Cosima Would Say

A horn tears the street in half.

It comes from my right, close, a delivery van that has every right to the road I have just stepped into without looking, and the body reacts before I do, the way it always does, a hard backward lurch off the ball of one foot, a hand flung out to nothing, and the van blares past close enough to lift the hem of the grey coat and slap me with its warm diesel wind. I am back on the kerb. I do not remember choosing the kerb. My heart is going like something trying to get out, and across the road, where my own body was turning, where the back of my own head was becoming the front of it, there is now a gap in the foot traffic and a bus pulling in and a stream of people and no navy coat at all.

She is gone. I am still here, on the wrong pavement, in the wrong skin, with my pulse in my teeth.

Count. One: a bus. Two: a chalkboard outside Margery's, the day's flat white in someone's hopeful hand. Three: the wet shine of the pavement where the milk and two sugars went down. Four: nothing, where my own face nearly was. Four is the worst number I have ever counted to.

I do not chase it. The van made the choice and the bus closed the door, and by the time the road is clear again the river end of the street has swallowed her whole, my own walk going away from me one final time, and I am left outside my sister's coffee shop with the bell still trembling and Joss, I know without looking, watching me through the steamed glass with her mouth open on a question she will ask herself for weeks.

I make myself walk. Not toward the river. Toward Halcyon, away, the way Cosima would. Because the same lesson keeps arriving, every hour, with new teeth: I cannot do the thing I want to do. I want to run down to the river and grab my own arm and look into my own eyes and find out who is home. I want to shake my own shoulders until the truth falls out. But a famous woman cannot sprint down a public street after a junior designer she is rumoured to have ruined, not three days after going dark on a deal, not with Damien already saying the word episodes, not with Meridian's people pulling at provenance. The first rule of wearing her is that I am always being watched. The body has known that for years. I am only now learning to wear the knowing.

So I walk back at the pace of a woman who owns the street, and inside it I am still on the kerb, still half a second from the van, and I rehearse the sentence I will need, because there is going to be a meeting, there is always a meeting, and I am going to have to be her in it.

Cosima would say. I do the thing I have started doing in the worst moments, the thing I will be ashamed of later and grateful for now. I build her. Cosima would walk in late on purpose so the room is already waiting. Cosima would not apologise for the weekend, she would make the weekend a gift she chose to withhold. Cosima would let a silence run until someone else broke first, and then she would smile at the breaking. I assemble the woman out of two years of watching her, and the horror is how easily she assembles, how little I have to invent, how much of her the body offers up before I ask, a teleprompter scrolling a script I have apparently always known.

I get back to the tower and the lobby tips its face at me and I ration the smiles out the way she taught me to without teaching me, and the lift takes me up, and Lacey is at her desk with her cardigan still buttoned wrong and her eyes still red, and she stands up too fast when she sees me, a girl coming to attention.

"Ms Wilde, the deck's on your screen, and Mr Wilde wants the provenance meeting moved to two, and legal's asking if you want them in the room, and," she swallows, "and I held your one o'clock car like you said, only you didn't say, the car was just, it's what you have on Tuesdays, so I."

"You did exactly right," I say.

The praise lands on her like a thrown thing she has to catch with her whole body. She does not know what to do with her face. Cosima would say. I know, with a cold certainty, what Cosima would have said to that small flustered overlap of duties, the snip of it, the little cut that keeps an assistant nicely afraid, and I feel the shape of the line rise up ready in the cello voice, sharp and amused, and underneath my breastbone the appetite leans toward it the way it leaned toward the espresso, because the body remembers that the cut feels good, that fear is a kind of obedience and obedience is a kind of safety.

I do not say it. I take my mouth back, and it costs me the way it costs to hold a door against a wind.

"Legal in the room," I say instead. "And Lacey. Eat something. You look like you skipped breakfast." Which is a thing my sister would say, which is a thing I would say, which is the opposite of a cut, and Lacey blinks at me as if I have spoken in a language she half-remembers from childhood.

I get into the office and shut the frosted door and lean on it and breathe, and through the glass Lacey sits very slowly back down and picks up a sad little supermarket sandwich from her bag and looks at it like it might be a trick.

The provenance meeting is at two and I have until then to learn how to lie about the thing I am the truth of.

I sit in her chair and I open the deck and I make myself read it as her, which means reading it as the woman who needs the chain of authorship on Lantern to stay buried, and the trouble is I keep reading it as me, as the woman in the basement with the takeaway menu, and the two readings will not sit in one head. There is a slide, near the back, headed Provenance and IP, and it says that all foundational work on the Lantern system was conceived and directed by founder C. Wilde, with development support from internal teams. Development support. Internal teams. I am internal teams. Fourteen months and a blind woman who could not phone her daughter and two in the morning and the back of a menu, and I am a footnote called support, and the rage gets up off the floor where I left it and walks around the office touching things.

I let it walk. I have learned that much. If I fight it head-on it wins, it floods, it wants to put a fist through the lit glass shelf of my own stolen awards, and a smashed shelf is exactly the breakdown Damien is hoping to catch me having. So I let the rage pace, and I keep my hands flat on the desk, and I do the cold arithmetic she would do, because the only way to survive being her in a room is to think like her for as long as the meeting lasts and then scrub the inside of my skull afterward.

How does Cosima win provenance.

The answer arrives smoothly, too smoothly, in a voice that is becoming harder to label as borrowed. Cosima wins provenance by controlling the documents. Whoever holds the paper trail owns the story, and the paper trail of Lantern lives in this building, in the version history, in the dated files, in the commit logs and the email threads from fourteen months in a basement, and every one of those documents, if it survived, has a name on it that is not Cosima Wilde. They have a name on them that is mine. They are the proof. They are the thing the loose thread on the balcony was about. We make sure no one's left to look, she said, but before you make sure no one's left to look, you make sure there's nothing left to find.

My hand is moving.

I notice it the way you notice the dog has gone quiet, a beat late, with a drop in the floor of you. The hand, her hand, my hand, has opened a file browser I did not consciously open, and it is inside the company's archive, the old project directory, and it has typed three letters into the search field, L A N, the start of Lantern, and the directory is filling with folders, dated, the oldest first, fourteen months of them, and the hand is moving toward the oldest folder, the first one, the basement one, with a kind of fluent ease that is not searching, that is not discovering, that is going somewhere it has been before, and at the top of the window there is a small grey button, and the button says Delete, and the hand wants it.

I feel the want arrive like a temperature. Cold and clean. A problem being handled. A loose thread and the hand that knows exactly where the scissors are. The body remembers this folder. The body has been here before, recently, hovering, planning, and the satisfaction pooling under my ribs is the satisfaction of a thing about to be finished, and for one full second it is the most natural feeling in the world, it is mine, it fits, and my finger is on the trackpad and the cursor is sliding toward the button.

These are the files that prove I existed.

The thought is small and quiet and entirely my own, and it lands in the cold clean satisfaction like a stone in a still pool, and the surface of the want breaks. I snatch the hand back. I physically take my own wrist with my other hand and pull it off the trackpad and into my lap and hold it there, both hands, one arresting the other, the way you hold a dog by the collar when it has found something dead and wonderful in the grass.

I sit like that, gripping my own wrist, breathing, and I understand what I almost did.

I almost deleted myself. Not Cosima. Me. The hand, left to drive, was going to finish the job she started, erase the only proof on earth that Lantern is Talia Frost's, scrub the basement clean so that even if the truth ever clawed its way out there would be nothing under it but founder C. Wilde and development support and internal teams, and the worst of it, the part that sits in my throat like a swallowed coin, is that for one second I wanted to. The want was not an intruder. It came up through the body and into me and I owned it while it lasted. I felt the relief of the loose thread cut. I felt, for one second, like her.

The dog. There is no dog here, the dog is in the apartment, but I look up anyway, reflexively, for the thing that growls when the body wears the wrong skin, and there is only the office, and the lit shelf of my name on her plaques, and the frosted glass with Lacey's blurred shape behind it eating her sad sandwich, and the black sleeping screen of the city on the far wall, and in the screen, faint, a reflection.

I am very still. I have not moved. I am sitting with both hands in my lap holding my own wrist, my face, her face, set in the flat appalled line I keep ordering it to hold.

The reflection in the dark glass is smiling.

It is the slow knowing pleased smile, the door-closing smile, the smile I saw on the mirror the first morning, the smile she gave the room the day she took my work, and it is on a face that I am not smiling with, sitting in a body I am gripping still with my own two hands, and it is looking back at me across the office with my own borrowed eyes, and it is not frightened, and it is not appalled, and it is not me.

It is glad I stopped her hand. Because now I know the hand wanted to.

And under my breastbone, quiet, patient, finally finding the shape of a voice, something that has been learning all morning how to be one says, in a tone that is almost fond, almost gentle, almost the way she said my name in the stairwell: You'll get tired, Talia. And I have nowhere else to be.