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Sarah meets with Doctor Aldous Leekie in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. They are sitting in front of a window, and the light slants in golden onto Leekie’ head, and that’s when Sarah realizes she isn’t afraid. Paul is looming behind Leekie, large and inscrutable, and Sarah’s heart is a steady fearless drum inside her throat.
“Do you know where Helena is?” Leekie says. “I’ve been looking for her for years, she’s – well, I suppose you could say that she’s my white whale. I’d be happy to arrange some sort of…deal, if you’d like.”
“I know where she is,” Sarah says neutrally. She knows. Helena had said it, under the terrible 3am light: someday you’re going to feel safe, and it’s going to be because you know I’m there and I’ll stop anything from hurting you. She had kissed Sarah’s forehead, and Sarah thought of baptism, and Sarah had never been baptized, but—
“You do,” Leekie says.
“You do?” Paul says.
“Yeah,” Sarah says, and leans back in her chair. “So. What’s this deal, then.”
He tells her. She is only mostly listening; mostly she is thinking about how if she pointed a finger gun at Leekie, bang, his head would explode. She thinks he can tell she isn’t paying much attention.
Afterwards, Paul escorts Leekie out of the trailer and Sarah lingers. She looks through the blinds and watches the car pull away, looks around: nothing in the lot. Gravel and half-constructed ghosts, skeletons of girders reaching up to nowhere. She steps out of the door. “Helena,” she says.
No answer. Sarah goes back in and sits down and isn’t afraid. Outside night falls, slowly, a scarf tossed up and left to drift towards the ground. There’s a knock at the door.
“Hello, Sarah,” Helena says when she opens it. She steps inside. She closes the door. “I like your skeleton friend. Does he know that you’re not Beth?”
“Yes,” Sarah says, and looks at Helena. No visible indicator of anything, menace or general well-being. Helena could be about to kill her. Helena could be about to fall over from a stab wound, or from hunger. Sarah wouldn’t know. She doesn’t, really, know Helena at all.
Helena sits down in Leekie’s chair, says: “Hm.” Idly she pulls her sniper rifle around its harness on her back and cradles it, like a girl with her very first baby doll. “Are you going to try to kill me again?” she asks, like she’s genuinely curious.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. Helena frowns vaguely at the walls, drums her fingers on the gun.
“Do you want me to kill the skeleton man for you,” she says. “I did not think that he was hurting you, and so I did nothing. But. It’s not too late, I can find him.”
“Why are you doing this?” Sarah says.
Helena is out of the chair and standing over Sarah in one fluid motion, hands a strangling cradle around the space between Sarah’s neck and chin. She tugs, and Sarah’s chin goes up. Helena could strangle her, or Helena could smush her cheeks. It all depends on what she wants, and Sarah doesn’t know what she wants – her eyes are blank, like polished stones.
“You are so stupid,” Helena says wonderingly. “Like a little lamb. How did you survive without me, Sarah? What did you do? Who looked after you?”
“I looked after myself,” Sarah spits. “Let go, Helena.”
“Tell me why I’m doing this,” Helena says, and tightens her hands. For a second Sarah’s throat closes up, and then Helena releases her grip and Sarah can breathe again. Out of desperate instinct she reaches up and grabs on tight to Helena’s hands. She tugs – they don’t budge. Like iron. Helena doesn’t even blink.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “That’s why I asked. Let go of me.”
“Tell me,” Helena says, the words a sibilant hiss. She tightens again. She lets go.
“Helena—”
“You can do it,” Helena says, and her eyes aren’t blank anymore – they’re bright and sparking, beautiful like a fork in an open socket. “You were Beth so well that you fooled everyone who ever thought they loved her. You were the Katja-sheep and nobody knew but me. You’re special, Sarah. If anyone could be me it would be you. Go inside of me. Tell me why I’m doing this for you.”
Her thumb is lodged up against Sarah’s pulse, and Sarah is vividly conscious of it: the round weight of it, like a marble. She can’t be Helena, she can’t, she won’t. It’s not a series of video tapes or German words muttered on her way to a hotel room or lipstick put on from a compact: it’s her pulse in her neck and she won’t and
“You love me,” she says, and Helena lets go. Sarah gasps for breath. She didn’t even mean to say it, but she said it, and it’s true. The weight of Helena’s love for her is a chasm in the back of her mind, and she looks at the drop, and she steps back from it.
Helena sits down in the chair across from her. She leans forward, eager. “Yes,” she says. “I thought that was why. Tell me more.”
“I don’t know,” Sarah says, voice shaky and rasping – Helena’s hands twitch – Sarah rubs a hand over her throat, fishes wildly. “You couldn’t touch God, could you,” she says. “God didn’t have a throat, but I do. You like that, yeah? Putting me in your crosshairs. Keeping me safe. ‘Cause I’m so fragile, and stupid.” In a jarring double vision she can see herself the way Helena sees her – oh, no, this isn’t Beth or Katja or Alison. She can feel Helena’s pulse beating strange and wrong inside her ribcage, and she can see: Sarah, a thin shell of black leather bravado over a mess of tender fear. She loves herself, and it’s awful and new. Sarah tries to shake herself out of it but can’t. She drowns.
She pulls herself back on the strength of some sensation, and when she blinks back to awareness again she realizes the sensation is Helena’s hand stroking, rhythmic, through her hair. Helena is standing over her again, face sad and tender. Sarah knows the feeling in it now, and wishes – desperately – that she didn’t.
“Good Sarah,” Helena says, like she’s a dog that’s just done a nice trick. “See? I told you you could do it.” She tilts her head to the side. “Did it feel good?”
Yes.
“Helena,” Sarah says, and means to say please stop touching me, and can’t quite get the words out. Helena’s name hangs in the air between them, ending on the desperate breath of that vowel. Sarah’s name ends on the exact same sound. Sarah still doesn’t know how Helena knows her name, she realizes. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn that she just – knew it, that she’s known it all along.
“I’m not God,” she says.
Helena’s face gets sadder. “No,” she says. “Not yet.” Her hand brushes soft over Sarah’s hair until sudden, sharp, she twists her fingers in it and yanks a chunk of Sarah’s hair out. Sarah opens her mouth to scream but Helena’s other hand is already over it, sweaty and fever-warm, and when Sarah screams Helena’s skin eats it right up. It’s all gone.
Helena takes her hand away from Sarah’s mouth, and when Sarah looks at her other hand the chunk of Sarah’s hair has already vanished. Instead Helena is holding a pen. She tugs Sarah’s hand towards her hand and writes ten digits on it, tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration.
“If you want me to tell your skeleton he is just bones,” she says, “call this number. I will answer it. If you want me to make that other man into bones, you can call, and I will answer that too. Or anyone else. Anyone else, Sarah. You call.”
She taps the digits on Sarah’s hand and then steps away towards the door. Sarah touches her scalp, pulls her fingertips away, finds them bloody. She’s shocked into a place between her mind and Helena’s, and there is an ocean of loneliness in one of their heads – she doesn’t know if it’s Helena’s loneliness or hers. She’s drowning in it. If she opened her mouth and said Helena’s name, Helena could come over here and put her hot palms on Sarah’s head again. She would do it. She would look at Sarah the whole time.
“I don’t need anyone killed,” she says, because she thinks that’s her line.
“Not yet,” Helena says. Sarah looks up at her, sees Helena’s mouth a wry sharp twist. Like a knife, but if she said that Helena would probably laugh.
Sarah swallows. “Not yet,” she says, and on Helena’s face the smirk blooms into a smile.