Free Mirror in the Sky by Aditi Khorana Page A

were missing, or a different color, or added in. Except none of those games sent a trail of goose bumps up my arms.
    It was after midnight. I was already in my pajamas, about to go to bed, when the alert popped up on my phone. It was Meg. My heart sank when I saw her name, but I was also curious what she might have to say to me. I opened up Instagram and saw the message:
    Megz23 mentioned you in a comment: @TKrish , isn’t this insane?! It’s all anyone’s talking about in Buenos Aires. Hysteria here over Terra Nova!
    Meg was always sending me messages over Instagram, and I wondered for a second if this was her way of apologizing for the way she had acted before she left.
    I clicked on the image. At first, it didn’t make sense. It was two images, small and side-by-side. They looked identical. One of them was blurry, but not so blurry that you couldn’t make out what it was. A street market of some sort. Most of the faces were obscured, but you could clearly see a woman’s face in the crowds. She was looking toward the camera, smiling, wearing a big blue raincoat. All around her, street vendors sold fruit and toys. Signs and billboards written up in an undecipherable language.
    On the right, the same image, but as I looked closer, I realized that it wasn’t the same. It was slightly different. The signs were in a different language. The woman was wearing a red coat instead of a blue one. A vendor sold apples instead of what looked like pears.
    I looked at NASA’s comment.
    On September 1, 2015, NASA decoded the bitmap image received from B612. The image appears to be that of a street market on Terra Nova. We posted this image on our feed right away. On September 2, NASA was contacted by a follower from Tokyo, Japan, alerting us to an Instagram photo taken a year ago of the Ameyoko Market between Okachimachi and Ueno Stations. As you can see, the images arenear-identical. The picture on the left, the image we received from Terra Nova, shows a woman at a street market. The composition, the colors, even the location look surprisingly similar to the image from Tokyo, with a couple of small variations. In the image on the left, from Terra Nova, the woman wears a blue coat. Behind her a vendor sells pears. We have not been able to decipher the language on the billboards and signs, but linguists are currently investigating. The image on the right, from Earth, shows a woman wearing a red coat. The vendor behind her is selling different fruit, but the similarities have raised a number of questions.
    I looked at the image on the left, the decoded bitmap from Terra Nova, and then back at the image on the right, from Tokyo, Japan. From Earth.
    In freshman-year biology, we watched a video of an amoeba splitting into two—pinching in half, its nucleus dividing till there were two identical organisms where there had once been only one. From this day onward, that was how I would feel—physically, I was still the same, but in some part of me, I had become divided. Just the thought that maybe there was another Tara somewhere in the universe made me half of a whole now, not just one. How could this not change everything about my world?
    I dropped my phone to the floor, my hands shaking.

TEN
    A T school the next day, everyone was talking about it.
    â€œOh my God, and they’re, like, trying to track down that lady in the picture.”
    â€œI heard she’s already come forward but they’re, like, interrogating her or something?”
    â€œThat’s, like, so stupid. Why would NASA interrogate her?”
    â€œNot NASA, like, the Japanese government.”
    â€œNuh uh. The Japanese government can’t hold her hostage. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
    â€œNot like a hostage, you idiot. They’re just questioning her.” This was Veronica, getting impatient with Alexa again.
    â€œThey have, like, Instagram, dude,” Jimmy Kaminsky announced to