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back in Denver, recognize it as part of the Green family and trace it right to us here, where nobody’s supposed to know where we are.
    “I’m going back someday.”
    “You can’t,” Cameron said. “You know that.”
    “Someday,” I said again. “I don’t believe in forever. That’s too long a time.”
    I didn’t tell her that Lulu and I had made promises. We’d go to the same college. We’d room together. We had already picked the school—University of Wisconsin in Madison, because Lulu’s father had gone there and always talked about how big and beautiful it was. Far enough away from Denver and this place. I’d have a new name. I’d be taller. But from the incubator till thirteen is a long, long time. She’d remember me.
    And Grandma. She’d be there, too. She’d promised. She was going to make a coconut cake for me. There’d be one candle on it—marking the first day of the rest of my life.

10
    IT RAINED THE EVENING WE WERE TOLD TO pick our new names. We’d been at the safe house for three weeks. That night, as the rain hammered against the thin windows, Cameron sat on the cheap sofa, her eyes on the television. I had read a book where a girl could stare so hard, a thing would catch on fire. First I stared at Cameron’s neck. When she didn’t move, I stared at her hands. Then her shoulder.
    “Do you feel hot yet?” I asked.
    “No.”
    “Now?”
    “No, stupid.”
    “How about now?”
    Cameron peeled her eyes away from the television. Mama had lifted her ban on it after me and Cameron watched the same video four times in a row.
    “Can you believe this is happening?”
    She had had a game the night we left and was still wearing the turtleneck from her cheerleading uniform when we got here. Now she was wearing it again. She’d had to leave the rest of it back in Denver. Her hair was a mess.
    “Who cares?” I said.
    Cameron rolled her eyes at me. “You’re such a freak. You don’t have the vaguest idea what this feels like. You can go to another place and make your one or two friends again. It’s different for me. It’s bigger.”
    “Yeah—a whole cheerleading squad. Whoopee.”
    “A whole world, stupid! You don’t get it.” She wiped her eyes quickly and glared at me. “You don’t know anything, do you.”
    “It just . . . when I think about before, it . . . it hurts a lot. I can’t be looking back right now.”
    Cameron looked at me for a minute and pushed some stray hairs behind her ear and let out a breath.
    On the television, a woman was petting the leather interior of a Mercedes-Benz. The woman in the commercial looked at me and winked as though she and I were in on some secret. I threw my head back and laughed. Advertising was dumber than anything. The woman climbed out of the car and ran her hand over the top of it. I used to touch Matt Cat that way. The world was so stupid. The Feds had said no Matt Cat. No big reminders of who we once were. The whole world felt like it was dissolving. I petted the ugly couch the way the woman was petting the car.
    “God, you’re a freak!” Cameron said again.
    “I heard you the first time, thank you very much.”
    “Well, you don’t act like it, thank you very—”
    “Stop it,” Mama yelled from the bedroom where she was again poring over the literature she’d gotten from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I’m getting sick of all your fussing.”
    I stuck my tongue out at Cameron. She mouthed immature and stared at the television.
    “What’s your name gonna be?” I asked, after a long time had passed.
    “Cameron,” she said. “The same name it’s always been.”
    “It can’t be, Cam. You know that.”
    A phone rang on the television, and Cameron jumped up then sat back down again. Except for the drivers’ cell phones, which we weren’t allowed to use, there wasn’t a phone anywhere near us. No more raspy voice explaining exactly how it planned to kill us all.
    “Anna,” Cameron said softly, her voice breaking.