seat. She clapped her hands over her mouth, peering over the tips of her trembling fingers as the particles of light arranged themselves: her unruly burst of hair, her serious dark blue eyes. She stared at the same image of her face—unsmiling and head-on, like a mug shot—multiplying across the block. She was where Jacqueline had been and where Ida had been. She replaced the clothes and the snacks. There were dozens of her. She was everywhere.
The people stared, too, looking away from the holograms only to exchange bemused glances with each other. A few moved on, shaking off the spectacle with practiced indifference, but most of them simply stood there, waiting to see what would happen next.
The light changed from red to green, but the traffic jam stayed the same.
Then came the banners, rippling across Marlow’s software-smoothed forehead in every image. WANTED: MARLOW CLIPP.
A voice from somewhere boomed above the gentle hum of the cab engines.
“Constellation fans!” it cried, female and ecstatic. “This is a special day. It’s time for a scavenger hunt! Our own Marlow Clipp is out there somewhere in Manhattan, waiting for you to find her. Spot her, and you’ll win serious prizes. Go, stargazers, go!”
Marlow pressed her back into the seat. She slid downward.
Jacqueline was right. The hunts were real.
She hadn’t ever believed it, and she hadn’t ever had any reason to. No one important enough to truly interrupt programming had ever left Constellation, at least not since Marlow was a child. About two years after the enclave opened, dozens of the original cast tried to defect. Some of them—the Idas, the people no one cared about anyway—were let go, their feeds canceled, their followers suavely redirected to stars with similar looks and lifestyles. Others—the ones with big audiences—were convinced to come back in different ways. The network gave them raises, or held their savings hostage—they all banked with First Constellation, after all. There were a few cases where none of that worked, and Marlow could remember trading myths with other girls during grade-school sleepovers, all of them spooking each other off-camera as they huddled in their parents’ Jacuzzi tubs. If you left, the story went, and you mattered, the network would make it look like they just let you go. They wouldn’t stop you by force. Then they would blast your photo everywhere, would tell your followers to help them find you. They’d make it look like a game, a stunt for the fans. There would be prizes for tips on your whereabouts, prizes for pictures of you on the run. And a grand prize for whoever actually caught you—for whoever closed in on you, believing you were in on the joke, and grabbed you, and made you go home.
“Total bullshrimp,” Floss had said, sitting on Marlow’s bed, when Marlow had brought her this story, as a child, and asked her if it was real. “It’s true that the network has hunts sometimes, but it really is just a game. Nobody gets hurt. The network is here to protect us.”
“But why did all those people want to leave our town, anyway?” Marlow had said.
Floss had paused, thinking. “They lived the other way for too long,” she said finally. “They couldn’t get used to their followers wanting to be with them all the time.”
“But you and Daddy,” Marlow said. “You’d never leave, right?”
“Oh, sweetie, of course not,” Floss said, tucking the covers around Marlow’s shoulders. “Daddy and I love it here.”
Marlow could remember the way she had wished her mother had said, instead, Of course not—we’d never leave you. She could remember feeling like she couldn’t catch her mother’s eye as they spoke. She could remember, the next morning, packing her schoolbag across the room and realizing where Floss was looking when she told Marlow not to be scared. Not at Marlow, but into the yellow eye of a daisy sewn onto her headboard—a spot better known, to Marlow, as Bedroom Camera Three.
* * *
Marlow was so shaken by the sight of herself in Times Square that she forgot where she was going: to 1000 Tenth Avenue, the hospital address Grace had given her. When the cab stopped, it scarfed down Marlow’s twenty-dollar bill through a grimy slit in the back seat. She put her hand on the door handle and waited for the rush of people coming down the block to thin out. When the street was as close to empty as she imagined it would ever be, she darted out and toward a