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Somewhere else she might be able to find a way to do all the things she had to do. If the PKs couldn’t fix d-mat on their own, they would need her help convincing Q. Perhaps she could trade that help for leniency when it came to reactivating her friends—in which case that lawmaker, LM Kingdon, might come in handy.
    â€œOkay,” she said, “I’m ready.”
    Jesse grunted, but with some grace. “I guess I am too, then.”
    He stood up and left his hair where it fell, covering his eyes. Her knees were stiff from sitting for too long, and her back ached. Moving would be good for that, too.
    â€œI’ll be with you every step of the way,” said Sargent as Clair walked out the doorway for only the second time in three hours. The first had been to go to the toilet. The hallway outside was boxy and nondescript. “We’re not going by road, by the way, Jesse.”
    So they had been listening. “How, then?”
    â€œI can’t say.”
    â€œHelicopter?” asked Jesse, trailing behind them. “Subway?”
    â€œI really can’t say. It’s the biggest secret on the planet at the moment,” said Sargent, guiding them ahead of her. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

[5]
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    AT THE END of the hallway was a large, windowless meeting room that contained twenty office chairs on wheels, scattered apparently at random, half of them occupied by people in orange jumpsuits like Jesse’s and Clair’s. Most of those people were handcuffed at their wrists and ankles. Clair’s lenses supplied names. She recognized Ant Wallace’s assistant, Catherine Lupoi, who in the flesh was a striking brunette with a defiant expression. There was a peacekeeper Clair remembered from her return to New York, a man called PK Drader, who had previously been assigned to Jesse but was now watching over the people in orange. Behind them in a corner on his own was a slender teen with wispy red hair, wearing a black Nehru suit done up to the neck. In a chair opposite him was a young woman in orange who Clair instantly recognized, although the text hovering above her head wasn’t a name she knew. She was blond, willowy, and folded into herself like a trap, or a building on the verge of collapse.
    Clair’s lenses said “Xia Somerset.”
    The face belonged to Tilly Kozlova.
    The only way they could be different was if the wrong person was inside Tilly’s body.
    Clair stopped dead in the entranceway for an instant, then numbly let herself be led through the others to a chair next to Jesse. She was sitting in the same room as her childhood hero, and there was no avoiding the fact now that Tilly Kozlova had been an imposter all along. She was one of the Improved, a beautiful young shell that had been given to a dying musician—an old woman who wanted to live another life. She wasn’t a dupe: a dupe was a temporary copy with someone else’s mind jammed in, an arrangement that lasted only a few days. Dupes could be created over and over again, whereas the Improved stole lives singly and permanently. By a slow and methodical process, the original Tilly Kozlova had been scooped out of her own skull and thrown away like so many pumpkin seeds. Clair felt unclean, as though her love for the music Xia Somerset had made in Tilly Kozlova’s body had tarnished her, made her somehow complicit in Wallace’s dreadful scheme. She rubbed her hands together as if to wipe them clean.
    Seeing this familiar face was a reminder of just how much mess was left in Wallace’s wake.
    â€œShe turned herself in, you know. The first of the Improved to do so, right before the crash.”
    The bump appeared at the top of her infield. She didn’t recognize the name of the sender: Devin Bartelme. According to the profile that came with it, Devin Bartelme was ambiguous regarding his gender but preferred the male pronoun. He had no fixed address,