I close my eyes. I want her to go away. I don't want to talk about butterflies or hearts. I don't even want answers. I don't want her. I feel her cheek against my hand. Her breath. Her need. And then she slowly lets go and leaves.

I open my eyes again. My room is dark. The silence of the house is a heavy blanket. It pins me to my bed.

White

There was a moment in the darkness when the fear lifted.

A moment where white surrounded me.

Hope.

Lily, and someone else, and a sprinkling of water.

"Holy water, Jenna."

"You can let go if you need to."

"Forgiveness, Jenna."

But I couldn't let go.

It wasn't in my power.

I was already swirling, flying, falling.

To someplace deep I didn't understand.

Where all the sounds but my own voice disappeared.

Only me.

For so long.

I don't want to be alone anymore.

Father

I hear a creak. My clock reads three a.m. Father stands in my doorway, the soft yellow light from the hallway illuminating his face. A shadow of stubble is on his cheeks. His hair is uncombed. His eyes are hollow. He looks like he could have run here all the way from Boston.

"Angel," he whispers.

"I'm awake," I say.

He comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't want you to find out this way."

"My hands are artificial," I tell him. "My legs, too."

He nods.

I sit up and lean against the headboard of my bed. I lift my hands in front of me and stare at them. "I loved my hands. My legs." I say it more to myself than to him. "I had never thought about it before. They were just there. And now I can see that these" — I turn them, looking at the palms— "these are different. They're not mine. They're imposters." I wait for him to deny it, to erase the last twelve hours with just a few words. I watch his face. Even in my shadowed bedroom I can see how tired he is. I can see the red rims of his eyes. "They're nearly identical to the original," he says. "All of your ballet recital videos allowed us to digitally measure every centimeter of you."

"Hurray for videos, huh?"

He hears the sarcasm in my voice and closes his eyes momentarily. I ache. Maybe for his pain. For Claire's. But mostly for mine. My loss. I can't care about theirs. Not now. How did I get to this point? How can I go back?

He takes my hand in his and examines the gash.

"It's not even real skin, is it?" I say.

"Yes. It's real. Some of it is even yours."

"How?"

"It's lab skin. Grown in the lab and genetically engineered to be nourished through the Bio Gel. It took months to get all the skin types we needed. We could only harvest a small portion of yours because of the burns and infection. But still, we did get some." His voice is stronger, less tired. He is more confident as a doctor than as my father.

"What do you mean, engineered?"

"We had to make some changes so nutrients and oxygen could be delivered in a modified way."

"So it's not human skin."

"It is human. Completely human. We've been genetically altering plants and animals for years. It's nothing new. Tomatoes, for instance. We engineer them to withstand certain pests or to give them a longer shelf life, but it is still one hundred percent a tomato."

"I am not a tomato."

He looks at me sharply. "No. You're not. You're my daughter. You have to know, Jenna, I would do anything to save you. You're my child. And I want to be honest with you. So let's cut the crap. Lab skin is yesterday's news. You want to know more than that. Let's move on."

I always loved that about Father. He was direct. Claire and I could dance around a subject for days and weeks. But not Father and me. Maybe because he was around less. He didn't have time to dally. Right now I want to dance. I feel like I could dance forever.

"Jenna," he says, nudging me.

"Skin, bone, that's one thing," I say. "But Lily says you only saved ten percent of my brain. True?"

"True."

"Then what am I?"

He doesn't hesitate. "You're Jenna Angeline Fox. A seventeen-year-old girl who was in a terrible accident and nearly died. You were saved the way so many accident victims are saved, through medical technology. Your body was injured beyond saving. We had to patch together a new one. Your skeletal structure was replicated. You have all the bone structure of a normal teenage girl. Muscle areas are taken up with additional modified Bio Gel. Most movement is accomplished through digital signals within the bone structure. Some is accomplished through the traditional method of cabled ligaments. Your skin was replaced. Your brain, the ten percent we saved, was infused with addi-tional Bio Gel. But obviously ten percent is not enough for full function, so we scanned your whole brain and uploaded the information for safekeeping until we had the rest of the elements in place — "

"Uploaded? You uploaded my brain?"

"The information. Every bit of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind, Jenna. That We've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is-groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way. Illegal brain scans have been going on for years. Nanobots the size of blood cells are injected, sometimes even without a person's knowledge since it's all wireless transfer. Bits of information are extracted. But the mind, the mind could never be transferred. It's an entirely different thing from bits of information. We found that it's like a spinning glass ball. You have to keep it spinning or it falls and shatters. So we upload those bits of information into an environment that allows that energy to keep spinning, so to speak."