False Hearts Read Online Free Page A

never be redeemed. I guess they think I’m unredeemable.
    Hardly anyone who goes into stasis comes back out. It does happen—some tireless lawyer will discover someone frozen was actually innocent. They come out of it, disoriented, to find years have passed them by. One woman was taken out after thirty years. Her husband and mother were gone, most of her friends had moved away. She ended up committing suicide, because she felt the rest of her life she got back wasn’t worth living.
    How would I react if I was frozen and woke up in fifty years to discover Taema was old and frail, or gone entirely?
    I don’t really have to worry about it, though. People coming out of stasis has only happened a handful of times in forty years. Not good odds.
    Then there are the outages. Whole wings of people in stasis losing power, and they die before anyone can fix it. So convenient, right? The government always claims it’s an accident. They promise to install a back-up server. Then they never do. One day, I’m pretty sure there’ll be an outage on everyone in stasis. Whoops. Away they go.
    Thinking about living without Taema has weirded me out. I can’t get it out of my head. I’m alone in this cell, and my sister’s miles away. I’m still not used to being alone, even ten years after we separated. Tomorrow is our surgery anniversary. Whoo. The first sixteen years of my life were spent looking over my sister’s shoulder, or resting cheek-to-cheek with her to look at someone together.
    I wonder sometimes if I started on this road as soon as they took the knife to us. She’s my better half, Taema. She’s the one with the sensible head on her shoulders, who would talk me out of doing stupid shit as kids because she didn’t want to be drawn into my trouble. She was usually drawn in anyway, though. It’s not like she had much of a choice.
    If the news does get out, she’ll have to dodge paparazzi drones left and right—how many alleged murderers have an identical twin they were once conjoined with? And grew up in that crazy cult in the redwoods across the bay? They’ll have a field day. At least she’s not here in the cell with me, and she’s not going into stasis when if I do, so that’s something.
    Ugh. I’m almost tempted to crumple this whole thing up and flush it down the toilet. I’m not stupid. Even though this is paper, they can read whatever I write on here and they’re going to rake through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what I’m trying to hide. When I’m in the shower or something, they’ll sneak in here and read it.
    WON’T YOU, ASSHOLES?
    It’s a waste of time. I might as well tell you now. There’s not going to be any confession in here. Don’t hold your breath.
    The guards just dropped off my food. Boring meals of algae and vat-grown meat. The guards seem to like the look of me. Men always do. Plenty of women as well. But then their eyes drop to my chest, to the white scar against my brown skin, peeking over the collar of my prison uniform. They can’t hide their fear at what it represents: that I am only half of who I used to be.
    *   *   *
    I’ve just been sitting here the last few hours, trying to think of what to write next. It’s dusk outside now, and the stars are coming out one by one in that little patch of sky by the window. It reminds me of the fireflies Taema and I used to chase in Mana’s Hearth when we were little. We were good at catching them. We walked sideways then, like the lake crabs, but we never slowed each other down. One of us would reach out and sweep the fireflies into jars, take them back to the house to light our bedroom, and let them out a few hours later. I miss those days.
    It was after I left the Hearth I learned the fireflies had only recently come to California, introduced to the area a few years after the Great Upheaval. How strange, that if that hadn’t happened, those memories wouldn’t have existed.
    Out there, I think Taema has been trying to help.