"He wouldn't be happy," Bella says. "I guess if he's gone this long without dumping me he probably isn't going to, but - ugh, sometimes I feel like our entire relationship is a string of new reasons to be tense and uncomfortable. This wouldn't help. But I'm not sure if that's even a good reason to consider being all - sisterly, with Soph."

"Could you think about the other reasons and then come back to that one?" he suggests.

"Yeah, I guess." She sits back in her chair. "So there's Soph herself, who near as I can tell is an innocent victim of sorts, who does not deserve to go through the subjective experience of losing her sister, and whose actual - so to speak - sister I have no hope of producing from the depths of Downside Jane or no Jane. She's probably entitled to some attention from me on that basis alone, but I don't know her well enough to know how to do that short of actually doing my seventeen-years-of-homework bit - which even if I decide to do it, I can't do it instantaneously, so there's the question of how to act in the meanwhile. There's Renée and Charlie - I don't even know whether to tell them that their younger daughter is an extremely convincing fiction."

"Yeah, I can't help with the parents," he says wryly.

"I mean, I could leave that up to her, consider her in the metaphorical closet about being what she is, but I don't know how good her judgment is."

"Which is something you could find out by doing your homework," he says. "I mean, or asking somebody who knows her, but I don't know if you want to trust somebody else's judgment about her judgment, and I don't know her that well."

"It's a lot of homework," mutters Bella. "Also I have to figure out how to go about it. Learning to read my own notebook cipher and counterfactual pastwatching will do reasonably well up to the point where we got the brainphone, but after that for a complete picture I'm going to have to read my counterfactual mind, and I'm - well, for one thing I'm not sure how the fact that these events never happened will interact with the fact that even in the false history I was mentally opaque, and for another I'm not sure how I feel about reading somebell else's mind whether she really existed or not. Like, she didn't walk around doing things, but the things she would have done have had effects on you and Sherlock and Soph and Charlie and Renée and so on."

"Sure," says Tony. "I guess you kind of have to figure that out for yourself. But I mean... she is kind of you, isn't she? In more ways than alts usually are? It's almost like that thing with Shell Bell."

"If she were around, we'd be talking mergers. This isn't a merger, it's a - cannibalization."

"Well, she's not around, and you can't - wait. Can you make her be around?"

"I definitely can't help you there."

"I'll need to think about it. I guess it's an option."

"It is!"

"What's Soph even like?" Bella asks, closing her eyes.

"Um... she plays softball," he offers.

That was not the kind of information Bella was looking for. "You and her don't really hang out, huh."

"We do some. But I don't know her that well. I mean, I like her! I just don't have, like, a list of her characteristics on file somewhere."

"I guess that's fair."

He shrugs.

"Do you remember me getting along with her okay, though?"

"Yeah. You guys were fine."

"Like - you've met Aurora and Lexi, right, can you compare?"

"I dunno," he says. "Maybe not as close?"

"Makes sense, I guess, they're twins."