“I know,” said Daphne gruffly. “I see it, too, and we’ll—we’ll do something about this, I swear. But time’s running out. We need to get what we came here for, okay? We need to prove he’s not your match, get out of here, and regroup.”
“Regroup and do what?” Zada whispered. “Who do wetell?” She surveyed the expanse of red lines of code. When she closed her eyes, the names were seared into her vision. “Everything we know is a lie.”
“Zada,” Daphne said urgently. “We’ll figure it out. But you need to check your match, now.”
Zada nodded, feeling oddly distant, as if she were no longer in control of her own body. With a few swipes, she navigated back to the Heartsong program.
“Gem, open file Chambers comma Zada.”
Another wall of code. A record of every bit of data Zada had ever handed over in every social studies class, in every purchase, in every choice of in-lens entertainment. Her entire life summed up in this file, her hopes and dreams listed right alongside her grades and her biometrics. Somewhere in this file was the answer they’d spent months searching for. Zada gestured, sending the file scrolling down to “match=Arnoth,Buford.”
“Gem,” said Zada, heartbeat thudding in her ears, “show user-generated activity in red.”
Nothing happened.
“Gem, when was this file last modified?” Zada asked.
The SmartGem chimed. “This file has not been modified.”
Zada stared unseeing at the glowing code before her. There was no glitch. There was no manipulation. There was nothing but the truth: Buford Arnoth was her soulmate.
Chapter EighteenIn Which, Defying Reason, Things Get Worse
That can’t be right,” said Daphne quietly. “There must have been some sort of mistake.”
Zada shut her eyes and opened them again, as if hoping to restart reality itself. Nothing had changed. She was still living in this world, in a universe where the most powerful program in New Ionia had unfailingly and without intrusion from anyone else declared that her destined match was Buford Arnoth and not—not anyone else.
All this time they’d wasted on this wild goose chase, only to discover that she’d been fighting against her own fate. And to make matters worse, nothing else in her life could be trusted again, not if that wall of red altered code was any indication.
“Gem, when was this file created?” Zada said.
Another chime. “This file was created on the twenty-third of January, year 100.”
Zada shook her head. It was the day of her eighteenth birthday. The Heartsong algorithm had matched her with Buford within seconds—and nothing at all, no interference or outside intervention, had happened since. She sunk down and pressed her knees to her chest, waiting for the urge to cry or screamor even break something to well up within her. What she felt instead was nothing, beyond a sense of churning dread.
She’d been so sure.
She’d been sosure.
Well, so had Marianne Erskine at Flora’s wedding.
Zada squeezed her knees. As if through a thick wall, she could hear Daphne say, “Gem, open file Baker comma Iphigenia.”
Zada looked up. She only knew of one Iphigenia, and that was Daphne’s mother.
“Gem,” said Daphne, “when was this file created?”
The SmartGem chimed yet again. “This file was created on the ninth of May, year 80.”
Daphne took a deep breath, the only sound in the empty library. “Gem, when was this file last modified?”
Yet another cheerful little chime. It sounded almost ghoulish. “This file was last modified on the eleventh of August, year 80.” Three months after Iphigenia had received her first match, it had been altered to Isaac Fallow, Daphne’s father.
A shudder ran through Zada’s body. This was definitive proof that Heartsong, like the rest of the Core, could be altered, and had been. Definitive proof that Daphne had been right. About everything but Zada’s future, which stretched before her into infinity. Buford was not so bad, she told herself, but after having tasted a reality where Daphne wanted to kiss her, she could not bear to think of it. She could not bear to think of going back to her old life, of following every strict rule and convention that society had laid upon her shoulders, heavy enough to crush her.
She’d seen the manipulation to the code, those damningred alterations. She knew too much now. Just like the book in the secret library had said, she’d woken up. And she could not go back to sleep.
“Gem,” Daphne was saying, “restore original version.”
