The Likeness: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

seen that face a million times before. Then I took a step forwards, so I could get a proper look and the whole world went silent, frozen, darkness roaring in from the edges and only the girl’s face blazing white at the center; because it was me. The tilt of the nose, the wide sweep of the eyebrows, every tiniest curve and angle clear as ice: it was me, blue-lipped and still, with shadows like dark bruises under my eyes. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, couldn’t feel myself breathing. For a second I thought I was floating, sliced off myself and wind currents carrying me away.
“Know her?” Frank asked, somewhere. “Any relation?”
It was like going blind; my eyes couldn’t take her in. She was impossible: a high-fever hallucination, a screaming crack straight across all the laws of nature. I realized I was braced rigid on the balls of my feet, one hand halfway to my gun, every muscle ready to fight this dead girl to the death. “No,” I said. My voice sounded wrong, somewhere outside me. “Never seen her.”
“You adopted?”
Sam whipped his head around, startled, but the bluntness was good, it helped like a pinch. “No,” I said. For an awful, rocking instant I actually wondered. But I’ve seen photos, my mother tired and smiling in a hospital bed, brand-new me at her breast. No.
“Which side do you look like?”
“What?” It took me a second. I couldn’t look away from the girl; I had to force myself to blink. No wonder Doherty and his ears had done a double take. “No. My mother’s side. It’s not that my father was running around, and this is . . . No.”
Frank shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“They say everyone’s got a double, somewhere,” Sam said quietly, beside me. He was too close; it took me a second to realize that he was ready to catch me, just in case.
I am not the fainting type. I bit down, hard and fast, on the inside of my lip; the jolt of pain cleared my head. “Doesn’t she have ID?”
I knew, from the tiny pause before either of them answered, that something was up. Shit, I thought, with a new thump in my stomach: identity theft. I wasn’t too clear on how it worked exactly, but one glimpse of me and a creative streak and presumably this girl could have been sharing my passport and buying BMWs on my credit.
“She had a student card on her,” Frank said. “Key ring in the left-hand pocket of her coat, Maglite in the right, wallet in the front right pocket of her jeans. Twelve quid and change, an ATM card, a couple of old receipts and this.” He fished a clear plastic evidence bag out of a pile by the door and slapped it into my hand.
It was a Trinity College ID, slick and digitized, not like the laminated bits of colored paper we used to have. The girl in the photo looked ten years younger than the white, sunken face in the corner. She was smiling my own smile up at me and wearing a striped baker-boy cap turned sideways, and for a second my mind flailed wildly: But I never had a striped one of those, did I, when did I— I pretended to tilt the card to the light, reading the small print, so I could turn my shoulder to the others. Madison, Alexandra J.
For a whirling instant, I understood completely: Frank and I had done this. We made Lexie Madison bone by bone and fiber by fiber, we baptized her and for a few months we gave her a face and a body, and when we threw her away she wanted more. She spent four years spinning herself back, out of dark earth and night winds, and then she called us here to see what we had done.
“What the hell, ” I said, when I could breathe.
“When the uniforms called it in and ran her name through the computer,” Frank said, taking back the bag, “she came up flagged: anything happens to this girl, call me ASAP. I never bothered taking her out of the system; I figured we might need her again, sooner or later. You never know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.” I stared hard at the body and got a grip: this was no golem, this was a real