A cheerful sign welcomed her to Virginia, and a tension crept into her chest that would build in the days to come. It was true no one was on the lookout for her there, but if her car should break down by the side of the road, if she stayed at the wrong motel or ate at the wrong restaurant, if someone recognized her—then she’d be in the worst kind of trouble, and she wouldn’t see it coming until it was too late. But what scared her most was that none of that made any difference to her. Not even the fact that she didn’t have a second clone, and if she died now, she really was dead. Even if she knew a pitchfork mob was waiting for her at the Virginia line with a length of rope, she’d have come anyway. She had no choice. Learning the truth about her missing eighteen months had become an addiction, except she knew there was no rehab in the world that could temper her compulsion. The need to know was calling the shots now.
Down below, the sunshine danced innocently across the Potomac like it was part of a whole different story.
Her husband lived on the outskirts of the outskirts of Richmond in a modern development that was indistinguishable from every other upper-middle-class subdivision built in the last fifty years. The most noticeable differences were what was missing. Despite the size of the lots, Con hadn’t seen a single swimming pool—victims of ever-tightening water regulations and taxation. In their place were the mandatory water collection tanks and solar panels. Grass lawns had also become smaller since Con was a kid, and about the only thing she liked about the development was how much space was devoted to newly planted trees. Even then, the saplings—probably numbering in the thousands—were too immature to offer any shade, which only reinforced the fact that this was all the invention of a real estate developer and not a real neighborhood.
The car parked itself across the street from her husband’s home, and she sat there staring up at the house. She hoped it might give her some feeling for the man who lived there, but it had the institutional sterility that came with planned communities. Every house on the block was nearly, but not entirely, identical to every other house, right down to the mild variations in paint colors, selected no doubt from the approved fascist homeowners-association swatch book. And the houses were all massive to the point of overcompensation. If she hadn’t come directly from a real-life castle, she would have been intimidated by the unnecessary size of the things. Fair to say she loathed everything about this place.
Driving here, she’d known it wouldn’t be familiar, but she expected to recognize it as a place she could imagine herself—a spiritual affinity if not a practical one. But no, nothing. Having spent the better part of her life trying to escape her small Texas hometown, she couldn’t understand anyone who voluntarily exiled themselves to the suburbs. But that’s exactly what she had done. This was her home. Where she lived with her husband. A man named Levi Greer. That and this address were all she’d let Vernon Gaddis tell her about him. It had felt too dangerous to know more.
Maybe she should have gone straight to find her original instead. Before leaving Charles Island, she’d logged in to the secure account that stored the encrypted GPS data from Con D’Arcy’s biometric chip. As advertised, Palingenesis had only kept the thirty-six hours immediately prior to the “death event.” It appeared those hours had been spent at a farm only forty miles south of here. Nor had her original left the farm since. Con wanted to hold out hope that there was a chance her original was still alive, but even her justifiable skepticism of Palingenesis was having trouble explaining it away. That was why she had come here first. Not that her death wasn’t important, but it marked the end of the story, and Con didn’t want to begin at the end—she wanted to know this woman, to understand how she had lived. Only then would she feel prepared to see how she had died.
That meant putting on her big-girl pants and finding out what was waiting for her behind door number one. Con opened the car door, meaning to get out, but then slammed and locked it, heart rattling like a snare drum. Until now, Levi Greer had remained a silhouette. A cardboard cutout upon which she could pin a thousand possibilities. But he would become real the moment he opened his front door—the answer to the question of whether she really was Constance Ada D’Arcy. What if she didn’t feel anything when she met him? What would that tell her about herself? How could she be Con D’Arcy if she didn’t love who Con D’Arcy loved?
Enough.
With a final push, she forced herself out of the car and went up the walk before she could talk herself out of it. She rang the bell and stepped back as if she’d lit the fuse on a firework but wasn’t sure what would happen when it went off.