched on. As Jeremiah watched the clone stumble through four hours of his workday, he found it unsettling to realize that he was now the watcher and that his double had no idea.

Chapter 17

Day 94

Jeremiah spent an uncomfortable week in his rooms. He ate his meals standing at the counter in the kitchen, and spent a lot of time in the bedroom, but he couldn’t stay out of the living room forever. There wasn’t much to do anywhere else. But whenever he was in there, on the computer or the treadmill, or practicing IF, he found himself trying not to look in the direction of the painting and hoping it didn’t appear obvious. Eventually, he realized he could move one of the chairs out of the camera’s view. It was an odd-looking arrangement, one chair pushed up against the wall on its own, but it afforded him a sense of semiprivacy and a place where he could read. Despite everything, Jeremiah was often happy for the long, quiet stretches when he could read. He had devoured half the New York Times bestseller list in the space of a few weeks, and had a growing log of books to request, ones he’d never found the time for in his old life. He was absorbed in a true-crime thriller when Charles Scott walked in the front door, unannounced, on a Friday afternoon.

“Mr. Adams,” he said, “we need to have a talk.”

In his own mind, Jeremiah sneered back at Scott: You’re damn right we need a talk, you spying piece of crap. In reality, he just looked up at him blankly from the chair.

If Scott had any suspicions about the new furniture arrangement, he didn’t mention it.

Jeremiah laid the open book down and walked over to the couch. He sat and put his feet up on the coffee table. “About what?”

“I’ve just come from a meeting with Natalie Young. She tells me you’ve been asking a lot of questions about taking Meld.”