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i.
They’re six years old when they are taken away from their – adoptive, a-dop-tive, adjective: not real – parents, shuffled into a cold clean bedroom that isn’t quite dark enough. They’re in two beds. They’ve been in two beds for years now, but Sarah isn’t surprised when partway through the night there’s the dip-creak of the bed when Helena climbs into hers. Sarah holds open the blankets and Helena crawls in, curls up with Sarah in the little space the bed allows.
“We don’t have a Mummy and Daddy anymore, do we,” Sarah whispers into the top of Helena’s head. Helena crawled into Sarah’s bed, but that doesn’t mean they’re both not scared. Helena’s just better at showing it, and Sarah’s just better at telling it.
“I don’t think so,” Helena whispers back. Her breath is hitching with enough tears for both of them – they’d loved, so much, the idea of family. Sarah’s heart hurts, where it’s beating against the wall of Sarah’s chest – Sarah’s chest pressed against Helena’s chest, with Helena’s heart sounding the same angry drumbeat in the same double-time – and Sarah is suddenly furious that people could do this to them. How dare anyone make her sister cry.
“We don’t need them,” she says, suddenly. Helena sniffles one last time and scoots back to look at her. Her eyes are wide and shining in the dark.
“We do,” Helena says. “I can’t braid your hair, and we don’t know how to cook, and—”
“Not like that,” Sarah says importantly. “There are people to do – um – tasks like that. But they can leave and it doesn’t matter. Because we have each other.”
“We don’t need a family,” Helena whispers, like she’s testing out the words. “We can make a family. All on our own.”
She reaches out and grabs Sarah’s hand, tight enough to hurt. “We’ll never be separate,” she whispers. “I won’t ever leave you, Sarah, promise.”
Sarah squeezes Helena’s hand back. “I’ll never leave you either,” she whispers fiercely. “I’ll look after you, ‘lena. Cross my heart.”
ii.
Aldous Leekie looks like a skeleton. Sarah glares at him from her chair; she can hear Helena banging her heels against her own chair, the sound like Sarah’s heartbeat. Bang! Bang! Bang!
He’s not their daddy. They don’t have one of those. Maybe they never did.
If they did, if they had, he wouldn’t look like this: smiling smiling smiling, like he thinks he’ll make them smile too if he goes long enough. They’ve met with him twice already, in this big cold office, and every time he won’t stop smiling. Kindly, like death. Sarah frowns at him from her chair and doesn’t say anything.
“Hello, girls,” he says eventually, after it’s quiet for long enough. “Do you like your new room?”
They both hold their breath for another second, waiting for the other one to go first. There was one time a few weeks ago when someone asked if they wanted seconds and Helena yelled yes and Sarah said no and it was terrible and people looked at them like they were different, like they weren’t family at all. But they’re learning. They don’t disagree! Not really! But it’s better if they don’t say different things out loud. That would be bad.
“No,” says Sarah, finally. “Why d’you think we like pink?”
Mr. Leekie laughs, the sound that they hate: that’s cute, because you’re just little girls and you don’t know what you want. They do know what they want. They know exactly what they want. Everyone else is stupid.
“We’ll redecorate,” he says, smiling even bigger. “What’s your favorite color?”
“Black,” says Sarah, which is a lie.
“White,” says Helena, smiling just as big as Mr. Leekie. That’s a lie too. Helena doesn’t like any colors, and Sarah can’t pick a favorite. Sarah’s heart is yelling that they shouldn’t have said different colors, yelling that they should have agreed, but Sarah doesn’t think it counts if you’re lying. You’re allowed to want different things, if you’re lying. Right?
“Well,” says Mr. Leekie, raising his eyebrows in a way that is friendly and also, Sarah thinks, a lie, “I’ll tell the folks in charge of decorating what you want, and we’ll fix it for you.”
Sarah thinks of the way the ladies at the desk outside smile, the way it looks like it hurts, and smiles so her mouth hurts too. “Good,” she says. Next to her, Helena kicks her chair, once. Bang.
iii.
Helena makes a frustrated sound when she can’t get one of Sarah’s braids right – they get up two hours earlier than they have to, because they’re not very good at making the braids even and they have to be perfect. No one can think they aren’t doing alright on their own.
“Ow, ‘lena,” Sarah whines as Helena pulls the braid out, yanks hairs out of Sarah’s scalp. Helena stops, scoots around so she’s in front of Sarah. Her eyes are very wide.
“I didn’t mean to,” she says, fast. “I would never hurt you, not on purpose.”
“I know,” Sarah says and bites her lip. Helena’s biting her own lip, the same teeth, the same dent in their skin.
“Take the braid out,” Sarah says. “It’s not ours.”
Helena looks at her thoughtfully, narrows her eyes. “We don’t like braids,” she says, words soft in her mouth. She’s testing them again, deciding what she believes. “We’ve never liked braids, but we kept them because they reminded us of our – of before. Like, um, mourning.”
“Black clothes,” Sarah says softly. Helena turns around and Sarah pulls the hair ties off, runs her hands through the softness of Helena’s hair to free it. Helena’s hair is wavier than Sarah’s, because Helena only finished one of Sarah’s braids. Helena grabs Sarah’s hand and pulls her to the mirror, and they look at each other. They aren’t the girls they were when they were six. They’re older now. Sarah’s hair falls smooth down her back and Helena’s jumps around like the image on the television did, when they were – younger, and they couldn’t get a signal. Helena pets down her own hair with small, nervous hands. They look the same. They do. They look the same.
Sarah reaches across the space between them and grabs Helena’s hand, pulls it off her head and holds it. There. Now, in the mirror, they’re together. They’re a family. They’ll never be separate.
iv.
“Clones?” says Sarah, wrinkling her nose; next to her, Helena’s forehead is all tight in a way that means she’s really mad. A couple days ago Sarah had said you can’t keep kicking chairs, ‘cause I don’t, and so now neither of them do that anymore. But Helena’s foot looks like it’s in the middle of a swing, like it’s frozen. Like any second it will all come crashing down.
“Yes,” says Mr.-Leekie-call-me-Aldous. “All over the world, little girls just like the two of you! But you’re the only ones who know.” He winks. Sarah moves her eyes so far to the side that they hurt so that she can see Helena without having to turn her head. Helena’s blurry, but she’s looking back at Sarah. She doesn’t believe him either, but unlike a lot of Aldous’ lies Sarah doesn’t know why he’s saying this one. Maybe it’s supposed to make them stop being close, because now they’ll think they have more family? That’s stupid. There’s no – no proof.
Then he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out file folders, takes out a photo and puts it on his desk. Sarah looks at the photo and feels like screaming, out of nowhere and all around the inside of her throat. She wants to throw her chair. She wants to throw a temper tantrum, like a baby. She imagines that the scream and the hate and the anger are like sticky peanut butter, in the inside of her throat. Swallows and swallows until it’s all gone.
See: Sarah can always tell the two of them apart. So can Helena. Sometimes, other people can’t tell, but in photos and videos and mirrors the two of them always know who’s who.
The girl in the photo isn’t either of them. She’s just – she’s just not. Sarah doesn’t even have to reach; Helena’s hand is already in the gap between them, and Sarah squeezes it tight-tight-tight. Out of the corner of her eye she can see him frowning. Aldous. She can see Aldous frowning, because he wants the two of them to be separate. But that’s stupid too, and besides, Sarah’s afraid. It’s not them it’s not them it’s not them. It’s not.
The inside of her mouth tastes like peanut butter. She pretends her eyes are cold like metal and looks up at Aldous.
“Who is she,” she says, flatly.
“Katja Obinger, from Germany,” Aldous says. “She likes chocolate chip cookies, and dancing to music.”
“You said she was just like us,” says Helena. Sarah’s proud of her: her voice is flat too. You can’t hear anything in it. “That’s not like us at all.”
“Did she tell you what kind of cookies she liked?” Sarah says. She’s staring at the photo. It doesn’t look like the photos they take of her and her sister. Katja doesn’t look like she has ever been in a lab.
“You girls have a lot of questions!” Aldous says with a laugh. “You see, what we’re trying to figure out is how all of you are different. And we find that out through asking questions – just like you said, Sarah – but also through talking to the people who know all of you best. We call those people monitors.”
“We don’t have one,” says Helena.
“Well, no,” Aldous says. “But the two of you are an exception! We can talk to you directly. It’s part of the experiment – it’s called a control.”
“We were hoping to see how the two of you were different,” he says in a voice that is almost like a whisper, like he’s pretending it’s a secret. Sarah taps her finger against Helena’s hand once: don’t believe him. “But you’re making it tough for us, by never splitting up.”
“How about this,” he says, loud again, leaning back in his chair, looking like he’s about to give them a special present. “You two can be together, but sometimes you’ll split up—”
“No,” Sarah says.
“—for classes and tests,” he finishes. He looks surprised that Sarah said no. She is still really mad about people telling Sarah and Helena what they think Sarah and Helena should want.
“You’re the scientist,” Sarah says, trying to make her words sharp like knives. “You figure out how to fix your experiment. It’s not our job to do bad things just so you can get what you want.”
Aldous stares at her for a second, and Sarah’s stomach flips when she sees that his eyes are cold. Really, really cold. But then they go warm again, and he smiles.
“Just think about it,” he says. But it’s too late: he can pretend he is nice, but now Sarah knows for sure that he doesn’t care about them at all.
v.
They’re split up for classes and tests. Sarah takes German, Helena takes French; Helena goes to the lab on Tuesday, Sarah goes on Wednesday.
It’s miserable.
It’s mis-er-a-ble and it’s all Aldous Leekie’s fault. When Sarah thinks about it, this, the way everyone is trying to separate them, she thinks of the way Aldous’ eyes had gleamed.
Because of this, she wants nothing more than to make sure it doesn’t work.
Sarah learned the word backfire recently: backfire, noun, to bring a result opposite of the one expected or planned. At the end of the day they are vicious when they check on each other, smoothing tiny thumbs across needle marks and never unclasping their hands. When they are together again they do not let go of each other, they do not leave the room one at a time. They stay up late whispering what they learned, what they saw, what they did, so that both of them know, so it’s like both of them were in two places at once. So it’s like they aren’t really separate, not really, not really.
It’s hard, holding both of their lives in her brain. But she can do it. If anyone asked what she did – if anyone ever asked them about their days, besides each other – she could say yesterday I ate breakfast and then I went to English class and also ran on a treadmill and then I went to German class and also solved puzzles; she could describe the burn of her muscles, the two different papers she wrote. She could do it.
No one asks. They tell each other, every little piece, under the blankets in their bed at night or crushed together in the armchair by the fake window in their room. (It looks like a window but it’s just bars of light, bright enough to make Sarah’s eyes hurt. It’s fake. Everything is fake.) The armchair is tough to see from the mirror over the dresser. Sarah’s been thinking a lot about monitors lately: Aldous said there wasn’t anyone watching them, but something about that seems like a lie. Until they know for sure no one is looking they stay very quiet. Until they know for sure no one is looking they try to keep out of sight.
Sarah’s curled up with Helena in the chair and scribbling away at her German exercises while Helena calmly does her own French homework. Sarah’s is fill in the blanks. Was ist der obere Teil des Körpers? Kopf. Was bekommen Sie, wenn Sie krank sind? Schuss. It should be easy, but it’s not – she’s not sure she’s getting any of them right and she hates it when things aren’t easy, hates the way it claws all through her. She tilts her head so her face is buried in Helena’s neck, and Helena stops her own homework to rest her chin on Sarah’s head.
“I don’t want to go to German,” Sarah breathes, not loud enough that anyone could hear it.
“You have to,” Helena breathes back, “or we’ll get in trouble.”
“It’s not fair,” Sarah mutters. “You’re good at languages, you do it.”
Then she stops. Thinks. Sits up, eyes Helena. They look the same. They look exactly the same. She shuffles so she’s angled towards Helena, leans in and whispers in her ear, “What if you did do it.”
She leans back, eyes wide, smile beginning at the corner of her mouth. Helena looks at her with her brow wrinkled, and then looks down. Her left hand is wrapped firmly around the pencil. Sarah’s holding her own pencil loosely in her right hand. Helena looks back up. Raises her eyebrows.
She’s right. They’d know. Sarah doesn’t bite her lip, just moves the pencil to the other hand and looks at her homework. Was ist Deine Lieblingsfarbe?
R-o-t, she writes, the handwriting shaking like she’s afraid. She makes an angry noise and erases it. Writes it again. Rot. Helena nudges her; in the margins of her own homework, in stumbling careful letters, is rouge rouge rouge. The third one looks better than the first one. Each copy is a little better.
Helena stands up from the chair, walks over to the dresser under the big round mirror and pulls out pieces of paper. She hands one to Sarah, and Sarah takes it with a cramping left hand. Rot, she writes, over and over. Rot.
“Is that your favorite color today?” Helena asks curiously, and Sarah keeps writing – rot rot rot – and thinks about it. Red is the color of: blood. Blood in neat vials pulled from Sarah-and-Helena’s arm, marked with the tag number that belongs to both of them and put on a shelf.
Red is not really the color of anything else. Not here. Red is just theirs.
“Yes,” she says, and keeps writing. Red red red red red.
It takes a long time, but at the end there is a whole page that’s red. Two pages. Two pages, and Sarah’s hand screams when she wraps it around the pencil. She grabs Helena’s homework and puts her pencil to the top of it.
Helena, she writes. The word is perfect.
vi.
They wait to switch until they know they can do it perfectly, until they know all the little tricks, the twitches. They build the mirror of each other one perfect piece at a time.
They start with history class, which they have together: two chairs in an empty classroom, the tutor going on and on and writing in marker on the clear glass board. The lessons aren’t on Napoleon or World War II – they’re on companies that make drugs, companies that run experiments, companies that run other companies. In 1986 the director of Primorez Pharmaceutical Co. feuded – that means fought, girls – with the Supreme Court. Why is that? Helena, stop fidgeting.
But it isn’t Helena. It’s Sarah, who spent their last lesson – patent laws – watching Helena. The lesson before that Helena watched Sarah. It makes Sarah feel good when Helena’s watching her; it’s like she’s more real. She has to stop herself from sitting up straighter, smiling with pride.
She can’t sit up. That would – skew things. So she doesn’t.
Sarah stays slouched in her chair, and Helena watches that. Helena sits up straight, and Sarah watches that. Sarah tucks her hair behind her ears and runs her fingers through it sometimes – just to make sure it is not still in braids, just to remember. Helena shifts from time to time, like all the times she meant to kick a chair are rattling through her now.
(Sarah feels bad, like it’s her fault. One time she catches herself wishing they could go outside, play in the park like she’s learned children their age sometimes do. But that’s a stupid hope. That’s stupid. So.)
In the spaces between lessons, the times before and after meals, Helena slouches down, pauses every now and then to run an uncomfortable hand through her hair. Sarah whispers to the little pieces of her blood that they are Helena’s blood, sends them rattling through her arms and legs until she feels like she can’t sit still. Until she feels like she has to start running.
She doesn’t know if that’s what Helena feels, the need to run. But when Sarah lets her body yell at her, it yells run run run without stopping. So that is what it says, when she is Helena. Run. Run. Run.
They start switching, back and forth. History is easiest, because their tutor doesn’t care about them that much and they both get good grades anyways. Writing class would be difficult if they hadn’t already practiced switching hands; it’s not as if they have different things to say about poems.
(At first she’d wondered why: like the lies Aldous has told them, their lessons all seem to steer them towards a point. Poems don’t help anything. She’d muttered as much to Helena on the third hour of marking up some stupid Shakespeare sonnet with red pen – she’d liked the part about And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee? but not the rest – and Helena had shifted a little in her seat and breathed back, confusingly, “Poems are like people.”
Sarah could have been mad that Helena figured it out before she did – but Helena is Sarah, and Sarah is Helena, and so she was only proud. Helena explained it to her in a low low breath, that you pick apart the words of a poem to say what it is actually saying. You pick apart the pieces of people to see what they are actually saying. Red means passion, violence, chaos, love. Helena fidgeting means she wants to move. Sarah fidgeting means she wants to run.)
They try the real game for Sarah’s German class. They wake up. They get ready. Sarah’s heart pounds on the right-left side of her chest. (Right, noun: correct. Right, noun: opposite of left.) Sarah wears Helena’s second-favorite dress, the red one with the white stitching. Helena wriggles her feet into Sarah’s shoes.
“Bye, ‘lena,” Helena says softly.
“Goodbye, Sarah,” Sarah says back. Helena moves down the hall one way and Sarah watches her go, the way she is smaller and smaller until she is gone completely. Then she turns the other way, and goes.
vii.
“How are you feeling, Helena?” asks their psychologist, light reflecting off of her glasses.
The one-way mirror that takes up half of the wall reflects them back: the psychologist, short red hair, glasses, restless tap-tap of pen against paper. The subject, long dark hair, sitting perfectly still.
“I’m fine,” Sarah says. She smiles.
viii.
When they are fourteen, they are moved out of their familiar room in the building of the DYAD Institute – familiar, that is, in the way it never fit. Familiar in the mockery of the mirror over the dresser, and the chair that grew too small for them both to sit in. Not enjoyable, no, but it was familiar: if Sarah closes her eyes now she can remember it, leaning against the arm of the chair and going over Helena’s notes from the last meeting, Helena’s hand petting the top of her head absentmindedly. It was all they knew.
Their new apartment has several chairs – but then again, it has several rooms. They enter together but split; Helena wanders from room to room, trailing her fingers over the walls, and Sarah moves in a sort of dream straight for the floor-to-ceiling window. It takes up a whole wall, and the view outside is almost more than Sarah can bear. They’ve never had a window. The city sprawls below them and it’s dizzying, the weight of it, how quickly and chaotically everything moves. She can’t stop staring.
From behind her, there’s the almost timid sound of a clearing throat. Sarah’s eyes roll, irritated, before she can stop herself – she’d almost forgotten their other new piece of furniture. They had been told in advance, of course, that their departure from a space filled with security cameras and other watching eyes would mean having a personal monitor. Despite herself, she’d managed to forget.
“Yes?” she asks sharply, turning around. There’s a split-second of warm comfort when she mistakes her own reflection for Helena standing next to her, but that’s stupid and she ignores it. Helena is in one of two bedrooms, idly investigating the boundaries of their space.
Or looking for cameras. It really depends on who you ask.
Sarah looks at him, their monitor: entirely forgettable in his neatly-cut suit, pale eyes, neutral expression. His name is Sebastian. Sarah hardly feels the need to remember it, though – she could not care less about him, except for the inconvenience of his presence. He prevents Helena and Sarah from being alone together. That is the entirety of him.
(She’s amused herself previously by thinking of the Sabines, the tribe that fought with Rome. But that was never their favorite story – Romulus and Remus fought, disagreed, and it ended with one of them dead. They’ve viewed it as more of a cautionary tale than an example.
Do not disagree. Do not fight. If you separate, you die.)
“Is there anything you need,” Sebastian asks flatly.
“Our belongings are being shipped,” Helena calls as she moves into the second bedroom – too flat to be a question. Sarah watches Sebastian’s attention leave her, briefly; he has yet to learn that to talk to one of them is to talk to both of them.
“Yes,” he replies, eyes flicking between Sarah in front of him and Helena behind him. Sarah smiles, fake enough to hurt. She’s grown very good at that; they both have.
“Good,” she says. “Nothing further.”
With that she turns back to the window, a clear dismissal. There is a whole world out there, one they’ve never known. Sarah wonders which one of the bedrooms has a clear view, which one they’ll be sleeping in. Helena is probably looking out the window in that room right now – but they’re seeing different things, different views entirely. Sarah tracks one bright red car as it makes its patient way through the city’s arteries. She is fourteen years old and if she wanted to she could make a phone call right now that would have the driver of that car dead. It’s comforting.
Sarah ignores the sound of heavy footsteps leaving but smiles despite herself at the soft pad of her sister’s footsteps as they cross the room, settle next to her.
“The beds aren’t very big,” Helena sighs, sounding put-out. “They didn’t want us sleeping in the same one.”
“What a shame,” Sarah murmurs; her hand, where it dangles, brushes against Helena’s. The familiar arches of bone, so close and yet so far from her own. She doesn’t look away from the world outside; if she unfocuses her eyes, she can see the dreamy blur of their reflections, right next to each other.
“They’re comfortable, otherwise,” Helena says.
No cameras, she means. Unheard-of luxury.
“That’ll make a change,” Sarah says back, with no particular inflection.
Helena’s hand wraps around Sarah’s, and the two of them walk hand-in-hand to a space that is finally entirely theirs.
ix.
Sebastian is politely but firmly placed in one bedroom, while Helena and Sarah take the other. Helena was right: the bed is cramped, but they manage. Sarah gets used to waking in the middle of the night with Helena’s sweat-sticky limbs sprawled across her own; thinks, comfortingly, of wombs. Once they were as close as anyone could be. It sometimes seems like their whole lives are trying to get back to that.
Tonight Sarah lies awake and stares out the window in the dark, unable to sleep even with Helena’s comforting weight tucked against her chest. She is thinking. A week ago they were given files for the first time, Aldous with his same dead man’s smile from across that same desk. Project Leda. Katja, Cosima; Jennifer, Janika. Sarah hadn’t realized how far the project spread, and there is something that’s either excitement or fear stretching her ribcage.
“Tu penses trop fort,” Helena breathes sleepily, burrowing her head into Sarah’s chest like she can block the noise of Sarah’s thoughts out. For some reason when Helena is tired she lapses more easily into other languages; Sarah finds it endearing.
“Rendors-toi,” she whispers back, but Helena sighs and scoots up so her face is next to Sarah’s. Her eyes, when she opens them, are almost all Sarah can see in the dark. Her breath smells like toothpaste and the sour taste of sleep.
“What are you thinking about,” she asks.
“The others,” Sarah says truthfully, and Helena makes an irritated sound of discontent. Her nose scrunches up in something like a pout.
“I stopped considering,” she says. “It’s been days since I’ve looked at the files.”
“Why?” Sarah asks.
Helena pauses, sighs a breath through her nose. This isn’t a new conversation, although this specific topic is new. Ever since Aldous told them about Katja-Obinger-who-likes-chocolate-chip it’s been something to pass back and forth between the two of them. Out there, many other girls who share their face but not the essential thing that makes them the same. The same, but not the same.
For a short time Sarah entertained the idea of being friends with them – Elizabeth, who had a red bike she rode everywhere, or Cosima with her seashell collection. But she was afraid that somehow there wouldn’t be enough of her heart for all of them, and so she’d decided to only choose Helena. It was a safer plan. Besides, she promised. She said she wouldn’t leave, that she would be Helena’s family.
Sometimes she thinks Helena could smell it, that Sarah had considered loving the others just as much as her. Whenever Sarah brings it up Helena gets snappish, irritated.
“I don’t want to be biased,” Helena mutters. “The time’s going to come when we’ll have to make difficult choices, and I don’t want to make a stupid decision just because I like Beth’s bike.”
Oh.
Sarah had liked Beth’s bike.
Sarah had liked Beth’s bike, because Sarah and Helena had never had one. For a second Sarah can’t breathe, because she’s so hurt – she tells Helena everything. She’d never thought Helena would use it against her. She didn’t think Helena would be cruel. It’s a small thing, one little jab, but it means Helena remembers everything Sarah told her; more than that, it means Helena is saving these things, and could bring them up at any time. To hurt her. Could bring them up at any time to hurt her.
Helena’s breath stutters for a second, and she wriggles her arm free to cup Sarah’s chin in her hand. Her elbow jabs Sarah in the liver, painful but not to the point that Sarah needs to move. Helena’s thumb strokes back and forth across the curve of Sarah’s chin and Sarah closes her eyes, tells herself fiercely that it makes up for it.
“That hurt,” Helena says, wonderingly. “I hurt you. Sarah, Sarah, je suis tellement désolé.”
Sarah’s mouth hurts with the sharp spikes of you promised. She swallows it, says nothing. Swallows down you were never supposed to hurt me, swallows down I don’t want to be afraid of you. The inside of her mouth tastes like peanut butter. She feels like a child, hates it.
“Sarah?” Helena says again, desperate. “I could keep going through languages, if you’d like. Triste, triste, triste.”
Abruptly, like a switch thrown, all the anger Sarah felt is gone. Helena is her sister. She can’t be angry with her, not Helena – not Helena, looking at Sarah with wide and desperate eyes, her thumb tracing frantic circles against Sarah’s skin. Sarah feels a pulse rabbiting along against the skin of her neck, isn’t sure if it’s the pulse in Helena’s wrist or the pulse in Sarah’s throat. She pulls her own arm free and wraps her hand around Helena’s wrist. Her thumb is pressed against Helena’s pulse point, nestled between the delicate cage of Helena’s bones.
“We can’t fight,” Sarah whispers. “We can’t.”
(Do not disagree. Do not fight. If you separate—)
Helena nods urgently, pulls her hand down so her fingers can lace with Sarah’s, Sarah’s palm against the back of her hand. Helena’s hand splayed flat against Sarah’s throat.
“Do you remember what we promised?” she asks, and before the breath can settle Sarah says, easily, “We’ll never be separate.”
“You have to promise me the others won’t come between us,” Helena says, coolly – she could almost get away with it, but from the urgent twitching of her hand, the way her eyes dart to Sarah’s and away again like moths to light.
“How could they?” Sarah asks, curious despite herself. “We don’t know them. I don’t know them. None of them are a mirror to me.”
Helena looks down, and her eyelashes brush against her cheek. This close Sarah could count them, probably, but she knows how many there are: just as many as she has. Helena’s smiling slightly – because all of the other clones are mirrors to Helena, Helena with all her body switched around so she and Sarah could fit together right.
“I promise,” Sarah says, holding it on her tongue. Helena nods, her eyes drooping shut. “I promise,” she whispers back.
They fall asleep just as they are: their joined hands pressed together on Sarah’s throat, their foreheads nudged up against each other, breathing each other’s breaths. In and out. In and out. In and out, the whole night through.
x.
This conversation takes place behind a locked door, in a room where the mirror has nothing behind it but a wall. All of their conversations take place there, nowaways – they spend as much time in the bedroom as they can get away with, checking it each day to make sure no cameras have sprung up in their absence, locking the door to keep their monitor out. Sarah listens to Sebastian pacing his dull way around the apartment and smiles to herself, smiles to Helena.
(It’s the same thing, of course. They are the same thing.)
They take an extra-long time in the morning to get ready, although it does not take them that much time – brush-hair-choose-clothes-go. There’s a luxury in making plans for the day out loud, instead of in whispers and the secretive brush of fingers against palms. Who will go where? Who will be who? Helena’s due to meet with their psychiatrist today, but Sarah’s always been better at telling the woman what she wants to hear. So Helena will go to the meeting Sarah is supposed to sit in on, take notes in an elegant right-handed scrawl.
It’s easy. They haven’t been caught.
How have they not been caught?
Sarah’s vaguely ashamed of everyone at the DYAD – it makes her remember the bright string of the word stupid. She remembers the thoughts of her younger self with a sort of vague curiosity, like admiring photographs in an old album or rewinding and replaying ancient videotapes. Such disdain, for a child; then again, some might call her a child still. And she still has the disdain.
She’s all tangled up in it now, fixing the collar of her dress, eyeing the pulled-down corners of her mouth in the mirror. Yesterday Sarah switched with Helena partway through the day, in the bathroom on the third level. On the way out she happened upon Aldous, who called her Helena. She’s satisfied, certainly, but also furious that it’s so easy. Sometimes she hates everyone except Helena so much—
“Our shoes are too small,” Helena says, jarring Sarah from her thoughts. Helena’s bent over in an attempt to pull on her loafer – schoolgirl-neat when paired with tights, skirt, blouse – and her hair has fallen over her face like a curtain, leaving her faceless. She is nothing but an irritable voice, saying “It’s all too small.”
Sarah hums, looks at herself in the mirror on the edge of the room. The clothes fit fine; the shoes are beginning to pinch enough to hurt, but neither of them have complained about it because Helena likes the little jabs of pain she gets when she walks. That isn’t what Helena means.
This is too small. The soft pad of footsteps as they walk from room to room, the muted colors, the neat shrinking into labeled boxes. Too small. It pinches, and not in a good way. It’s still reminiscent of the before, all those black clothes. The mourning of a life that they no longer live. She’s irritated it’s taken them this long to notice.
“What do you suggest,” Sarah asks idly.
For a second, the only sound in the room is Helena’s even breaths – so even Sarah’s sure she could time them, play piano with her sister’s breathing as a metronome. Sarah watches the breath rise in and out of her own chest in the mirror. Perfectly in sync.
“I think,” Helena says thoughtfully, “we’ll know it when we see it.”
xi.
They meet Marion Bowles three weeks later. She is tall, and her heels reshape her spine into steel. She smiles at them in a fake, painful twist of lips; Sarah thinks of her own attempts, feels shame like a stab in the chest. She feels small, and unclean.
Yes. That’s it.
Marion talks to both of them, and Sarah pokes at the burning shame in her chest, feeds the fire of it until it becomes anger. It’s the same not-us anger that sparked to life when Aldous Leekie separated them for the first time, the same anger that roars at the thought of the other clones, the word same. It’s almost a comfort: it makes things clearer, sharper. Sarah watches the slow syrupy movements of Marion Bowles’ blinking, the neat lines of her clothing, eats every piece of Marion with her eyes until Marion finally leaves them with false smiles and platitudes if you ever need—
As if Sarah and Helena have ever needed anyone.
When Marion leaves, Sarah looks at Helena. Helena is still looking after Marion. Every small curve of Helena’s body screams hunger. When Helena meets Sarah’s eyes, the hunger is still there; for a second, Helena is devouring Sarah whole.
On the ride home they’re practically vibrating; oh, they’d let the rest of the day pass normally, completed tests and were tested on, but they’ve kept the secret like sugar melting under their tongues. When they arrive at the apartment, Sebastian a faithful shadow two steps behind, they lock themselves in their bedroom immediately. He doesn’t get to listen. This is how they make themselves: alone.
“Her mouth was red,” Sarah says. “Red is ours.”
She means: we’ll take what she’s given us, even if she doesn’t know she’s given it to us. We’ll make it better. We’ll make it ours.
“I appreciated her taste in shoes,” Helena says lightly, but her eyes are just as bright as Sarah’s. Heels hurt more than pinching loafers. Heels make you tall. Heels make other people feel small, and unclean. This is what they learn.
They wait months to go shopping, in the hopes that two and two won’t be put together immediately. The mere thought of someone writing imprinting or mother figure or copying in a report somewhere sends anger scraping hot and rough down Sarah’s throat. They’ve spent years carefully cultivating what is written in their file – they’ve given Helena a Remus complex, said that of the two of them Sarah values winning more. The introduction of some desperate hunger for a mother figure unravels all their hard work.
The words “Marion Bowles” do not escape either of their mouths as they take the car, head into downtown with Sebastian dragged behind them like a dog on some unseen leash. Every time her specter shows up in Sarah’s mind Sarah banishes her, firmly. She has no power here. Not in the racks of blouses and blazers, not in the mirror of the changing room where Helena and Sarah stand side by side. Weigh each other.
Helena smoothes the line of a dress that hangs on Sarah’s shoulders, her fingers lingering with some sense of ownership. She frowns thoughtfully.
“I think so,” she says, and Sarah pulls the edge of Helena’s skirt down, hums a noise of agreement. It works: in tight skirts and fitted blazers they look older, sharper, something that is almost the same as dangerous. They look more and more like themselves – or, rather, the people they are learning to become.
They buy clothes mostly in black and white. It’s a joke. It’s also easier to coordinate, if you only have two colors to work with. Helena wearing red, Sarah not? Almost embarrassing, that difference. Something to be ashamed of. So: two dresses in virginal white, two crisp black blazers. Two by two, each fitting them perfectly. They try on heels, Sarah sliding Helena’s foot into her shoe in a way that makes her think, oddly, of Cinderella – but then again, neither of the sisters were real. Their feet weren’t the same size, and so parts of them were chopped off.
Helena’s foot in the shoe is a perfect fit. They bring pairs of heels – two by two by two – in boxes back to their apartment. Sebastian carries most of them, mute displeasure beginning to work its slow way across the lines of his face. What did he think he was getitng himself into, Sarah wonders. She does hope he won’t be any trouble.
But that consideration is for another time. For now Sarah occupies herself and their monitor by having him test her in Mandarin out in the living room. In the bedroom, she knows, Helena is pulling on a pair of heels and walking in circles. Click, click, click. The sound of pieces of their life slotting into place.
xii.
The day before they turn fifteen they go shopping again – this time for makeup, lipstick and mascara and concealer, concealer, concealer. There’s a certain thrill to the fact that Sarah can hear Helena walking wherever she is in the store, followed as she is by the clicking sounds of her heels. Sarah’s heels. The same pair, the same feet, the same raw tender beginnings of blisters pricking along the edges of those feet. The same, the same, the same.
When they get (home) back to their apartment, they empty the bags on the bed and go to work; there’s no need for a mirror when you are using your own face. A pile of discarded products grows at the foot of the bed. This one makes Helena’s face look soft, brings out the babyish curve of her cheeks; this one makes Sarah’s eyes look – apparently – a disconcerting amount like Beth’s. Eventually Sarah says: “Wait.” Helena loosens her fingers from around Sarah’s throat, where she was holding Sarah still, and Sarah slithers off the bed. Pads to the closet, opens the door. She has to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf, but sure enough: her fingertips brush against a plastic box, all cold smooth edges. Sarah can feel the curious weight of Helena’s eyes on her, making their idle way up the stretched lines of her legs, her aching fingertips. She gets the box. It’s smooth in her hands, and the lid clicks open easily when she sits down on the bed and opens it.
She isn’t precisely sentimental – why linger on memories, after all, when all you’ve ever had is sitting right next to you? They’ve never dwelt on the past. The two of them remade themselves on their own, after all.
And yet: Sarah kept the box. She opens it, rifles with a forced carelessness through the contents – a folded-up page ripped from a book, a scrap of newspaper reads —ientists incinerated in lab e—, a hair tie, a tea bag – and pulls out a tarnished tube of lipstick.
“Where did you get that,” Helena says, suddenly still.
“I stole it,” Sarah says, “the night they said we were going to be leaving.” She opens the tube, twists it back and forth and watches the lipstick duck in and out of its hiding place. She still remembers: six years old and so angry, not understanding the hissing from downstairs. Our daughters, experiment, Project Leda, Project Leto, separate, together. Replacement. Now, of course, she can fill in the pieces – but then she had left Helena sleeping in their bedroom and tiptoed into their parents’ bedroom, still furious to the point of howling.
She’d thought at the time of smashing the mirror. Their mother—
…
One of the scientists who had raised them had a large vanity, in the bedroom she shared with her partner. Sarah and Helena weren’t allowed, except when the woman they still called Mummy brought them in, pretended to do their makeup while the man they called Daddy filmed. Not on their own. Never on their own.
Sarah crossed the room, opened the vanity. The same thing that would later make her Helena-limbs yell run was telling her to take. She eyed the mascara, the perfume, settled on the lipstick tube. When Sarah closes her eyes she can still see it: the achingly small shape of her hand, clenched tight around the metal, shoving it in her pocket. Running back to their bedroom to make sure Helena hadn’t left her in the five minutes she’d been away, tuning out the yelling from downstairs: replacement, surrogate, Project Leto, dau—
She opens her eyes. The tube of lipstick looks much smaller now, in her hand. She’s grown.
“I remember,” Helena says quietly, looking at the lipstick tube, fingers clenching and unclenching on the bedspread. Sarah had botched the eyeshadow earlier, so the skin around Helena’s eyes is a smeared pink mess – she looks like she hasn’t gotten enough sleep, or maybe like she hasn’t slept in years. “You vanished. I thought you’d left.”
“I did come back,” Sarah says, sitting next to Helena on the bed; she shoves the makeup to the side so she can lean on Helena, rest her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I came back. I made you a promise, Helena.”
Helena nods, says, “We ended up reading from that enormous book of mythology that – the professors had insisted we keep around.”
“It was hardly subtle,” Sarah says. Helena makes an irritated sound at that past injustice and releases her control over her body, flops across the bed. Sarah shifts so her head is on Helena’s chest, the reassuring sound of her heartbeat a background to their half-hearted storytelling.
“Once there was a woman who gave birth to gods,” Helena says, her voice lilting over the syllables in a way that veers between loving and mocking.
“Her name was Leto, and she carried the children of gods in her belly,” Sarah continues. “No place on earth would have her, for the gods were angry with her. She had reached too high. They were displeased.”
“Zeus, the king of gods, raised an island for her to give birth on,” Helena whispers, and they finish at the same time, “And she birthed gods.”
“Apollo and Artemis,” Sarah says, reaching out to twine Helena’s fingers with her own.
“Night and day,” Helena says dreamily.
They lie like that in contented silence for a moment, mulling over the story – Leto, Leto, Leto, mother of gods. Leda’s children could only fumble for godhood; Leto’s children were born and took their seats on that immortal pantheon. Leto’s children were never anything like ordinary.
With her left hand Helena reaches around Sarah, snags the lipstick tube between neat fingers. Sarah thinks for a moment about Prometheus, who stole from gods. Brought the fire down to mankind, scorched the nonbelievers – but she’s mixing her mythology up. Prometheus was never wrathful. Unfortunately. She watches Helena click the tube open, twist out the sharp red blade of the lipstick. There’s a heavy weight of ceremony in the air, like the shivering feeling before a storm.
Sarah sits up, curls into herself, watches Helena do the same. Helena sits up across from her and brushes that long dark hair out of her face, lets it spill like fresh new ink across her shoulders. She wraps her fingers around Sarah’s chin; Sarah can feel her pulse beating against Helena’s fingers, Helena’s fingers against her throat.
She breathes, watches Helena’s breaths cycle in and out of her chest at the same time as she draws the lipstick over the curve of Sarah’s lips. After all this time, they are still perfectly in sync – Sarah can’t imagine a time when they aren’t, not when Helena’s eyes are so solemn on Sarah’s face.
Helena purses her lips, once – mwah – and then hands the tube of lipstick to Sarah. Sarah paints Helena’s lips, like making up a doll, creating her sister through the slow bloody path of the lipstick across her face. Or maybe she’s excavating her – maybe this is who they have been this whole time.
Somewhere, a clock is chiming midnight in slow, relentless sounds. Somewhere all of their mortal siblings are sleeping, dreaming of godhood; somewhere Aldous Leekie is going through his life unaware of the monsters he has not made. For now Sarah leans back, caps the lipstick, drags Helena by the hand so they can stand next to each other in the mirror.
They turn fifteen like this, on the cusp of one night and another day, looking at themselves in the mirror.
They turn fifteen like this:
Together.