Arun turned from the wall screen and caught my gaze, his brown eyes serious. “You’re the most well-read guy I know. You’d run circles around all those spoiled you kids with your smarts.”

“Your new identity will be solid,” Victor said. “Jin’s men are looking for a gambler, a druggie, some rich, stupid criminal. Not an educated you boy from the United States. Besides, I barely recognized you when you walked in that door.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s true,” Lingyi replied. “You look like you’ve gained fifteen pounds of muscle since I saw you a few months ago.” She squeezed my bicep for emphasis, and I felt my face grow hot. “What have you been doing in that apartment of yours?”

Sleeping past noon. Staying indoors all day and night, reading novels and comics, and trawling the undernet. Following the net diaries of a few you boys and girls, caught between revulsion and fascination over their vapid lifestyles. Then, come two a.m., I left my studio and headed to the twenty-four-hour gym, lifting weights and doing indoor rock climbing to blow off steam. “I’m eating more,” I said after a pause. “And I go to a hole-in-the-wall gym in the dead of night.”

“Well, it shows,” Victor said. “You’re bigger. And pale as a white foreigner. No one will make the connection between the blond, thin street urchin in that photo and your new, rich-boy identity.”

Iris had told me to put on some muscle, which seemed to work out in the end. But I had been going to the gym because I needed to—because I had to get out of my dark studio, but also to sweat out my frustrations in having to wait, and to curb my anger over, well, everything.

“Let’s continue,” Arun said. “Zhou, you’ve just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in world literature from Berkeley in their accelerated program. Lingyi’s laid the groundwork to back all this for anyone who might want to dig up info on you.”

An image of me flashed onto the projection wall. My hair was clean-cut and black. Instead of a worn black T-shirt, I was wearing a white dress shirt and a gray vest. “I don’t look like that,” I said, blinking at the dapper young man on the screen—Victor’s clone.

“Actually, you look like this now.” Arun pointed his Palm at me, and I was momentarily bathed in green light as the device scanned my face, just like when Vic had done the same three months ago at the Rockaroke. His fingers raced over the Palm. My tanned face with the sharp cheekbones and chin morphed before our eyes on the wall screen. My coloring grew more pallid, rendering my brown eyes almost black, even as my face filled out, making what had appeared sharp before more defined. Mature.

They were right. I barely recognized myself.