The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For

In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

Novelette | 8,925 words

The girl that my mother is leaving me for has hair as rich and glossy as a horse chestnut. Her skin is ivory and her eyes are emerald green. Her belly is slightly round, and that’s what matters.

“This is beautiful,” she says. She’s holding up a fabric sample, deep green embroidered with gold. I wore green at my adoption too. I’ll wear black to be abandoned. She slips the little square of cloth into my hand. It’s soft like the silk it is, but her voice is softer.

We’re on the ninety-first floor of the tower. Outside the window, a woman walks by on the skyway, a guard. She’s strong and tall—guard bodies are all made that way. The skyway’s narrow and there’s no handrail, but she isn’t bothered, because her bare feet stick tight to the smooth glass. Her eyes scan for tiny drones, for cameras ordinary people couldn’t see, signs of espionage or attack. Another guard passes her going the other way; she smiles like she’s greeting a friend. I don’t know if the smile is real. People whose minds are put into enhanced bodies always say they feel the same as ever. But maybe they just don’t remember what it’s like to feel at all.

Far from this tower, people are living in slums and in camps, starving because the world is broken. I don’t want to starve in a slum or a camp. If I’m cast out, that’s probably where I’ll end up. I could beg the new daughter, Mira, not to take my mother from me, but what would be the point? She doesn’t want to starve either. She’s already carrying my mother’s child. So I can’t stop what’s going to happen. But if I am very obedient—if I smile when I’m disowned, applaud when Mira is adopted in my place, and even help to plan the double ceremony—maybe my mother will find some kind of job for me.

“Has she set a date yet?” I ask.

“Not till September, when I’ll be six months. She wants to be sure.”

“You’re already further along than I ever got.”

She makes a sympathetic face. “They say sometimes it’s harder when you were born a man.”

I should smile and agree, yes, that’s so, but I can’t help myself. “That’s a myth,” I say. “And I was born a baby.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

I can’t bring myself to apologize. But I pick up a square of fabric, an amethyst jacquard. “This one is pretty too.”

She smiles and she agrees.

My mother is the CEO of Griffin Corporation, the third of her line. Every Griffin CEO adopts a daughter. Every daughter bears a child who is the Founder’s clone, and raises her in just the same way the Founder was raised. When the CEO retires, the clone takes over. In this way every CEO of Griffin is the same.

The Founder’s mother grew up poor but she still managed to start college. So my mother went through all the records of scholarship students, and I was the one that she wanted to see. She was a woman in a suit behind a desk, no older than thirty, I thought. Her hair was pulled back in a perfect twist with not a strand left free. It was red-brown, almost the same shade as mine. She didn’t look like my real mother, didn’t really look like me—her face was more pinched, eyes were a pure green where mine have brown around the iris—but close enough that someone might have assumed we were relatives. That was the idea. I’d tell people the clone was my genetic daughter, and it would be easy for them to believe.

The CEO told me she was impressed I started on hormones so early, even though I was poor and an orphan. She said that showed determination. I spent years pleading for help while my body changed in the wrong direction, until somebody finally listened—that’s what she considered early. But I smiled and I agreed.

She said I would have to leave school, because the Founder’s mother did. I’d marry a woman, because she did that too. If I had a fiancée in mind, she would have to be vetted. If I didn’t, the company would find a bride. We could stay in the tower till the baby was born, rent-free with everything provided. Then all three of us would live for eighteen years in costume poverty. We’d have a little apartment, shabby and in bad repair, but the building would be solid and fireproof, free of mold, and every person in it screened for safety by the company. Enhanced guards would watch over me discreetly on the train to my low-level corporate job. The baby would go to a charity clinic, where fancy doctors volunteering just for that day would check her health. Also my mother would make sure we always had enough to eat. It was easier to eat, back in the Founder’s time.

“The point,” she said, “is that it will feel real to her, as it did to the Founder. But sickness and malnutrition could cause lasting damage, and I won’t allow that.”

I missed meals as a child, inhaled all kinds of spores, didn’t see doctors when I should have. But I didn’t complain that she was calling me damaged. I’m not that big a fool.

The CEO explained the rest. At eighteen my daughter would go off to college. At the end of the school year, she would be told we both died in an accident, because the Founder’s mothers did. She wouldn’t come home for our death, because her school wouldn’t let her defer her exams—Griffin money would make sure they didn’t. So there’d be no need to stage a funeral, I wouldn’t have to lie still in a coffin. I’d have a lifetime stipend. I’d be free.

I was wondering why the CEO didn’t just move into a new body before she could get old, like every other rich person who’s terrified of death. Of course I didn’t say that, but she must have guessed what I was thinking.

“To change bodies is to change perspectives. To age is to change too, even when you cheat the wrinkles by adopting a new face. I’ll move on from this body when I need to, and that’s when your child will take over the company. She’ll have the same body as I did, the same fire, the same spark of youth, the same mind. But all of that depends on you to raise her right.”

It was a better life than I was going to get out of a college degree. So I gave up my scholarship and moved into the tower. My mother paid for my surgery. I think she liked the idea of buying a clean new lab-grown reproductive system, instead of using one that some poor person had been walking around with. That’s what I’d always wanted. Not to throw away this body for a new one, but to heal it. Me, but made right.

Then I miscarried three times, and that was it, I’d missed my chance. The Founder was born when her mother was twenty, and now it was too late to meet the deadline. So my mother found another girl. Probably she found a few. After my failure, she would want to hedge her bets.

There’s no reason she couldn’t have had both of us as daughters. It’s not like I’d inherit anything—only a clone can be her heir. But my mother likes things tidy, and she doesn’t want the stink of failure clinging to her. So I’m being traded in for Mira of the auburn hair, patient and demure, everything I pretended to be. Just look at her, it’s obvious I can’t compete.

Mira has decided to sew her own dress, to have something to do. I tell her she should sit back and enjoy the idleness—it’s the last rest she is going to get for eighteen years. She says she likes to keep her hands busy. I iron the pieces of the sewing pattern flat for her so she can pin them out. At fourteen weeks it isn’t like she couldn’t stand up at an ironing board, but I want to be helpful. I’m living in these rooms on borrowed time, as a companion until Mira gets adopted and married. I should look like I’m useful, so nobody gets the idea of kicking me out early.

I remember being alone here, having no one but the guards to talk to. Mira shouldn’t have to live like that. Most of the guards are nice and you can learn a lot from them, but some of what you learn’s depressing. Usually borrowing money to take an enhanced body was the only way they could find work. Then most of every payday goes toward servicing the debt.

I know Mira met her future wife today. She’s been quiet since she came home and she hasn’t mentioned it. I watch her push pin after pin into the fabric and the paper, slipping each point underneath, then making it come up again. She makes me feel silly and idle, but I like watching her slender fingers. How they move, how they tense and then relax. Now and then she looks at me and smiles.

“How did you like her?” I ask, finally.

“She seems nice.”

“When are you going to be married?”

“The same day I become the CEO’s daughter. Adoption in the morning, wedding in the afternoon. It’s to save money, I think. They can put all the leftover food in the fridge and serve it cold at the reception.”

Mira thinks this is funny for some reason. I guess if you want to fit in with the rich kids, you treat food conservation like a joke. I never bothered trying, I wouldn’t have fit in anyway.

“What’s her name?” I ask.

“Colleen.”

It’s a small kitchen and as her belly gets bigger, it seems to get smaller. When we cook together—which for some reason she wants to do more often—she’s always brushing my arm as she reaches past me for something on the counter. Touching a hand to the small of my back to let me know she’s passing by, so I won’t bump into her. She acts like she doesn’t mind being so crowded together, but I try to keep out of her way.

Today Mira baked bread, so I make us a soup. We didn’t get the carrots we asked for, another crop failure, I guess. But I have a broth I made from tops and peels before, and there are lots of potatoes and even some beef. It’s not as good as it would have been, but it’s okay.

Mira’s always nice about my cooking, even though hers is better. She was sixteen when her parents died, she’d had a chance to learn these things. My real mother died still thinking I was a boy.

There’s a table in the kitchen but we hardly use it. Mira likes to curl up on the couch, balancing her soup bowl on her plate, her legs tucked up beside her. And she likes me to be next to her—if I try to sit down somewhere else, she’ll call me over. I know her feet swell at the end of the day now. I wish I dared to ask to rub them. I wish we could stay here forever, making our little meals and being alone. But I’ll see her for the last time at her wedding. After that, Colleen moves in.

She puts her plate down on the table, stretches out her leg, nudges my knee with her bare toe. “What are you thinking about now?”

“The wedding,” I say, which is true.

“Well, don’t. Do something useful. Rub my feet.”

I don’t think Mira’s happy with Colleen. They’ve met four times now and she’s always quiet after. I asked what the girl looked like and she changed the subject. If she refused to marry her, would my mother find somebody else? Probably, but she’d be irritated. It’s not smart to defy her just because you don’t think your bride’s pretty enough, or whatever. I don’t know if Mira understands that.

We’re sitting on the couch. She’s sewing, and I’m watching her. We had a good meal and we ought to be happy. She’s nervous, and she’s been nervous for days.

“It’s natural to worry now,” I tell her. “Once you’re married you’ll get to know her better.”

“It’s not that,” Mira says. She’s staring at her sewing and not working on it. “Do you like living here? I mean, do you like living here with me?”

“Of course I do. I wish it could go on forever.”

“What if it could? Not the here, but the with me?”

This makes me shiver but it’s perilously close to treason. I’m sure there are bugs in these rooms—probably cameras too. If my mother thinks I’m tempting Mira out of her prescribed marriage, I don’t know what she’ll do.

“We can’t,” is all I dare to say.

She puts her sewing down and finally looks at me, and I can see that she’s afraid. Of Colleen? I consider carefully what I can get away with saying.

“If something’s wrong with Colleen that could affect the baby—”

“No, nothing like that. I like her well enough, I guess. I just don’t feel the way you’re supposed to feel about someone you’re going to marry.”

Oh God, she’s going to back out of the marriage just because it’s not a romance. We’ll both be on the street. Or no, we won’t, because my mother will find some way to threaten her into obedience. But I can be thrown out, and even if I’m not, everything will be much worse for both of us.

“This is a job that you signed up for. It’s for the baby’s sake. You have to think of it that way. The feelings will come after.”

“That’s what I thought. But then I met you. I can’t think of marrying anyone else.”

She looks into my eyes, and I don’t know what she can possibly be seeing other than panic and disbelief, but whatever it is makes her bold enough to say it. “I love you.”

She kisses me, soft and tentative. I can feel that she’s trembling. This terrifies her, and me too. I never even dared to hope that she could want me. But even as we’re still kissing, as she presses close against me, the certainty sinks in that what she feels now isn’t love. It’s not even desire. It’s only mercy.

I pull away a little. We have to get this right. There are cameras and microphones to worry about. “I love you too,” I say, and it sounds real.

It’s not like that takes any acting. How could I not love her, when she’s throwing me a lifeline? She’s afraid I’ll be turned out on the street—or maybe she knows I will, my mother might have said something. So she’s offering me a life with her and with the baby. It would be safer for her if she married Colleen, like my mother planned. She’s too good to do that, she’s too kind.

She holds tight to me. “I was so worried you’d say no.” She’s stopped trembling, all the tension has gone out of her—it must be visible, for anyone who’s watching. She’s really good at this.

“I’ll make you a dress for the wedding,” she adds.

I think of saying that technically, she’s supposed to ask me to marry her, but what would be the point? We both know the answer would be yes—it’s not like I have any better options. Instead I say what matters.

“We have to ask my mother first.”

Mira tells the CEO that we’re in love, words spilling out in an excited nervous rush, sounding younger than she is. She’s so much better at talking to my mother than I am. She even manages to sound contrite when she apologizes for disrupting Griffin’s plans. “I can’t help it,” she says. “You put us together and we fell in love—that seems like fate.”

I doubt my mother believes in fate and I’m sure she had her answer ready before we walked in here. She gives a practiced sigh and turns her gaze to me. “Well, you’ve been vetted. You already know what’s required of a clone’s parent. Your infertility is no defect in a daughter-in-law—a benefit, even. One of my mothers got pregnant when I was six. Of course it had to be aborted before she could show. The founder never had a sibling.”

I wonder if the mother wanted that. I wonder how the CEO found out it happened.

“My mothers were never in love,” she adds. “It’s not essential, obviously, but it might reduce the chances of that kind of complication.”

She pauses, like she’s considering. Was the Founder like this—treating everyone like an object, even herself? Or did that only start when Griffin started raising clones on lies?

When did she find out her mothers weren’t really dead, that they took their payoff and abandoned her? When will the child we raise find out?

“Very well,” she says. “I’ll give Colleen her walking papers.”

I wish she hadn’t said that. I don’t want to think about somebody else being put out on the street for my sake. Maybe Colleen didn’t give up as much as I did—maybe she still has a life she can go back to. Maybe I just won’t think about it.

Mira and I look grateful and don’t meet each other’s eyes.

Mira wears the green-and-gold she chose to her adoption. She wears the amethyst I picked out at our wedding. She looked better in the green, of course. The cream lace dress she made for me is every bit as perfect as she said it would be. All the fabrics that I wanted for myself got vetoed. “You are not a summer, you’re an autumn. You can’t wear those dusty tones.” This is some kind of a system, an astrology for colors. Still, I like it. Summer is smoke in the air, thought-crushing heat. It’s fainting in the sun and burning yourself if you fall on the sidewalk. Autumn is reprieve. That’s what I hope I’ll be to her.

We weren’t allowed to invite anyone. Nobody’s supposed to know what CEOs of Griffin look like, because then someone might recognize her clone. She’s invited the people who’re in on the secret, but they all seem more like underlings than friends. None of them bother to talk to us, but we still have to keep up appearances.

Mira is the picture of a happy bride. I never knew she was so good at acting. We dance, we lean our heads together, I kiss her even when nobody’s looking, except, probably, a camera. We say “I love you,” and she sounds just like she means it. I quiver whenever her hand touches mine, my whole skin is embarrassed being next to her. I know all these people are wondering why she’d want someone like me. It wouldn’t matter what they thought, if only she really did.

That night we share a bed, of course. She switches the light off, so the cameras can’t see us as well. Then she turns onto her side and kisses me. She puts a hand against my collarbone, then moves it down. She does like to keep her hands busy. I guess so do I. I know this is because of pity, or to make the marriage look convincing to my mother. But she’s lovely in the dark, the way she feels against me. I wish I could believe she wanted me, but for a little while I let myself pretend.

There’s a meal she’s been wanting to make for a while. She chopped up cabbage weeks ago in preparation, bathed it in brine in a jar that she’d boiled, aged it on the counter. Now the homemade sauerkraut is in the fridge and we have all the vegetables we need, leftover chicken stock that needs to be used up, plenty of ground beef and even some butter and pork. Tonight’s the night. Mostly I cook the meal at her direction so she can stay off her feet, except that I have no idea how to make pie crust, so she does that sitting at the kitchen table. Meanwhile I cut up fresh cabbage to combine with sauerkraut in the soup. It seems like something you would only make because you got a lot of cabbage cheap, and I’m not expecting much, but it tastes wonderful—sour, but also a little bit sweet from the carrots. Then instead of bread with soup like usual, I get a mouthful of the meat and buttery crust.

“This is so rich,” I tell her. “I feel like a queen.”

“I always felt that way when I was little.”

So probably her real mom or her dad made this. I don’t think she likes to talk about them, so I don’t press for details. I wish I could know everything about her, but it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is this time, us here together, an interlude with no beginning that will never end.

But her belly’s getting bigger, and sometimes reality leaks in. After dinner she picks up her sewing, but her mind keeps wandering. I see her looking at the bookshelf where we keep our wedding present from her mother, the only one we got—we wouldn’t have been allowed to take anything else with us, after the baby was born. A pile of old board games that her mother told us were the Founder’s, then her grandmother’s, then hers. She gave them to us in the reception hall after the other guests had left. Mira carefully removed the wrapping paper and held up a box, admiring its condition. “You must have been very careful with your things.”

“We were, as children go,” her mother said. “But parts have been replaced as needed.”

Now they’re in a loose stack on the shelf, bright-colored boxes, long and flat. Mira can’t stop being distracted by them. Finally she says, “Do you want to try one?”

“Sure,” I say, although I don’t.

I just pick the one on the top of the pile. We take it to the table, assemble the board, read part of the instructions and give up, then start to play. Parents and children are pink and blue pegs slotted into the outside of old cars, and their colors never change. We both get educations and houses, we pile up money just by moving forward. At first it just seems stupid, then it starts to feel like a sick joke. We’re supposed to count up all our assets at the end and figure out who won, but we don’t have the heart.

“It’s colorful and things are happening all the time,” she says. “Our daughter will like it.”

“We’re going to get sick of it, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. It’s different with a child, don’t you think? They’re having fun, so you have fun.”

“Maybe.” I imagine our daughter, a little brown-haired girl in a blue dress, leaning in over the board to move a car three squares. Excited, she demands more money from the bank. She’s probably already winning. What lies are we telling her that day? What are we trying to make her be?

“Anyway,” Mira says, putting the lid on the box, “a baby could choke on those cars. It’ll have to be put away until she’s old enough. Probably all of them will.”

I understand what she’s saying. When we move into our new apartment, we’ll put the games up on the top shelf of our closet, and this one will never find its way back down again. Mira and I work well together in this way, I think. Even if she’ll never love me, she can be my co-conspirator. Together we can hollow out a little space where things make sense.

Mira’s due in sixteen days the night that her phone wakes us. She picks it up and listens. “Okay,” she says at last, and puts it down.

“Vega Corporation is invading the tower. My mother is dead. We should each pack a bag, and somebody will take us to safety.”

We wait an hour and then the lock on the door clicks, making us jump. Nobody opens it. I go to answer, hoping it’s a guard, fearing it’s Vega soldiers. But the hall is empty. Nothing’s happened except that the door is unlocked and it won’t lock again.

“I don’t think anyone’s coming to help us,” I say.

We creep out into the hallway. The elevators are all dark, disabled. We go into the stairwell, sit on the landing and listen, and for a while it’s quiet.

Vega’s CEOs are clones too, but they raise their own successors. Mira’s mother says they get weirder and stupider with every generation. I guess they haven’t gotten stupider than Griffin yet, because it seems like they won easily. That’s the only reason for the doors to be unlocked: they’ve finished off the guards and now they’re going through the building floor by floor. They don’t want there to be anywhere to hide.

Finally we hear steps and shouts, far below, and a sound like a door being kicked open. They’re pacifying another level. There’s shooting right away and it goes on in bursts for a long time.

Maybe some fools are doing a last stand down there, but I don’t think so. I think Vega is killing everyone. No hope of getting past them—they won’t leave any exits unguarded.

“We have to go up,” I tell her. “There’s something we can use up there.”

“How many floors?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where it is, I just heard the guards talking about it.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t press for details, she just trusts me. I’ve done nothing to deserve that. I should tell her what I’m looking for at least, but I don’t want to think about it.

She starts up the stairs, slow but steady. I follow after with both bags. I’m afraid we’re going to die because her footsteps are so heavy and her breathing is so loud, but apart from that she doesn’t make a sound.

There are cameras in the stairwell, probably, though nothing big enough to see. Vega disabled all the locks, they probably have access to look through them. If they see us, I’m no one and not worth coming after, but I’m sure they would rather not have an heir running around. On the other hand, we’re moving slowly, and they won’t think there’s any way we can escape up there. A pregnant woman trudging up the stairs toward a dead end doesn’t cry out for a strike force. At least that’s what I have to hope.

We make it to the next floor. Mira rests on the landing, I go in to scout. It’s not what I’m looking for and it’s deserted. Anybody who was working late here must have fled while we were still waiting for help, or else they’re hiding.

Then we do it again, eight more times. Every time, I think Mira can’t possibly make it. She pants and leans hard on the railing, but keeps moving. I wish I could make this easier for her. All I can do is follow close and try to catch her if she falls.

On the third flight of stairs my ankle starts to ache—the revenge of a fracture that never quite healed right. I remember how my mother sang to me while I was stuck in bed. Every time we stop on a landing, I rub at the scar on my palm where I fell on a sharp rock when I was little. My mother cleaned the wound and kissed it better.

On the ninth landing I open the door and I know right away.

The first room is male bodies and I back right out again. Not that, not for anything. In the next one they’re all female but for sex workers, I think—no powers I can use. We keep searching through a maze of rooms, all full of bodies lying in glass chambers. How close is Vega now, I wonder.

The last room is the biggest and it has both men and women. I pick one and read the label. Stealth. Endurance. Agility. Perception. Strength. Precision. Electronic countermeasures. Gecko. Gecko is what sticks the guards’ feet to the skyways. But these aren’t guards—guards have maybe half that many powers. There are forty-eight bodies, enough for an invasion. Maybe Vega was smart to strike first.

Mira’s staring into a chamber as if a snake’s coiled up inside it. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t leave the baby like that.”

I know what she means. If she transfers her mind to another body, the baby will rot in the old one. She’s carried it inside her for most of nine months—of course she can’t leave it to die, even if it is the next edition of our mother. In her place I’d feel the same way.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You don’t have to. I’m going to change, then we’ll escape. You destroy all the rest of these bodies so no one can use them to come after us. It’s this switch here, under the flip-up cover. Then see if you can find a manual for these enhancements.”

I look down at the nearest of them, lying in its chamber. It’s uncanny, with its empty face, its perfect body. After I’ve lived and worried and worked too much and hardly slept at all in it for a few months, maybe it will look less like a doll.

I don’t want to transfer. I want my body, with its scars and flaws. Even with the damage done by all those years of the wrong hormones. With all that, it’s still mine, it’s still me. But if I stay in my body I’ll die here and she will too.

“Is this what you want?” she says.

“No. But it’s the only way.”

“What if we surrender?”

There’s no real hope in her voice. She knows as well as I do they’re not taking prisoners. I don’t want to say it, so I just shake my head.

“Please,” she says, and tears are in her eyes. “I don’t want you to do this. You’re my wife, the way you are, I love you.”

She means it. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be crying. Anyway nobody’s watching now, there isn’t any reason left to lie. She didn’t marry me out of pity—or not just. She really fell in love.

I don’t know why she would do something so stupid. But I’m going to save her and then maybe I’ll be worth it.

“I have to,” I say, and I kiss her. I try to memorize what kissing her feels like in my real body. I focus on wanting to save her. Even if I can’t feel that anymore after the change, I might remember. “Help me pick one of these out.”

She walks along the rows of bodies, stops with her hand on a chamber. Copper hair, skin like peaches and cream. The eyes are amber and stare up at nothing. They blink mechanically once, like a doll’s. If they didn’t, I guess, they’d dry out.

“This one is beautiful,” she says. Her voice is hollow.

I can’t bring myself to smile, but I agree.

I wake up and the room’s not full of soldiers. Mira isn’t dead, she’s here and crying. I want to comfort her, I want to protect her. I don’t dare try to touch her yet, because I think she’d flinch away. But I can feel things. I’m still me, I’m real inside this, it’s okay.

Then I open up the side of the glass chamber and climb out, and everything is wrong. The body’s balance is off, its eyes are too high up. Even how my tongue feels in my mouth is strange and fake. I want to collapse to the floor, I want to lie down there and die. But I have to save Mira.

So this body doesn’t feel like me, so what. I felt that way at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, most of sixteen. I was a brain cased in a robot, I pushed my body forward like a wheelbarrow, because I had to. I tuned out everything that hurt and made myself a perfect student, because if anybody could get hormones without parents or money to pay for them, it would be a high achiever, not a failure. I did that for almost four years, until my first shots of estrogen bathed me in calm, made me feel like a person. I can do it long enough to get us out of here.

I make the body walk over to Mira. She’s found a manual, but it’s videos. There’s one about gecko, but the guards say that’s simple—the body’s made already knowing how to do it. I play the one on electronic countermeasures instead, because that sounds like it might help us against cameras.

The first two minutes are on motivation. I skip forward and it’s talking about loyalty to Griffin. Another skip and it’s explaining that these countermeasures are new and a secret, so whatever you do, don’t get taken alive. Then it’s telling about how the technology was invented. We’re going to die before I get anything useful out of this.

“Let’s just go,” I say. It comes out high and thin, because I’m still trying to correct the too-deep pitch of my real body. I try to loosen up my vocal cords, remember how I used to talk, but don’t repeat the line.

I go into my suitcase and pick out clothes I hope will look like office wear. I manage to get the bra on, stretching the band till the eyes barely capture the last set of hooks, but the fit is all wrong—the edges of the cups dig hard into my breasts, the band is nowhere near my sternum in the middle. The blouse gaps between buttons, too. I throw a jacket over it and hope no one will notice. I try on my old shoes, but they’re too big and they’d just slip off. Anyway, I’m going to need my feet bare soon.

I’m afraid to see my old body, but it’s right there and I can’t help looking. I must have turned onto my side at the beginning of the transfer, while it was still like sleep, before it was like death. One leg is stretched out and one drawn up. My hair has curled unevenly, the way it does when I air-dry it, the way my mother’s did, and spread all over everywhere. It would need a lot of brushing out, if I woke up. I didn’t even get to look like Sleeping Beauty in the end, I just look like I passed out in there. I want to open up the chamber, touch my body’s face and stroke its tangled hair, but then I think maybe that’s morbid, and anyway we need to hurry. I just leave it behind.

At the door out to the stairwell, I think of the cameras again. The body’s made already knowing how to do it. I close my eyes and try to feel what this body wants from me. I see my right hand moving, flicking upward. I’m probably imagining it. But all I can do is try.

I push the door open a little, standing so my feet are hidden, and peek out. High on a wall I see a little winking light, a star. Is that what cameras look like to these eyes? I push my hand out through the gap.

As the body makes the gesture I realize what it is. It’s the way you cup up water from a pool to splash someone in front of you. I went to a pool once, when I was little. There were public pools back then, it didn’t cost too much. And I was still wearing boy’s clothes, so I didn’t have to worry about what a girl’s swimsuit might show. I remember splashing some woman, my real mother, I guess. The memory is just a glimpse and I don’t really see her face, but who else would let me splash her. I feel something shiver in my chest and flow out through my fingers in a rush. The little winking light turns red and dull.

“The cameras are disabled. Or deceived. I think.”

I push the door open slowly, and when another light appears I splash it right away. Would that gesture be the same for anyone, I wonder? Or did this body search my mind to find a memory of joy?

We go out on the landing. “Can I carry you?” I ask.

I’m so afraid she’s going to say no. But she’s figured out what’s coming, knows she’ll have to let me carry her soon anyway. So she just shrugs. “I don’t know, can you? We didn’t watch the strength video.”

I never picked up a person before, but I have an idea about how from somewhere, movies probably. I wrap one arm around her back and one behind her knees, and when I lift she just comes up. It isn’t like I’m strong, it’s like she’s light. She puts her arms around my neck, then winces and lets go.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and start to put her down.

“It’s just that my belly’s getting squished.”

I shift my arms and she says it’s better, but I think she’s still uncomfortable. She should have had more time to get used to this body before she had to touch it.

We have to leave the suitcases behind. Our wedding dresses are inside those. My real body is still lying in the leaving-chamber. Vega will paw through it all, but by that time we’ll be gone.

“Do you want to keep this baby?” I ask her as we’re going up the stairs.

She doesn’t complain that I’m talking about the future while we’re running for our lives. I think maybe this was on her mind too.

“If we leave her at a hospital or something, Vega could find her and kill her. We have to keep her hidden. And she’s been inside me all this time, I can’t help loving her.”

“Your mother put her in you. She made you feel that way.”

“I know,” she says, but the way she says it, I can tell she means “that doesn’t matter.” Then she adds, “Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to make someone an orphan,” and I know that I can’t either, and that’s all there is to say.

Outside, the skyway wraps around the building so the guards can patrol everything, just like on every floor. On this one there’s a bridge ahead, a long and narrow path, unlit. The skyways are built on a framework of steel, but the surface is glass, polished smooth and slick, with no sides and no handrails. No one without gecko could use them to attack the central tower. But if one of the satellite towers gets invaded, guards can run across them from the main one to defend.

This bridge goes to the southwest tower, which is Marketing. I’m betting that it’s safer than the one we’re in. Who’d bother doing an armed incursion on a Marketing department?

“You’ll have to hold on with both hands for this part. Press against me and keep your eyes closed.”

I walk in place for a few steps, feeling how my feet stick, testing how the bond gets firmer when I press down, weakens when I rock my foot forward. Then I step out into the cold. The tower is swaying in the wind. The guards say Griffin’s towers are the most stable ever built, and I guess the range of motion’s not that big really, but I still feel like it’s trying to throw me off. I’m terrified and so is Mira—I can feel the tension in her body. “It’s okay,” I tell her. The voice that comes out doesn’t sound like it’s okay. I wish this body was made knowing how to lie better.

Our tower is swaying and Marketing is swaying out of time with it. The bridge between them slips and shifts, pulls away and comes close again. It has to—if the bridges were fused rigidly, the movement of the towers would snap them. I watch the bridge until I’ve learned the rhythm of it, then step out and stick my foot down, pull the other one after it quickly. My grip on Mira is too tight. She doesn’t seem to mind.

The bridge is only wider than my shoulders by a little, and carrying Mira I can’t see my feet at all. I still feel unstable and off balance, my legs are too long, I’m going to topple even without the wind’s help. How did I give up my trans body for this perfect female doll and manage to be taller than before? I keep my eyes on the opposite end of the bridge and feel my way with my feet.

It’s a cold night. There are heating coils beneath the glass, but Vega didn’t turn them on. By the midway point my feet are freezing, starting to get tingly—I’m afraid they’ll go numb and I’ll fall off.

Then I put my right foot down and there’s nothing underneath the edge of it but empty space. I freeze, then shift my weight back slowly, plant the foot back in a safer spot. I can’t bring myself to take another step.

If I fall off, it won’t just be some doll I’m piloting that shatters on the pavement. It will be me—I feel that in my bones now. Wrong and awkward, artificial, but still me. Fear shows me that, and I know fear is telling me the truth.

“Just keep going,” Mira says into my shoulder. “Don’t look down.”

“I can’t, you’re in the way of down.”

She makes a noise that’s kind of like a laugh. I’m freezing everywhere except the part she’s pressed against. I focus on that part and let the body’s feet think for me.

Finally we’re at the door to the Marketing tower. I let her legs drop down, smack my hand against the door and stick it there. For a moment I just breathe. Her feet are on the slick glass, but she’s pinned against the closed door by my body, held up by my arm, safe inside a cage of me. This isn’t the body she loves, but it’s the one that can protect her. She doesn’t try to shrink away.

Inside, the elevators are alive, but I tell Mira it’s too dangerous. “The door could open on anything.”

“You cannot carry me down a hundred flights of stairs.”

“I think maybe I can.”

“Even if you don’t pass out, my spine would never be the same.”

So I stick a hand inside the elevator, splash imaginary water all around, and we get in. The whole back wall is a mirror, so I can’t help seeing the body I’m wearing. Of course I’m beautiful—a little bit too much so to be natural. I look right, next to Mira. People will believe she married me on purpose. Nobody will guess I’m trans now, nobody will ever think She’s poor, or she’d have gotten a new body. Then she’d look like a real woman.

I turn toward the door right away, avoiding the sight of myself, but the picture is still in my head and I have the whole ride down to think about it. It comes to me that maybe I won’t always hate this, being perfect. Maybe hating it is one more thing I’ll lose.

We get out on the second floor. I carry her to the very bottom of the stairs. I don’t have a plan for this part. I push the door open an inch, spot a camera and splash it, then push it a little more.

I can see a station with two Griffin guards. Not enhanced I think, just guys in uniforms to check IDs. Does Marketing even know we’ve been invaded? They might let us walk out—you don’t need an ID to leave a building. If not, this body’s strong enough to knock them out. I hope it was made knowing how to throw a punch.

I ease the door shut, lean my head close to hers, and whisper. “You’re in labor, we’re both freaking out, a car is waiting for us outside. No matter what they say, keep moving toward the door.”

She nods like this is normal. It feels that way to me too. Trying stupid desperate plans and hoping not to die is just our life now.

I crack open the door, just enough to make sure the guards aren’t looking this way. Then I put my arm and shoulder through the gap. I skim the surface of the pool in a big arc, sending a wave out in every direction, feeling the power flow from inside me, and just for a moment it feels like joy. Then I’m back to being terrified, which is good because I won’t have to do any acting. We burst through the door and make for the lobby. She’s walking like it hurts her, I’m supporting her on one side.

“Did our car come?” she asks. There’s panic in her voice. Of course the guards don’t know the answer, they’re not there to keep track of cars. They look startled and don’t try to stop us.

We turn toward the doors and there are Vega soldiers, four of them, sitting in chairs on both sides. Enhanced. They’re going to notice my bare feet, how can they not. If they figure out I’m gecko then we’re dead. I’m her wife, she started bleeding, I ran out without my shoes, I think, hoping it will somehow translate into body language.The nearest one is standing up. I don’t know what to do, but I told Mira to keep moving and that’s what she does, so I go with her. The soldier takes a step closer to the door we’re headed toward. Then he holds it open.

“There it is!” I shout, and point at nothing down the street, away from the main tower. We hurry that way. I don’t dare look around, but I can’t hear anyone following.

So now we’re free. I did it, we got away. I feel light, like anything is possible, these city streets could take us anywhere. But then the triumph fades into a chill. We’re all alone and we have nothing, no one we can turn to. We’re out here on the street exposed to cameras. Vega will find us anytime they figure out they want us. I took this body for one purpose and that’s done now. Now I don’t know what I’m for.

We’re just walking, trying to put more distance between us and Griffin. I wish my feet weren’t cold again. I wish I dared to pick her up and run, but someone might be watching from a window, or through a security camera. We’re conspicuous enough as it is.

“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her.

“Just find a way to get us out of here,” she says. “I have a plan.” She’s breathing hard again, and can’t walk very fast. I don’t know how much more of this she can take.

The streets are dead this time of night—no people and no vehicles, nothing that can help us. Nothing but corporate towers in every direction. I wish this body was made knowing how to find a bus.

Finally we come upon a whole block lined with empty taxis on both sides. It’s eerie. I can’t help feeling they’re a herd that’s going to stampede when we get too close, or flick away all in the same direction like a school of fish. But they’re just drones, brought here by some algorithm to wait until demand increases.

“I don’t have any money,” I realize. “My wallet’s still on my old body.”

“I have a cash card a friend gave me that’s in her name. She thought the idea of raising a clone baby to replace the CEO was sick and I might have to run.”

“It was sick and we do have to run.”

“I’m sure she’ll put us up tonight, probably until the baby’s born. She might need to yell at me a little first.”

“You’re a desperate pregnant woman fleeing a war. People aren’t allowed to yell at you.”

“You’re right, she’ll probably yell at you instead.”

We’re supposed to touch the cash card to the door to make it open. As an experiment I splash some water on the lock instead. It opens and the drone asks where we want to go. This way we’ll be harder to trace.

The cab pulls out, a silent chariot. Soon we’re in a part of town where there are lighted signs, things on a human scale. We’re getting away. Mira leans in and puts her head against my shoulder. I stroke her hair and she melts into me. I guess after I carried her, my body feels familiar to her now. More familiar than everything else ahead of us, at least.

“You’ll stay with me, won’t you?” she murmurs.

“Always,” I say, and it feels so good. But I can’t help thinking of what always looks like. We’re going to raise her mother’s clone in poverty, just like we promised to. We’re gliding back into the same cage we were headed for, only without the guarantee of safety and enough to eat.

“Hey,” she says, tugging on the lapel of my jacket to get my attention and looking up at my face. “It’s okay. You did it, we’re safe, you can rest now.”

I feel a wave of relief. Not because I believe for a second we’re safe. Because she knew what I was feeling, even if she didn’t quite know why. Because even in this shell, this armor suit, she understands that I need comfort too.

“I love you,” she says. It sounds just like it did before, when I didn’t believe her but it was true.

I remember I’m supposed to say “I love you” back, and so I do, although I think it’s pretty obvious.

She sits up, wincing, and pulls my head to her. She brushes my tears away and kisses me. “It’s going to come out fine. With what your body can do, you’ll get good work. I can probably get something. We’ll be all right, even with the baby.”

“No. Listen.” I move close so our sides are pressed together and I take her hand. “We need to break out of the Griffin program every way we can. Like, tell our daughter a child-size amount of the truth about who she is, fill in details as soon as she’s ready for them.”

“Of course, that’s better.”

“And we can’t just scrape by with corporate jobs. That’s what she wanted. So I’m going to be a thief.”

“What?”

“I’m going to steal from all these corporations. It’s perfect. The countermeasures in this body are brand-new, no one will be prepared for them except for Vega and whatever’s left of Griffin. I’ll stay away from those two. I can climb up the sides of buildings and confuse any cameras or drones they have watching. Their guards will be like toy soldiers compared to me—I don’t think this many powers have ever been stuffed into one body. The best part is, they’ll probably blame Vega.”

She thinks about it for a long time. “It’s a good job for raising a child,” she says. “You’ll be home all day. Away one night every couple of weeks, maybe?”

“Maybe even less.”

“What will you steal?”

“Bodies, if we can figure out how to keep them alive until we sell them. If not, maybe equipment. Anything I can carry.”

“We should brainstorm targets, and I’ll do the research.”

“We’ll have to do it fast. We need money for a place where we can raise a child. And we need new ID right away.”

She nods at that. I hope she’s up to this, I hope I am. It’s one thing not to want to let a baby die, another to love her and care for her. We’ll have to learn to see her for who she is, not who she looks like or what her genes want her to be.

Mira lays her hand against her belly. She strokes it soothingly, like you would comfort someone who’s been hurt.

“It’s okay,” she whispers to the baby. “It’s over. This time will be different.”

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