Chapter 11 - The House With the Light On
All three of us stopped beneath the dripping pines.
"They're at my house," I said.
Wren watched the photograph on my phone. "They're waiting to see whether we run toward something we love. That's how Rusk thinks."
I called the police, then my friend Maya Ortiz, who worked beside me in the county records office.
"Clara? It's six in the morning."
"Someone broke into my house. Don't go there. Can you meet me at the all-night diner on Ninth? Bring your laptop."
"Are you hurt?"
I looked at two women wearing my face. "It's complicated."
Maya arrived forty minutes later and stopped between the booths.
"Okay," she said. "Either I need more coffee, or you've got some explaining to do."
I showed her the birth record, the video Iris had filmed in the tank room, and the cassette in its cracked plastic case. Maya listened without interrupting.
"I can make authenticated copies," she said. "But you need a lawyer and someone outside this county."
She knew I wasn't given to wild stories. For six years we'd argued over tiny discrepancies in old land records. I wouldn't fake a parking ticket, much less a birth certificate.
Wren pushed her sleeve back. The tracking port under her skin had turned red and swollen.
"If they know where I am," she said, "they'll come here."
Maya got up and locked the diner's side door, then called a lawyer she trusted, Sasha Reed.
As she copied the files, a local news alert flashed across her screen.
BREAK-IN AT PRIVATE BIOTECH FACILITY. THREE WOMEN SOUGHT FOR THEFT.
Below it was a photograph of me.
Then another of Iris.
Then a third image of a woman wearing my coat, standing outside the research building.
May you like
Wren leaned over the table.
"That isn't any of us," she said.
