Click.
Rita hunched over the steering wheel of the rental, breathing deeply for a minute, then slid her split-personality phone away. It didn’t seem real, exactly: there was a sheet of invisible glass between her and the world now, unreflecting, intangible, but a barrier nonetheless. And I’m not Rita. I’m Anna, until I get home. “Anna Mittal,” read the name on her Arizona driver’s license. With an address in Phoenix, age twenty-four, a physiotherapist. Not: Rita Douglas, age twenty-five, Boston resident and driver’s license, former nonunion actor turned DHS probationary employee with payroll records pointing to a back-office job vetting frequent fliers for the streamlined secure boarding program.
“It’s a game,” Patrick had explained during one of the briefing sessions. (Training doctrine called for the gamification of everything short of “wet ops”—assassination. Games were, after all, formalized play, and play was how young mammals acquired and then performed essential life skills.) “Your objective is to minimize your threat surface when exposed to a hostile environment; in this case, all you need to do to flip between Rita and Anna. There’ll be a different protocol if we ever send you overseas, but these are the basics, and practicing on your family is a great way to upskill yourself. Just remember not to show Anna’s ID card or SIM personality to your folks, or Rita’s to any Hostiles, and you’ll do fine.”
The car did most of the driving for thirty miles, finally beeping for human supervision when it reached the main street leading to the subdivision her family lived in. The suburbs were undergoing a mild renaissance, recovering from the gas price–induced real-estate wilt of the noughties. Franz had followed a job out here, Emily joining him along with her brother, River, another adoptee. They’d snapped up a McMansion in a not-too-decrepit area for cash and extended themselves on credit to adapt an adjacent house for Grandpa Kurt, on the not-unreasonable theory that when Grandpa didn’t need it anymore they’d be able to turn a profit on it for the kids. Back when gas had been four bucks a gallon, commuting from here would have been a real strain, but with gas at eighty cents, thanks to imports from other time lines, it was a different story. The neighborhood was rising: only the unnatural green of the Astroturfed front yards hinted at the real cost of living large.
Rita didn’t like Arizona. It was currently run by a Dominionist governor who rallied his followers with a dog whistle, with a creepy Save the Babies/Defense of Marriage proposition on the ballot to amend the state constitution at the next election. But it was where her family had moved: if she wanted to see them, she could either visit Jesusland or use her phone camera.
Rita pulled in behind a familiar SUV and parked. She swapped her ID cards again, reset her phone, and hauled out her carry-on. She walked up to the front door, smiling and waving at the camera: “Hi, Mom! It’s me!”
The door clicked open. “Rita!” Emily hugged her. “We’ve been so worried! Where have you been? Come in, let’s shut the door.” It was almost a hundred Fahrenheit outside, seventy-five indoors.
“Long story.” Rita dropped her bag in the hallway. “Ancient history came looking for me, but I’m okay.”
“Coffee first. Your room’s waiting for you: I left the bedding off to air, but it’s same as always. River’s in class but he’ll probably be home by six—”
“Gramps?”
“He’s out, as usual at this time of day. He volunteers at a Goodwill shop. Not Goodwill, a different charity, but you know what I mean.” Emily retreated toward the kitchen; Rita followed. She hadn’t seen her mom in three months. There was more gray in her hair, and her cheeks seemed to sag more than ninety days could account for. “Don’t worry, by the way, I’ve finished all my work today. I was thinking about cooking up a feast for tonight, seeing we’re a full family.” She smiled. “Want to help me shop for food?”
“Oh, Mom. Yes, but you don’t have to—”
“The hell I don’t! First you’re off to Seattle on that hand-to-mouth thing, then you disappear for a couple of days, and the next I hear is some horrible news—an attempted abduction? And we’re visited by a couple of men in black who tell us everything is going to be fine, then you barely write, much less call, for weeks and weeks—”
Her mother’s shoulders were shaking. Rita stared for a moment, then closed the gap and hugged her. “Listen, it’s going to be all right. But—” She hesitated. “I’m going to have to ask you about my, uh, birth mother: everything you know about the … before you adopted me—”
“Oh, hon.” Emily sniffed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. Or it could wait for another few years. Until everything was a bit … calmer.”
“Calm.” Only her mother would use that word to talk about the biggest national trauma of the century. “Mom. Listen, it’s okay. They, uh, gave me a job. I think so they can keep an eye on me. The DHS, I mean. It’s just that I need to know everything you know. For my own safety?” She heard a whine threatening to climb into her voice, made herself stop talking.
“I get that. Thing is, hon, we didn’t know anything. No, that’s not quite right. I mean, yes, Kurt suspected something. A bit. But we didn’t put two and two together until after 7/16. We thought it was just the usual sort of problem, that your birth mother had just been unlucky and you could live a normal life. It wasn’t until after 7/16, and the visit from the FBI, that we realized who she must have been.” Rita let go and took a step back. “Well, I mean I, I never met her! It mostly went through the lawyers. But her mother—your grandmother, I guess—Kurt knew her, and he introduced us this one time and she seemed perfectly nice.”
“Wait.” Rita shook her head. It was too much to assimilate quickly. “A grandmother? You mean, I’ve got a grandmother?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her mom shrugged uncomfortably. “She was on crutches, Rita. She had MS. A few years later Kurt said he’d seen her and she was in a wheelchair. Then she disappeared. This would have been, oh, late 2002 or early 2003. A while before 7/16. Months, maybe a year.”
“She disappeared? How come?”
“I don’t know. Ask your grandfather; he might know some more. But Rita, you’ve got to understand—we didn’t know. Nobody knew about the world-walker thing. Or the bombs. That all happened years later, and we only figured it out when the FBI came and interviewed us after 7/16. All we knew was that this nice lady, a friend of Kurt’s, whose daughter had got in trouble at college, and was looking for adopters. And Franz and I were never going to have babies ourselves.”
“Oh, Mom.” The coffeemaker began to hiss, then clicked loudly. Rita moved instinctively toward the cupboard with the mugs. It was something to occupy her hands with while her brain tried to catch up.
“I hope you don’t think I blame you for any of it.”