Chapter Text
When Rachel Duncan is eight years old, her life changes.
There are things that are hazy in her memory: the ride in the ambulance, the voices of the doctors and nurses who examine her parents, the room with the couch and the water cooler they take her to at the hospital. What isn’t hazy at all: the gurgling breaths coming from her parents’ chests, the blood pooling under their fingernails, her father’s voice when he murmured, “My poor, poor Rachel.”
After that, Dr. Aldous Leekie comes to take her to DYAD, and her world shrinks to a single wing in a single building. She learns words like asymptomatic carrier and no one ever tells her that her parents are dead, but she figures it out after a few weeks when nobody comes to take her home. She’s not allowed out of her room except for once a day, where for forty minutes she’s allowed into a special courtyard with a playground and a big patch of grass.
She’s the first—and for a long time, only—asymptomatic Cruso carrier, and everyone is always telling her what a great thing it is. Every time they take her blood, they tell her what a hero she’s being. For DYAD, for everyone. Her room is huge, even bigger than the one she’d had at home, and she gets practically anything she wants. No one’s allowed to come into her room without a suit and mask, but she gets a laptop and can video conference with Dr. Leekie, which is almost as good as talking face-to-face. Dr. Leekie cares about Rachel—he’s invested in her, he says, he cares about her like she’s his own daughter. He brings her new books every week, and sometimes they play chess over video conference.
It’s nearly three years before she gets a roommate. Beth Childs is around her age, a stoic girl with her long hair tied up in a ponytail. She doesn’t cry, but she asks about her parents all the time, badgering anyone in a uniform until Rachel has simply had enough. She tries to think back, to remember whether she asked about her own parents as much, but she just… can’t, anymore. She feels like an entirely different person.
“They’re dead,” she tells Beth one night, not even looking up from her book. She sort of tries to sound empathetic, but she thinks she mostly just sounds bored. Really, she just wants Beth to shut up about them.
“What?”
“Dead. They’re dead. So are mine.”
“What?” Beth repeats again, her voice high, reedy, like she’s close to tears.
“You’ll get used to it,” Rachel says. “I did. Honestly.” The last word manages to be both a promise and a statement of exasperation.
After that, Beth stops talking, her jaw clenched so tightly that Rachel can practically hear her teeth cracking. The two of them never fight, exactly, but Rachel has come to understand a fundamental difference between the two of them: she is strong, Beth is weak. Where her walls are iron, Beth’s are wooden, cracked and splintered and barely holding up. In other words, Beth just isn’t worth her time, and Rachel stops offering it.
As months pass, more arrive at DYAD. Their similarities are noted: they were all born female. They were all born within a year of each other. But the overlapping patterns are outweighed by the differences among them: born in different countries, different continents. Some were rich, some poor, but most of their families seemed to fall somewhere along the lines of the middle class—and Helena grew up in a convent in Ukraine and is all but feral with her peroxide bleached hair and twitching fingers.
It’s impossible to fit them all in one room, but the purpose of putting Beth and Rachel together was for companionship, not out of necessity. A few months after they turn fourteen, Beth requests to be moved to a different room with a high-strung girl named Alison.
“I hope you’re very happy together,” Rachel says with a tight smirk as Beth is escorted out, not entirely sure what she means by it but knowing by the uncomfortable flush that spreads across the other girl’s face that she’s hit a nerve.
They try giving her a few different roommates; Katja, who spills red dye in the bathroom; Jennifer, who cries herself to sleep every night; Cosima, who never shuts up and almost sets her own bed on fire with a cold pack and some salt (somehow—Rachel never asks about or takes an interest in her experiments, aside from this one, for obvious reasons). After that, Rachel files a personal request with Dr. Leekie: no more roommates. Ever.
Your family is dead, yes, she wants to spit into each new arrival’s tear-streaked face. Your old life is over. Learn to adapt before it ruins you. I did.
One by one, she finds a reason to hate all of them, these teenagers trespassing in her tiny, closed-off world. Using up the dwindling supplies and taking up the attention of the staff. Naive. Stupid. Fragile. Afraid.
+++
When Rachel Duncan is sixteen years old, her life changes.
That’s the year Dr. Leekie stops coming in. The year the books stop, the year their laptops don’t connect to the outside world anymore, the year the lights start to flicker like strobes more often than not. The year she walks out of the en suite and finds Sarah Manning standing in her room, teeth bared and a bruise blooming on one cheek.
For a second, she’s too shocked to move. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to meet you too,” Sarah says, her voice gruff but the words rolling out effortlessly on her thick, low-class accent. “Rachel Duncan, yeah? My name’s Sarah.”
“I don’t care what your name is,” Rachel says mildly. “I want you out.”
“Yeah?” Sarah doesn’t seem offended. She nods. “I want out, too.”
She can’t help the incredulous laugh that comes out of her. “Not out of DYAD. Out of my bedroom.”
“Look, princess, I don’t plan on stayin’ very long, so get over yourself.” And just like that, Sarah is flopping down onto the previously unoccupied bed with her boots still on.
With her boots still on.
“Those are filthy,” Rachel blurts before she can stop herself.
“Piss off already,” Sarah groans, voice muffled in the pillow. “I’ve been on a plane for ten hours, give me a fuckin’ break.”
“Excuse me.” Beth was silent and sulky, Katja was German, Cosima was obnoxious and chatty. None of them ever told her to piss off.
“I said piss off! I’ll be out of your hair in a few days. It’ll be like I was never even here.”
That evening, Rachel waits by her door until she sees someone walk by outside. Then she presses the button on the intercom. “Excuse me. I’d like to arrange a video conference with Dr. Leekie, or to have him come in, if that’s possible.” She doesn’t smile, and it’s not a question.
The person—a guard, maybe, she’s not sure and can’t tell under the mask—stares at her for what seems like a long time. “Dr. Leekie’s dead,” he says finally, incredulous. “He got sick. Everyone outside is getting sick. Everyone except you freaks.”
After that day, Rachel watches Sarah watching everyone else. She’s always on the lookout for holes in the fence, for something she can exploit to get herself out and away. She fights everybody, the guards who walk her down the hall to medical so she can have her blood drawn, the nurses who are drawing the blood, the doctors who inevitably arrive to sedate her or help strap her down. Then she’s dragged back to the room—to Rachel’s room—where she becomes Rachel’s problem. It’s infuriating. Sarah is infuriating.
One afternoon Sarah is dragged inside, not sedated, but limping. Blood drips from a split lip, from a cut along her hairline, onto the floor. The white floor. Rachel is up instantly and throwing an entire roll of paper towels at her before the door’s even clicked shut behind her.
Sarah catches it and limps over to the bathroom, filling the sink with water and abandoning the paper towels in favor of a washcloth, wetting it and running it over her bloody face. Rachel follows and stands near the door, unwilling to cross the threshold and involve herself any further. “What have you done now?” she asks in a low voice, hoping to convey her intense aggravation and mild disappointment in the single sentence.
“I was kickin’ the guy who was trying to take my blood,” Sarah tells her between applications of the washcloth. “And he wanted to strap me down to the table, so I kicked out real hard and ripped his suit open.”
“You—what?” She averts her eyes as Sarah starts to pull her shirt over her head and feel along her left side, but Rachel Duncan is not the type of person to stare demurely at the floor. She glances back up, up the smooth white of Sarah's side, past the reddish bruise on her ribs, past the delicate angle of her neck and the brown tumble of her hair, back to her face, her bared teeth and narrowed eyes.
“He saw and just went off. I think he cracked a bloody rib, shite…” she murmurs, wincing.
“Sarah,” Rachel says, half-unbelieving (only half, because Sarah is a wildcard, Sarah doesn’t care about anyone but herself—she’s like Rachel, in a way, but twisted). “You do realize that if he’s been exposed, he will die.”
“Yeah?” Sarah asks. “And what do you think’s gonna happen to us, locked up in here like bloody animals? Donating all our blood to science?”
“You are an animal,” Rachel snaps. “Honestly, look at you.”
Sarah pushes past her, back into the bedroom, her skin sweaty against Rachel’s where it touches. “I think you like to,” she hisses, hot and quick, and then she’s gone.