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Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers — Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Rachel Duncan has died three times in her life.
First, on the day her parents died in a fire, the day they took her away and told her what she was. Rachel Duncan the child (the girl, the daughter) died that day; Rachel Duncan the clone—the proclone—began to take root. And yet, through the years, that was never enough for her, because upon her first rebirth, they were the ones who told her what she was. Who she was. Ethan and Aldous, they took the girl away and, in her place, built what they wanted.
Rachel will not make the same mistake again.
Her second and third deaths happened in quick succession. When Ethan took his own life, he took whatever was still human left in Rachel along with it. And Sarah Manning’s little piece of wood that took out Rachel’s eye, well it took a bit more than that, didn't it? Rachel the goddess, once untouchable, now shattered.
No longer girl, human, or goddess—what is she? Another thing she is no longer is eight years old, no longer at the mercy of men who thought themselves greater gods than she, who thought they had created her, who thought she was theirs. Those men are dead, and Rachel is not. Not yet, not quite. Not entirely.
1. Man
She’s awake beneath the surgical lights, as they slide the retractors under her eyelids and pry open her left eye (what’s left of it).
She’s awake as they slowly draw the pencil out. They flex her fingertips, prod her legs, ask her questions—what’s your name? do you know where you are? what’s today’s date? Testing her, testing her, testing how much damage their subject has sustained.
She’s awake as they declare the eye unsalvageable. She hears the word through the tinnitus, the screaming, in her ears. (Who’s screaming in her ears?)
She’s awake as they remove it. (Whose screaming? Hers?) As they take her apart. (When—is she screaming now? Was it the eye that ripped the scream out of her chest as they ripped it out of her skull?) As they put her back together again. (Or was it another loss that screamed within her?) As they slide a new eye, cold and glistening and perfect, into her waiting socket.
(Could they hear her scream at all?)
She truly is Frankenstein’s monster now, Rachel thinks. She almost laughs before she chokes it back down (or was that the anesthetics?)
But even Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t awake for this part, for every one of Victor’s stitches through his flesh.
…
The elevator rises. Rachel rises.
She stares straight ahead, into the brushed steel. Her own warped reflection (warped: distorted, false. It can’t be hers, can it, that face so marred, with gauze taped over one side?) stares back at her.
For a moment, after the lift halts and the doors slide open, Rachel remains in that spot, rooted to the floor by the points of her stiletto heels. It isn’t until Martin moves to help her, moves to slide his arm under hers (can you imagine), that her eyes snap (eye snaps) onto him.
Martin recoils. Rachel collects herself. Pulls her root-heels out of the ground and ignores the slight, unfamiliar hesitance in her step as she strides down the hallway.
She walks through the door to her flat and inhales deeply, eyelids fluttering (eyelid fluttering).
It’s familiar, even in the dark.
It’s familiar, the dark.
For the first time in days, after those windowless exam rooms and surgical lights reflecting off white tiled floors, Rachel breathes.
And then all too soon, Martin’s hand reaches for the light switch, and the stillness breaks. “Thank you, Martin,” she declares over her shoulder, her gaze never quite meeting his. That’s his cue to leave. Martin knows. A curt but respectful nod, and he’s gone. He closes the door behind him and takes with him the light that had been spilling in from the hallway. Rachel’s left alone again, alone with her darkness. Finally.
She drifts slowly through the black. It’s crisp against her skin; it caresses her, soothes her, winds its fingers through the bandages on her face. Not that the bandages bother her; not that she deigns to notice them at all.
She drags her manicured fingertips along the marble and chrome and wood as she walks. Not that she needs to for balance.
Her feet carry her on instinct—she doesn’t need eyes for this—and she finds herself in front of the television. The old routines call to her, and why shouldn’t they? Nothing has to change. Nothing has changed. She grabs a tape at random and slides it into the VCR, exhaling deliberately as she steps back.
Good, Rachel thinks. Everything is just as it was.
But no sooner does the light of the screen flicker on than she recoils away from it.
This is wrong, it’s all wrong.
She can’t bear to watch that insipid little girl, so desperate for her parents’ love (she gags at the venom of that word on her tongue), so desperate for a man who, in the end, clearly wasn’t capable of loving at all.
With each image, each pulse of light, Rachel’s revulsion courses deeper into the core of her being. She could tear out her other eye just to make it stop. The darkness would be merciful.
She tears the recording out of the VCR instead. (Good. This is all that is left of him now)
Grabs the rest of them from the drawer. (There are so many of them)
Rips them apart. (But these are all that is left of him now)
Doesn’t feel the sharp scrape of the edges. (Move up manicure to tomorrow)
Scatters the tape in ribbons across the floor. (Have Martin send someone to clean this up)
Throws the tape’s plastic shell onto the ground at her feet. (What am I doing)
Steps on it with her heel. (What am I doing)
Hears the plastic crack but doesn’t feel the crack of her kneecaps against the ground.
(What am I doing)
(I am all that is left of him now)
Kneeling on the floor, Rachel shakes her head. I’ve made quite a mess. Tries to shake away the rage bubbling behind her eye sockets. I shouldn’t have… let myself do that. She doesn’t acknowledge that the room is spinning. Doesn’t admit it. Doesn’t feel it.
She does, however, feel the droplet running down her face. She is not sad, she tells herself. She’s livid. She will not cry for him, will not waste her tears and sadness over him.
But the droplet is undeterred. It makes its way to her chin and beads off the end. Drips onto the crisp grey lapel of her blazer.
Red.
She drags her fingertips across her cheek, not concerned but… curious. They come back crimson, glistening in the static of the television screen.
Quite a mess.
She pulls herself to her feet and grabs the mirror off the dresser beneath the flatscreen. Flicks the switch on the base of the mirror and gazes coolly at her own face, newly alight.
Still expressionless, Rachel assesses the damage. Well, almost expressionless. She breathes, rapid and deep, through flared nostrils, and the barest hint of a smirk begins to play at the corner of her mouth.
Rachel simply watches, for a bit. Watches herself breathe, watches her chest expand and relax. Watches the red carve rivulets down her cheek, watches it seep upward through the cotton capillaries in the gauze.
She looks every bit the part now, every bit the monster: the blood, the rattled breaths, the inexplicable smile on her lips.
The mad glint in her eye as the snowy remains of her past dance on its surface.
Every bit the monster. Every bit.
She watches the Rachel in the mirror raise its hand (its right, her left) up to its face and calmly peel tape from skin. It sticks a bit more than it should, leaving a ghost of tacky pink webbing in the air for a moment and an imprint on her skin in blood.
Once the bandage is gone, she looks at herself again. Her eyes, once more an indistinguishable pair, see just as they always have. She looks just as she always has.
Perfect.
She is far more perfect a creation than anything Mary Shelley could have dreamed up in her wildest nightmares. Rachel is not Frankenstein’s monster—it was not pieces of mere men from which she was made. She was built not by men, but by beasts; she was nothing, and they grafted parts of themselves onto her shell and made her whole.
No, no… NO. That’s not right.
Rachel blinks and feels her eyelids slide over the immaculate orbs beneath them, both of them. She wipes the blood across her cheek in streaks. Her eyes. Her cheek.
No, it was not those beasts that made her. Whether Daddy Doctor dearest was a beast or a man, Rachel is not his monster at all, for that would imply it was her Frankenstein to whom she belonged. Shelley named her doctor after Milton’s God, ‘the potent Victor,’ and no god created Rachel. No, she is a monster all her own.
They did not make her any more than they succeeded in making themselves divine. She is Rachel, not someone else’s girl. She is not Duncan’s creation; she is the Duncan of whom men spoke. Duncan is her name, not his anymore. Men heard it whispered, heard its echo, and cowered in fear because of her.
The beasts may have given her the parts, but she made herself.
Even as a child, she took pieces from them, and made them part of her. Pieces of Ethan, pieces of Aldous, pieces of Marion—pieces, each so different and yet treacherous in its own way, pieces that became the monster known as Rachel Duncan.
Ethan became her teeth, Aldous her claws, Marion her venomous tail.
Dyad couldn’t have made a monster as beautiful and terrible as she. They lack… imagination.
The smirk on Rachel’s lips cracks into a fanged grin.
They don’t make monsters like her anymore.
2. Myth
chimera, n. /kɪˈmɪərə/
a. A fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail (or according to others with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a serpent)
“A thing of immortal make, not human,” the Chimera was, according to Homer, “snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.” And though he was the first, he was by no means the last. Tales of the tripartite monster flowed from the tongues of dozens of Ancient Greek storytellers—all old men, now long since deceased.
This monster, they said, warned of volcanoes and disasters, shipwrecks and storms. A dark omen—fearful, she was. And always a she.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how often it is that when men create monsters, it’s a she they imagine? That the creatures that populate their stories, their nightmares made flesh, are so often women?
What is it they feared when they made us, their little girls? Rachel wonders. Ethan’s voice echoes in her ears, chanting barren by design barren by design
barren
by
design
Did they really fear our womanhood so much? So much that they tore it away from us before we were even born, so much that they turned it against us so it would kill us slowly from the inside out?
The little girls they wanted, but the woman they feared.
But was it truly, though? They feared the woman so much that they tried to erase it, tried and succeeded in Rachel’s case. Left her barren, left her empty. Left her this way and didn’t even think to tell her for twenty eight years.
And yet she, who had sacrificed, who should have been shining paragon of perfection, sterile and controlled, exactly as they had designed—she was not the one they wanted.
It was Sarah.
Sarah was the one with the child, the magical child that they all fawned over. And Helena, well she was Leekie’s white whale, wasn’t she, the one he’d been searching for all these years. The twins are back together again. And again, and again. No matter how many times circumstances separated them, how many times Rachel separated them, they somehow always found their way back to each other didn't they? How nice.
From the very beginning, Rachel had taken comfort in the fact that, in her world full of clones, she was singular. Just as god had made man in his image, the clones were made in hers. She could look in the mirror and see only herself because she knew that when they looked in the mirror they saw her.
But not anymore. The twins—they saw each other.
Did they feel it, the very first moment they met? That connection between them? Was it the answer they'd been searching for all their lives, the answer to a question they didn't even know burned within them?
They are not one, as Rachel is, they never were. Not copies, like the others, but a pair. They came into this world a pair, and a pair they remained. Even apart, before they each even knew the other existed, they were two—one soul in two bodies. Not because they were made that way by men in white coats, not by design, but by chance. By fate.
But that's not anything Rachel ever wanted. She doesn't want another, someone separate, someone else. All she wants is her self in the mirror. She doesn't want another half to be waiting for her, she wants both halves for herself. And she does—have two halves within herself. She is singular, of course, but she can't just be one, can she?
A thing of immortal make, not human. One is so… small. Rachel is more than that, more than just one.
b. with reference to the terrible character, the unreality, or the incongruous composition of the fabled monster: a horrible and fear-inspiring phantasm, a bogy.
At least Dyad remains unchanged. At least here she is still Rachel Duncan, the woman who had long ago cast aside the girl in those tapes.
Heels strike floor. Hips sway, hair doesn’t.
Flurries of shuffling feet and shuffling papers in her wake. Men duck back into their offices as they see her approach, desperate to place any wall between them, even ones made of mere glass.
At least that’s how it had been, and has always been. And it is the same, is it not, those same men still not daring to meet her gaze because she is her?
She is Rachel Duncan, the bitch (don’t think she doesn’t know everything they say about her) but she is the bitch who owns them, the bitch who was designed and molded and vulcanized to be absolutely pristine—the bitch they all signed their careers and lives and very souls away to try and replicate. Those same men still sneak glances at her when they think she isn’t looking, simply because she is who she is (I mean, have you seen her?)
But it isn’t quite the same anymore, is it? The song remains the same but the key has changed. They still look away as she approaches and stare as she walks past, but it’s different now. A little more brazen, gazes linger a little longer—linger on parts of her longer, and not the parts that she would have wanted.
When did the definition change, Rachel wonders. When did they begin to look at her differently? When did she lose her grip on their throats?
c. An unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception. (The ordinary modern use)
Rachel stops in front of her office door and sets her chin, tilting her head upward slightly with a sharp intake of breath before crossing the threshold.
It was here. Here is where it happened, where she lost it, where she lost.
Here is where Sarah Manning first struck her, laid hands on her, laid her flat against the floor like some animal. Rachel walks to that spot and sees her own body there like a chalk-outlined corpse. She digs her heel into the carpet, carves out the spot where her head had once lain.
Rachel is no longer a divine creation personified, impervious, untouchable. Because she had been touched. Sarah Manning had touched her, had harmed her, had broken her. Sarah Manning, the unmonitored tramp, a mere mortal in the realm of the gods, a mere girl who'd gone up against a myth and yet
She won.
How boring it must be for them now, to be faced with a monster such Rachel Duncan, one they thought toothless and lame. She’d been made a fool, Rachel seethes, continuing to tear through her own chimerical ghost. Sarah Manning could not comprehend her, all the parts of her, could not see how the pieces fit together to make up a single animal, and so she felt no fear.
The patchwork image of Rachel the myth is being erased, piece by piece. Soon all that will remain is the word, the name, signifying nothing more than an impossible dream, an improbable nightmare.
3. Monster
Rachel faces the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in her apartment. She takes in the city beneath her, glittering in the night. This view, through the wide expanse of clear glass, was all hers. She’d always liked it here, always liked watching, watching the tiny people go about their boring ordinary lives. They had no idea. No idea what Dyad was doing at this very moment, what they were capable of, no idea how much power they had. How much power Rachel had. The very world they lived in was shifting beneath their feet, and they had no idea.
She's been spending more and more time here lately, since she'd recovered. Since Marion had let Sarah go.
It doesn't give her the same satisfaction it once did, but still, it's better than being at Dyad. All that waits for Rachel there are endless conversations with Marion in which she apologizes (again) and swears she wouldn't have gone through with it if she had known the drastic measures to which Sarah had resorted and reminds Rachel continuously that it had been necessary, that it was part of the larger plan.
Larger plan. Rachel bristles, scoffing at the thought. The nerve of it. They were her clones, it was supposed to be her larger plan that Dyad would follow. Did Marion think promising to bring her in the loop from this point forward—"fully and completely," Marion had pledged—made up for the fact that Rachel had needed to be looped in at all?
And so Rachel is home once again, standing atop her Olympus and waiting for that calm to wash over her as it always has. She places her palm tenderly against the cool glass, but it doesn't come. It no longer feels like her window out to the world. Though she’s always known, deep down, that this is what it was, this is the first time she feels the cold of the glass against her skin like the bars of a cage.
She stares out into the night until her vision blurs and the pinpoints of streetlamps and illuminated windows smear together, faint streaks of light filtered through not glass but hundreds of feet of frigid water.
Blink.
Rachel jerks herself backwards, pushing away from the window and this sick tableau, her body framed in glass. Stumbling, she retreats further into her apartment.
Children don’t fear sharks in aquariums.
Return to the sea, though, and the story changes. If you ask a man what terrifies him more, an Ancient Greek myth or the what waits in depths of the sea, he will answer the latter.
Rachel’s sea is made of columns of polished tile. As she stands before the bathroom mirror, her hands skate across the reflective surface, grazing the glistening water from below.
Sharks in the wild are indeed worth fearing. Not because they are evil in any way—no, that part of it has been wildly mischaracterized—but because brutality is merely in their nature, bred into them from the very start. Status as apex predator means very little when those who seek to harm you come from among your own.
Rachel knows this all too well, knows just how early the struggle for survival begins. There are certain species of shark, scientists have found, for which it begins before they are even born. Within the womb, before they've even set eyes on this world, "the embryos begin eating one another," they say, "until only one, the fiercest and fittest, remains."
Even the embryos have fully-developed teeth, scientists say. For the benefit of their potential siblings, of course. All the better to eat them with.
Rachel can't imagine herself ever not having teeth.
She smiles at the thought. There's something quite fitting about it, taking your sisters into yourself. Not one soul in two bodies, but two souls in one. When Rachel looks into the mirror, she might have seen the shadow of a loss, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t need to seek out a sister that she never had; to find that missing part of herself, she needs only to seek out her own reflection.
She is no longer the divine daughter of a god (of gods); she is not the monster who tormented men (not mere children, but Ancient Greek warriors) when they slept. She is a beast, an earthly one, a mortal one, who was bred in the dark and who was raised—who raised herself—in the dark.
Rachel’s world is darkness, and yet her whole life, or at least the parts of it she can remember, she’s been encased in steel and glass and fluorescents that burn. That true darkness had lasted only for a second—only for a second did she feel it. The sinking of wood into her flesh. A moment of darkness, a moment of reprieve; the wood that burned within her saved her from the burn without. But only for a moment. Then
Floodlights.
All too soon, Sarah was gone, Rachel’s darkness ripped from her as they had wreathed her in light once more.
Honed in the deepest recesses of the ocean, a shark's eyes are not meant for the sun.
But perhaps that is precisely why Rachel yearns for it now. She can still feel the muzzle of Sarah’s pistol, pressed hot and unyielding against her cheek, and all she can think is more. She shies away from the light but cherishes the feeling within her, even if it burns her flesh—that steel, long ago tempered in ice. Even if it threatens to burn her alive. Because at least then she would know she was alive.
She’s lived in the dark for too long to pull herself out of it, but that warmth is just too intoxicating to resist. Is this what Hell is, burning in the dark? Well then, Hell is what Rachel seeks.
She is not divine. She is a fallen goddess. She is a beast and Hell feels like a return to the womb, engulfing her in darkness save for the that soft warm pulsing
red.
A heartbeat. All she sees is her own heartbeat pooling blood around her eyes.
She is mortal, a beast among men. She feels her lips curl around that word, beast, feels shark hiss through her teeth and smiles, because this is not her fall from grace, this is her apotheosis.
She looks in the mirror and no longer sees a mere myth, but something real. Something solid and built of flesh and blood and bone, and capable of ripping out your throat with her teeth.
She bled. She bleeds. She can draw blood.
She is not a daughter of Zeus, one of a million, an unwanted product of his permanently adolescent indiscretion.
She is a shark, who had to tear apart her sisters and swallow them whole just to be born.
…
Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing?
For some of us, the mythologies are different.Margaret Atwood, “My Life as a Bat”
…
They feared her once, when she was just an idea. The little girl they wanted, but they feared the woman she might become.
And yet.
The perfect woman was precisely what she crafted herself to be, flawless and pristine—wasn’t that the point of the eye, after all? They placed that new eye inside her skull without a second thought so the perfect woman she could remain.
And yet they feared her no longer.
Maybe that hadn't been the point, after all. Why had Dyad wanted to fix it, to fix her, so urgently? Perhaps it was so they wouldn’t have to confront the depth of her loss, her pain, her rage every time they looked at her.
Those scars would have been ghastly to look at, wouldn’t they?
She picks up her cell phone from the bathroom counter and dials. It picks up after barely one ring; Rachel doesn’t wait for a hello.
“Martin, dispatch a medical unit to my flat.”
Her voice is perfectly calm—impassive, unreadable.
“Ms. Duncan, is there someth—”
“Sooner would be preferable, Martin.”
“Yes, Ms. Duncan.”
Rachel selects a tube of blood red lipstick and twists it up slowly. She applies it meticulously to her lips, and then brings the lipstick up to the mirror to write a single word.
Don’t.
Her fingers then pick through the drawers beneath the countertop until they close around a small pair of scissors, glinting chrome even in the dimmed light.
What Dyad wanted, she whispers to herself under her breath as she turns the scissors over in the palm of her hand.
What I want. Her eyes dart upward to meet their reflections for an instant.
And then Rachel Duncan lifts the scissors to her face and plunges them into her left eye.