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It’s been two days since they were given all the files.
Two days. One day for each of them, Helena thinks idly, but that is enough and now they can go back to the days that are for both of them. She gave each piece of paper a cursory glance – Aryanna has their eyes, Janika has Sarah’s satisfied smirk curling up the edges of her mouth, Cosima looks delighted and beams vacantly at no one in particular – but is quickly bored with them. They’re hardly real, just copies. Subjects. Spikes of heart rates and neat lists of grades, proclivities.
Sarah hasn’t stopped looking.
They’re sprawled across the bed in their bedroom, Helena wrapping Sarah’s long dark hair around her finger to watch it purple and swell up. Sarah makes low irritated noises when Helena tugs too hard, and so Helena does it every now and again just to coax the noise from the back of Sarah’s throat. Without the sound, the room is silent. Every now and then: the crinkling of paper.
“Cosima likes girls,” Sarah says in fascination, and Helena groans, abandons Sarah’s hair so she can roll herself into a sitting position, lean her weight on her arm and look at Sarah. Helena’s sister is on her stomach on the bed, legs seesawing back and forth, brushing against Helena’s legs. Her toes curl and uncurl, from time to time. All of her focus is on the folders stacked neatly on the bed next to her. All of Helena’s focus is on Sarah.
“I know,” Helena snaps – whines – says. “We received the same information, Sarah, it’s hardly fascinating.”
“Do we like girls?” Sarah asks, tilting her head to look at Helena. Helena thinks about biting her lip, doesn’t, considers. She doesn’t feel anything in particular for girls, the same way she doesn’t feel anything in particular for boys. She doesn’t want any of them to touch her, not the way the surveillance footage shows Cosima and her girlfriend exchanging sloppy kisses on a grainy, black-and-white screen.
“I don’t know,” Helena says finally, “we don’t have enough of a data pool to confirm anything.”
“This is our data pool,” Sarah breathes delightedly, and Helena watches Sarah’s fingers trail fondly over lines of text and feels a stab of something like hatred.
“They’re not us, you know,” Helena snaps. “We’re not them.”
Sarah’s looking at her, some sort of unexpected hurt wrinkling between her brows, and Helena feels a raw horror that she’s done that to her sister’s face but she keeps going because she doesn’t quite know how to stop.
“Jennifer’s an excellent swimmer, we aren’t,” she says, “Alison likes pink, we don’t. Elizabeth is a quick study of languages – and Sarah, I’ve seen you try to speak German.”
“Shut up,” Sarah says, sounding fond – her language always gets rougher, with intimacy, and Helena’s relieved despite herself. She lies back down, curled onto her side in a way that feels vaguely fetal. Like this, she feels like Sarah’s reflection – Sarah’s face is a few inches from Helena’s face, and it is Helena’s face. Sarah reaches out and tucks a piece of Helena’s hair behind her ear, just like Sarah’s hair is tucked behind hers, and now they’re perfect mirrors.
“I just don’t understand how you aren’t more excited,” Sarah whispers sadly. “Helena, there are so many possibilities. There is so much to learn.”
“They’re like sheep,” Helena says. “They’re going to live out their dull, pointless lives and they will never realize that they are anything more than human.”
“It just seems like a waste, that’s all,” she mutters, “to get attached.”
Sarah makes a noncommittal humming sound and laces Helena’s fingers with her own, watches their joined hands with fascination – like it’s something new, and not something they do whenever they are alone.
“Alone,” rather.
“You read the files, though,” Sarah says. “Memorized all the useless trivia.” She sounds amused by it. Helena watches their fingers move back and forth, the same hand, the same nail polish applied just a few days ago. They’re getting better at it; they’d only had to repaint two nails total, between twenty. Ten percent is an acceptable margin of error, and far better than getting a manicure done professionally. No one else should touch them. No one.
“Of course I did,” Helena says. “Just because I don’t find them interesting hardly means I’m going to abandon the information.”
Also, she doesn’t say, I lost you when you opened Alison Hendrix’s file. Two days, Sarah. What else was there for me to do?
“Alison, Antoinette, Aryanna,” Sarah says in a sing-song. “Do you think we’ll ever meet them?”
Helena considers the question, lets go of Sarah’s hand and rolls onto her back to stretch her whole body. A shiver makes its delicious way down her stretched legs and extended arms. Her fingertips, dangling off the edge of the bed, do not quite touch the floor; they brush a discarded file, and scratch the forehead of a grinning photographic Katja Obinger. She’s meanly satisfied that her finger has left a dent. Right between the eyes.
Her shirt’s ridden up, slightly, and Sarah tugs it back down while she waits for Helena to answer the question.
“They’d have to be made self-aware, first,” Helena says slowly. She pulls a piece of Sarah’s hair separate from the rest and begins to braid it while she thinks. “I’d say there are a number of advantages and disadvantages, to doing that. You’d have to make sure it was the right time, the right – subject.”
“We’re the control,” Sarah says absentmindedly, reaching up to push a hand through her hair, bumping into Helena’s hand, withdrawing it. “We’re the right subject.”
“Yes,” says Helena, feeling warm all the way through. Sarah hums again, and says, “You’re right.”
“Of course I am,” says Helena. Pauses. “About what.”
Sarah snorts, hits Helena’s forearm limply in a way that turns into a gentle drag of fingers across the skin of Helena’s arm. “They’re not the same as us,” she says. “I don’t want them to be. It’s not as if I’d let any of them braid my hair.”
Good, Helena thinks. She’s already undone the first braid, gentle tugs through the softness of Sarah’s hair, and is beginning another one. Sarah keeps talking, rolling onto her back so the both of them are staring at the ceiling.
“They’re interesting,” Sarah says thoughtfully, “but bring them here…no. They’d ruin everything.”
“Imagine Cosima here,” Helena says, vindictively pleased with the easy familiarity of the name on her tongue, the way they could both picture it. Cosima doesn’t know them. Cosima couldn’t picture them anywhere.
Sarah groans. “I don’t want to imagine it,” she says. “The scientists would be infatuated. All that time we spent training them…she’d probably stick her arm out for the needle.”
She’d probably try to be our friend, Helena doesn’t say. “Hi,” she says instead, in a frankly terrible attempt at an American drawl. “I’m totally glad to meet you! Let’s all be friends!”
Sarah reaches between them and claps her hand over Helena’s mouth, effectively shutting her up. It’s the same temperature as Helena’s skin; Helena slits her eyes slightly, so the world blurs and she can almost believe the hand is hers. She would believe it, if her hands weren’t busy looping Sarah’s hair over itself, strand after strand.
“Maybe someday,” Sarah says lazily, to the silence. “Once we’re in charge of the program. Once we can control how they come in, what they see. When we’re older.”
She takes her hand from Helena’s mouth, but Helena stays silent. She’s torn: the idea of the two of them taking charge of everything they are is glowing behind her eyelids, but the idea of the other clones tramping through their hallways and their lives is an equally dark force. Like night and day.
She holds up the completed braid above her head, arms extended. The light hits the strands of hair and turns each individual brown strand into a single shining thing: between her fingers, Sarah’s hair is gold.