Constance (Constance #1)(29)

This need to know every detail of her missing eighteen months was verging on obsession. How else to explain rejecting Vernon Gaddis’s sanctuary? She’d spent one night on the streets without getting robbed or worse, but that had been luck as much as anything. Surviving on a city’s streets took skills she didn’t possess—skills she wanted very much to avoid acquiring. But forced to choose between a safe place to sleep and pursuing answers from that cop, she hadn’t hesitated for a second. And she knew she’d make the same choice again. Being homeless scared the hell out of her, but this half existence of questioning who and what she was scared her far, far more.

If Vernon Gaddis was right and Brooke Fenton had orchestrated Con’s revival and escape from Palingenesis, that meant Fenton might also be responsible for the disappearance of the original Con D’Arcy. If she was dead, Con needed to know. If she wasn’t, she needed to know that too. No matter the consequences. Everything else was just background noise to her now. And was she really going to wait in DC and rely on Darius Clarke? He hadn’t exactly overwhelmed her with confidence in his intentions. So why not go to Richmond herself? She had access to her original’s GPS data. All she needed was a car.

She laughed at the hopelessness of her situation. With what Kala and Peter Lee had given her, she was only a few thousand dollars short. So what now?

Even though she knew it was futile, she tried logging in to her private social network. After the behemoth social networks had died off in the twenties—victims of changing legal and cultural privacy concerns—they’d been supplanted by self-managed private social networks. Designed by white-hat, open-source, anti-corporate coders, the new do-it-yourself PSNs were free, easy to set up, decentralized, and had no corporate overlords. Con had read somewhere that there were more than twenty billion private social networks worldwide interconnected in a complex latticework. But her original had changed her credentials in the last eighteen months, and without them, Con couldn’t even see her PSN, much less access her personal account.

After that, she spent time working through her contacts, hoping to hunt down a bed for the night. It didn’t take long to realize that Kala had been busy since this morning. There was a lot of overlap in their friend groups, and word had spread like wildfire that Constance D’Arcy had died in Virginia and that her clone was looking for a handout. A handout? That pissed Con off all over again, although she supposed that Kala had helped her in one regard—there was no way that Palingenesis could simply disappear her now. Too many people knew she existed. But in the short term, her friend had closed a lot of doors before Con even got a chance to knock.

The few people who answered seemed genuinely heartbroken by the news. The consensus was that Con had lived a hard life, and they wished she’d found a way past her grief. It was touching to hear your death mourned, but it didn’t feel right that she should hear it. Eulogies were for the survivors, not the departed. Con was in the unique position of being both. They asked her if she knew how she’d died. No one came out and said the word itself, but it was clear that people were worried she’d taken her own life. Con didn’t like the idea. She hadn’t been that depressed. Or had she? Could that have been what had happened to her?

Everyone had questions, and she could hear them mentally composing the posts they’d share later on social media. How many people could say they knew a clone personally? Con answered as best she could, hoping to earn some goodwill. But when it came to a place to stay, the answer was always a hard no. For some, it was an unmistakable anti-clone bias, but for others, it was simpler than that: their friend was dead, and the idea of letting a living reminder of that loss into their homes was too much.

In frustration, Con tore her LFD from behind her ear and put her head back, staring up at the sky through the canopy of green. There wasn’t a breeze on the ground, but the branches up above rippled as if from some untouched hand. When Con looked back down, a white woman was standing a short distance away. The brittle posture was familiar, but it took a moment for her to place the pinched face. Brooke Fenton. Con reached for her backpack and glanced around.

Fenton seemed to read her mind. “I’m alone. I only want to talk.”

“Don’t you mean delete me?” Con said. If she ran south, she’d be out in the open on the Mall with nowhere to hide, but if she went for Constitution Avenue, there were enough museums and businesses that she might be able to disappear. Depending on how much backup Dr. Fenton had brought.

Fenton shook her head. “We’re way past that. You’re out in the open now. Richmond PD interviewed you—you’re on the record as existing, so deletion is off the table even if I wanted to, which, believe me, I do not.”

“I’m a you now?” Con said, remembering the casual way that Fenton had ordered her sedated until the board decided how to dispose of her. “I thought I was an it.”

“I apologize if you were offended,” Fenton said. “It was a difficult situation, and I chose my words poorly.”

Con made a note of her artful non-apology apology. “How did you find me?”

“Detective Clarke. He was at Palingenesis this morning conducting interviews. He mentioned he was meeting you. I had him followed.”

It sounded plausible, but Con still had doubts about her LFD and powered it off just in case.

Fenton drifted closer. “May I sit? Please? Ten minutes.”