Though Oscar had agreed to withdraw the surgical knives, he hadn’t abandoned the project of convincing me to submit to surgery. He conducted the campaign secondhand, confronting me with people I couldn’t refuse to speak to, people who were or had been Treya’s friends and family.

They were my friends and family, too, in a real sense, though I wasn’t the person they had known, much less the person they wanted and expected me to be. And I was human enough to be hurt by their incomprehension and their grief.

One day Oscar brought my mother (Treya’s mother) to see me. My father (my Vox-father) was an engineering worker who had been killed in the collapse of an exchange tunnel not long after I was born. As a child I had been cared for by my mother and a crew of aunts, all of whom loved me and whom I had loved. And enough of Treya remained in me that I couldn’t help reaching out to the woman whose arms had so often comforted me, couldn’t help looking into her terrified eyes while I told her no, her daughter wasn’t dead, only transformed, freed from a harsh but invisible bondage. She understood none of it. “Don’t you want to be useful?” she asked me. “Don’t you remember what it means to be part of a family?”

I remembered altogether too well. I ignored the question and told her I still loved her. And truly, I did. But she wasn’t consoled. Why should she be? She had lost her daughter. Treya was gone, and I was just some stubborn golem who had taken her place. And in the moment I told her I loved her, I saw from her frozen expression that she hated me in return, actually hated me; that the person she loved wasn’t me but a shadow I had ceased to cast.

Well, maybe she was right. I would never be the daughter she had known. I was what I had become. I was the thing I was and the name of the thing I was was Allison, Allison, Allison Pearl. I whispered it to myself long after she had left the room.

I didn’t mean to take these troubles to Turk. Turk had troubles of his own. He wore his stoic come-what-may attitude proudly, and I guessed he had earned it, but fundamentally, inescapably, he was alone here, a stranger in what must have seemed to him a terrifyingly strange land. Our rooms adjoined, and some nights I woke to hear him pacing or mumbling to himself, confronting fears I couldn’t imagine. It seemed to me that he must feel like a man trapped in a dream, aware of the lunacy of it but helpless to break through to a saner reality.