“All right, if there’s a flaw in Heartsong, do you know how many of the matches are off?”
“They were throwing around a lot of numbers, it didn’t all stick.” Daphne winced. “Two percent, maybe? No higherthan five.”
Zada nodded thoughtfully. She could feel her mind shifting into problem-solving mode, away from the swamp of messy emotions clogging her throat and into the safer world of math and numbers.
“Do you know when it started?” she asked.
“Judging from the very narrow slice of conversation I was able to pick up? About twenty years ago,” said Daphne.
“I’d need a list of every match from the last twenty years,” said Zada.
“That’s a lot of matches,” Daphne mused.
“Yes.” Zada did some quick mental calculations. “Everyone who’s matched in the last twenty years, so say, on average, ages nineteen through thirty-nine. That would be about eighteen percent of the population.”
“How do you know that?” sputtered Daphne.
“Nerd mode,” said Zada. “We talked about demographics all the time in social studies. Doesn’t matter. So out of one million citizens, give or take a few every year that join the convent, that’s ninety thousand unions.”
Daphne’s eyes went wide. “How do you plan on gathering intel on ninety thousand marriages? No feed goes back that far.”
“Is there some kind of city database that logs all the matches?” asked Zada.
“Yeah,” said Daphne, “in the Core itself, at City Hall. Unfortunately, the door log reported thatsomeonegot in during Flora and Aiden’s wedding and I hear they’ve really beefed up their security.”
“Hmm,” said Zada. She tapped her thumb against eachcallused fingertip of her left hand, wishing she had another quaint little square of paper to fidget with. One of the fake letters from a florist or a cake shop, even if her skin crawled ever so slightly at the notion that they’d known so quickly about her impending nuptials—and there it was. She snapped her fingers. “Businesses can access the full list, right? Along with everyone’s birthdate, gender, and student number. Otherwise they wouldn’t know what to sell us.”
“They can,” said Daphne. “On their private feeds. How are you going to—”
“Most shopkeepers keep a pretty close eye on their Gems, obviously,” Zada broke in. “But I remember Flora did say that when she visited the dressmaker, Mx. Beauchamp had to keep scurrying to a back room to access theirs. Something about hating the feel of jewelry. So if I can sneak in there for a few seconds, I can use my clone-scanner to copy the list onto a new Gem.”
“You, uh, still have that thing?” Daphne’s voice sounded strangely gruff. She’d given the clone-scanner—obtained, according to her, on the black market via a series of highly unlikely shenanigans—to Zada for her fifteenth birthday.
“Of course,” said Zada, with more feeling than intended.
Daphne cleared her throat. “Well,” she said briskly. “I guess that’s useful. So once you have your ninety thousand matches, what’s next? How do you determine which ones are false?”
“Randomize a sample and then research everything I can find about them,” said Zada. “Visit them door-to-door if I have to.”
“The nuns collect personal testimonies from people in the dome,” said Daphne. “You could probably cross-referencethem. I know how you feel about cross-referencing.”
Zada nodded. “It could take weeks to find a likely candidate. If the rate of mistaken matches really is two percent now, then any recent couple has a one in fifty chance of being faulty.” It also meant that hundreds and hundreds of New Ionians in total had been partnered with the wrong person, but she refused to let her thoughts settle on that shifting, uncertain territory.
“Hmm,” said Daphne. “How are you going to access Mx. Beauchamp’s Gem?”
“I’ll creep back and—”
“Right, and what will Mx. Beauchamp be doing while you creep?”
Zada could feel her face fall. “I’ll have to cause a distraction. I guess I could come in and ask questions about my dress?”
“Then how will you sneak away during a fitting?” Daphne pressed.
Of course. Zada sighed. There was a reason she’d always worked as part of a team. “I don’t know.”
“This all sounds like a two-person job,” said Daphne, somehow reading Zada’s mind. She leaned back onto her elbows. “Good thing that last time I checked, we are two people.”
Zada tried not to boggle. “What?”
