“Get the basics down, and you’ll be fine,” said Knox on the first day of my training. “The trick isn’t to convince them you’re Lila—it’s not to do anything to make them question it.”

That probably held some special distinction for Knox that was supposed to make it easier on me, but I didn’t know enough about Lila to mimic her. Everything I did, from the way I walked to the way I spoke, was different. I had an accent she didn’t. I’d never worn a pair of heels before, and those were all Lila seemed to wear. The foods she ate were ones I hated, which made maintaining her slight weight easy enough, but it also made the urge to sneak into the kitchens for a real meal gnaw at me unbearably.

I didn’t, though, and not just because I could barely find a bathroom in the Stronghold, let alone the kitchens. If I were caught, or if they had any reason to suspect I wasn’t going along with their plan, I had no idea what they would do to me. Knox at least seemed to pretend he was on my side, but Celia—she never looked me in the eye. Not that I could blame her, but it did little to make me feel like any less of a pariah. To her credit, she didn’t seem to take it out on me. She grew more and more distant as the days passed, but she was never cruel. She was as stuck as I was, and the most either of us could do was pretend not to hurt as much as we did.

The one problem that wasn’t going to be solved anytime soon was the fact that I couldn’t read. Lila had loved books, and according to Celia, she had an entire library to herself in their New York home. She had constantly carried an old-fashioned paperback around with her to read in her spare moments, and many of the speeches she gave were read off glass screens in the middle of the crowd. Teleprompters, Celia said. Knox called them cheat sheets.

That wouldn’t work for me, though. I had to learn how to repeat a speech fed to me through an earpiece, which I quickly discovered was much harder than it sounded. I tried again and again, but it never got easier. Worse, Lila sounded exactly like Celia, her voice rich and much more adult than mine. Some sort of technology had been implanted in my voice box to copy hers, but it wasn’t really the sound of her voice that tripped me up. It was the way she talked and formed sentences. After a week, I still didn’t have it down. When she spoke, she sounded like she had the answers to everything, and there was something about her that made even me want to follow her off a cliff. I couldn’t mimic that no matter how hard I tried.

Celia also made the mistake of trying to teach me how to read, even though I insisted it was useless. It wasn’t that I was stupid or wasn’t trying. Letters strung together had simply never made sense to me. I knew what words meant, and because Benjy had read to me every night, I knew my favorite stories by heart. But while I had a talent for remembering what I’d heard, something about reading didn’t work in my head. Celia tried to keep her cool, but eventually she gave up.

“I’ll record your speeches for you,” she said after a disastrous lesson using one of Lila’s favorite childhood books. “You can memorize them instead.”

This worked for me, and once we figured it out, things gradually grew easier. Whether I liked it or not, I was slowly turning into Lila Hart.

It took me eleven days to learn everything I needed to fool the casual observer into thinking I was Lila. Every moment I wasn’t sleeping or receiving lessons from Knox and Celia, I watched recordings of her. Speech after speech after speech, public appearances, family recordings from when she was an infant onward—by the time those eleven days were over, if there was something to know about Lila, I knew it. She didn’t eat red meat; she preferred music so old that the songs were sung by people, not by digitally created voices; her eyes never crinkled when she smiled; and according to Knox, she’d gotten that butterfly tattoo only months before she died. It had been an act of rebellion that she’d purposely revealed during a formal dinner between her uncle, her grandmother, and the leaders of foreign nations I’d never heard of. Even Celia, who stared blankly at her hands while the speeches were playing, managed a smile at the memory.

But those were only snapshots. Glimpses of who she was. Facts. In a way, it felt like the more I learned, the less I knew her. And I was no closer to having a conversation with her than I had been before Daxton had found me.

The speeches she gave were dangerous and full of reasons why there should be equality among the people like there had been during the early twenty-first century—when no one was marked or assigned careers, when freedom meant more than being able to walk down designated streets at night. When one person’s entire life wasn’t determined by a single test; when you had the chance to be whatever you wanted to be and live the kind of life you wanted without being told what to do. When we all had a choice. A real choice.

My entire life, I’d been told that the ranks were there for a reason. Everyone had their place, and the only way society could function was if we all respected the system. We were all equals when we took the test, and we were all scored the same way.

But in the speeches Lila gave, she said that the children who grew up in the neighborhoods meant for IIs and IIIs weren’t given the same opportunities as the others. At first I didn’t understand—there was only so much you could learn, right? Who cared where the schools were or what kind of supplies we had?

And then she talked about the education the children of Vs and VIs received.

“Some kids have tutors to help them with the test?” I said, stunned. “Isn’t that cheating?” Getting five minutes with my teachers had been next to impossible, let alone anything more. It wasn’t their fault, not really—there were dozens of us crammed into a classroom. Most days the teachers were lucky if they got everyone to shut up at the same time.

Celia pressed a few buttons on the remote. “I wouldn’t call it cheating. It’s more...teaching to the test, shall we say?”

“Most of the highly sought-after tutors are people who have worked in the testing centers,” said Knox. “If your family has enough money, they’ll hire one.”

“Yeah, but only VIs can afford that,” I said. He shrugged.

After that, I made a point of listening to what Lila was saying, not just the way she said it. If the government lied to everyone about the so-called equality of the test, then what else were they lying about?

None of the speeches Lila gave were televised. Instead they were recorded on handheld devices like the one Daxton had, some so shaky that I had to look away, but it wasn’t what she looked like that mattered. She talked about doing away with Elsewhere and reverting to the system of government America had used before the Ministers of the Union had been formed, one where the elections were real and not a way for the Harts to legitimize their stranglehold over the country.

It was political treason, and if she’d been anyone other than a Hart, she would have been shot on sight. She was questioning the very system that was responsible for her family’s power and the VII on the back of her neck. She was leading a rebellion.

School didn’t teach us anything about the time before the ranks. There were mentions of the past, the World Wars and long-dead kings of countries across the oceans, but as far as the textbooks were concerned, history began seventy-one years ago, when the first citizen of the union was marked and Daxton’s grandfather became prime minister. Years before I was born, there had been people who’d remembered a time before, but now everyone over the age of sixty was sent Elsewhere and never heard from again.

Maybe instead of killing me, that was what Daxton had in mind. I’d be as good as dead anyway, since no one knew where Elsewhere was. Presumably someplace warm where people could grow old and die, where they wouldn’t take up space in already-crowded cities and could keep an eye on the criminals who were sent there as well, banished from society for the smallest of crimes. That wouldn’t be so bad, except for the part where I wouldn’t have Benjy.