Chapter 1: Tolerances

Reese had clay in her hair and didn’t know it, a gray streak over one ear where she’d shoved it back with a dirty hand, and I wasn’t going to tell her. Telling her meant looking at her, and I’d gotten good, over the years, at not looking at my sister any longer than a job required.

One in the morning, four days out, and neither of us had said the word bed in hours, because saying it started the clock we were both pretending not to hear. This was the last build. The last con. The last of the summer before she folded herself into a dorm a few hours east and left me here with a garage about to go very quiet. We didn’t say any of it. We sat on cold concrete until two in the morning instead.

She had Godzilla’s head in her lap — or what would be Godzilla’s head, once the clay came off and the skin went on — scraping a hair off the brow, cursing at it soft and steady the way she cursed at anything she loved. Even half-finished, newspaper-gray, it had a face: the heavy brow, the jaw built to crank wide, that patience around the mouth like it hadn’t decided yet whether we were worth standing up for. I made things stand up. She made them look like they wanted to.

She worked the clay with the same hands she did everything with — strong, blunt-nailed, a shiny heat-gun burn on the left thumb from two summers back. They were my hands, more or less. We had the same hands, the same too-dark brows, the same wide mouth; people who met us as kids used to look back and forth and decide out loud which twin got the better version of the face. They always decided her. The brows that made me look braced for bad news made her look like she was about to start something, and the mouth that just sat there on me was never more than a second off a dare on her. Somewhere back in our teens I’d worked out the exact length of time I was allowed to look at that face before looking turned into something else.

Her phone lit up on the concrete between us and she flipped it facedown without looking, which meant she’d already looked a dozen times tonight. I turned it back over.

Overbuild had posted at midnight. One photo — a bare steel exoskeleton, ten feet of it, lit like a car ad — and one word under it. Soon. Thirty-eight thousand likes and climbing while I watched, Dorian’s face grinning in the corner of the shot, not even in costume, because he didn’t have to be anymore. He was the brand.