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risen to her knees, hands clasped in front of her, tight under her breastbone. The fire, the fire on the screen, on the news—she’d dreamed about it last night. Not afterward , not because her brain had seized on external data and turned it into a loop in her brain. She’d dreamed it while it was happening .
    But I can’t have. They’re hallucinations. They’re all hallucinations, the doctor said so.
    Her heart was banging. This couldn’t be right. It made no sense. You couldn’t have a hallucination that turned out to be real .
    And as if to prove that nothing made sense, that she was in control of nothing in the whole world or the whole universeor her whole life, with no warning the room blinked out.
    She was elsewhere . In someone else’s body, looking through someone else’s eyes.
    There was the cold, gritty feel of dried mud and grass beneath her curled-up legs, the taste of dust and metal in her mouth. All around, the night pressed against her, thick, hot, and full of noise. Something thundered over the bridge above her head, then faded into the distance; not the quiet rattle of a beetle-car but the rumble belonging to a heavy-goods vehicle.
    She was shivering, in bursts that hurt all over her skin. Her arm ached, the place where she’d torn her skin on the barbed fence throbbing in a pulse that kept rhythm with the pulse of her blood. The cut must have gotten infected. She’d been weak and sweaty since noon today, and now, around the hot red line on her skin, the flesh was hard and swollen, too painful to touch. to fall and fall and fall . . .
    I don’t dare go back into the city; I can’t get into one of those medical centers without ID.
    She’d thought she’d do better than this. Thought she’d been so clever. She was out, but she wasn’t any nearer to freedom than she’d been before she’d escaped.
    She pulled the ragged hoodie closer around her, shivering into it. But it didn’t help. The effort of moving sent another wave of cold through her body, and in her bones an ache began. She put her head down on her knees. If I sleep, maybe I’ll feel better when I wake up .
    Then a last thought, as the hazy darkness of fever-induced slumber took her. And if I don’t wake up, that will be a kind of freedom too  . . .
    Elissa came back to herself with a jump, her whole body jerking so that the bed bounced beneath her. On the screenacross the room, the images played the voices talked, far too bright, too loud. She put her hand up to mute the computer and found she couldn’t make the signal because her hand was shaking.
    “Mute,” she said, and her voice was shaking too.
    All the pictures, ever since she was tiny, had felt real, but that one . . .
    The picture of the fire was real. It happened . And if that had been real . . .
    What if they were all real? What if the pictures, all along, had been what they felt like, glimpses into someone else’s life? The images of elsewhere, of the rooms and corridors she hadn’t recognized, the—
    Oh God .
    The machines. The injections, the clamps, and the shrieking, awful pain. The bruises—every few days the new bruises, marks of what had been done to her helpless body. What if they weren’t something weird and self-destructive in her mind? What if they were echoes of what had been really happening, to another girl somewhere in the world? A girl who’d finally escaped, running through smoke and fire, tearing her arm on the barbed wire of a fence. A girl who was now lying on wet, filthy grass, fighting an infection that could kill her.
    But who? And how ? She didn’t live on some awful third-world planet in the backwater of the outer edge of the star system. This was Sekoia, technologically advanced, civilized, with the lowest crime rate in its entire sector and a whole fleet of laws on human rights. This couldn’t be happening, not here.
    Elissa put both hands to her face, shutting out the world as if she could shut out the thoughts—or at