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“Well, anyway. One time, Twig and I were hanging out in there—she was, I dunno, maybe seven. She was asking a million questions about animals that I didn’t know the answers to, so we hopped on the Primer and started looking stuff up. There’s this one really cute one painted up in the corner with a long body and a funny little face, and we found out it’s called a marten. They live up in trees, I guess. And we started reading about them—or, well, I was reading aloud. She had a hard time with reading. We found out that marten babies get kicked out by their moms when they’re really small, and they have to go it on their own. And Twig said, ‘Just like us!’”
“Oh,” Signy said, almost laughing, but not quite. What was the right way to respond, when something was adorable but also terribly sad?
Cora almost smiled, her face echoing the sentiment. “So, yeah. When we became family on paper, we took Marten.”
“What was yours, before?”
“Taylor.”
“And hers?”
“Carroll.”
Signy turned those names around a few times in her mind. “I think Marten suits you both better.”
“She said the same many times,” Cora said. “She never liked having”—she made quotes in the air—“‘clone names.’ And I mean, it is kind of weird, knowing we’re all using a jumble of names somebody stuck in the Primer for the first gen to download.”
“No different than our genes,” Signy said.
“Yeah, well, that’s weird, too.”
Signy paused. “I hate to point it out, but I do think Marten is a name other people have.”
“Oh, it totally is,” Cora said. “She might’ve been good with ‘Twig,’ but I wanted a name that sounded like a name, y’know?”
“And she was fine with that?”
“She was fine with it because she got to choose it.”
“Isn’t it still a ‘clone name’?” Signy said, trying to follow.
“Listen, we’d already agreed on it and I wasn’t about to throw a wrench in her gears.” With that, something changed in Cora. Her mouth tightened. Her eyes watered. “This feels . . . wrong. I don’t want to talk about her like she’s gone. Maybe—maybe she is, but—I don’t want to talk about her like this. I don’t want to have to talk about her the way everybody talks about people who are gone.”
“I know,” Signy said. “I feel the same.”
Cora rolled her head to face Signy. “I’m sorry,” she said seriously. “I’m talking so much about this, and you’re still—”
“You’re allowed to talk about this. You need to talk about this.”
“Yeah, but not if it doesn’t leave space for you. You’re going through it, too.”
“It’s different,” Signy said. “He was old, and old people dying is the correct order of things. She”—not was, not yet—“she’s twenty-three.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cora said. “We’re not gonna compare them, that’s fucked up. That’s not right. We’re not gonna play ‘whose loss is worse.’”
“We’re not,” Signy agreed. “But the fact remains, it’s different.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think so.” Cora checked her phone again, reflexively. She was checking her phone all the time, these days.
“You know what I’ve always liked the thought of?” Signy said.
“Hmm?”
“A vacation.”
Cora barked a laugh, and oh, that was a sound Signy had missed. “A vacation?”
“You know how in Primer movies they put some clothes in a bag and they go somewhere they’ve never—”
