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around her bed. One wall had a dressing table with the girly things her father thought she should love. The table had a non-networked master computer, which she really did love, because she could do all kinds of research on it and use it to develop programs. The only person who shared that computer with her was her father. That one thing had been non-negotiable for him, and it was a small price to pay for the freedom to let her brain roam.
    There were a couple of chairs, and a full virtual reality/holochamber that had come with the apartment and which she doubted she would ever use.
    Reality was tough enough. She didn’t want to confuse herself with made-up realities.
    She sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. She was exhausted. That was part of the problem. If only she could sleep.
    The stupid therapist that her dad insisted on taking her to this week had told her to record the nightmares the moment she woke up.
    It’ll be like exorcising a ghost , the stupid therapist said. The more you talk about what you’re seeing in your dreams, the less power those dreams will have over you.
    Yeah, right. She’d looked up dream aversion therapy and had seen just how controversial it was.
    First, the stupid therapist would get her to talk about the dreams. Then he’d make her use a chip to actually record them. Then he’d play them back in the daylight, in a protected environment.
    Only she didn’t want her brain to be examined like that.
    Her dad told her to cooperate fully with the stupid therapist—that she needed to trust him—but she had her doubts.
    He might find out that she was a clone, and right now, in Armstrong, clones were considered evil. She’d actually heard some otherwise intelligent people say that cloning twisted the DNA and made every single clone into a potential psychopath.
    Even as a kid, discovering her background for the first time, she’d known enough science to know that wasn’t true. The clones were physical copies of the original, nothing more. And maybe not entirely that. Because the originals usually got subjected to a different environment in the womb, one that clones rarely experienced.
    Clones were completely different creatures than their original. And, Talia suspected, clones—grown in a controlled environment—were probably more stable, healthier, and saner than any original could be.
    She kept that opinion to herself. She hadn’t even told her dad that theory.
    Talia stood again, because her heart was still pounding. Half her brain was still in the nightmare.
    Maybe she could banish it all on her own.
    She wouldn’t repeat it into any recording device, but she could review it.
    She’d never tried that before.
    The nightmare had started at the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy, which her dad had enrolled her into because it was the best private school in the city and, he believed, it was the safest. But the school hadn’t been safe during the Peyti Crisis.
    She covered her face. If she was going to do what the stupid therapist wanted her to do, she couldn’t just review the nightmare, she had to dive into it.
    That wouldn’t be hard.
    She flopped on her back onto the bed, put her right arm over her eyes, and took a deep breath.
    She’d been walking down the hall with Kaleb Lamber. God, he was a jerk. She hated him, but he was the best-looking guy in the school, and he looked at her like she was pretty.
    Only he was mean to everybody, including her, and she had yelled at him, and now, he said, he wanted to talk about it, that maybe something else was going on, and she’d seen it. She’d seen it in the way Kaleb’s dad treated him, like Kaleb treated everyone else, as if they were idiots in training and not as strong as he was.
    She was feeling compassion for Kaleb, and she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to like him or even feel anything positive for him. For days, she hadn’t even looked at his face because he was so handsome, and just thinking that, thinking how