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+0.5 hours (8:30am)
Right now, Helena is on a plane, and Sarah is sitting in the backseat of a car driving in the opposite direction. She’s twisting a ring around her thumb in slow, methodical movements. Twist, twist, twist. Her sister is somewhere over the sea, sitting in an airplane seat with a ring on her index finger. Twist, twist, twist.
-15 hours (5:00pm)
“They’re sending me to Germany,” Helena says as soon as she steps through the door, in a pidgin mix of German, French, and Italian. A few months ago they were pulled into Aldous’ office – again – and told that they’d have two monitors, now. Girls, this is Casper. He is Helena’s monitor. Sebastian will stay with Sarah.
(Stupid. Stupid. They should have realized.)
Ever since then, Casper has trailed after Helena just as faithfully as Sebastian always did. Because of this, English isn’t safe. They don’t know what languages he knows. None of them are safe to use.
“You?” Sarah says, closing the lid of her laptop; the report is forgotten, momentarily, for the earthquake shock of that one word. You, pronoun: not us. Helena crosses the room, settles next to Sarah on the couch. Sarah watches out of the corner of her eye as Casper wanders into the kitchen. Sebastian is looking out the window. Sarah reaches out, quickly, and tucks Helena’s hair behind her ear – traces the curve of Helena’s ear briefly, with the tips of her fingertips. Assured Helena is still there, she drops her hand.
“Me,” Helena says, in English this time. She looks about as nauseous as Sarah feels, and she switches into pidgin again. “This is why you shouldn’t have let me take over your German lessons, Sarah.”
“I’m perfectly proficient,” Sarah hisses, one finger tapping against the lid of her laptop in agitation. Helena painted her nails last week. Helena will be in Germany next week. If Sarah’s nail chips, she’ll have to repaint it herself. She’ll be alone. The bed will be cold. She’ll just be Sarah, no Helena-and-. She’ll be alone.
“I’ll be playing a part in the monitor selection process for Katja,” Helena says, pressing one finger to Sarah’s to stop the tapping. “Ever since she transferred schools…”
Sarah knows the story – read it in Katja’s diary, in the angry scrawl of a self-obsessed teenager. It allowed Sarah to feel pleasantly above it all, sitting next to Helena, paging through the printouts of the diary while sipping tea. Occasionally she would get Helena’s cup, wince at the taste of sugar – but even that wasn’t enough to distract, not really. Watching the drama unfold through diary entries and the weekly reports of Katja’s biology teacher had been fascinating. Like a television melodrama…except less stilted, because all of the drama was real.
Sarah pulls out her Blackberry, flips to her schedule, begins changing the color-coding to reflect Helena’s absence. Blocks of time marked out in red, vanishing like heartbeats. “How long will you be gone,” she says absentmindedly.
Helena’s silent, for a moment.
“Three weeks,” she says distantly.
Sarah hurls her laptop through the floor-to-ceiling window across the room in one sharp, sudden movement, startling Sebastian; Helena’s hand is sudden around Sarah’s wrist and she can feel her pulse acutely, watching the mess of circuits and glass fall to the ground far far below—
Sarah’s fingers tense around her phone, minutely. “Almost a month,” she says back. “Quite the project.”
“You know it’s not,” says Helena, Mandarin-German-English-French. All the syllables slur together.
“Of course I know,” Sarah says. “It’s almost clever, for them. One last effort to provoke a schism.”
Helena’s finger curls around Sarah’s, tight enough that Sarah can feel a heartbeat rat-a-tat-tatting along through all that skin. She stares at their fingers, for a second. Childishly, she feels the urge to say you promised you wouldn’t ever leave, make Helena reassure her. Sarah has only her sister; she wants to lock Helena in their bedroom so Helena can’t leave her. She’s be safe that way. Sarah could protect her.
But tragically that isn’t feasible.
“When do you leave,” she says.
+1 day, 5 hours (11:00am)
“Turn it off!” Katja says with a laugh, Sarah’s voice rough around the syllables of the German. “You bitch, stop the camera—”
Obligingly Sarah does, sighs. Taps the remote once-twice against her lower lip. On her notepad, in neat right-handed penmanship, are notes on body language and trust and emotions and other things that are easier to understand when they are on the other side of a screen. The other hand holds the remote, the plastic beginning to warm slightly in her grip in a way that is not at all like another hand. She clicks rewind. The video loops.
Honestly? She’s bored.
Helena has been gone for a day, now, and Sarah is perfectly fine perfectly fine perfectly fine perfectly fine perfectly fine perfectly—
She slaps herself once, gently, in the face. Fine. She’s slightly disoriented, because she didn’t get enough sleep. Besides that: fine. Perfectly fine. Just…bored. Tomorrow she’ll be accompanying Dr. Nealon to Elizabeth’s medical examination, in what is presumably an attempt on the behalf of the North American branch to pull Sarah more into the proceedings. For today, all she has is a backlog of security footage and a single teacup with no sugar in it. She sighs, presses play. Onscreen Katja dances on in her room, dark mohawk falling all to pieces. Just the same as she did last time. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all.
Except: right now in Germany Helena is playing a puppetry game with anonymous men in suits, moving the pieces around the chessboard of Katja’s life. Sarah wonders if Helena is going to Katja’s medical examination, the same way Sarah will soon be standing over Elizabeth’s unconscious body.
(Beth, her brain thinks, but Beth is the girl with the bike Sarah wanted. Beth is the girl who won a silver medal at her track meet, filmed by her father on a shaky video camera. Sarah watched that video with Helena’s feet in her lap, her fingers curled around the delicate bones of Helena’s ankle. Beth, Helena had said. Beth, Sarah had said back, knowing the way both of their mouths would fit around the word.
Elizabeth is a six-digit tag number, a list of medical statistics, a word said to Aldous Leekie. Elizabeth belongs to everyone; Beth belongs to her friends, her family. Beth belongs to Sarah and Helena.)
Onscreen Katja has noticed the woman with the camera and is shrieking, trying to stop the music and push away the video camera at the same time. Sarah watches Katja’s bedroom blur and shake on the large video screen, reaches her remote up lazily and pauses it. There is Katja’s bed, there is Katja’s wall with Katja’s posters. Sarah pictures Helena in that space, sitting in Katja’s desk chair and watching Katja with lidded, unamused eyes. The same way Sarah would.
Fine. It’s only been a day, and she misses Helena desperately. Misses the reassurance that someone else understands. Misses the curl of Helena’s fingers against her own, the way her hand curled in Sarah’s hand is not like the stiff plastic of a remote, the way their fingers fit together perfectly. Misses having someone to talk to. Misses having a sister. Misses Helena, and all the little things that do not make her Sarah.
She presses play again, as Katja gropes for the camera. Imagines a world where Helena looked like that: desperate. Imagines a world where Sarah held a video camera, and would not give it to her sister if her sister asked for it.
This is the closest she can get to having Helena back.
Schalte es aus, Sarah mouths along, the movements of her mouth matching Katja’s perfectly. Schalte es aus. Stopp.
+1 day, 9 hours (5:00pm/11:00pm)
Sarah’s sitting on the bed with the door closed, looking out the window that makes up an entire wall of their bedroom. The phone held to her ear is beginning to warm, slowly, from extended proximity to her skin.
On the other side, she can hear Helena breathing. The sound is staticky, thin. A poor substitute.
“Hello,” she says finally. Before she can even finish exhaling the last syllable Helena’s said “Hello” back.
“Hello,” Sarah says again, and for a moment they’re lost in a childish giddy stream of Hellos, over and over and over again. A chorus of two.
Then that stops, and – what else is there to say? It’s not as if phones are a safe space to speak. It’s not as if they could say it’s been harder having to be me without you, or this is dull, or I miss you. Anything they say can and will be held against them, like the American rule. Neat printed-out logs of every word and pause and cut-off syllable. Exhibit A: you are weak and fallible, mortal, and you can’t be trusted with this experiment.
“The timezone difference is murderous,” Helena says finally. “I should be asleep, but—”
I can’t.
“Have you tried counting sheep?” Sarah says. She wishes she could work some doublespeak meaning into those words, I can’t sleep either, I miss you too, I love you. But it wouldn’t make sense for her to have insomnia. For Sarah, nothing has changed. For Sarah, nothing has changed at all.
“I doubt that would block out the sound of Casper’s snoring,” Helena mutters, venomous. “We’ve spent all day together. I suppose he’s tired.”
“Katja’s literature teacher will be her new monitor – or at least, that’s my opinion,” she continues. “Katja’s grades are…slipping. She’ll need tutoring. There’s a new program opening up in her school district, where teachers take on a pupil, make weekly reports. Quite the coincidence.”
Sarah smiles into the phone, a sly curl of lips. It’s all she can do – there is so little she can say, so little that could make it through the wires and still maintain some semblance of meaning. So she stays silent. On the road outside cars are streaming by, streaks of red and colorless headlights against the dark.
“Are you viewing Katja’s medical examination?” she asks lightly. There’s a pause, and then Helena says, “Beth.”
Beth, that familiar word. Sarah hums agreement.
“Yes, tomorrow night,” Helena says.
“Be careful,” Sarah says. “Her room is a mess.”
Helena pauses again.
“I will.”
“Goodnight, Helena,” Sarah says, closing her eyes to listen to the cheap replacement for her sister on the other end of the phone.
“Goodnight, Sarah,” Helena says back. Then Sarah hangs up the phone.
+2 days, 16 hours (12:00am)
Sarah’s ushered into Elizabeth’s house in the middle of a crowd of doctors, assistants, bodyguards. It hardly seems necessary – they’re going to wake someone up, and then everything will be ruined. But the crew is used to this, apparently; they know what floorboards do not creak. So does Sarah. There are two different kinds of experience.
Sarah knows most of this house – knows the kitchen, knows the living room, knows the wall with Beth— Elizabeth’s track ribbons and old school projects. Knows the locked cabinet with the hunting rifles in it. Knows the dinged-up piano. It’s amazing, what you can glean from security footage and a handful of family videotapes.
They climb up the narrow wooden staircase, with Sarah in the middle. A wall of family photographs, to her right – Elizabeth, brother, father. Sarah trails her knuckles across Elizabeth’s face. Elizabeth is the product of a broken home. Growing up in a male-dominated environment, Sarah knows, altered her way of thinking. The phrase Sarah would use would be “rough and tumble,” although that isn’t the one she put on the reports. Desire to please. Protective. Gravitates more towards traditionally masculine activities.
And here is Sarah with no mother at all, tight pencil skirt and perfect painted-on lips. Fascinating, the slow march of nurture, separating them from one another.
They reach Elizabeth’s bedroom, start setting up equipment. Sarah walks inside.
For a second, her heart clenches in her chest. Sarah frowns despite herself. That is odd. But understandable: for a second, in the dark, she mistook the curve of Beth’s back in her bed for Helena’s. She gives it a moment, lets the feeling pass through her. There. She is perfectly fine. She crosses the room, stepping over a balled-up soccer jersey and an apple core whose bright red color has been sucked out by the dark. Sarah crouches on her haunches so that she and Beth are face to face.
“Hello,” she whispers, not loud enough for anyone to hear – not that they’re listening, anyways, over the soft clattering of equipment. “My name is Sarah.”
Beth wheezes on, oblivious. Sarah imagines reaching out and running her fingers, lightly, across the strands of Beth’s hair. It wouldn’t be as soft as hers or Helena’s – but it would be the same chain of dead skin cells, the same woven-together strands of the same DNA. Beth is real, right here, breathing and dreaming and drooling a little. The sight of her there, with her eyes darting behind the paper-thin skin of her eyelids, stirs something in Sarah; the only one of them she has ever been this close to is Helena, the only one she’s ever seen sleep. She muses that it’s setting off chemical reactions, familial love and protectiveness. Hence the warmth, the feeling resembling love. That’s all. It’s not as if Beth is her sister. Sarah’s already got a sister. It’s just that her sister is gone, and the stupid machine of her body is seeking a replacement.
(She’s lonely.)
But she’s letting herself get distracted; she stands up, smoothes her hands down her blouse and skirt, and moves to a corner of the room. A man moves in to take her place, sliding a needle into the tender skin of Elizabeth’s elbow. He looks at her, waiting for confirmation.
“You may begin,” Sarah says.
They do.
Sarah is awake for some of these tests, but it’s an entirely separate entity to see it on another version of herself: the blood drawn from Elizabeth’s arm, black in the darkness of the room instead of the bright unreal red it seems when lit by fluorescence. The ridiculousness of the EEG helmet. She scribbles down shorthand on a notepad, ideas, thoughts. Watches Elizabeth unmade and remade by the equipment.
Then it’s done. They begin packing up and Sarah moves back over to Beth’s bed, crouches down again. Beth’s brow is twitching in her sleep; Sarah imagines that something in the pit of Beth’s mind is struggling to wake up, urging Beth to protect herself. It’s beautiful, the simple animal instincts at the pit of every human being. What wonderful creatures they all are. She really does love them: Them, that is, all of the clones who are not Sarah-and-Helena. She loves their little lives, she loves them as tiny incomprehensible pieces in a grander machine. She loves them the way you love pieces of an elevator, for working right. She loves them like the vials of blood that are on a laboratory shelf somewhere, marked with her tag number.
Slowly Sarah reaches out and pushes her finger lightly against the almost invisible dot on Beth’s arm where the needle had plunged in. It’s her first time touching one of the subjects. She really shouldn’t; it’s best for everyone if they remain locked tight away behind screens, just out of reach. And yet here she is, with her finger like a needle in the dip of Beth’s elbow. Her skin is warm under Sarah’s finger.
What if Beth woke up, right now? What if the introduction she got to the program was Sarah’s face, floating in the dark, Helena’s face floating in the dark? The sheer incomprehensible wrongness of that idea sends shivers down Sarah’s skin. She wishes Helena were here to tell it to – Helena would understand it, the joy in ruining everything. On the other hand, maybe it’s better that Helena isn’t here. Part of the wrongness is that it’s Sarah who’s reaching out, Sarah initiating that skin-on-skin. Out of the two of them it has always been Helena who understands touch. But here in the dark Sarah is saying nothing, and the one point of contact is her finger pressed to Beth’s skin. It’s Sarah, who’s shattering the pristine glass of that mirror.
She wishes Helena were here.
But she isn’t. The equipment is packed, and Elizabeth is asleep, and Helena isn’t here. So Sarah swallows down the thoughts and curls her hand into a fist, loosens it. She stands up, nods to the doctors waiting for her, and heads out the door. She leaves Elizabeth behind her, one more counted sheep.
+5 days, 4 hours (12:00 pm)
Sarah and Helena don’t have an office of their own; they have a desk in the corner of Aldous’ office that they share, a small humiliation they have learned to bear with grace. Aldous is gone frequently enough that it’s not a terrible hassle – he has business to tend to in other parts of the building, other sectors of the DYAD. A pet project in the medical wing, meetings in office buildings across town…the point is that he leaves his office barren, and Sarah and Helena take over his desk while he is gone like creeping vines. Kudzu fingers. Mistletoe smiles.
Aldous is down at the medical wing again, and Sarah sits in his desk chair and scans through Beth’s data. The office is terribly empty with Helena not there – even with Sebastian playing his normal role of furniture in the corner, the silence is disconcerting. The tentative click of laptop keys does not quite fill it. Sarah buries herself as deep as she can in the dips and spikes of data, to distract herself – Beth’s vitals are fine, her brain activity normal. No change since the last test. Everything is perfectly fine. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all. It’s good news.
She’s distracted by the door opening (usually one of them is paying more attention to the door; it’s a difficult transition, losing half of your eyesight) and for an irritated second she thinks it is the boy who’s posted to the desk outside of Aldous’ office. He keeps looking at her, his eyes lingering on her skin with something like possessiveness. He doesn’t own Sarah. Sarah knows precisely who owns her, and—
And the person walking through the door is, if not at the top of the list, certainly perching near the top.
“Marion,” Sarah says warmly, shutting her laptop; her fingers curl into sharp claws on the edges for a single second, before she can stop herself. She relaxes them. She’s certain Marion noticed. “I’m afraid Aldous is out at the moment, but—”
“I’m not here to see Aldous,” Marion says with equal warmth. A weight in Sarah’s chest plummets as she stands and crosses the room so she and Marion can exchange polite kisses, bare millimeters from the skin of the face. Sarah gestures to the chair in front of the desk, returns to her seat. They settle across from each other.
“I was hoping we could go to lunch,” Marion says. “Just the two of us. It’s been so long since we’ve gotten the chance to talk.”
“I wouldn’t want to steal you away,” Sarah demurs. This is the next step of the dance; she’s spent years learning it, but usually she has a partner.
“No, no, I insist,” Marion says. “I don’t know how you bear being cooped up in this stuffy office.” She lowers her voice, conspiratorially. “You’ve seen what it’s done to Aldous.”
Sarah makes an amused hm, the equivalent of laughter. There is no way out that she can give, no reason she can’t go. And Marion is already moving out of her seat, sending a polite nod to Sebastian and waiting for the boy outside to hold the door open for her. Sarah stands up, smoothes down her skirt, and follows Marion out the door. After all this time, the sound of Marion’s shoes clicking on the floor of the hallway still sends residual shivers of prey-fear down her spine; she almost relishes them, because they send anger snapping after them. Because they are easy to eliminate. It gives her practice, for the more difficult feelings.
Fear scuttles down her spine in an arachnid-shape, hissing: you don’t know how to play this game alone. Sarah doesn’t think shut up, because she won’t humor the voice, won’t humor weakness in herself. She refuses any of this. She spends the ride in the backseat of a black car exchanging pleasantries with Marion and relentlessly crushing every spark of fear, fear, loneliness.
“How is it, being apart from your sister?” Marion asks over lunch – she’s ordered the salmon, and Sarah feels vaguely foolish for having ordered a salad. She turns over chunks of apple to avoid making eye contact, hiding the bright red peels; from the corner of her eye, it looked too much like her lunch was bleeding. Like this, she turns over Marion’s words: underneath them is pity, and an aching fondness. Underneath that: the superior checking in on the project.
“Fine,” Sarah says politely. “I’ve been keeping busy.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Marion says, smiles. She leans forward, just enough to make it seem like she is telling Sarah something in confidence. “That’s actually what I brought you here to talk about, Sarah.”
She pauses, like Sarah is going to say something. What Sarah is thinking is the word no, over and over again, very loudly. What she says is nothing. She spears a chunk of apple, viciously, and bites into it. The crunch is not as satisfying as breaking bone.
“I’m sure you’ve realized by now that the two of you are being groomed for separate tracks,” Marion continues. “Helena will be spending most of her time in Europe, and you will be spending most of your time here.”
“I’d hoped this process would have started earlier, honestly,” she sighs, eyeing her salmon with distaste before looking moodily at a distant corner – that is, being kind enough to avoid eye contact. “But you know how Aldous tends to get overattached.”
“I had noticed,” Sarah says dryly. Marion gives her a small, delighted smile; Sarah ruthlessly crushes the small bloom inside her chest that is something like hope, or desperation, or longing. Marion does not approve of Sarah. Sarah does not want Marion to approve of her. Stop.
“I wanted you to be the first to know,” Marion says softly. “It hasn’t been made public knowledge yet – the head of the European branch hasn’t been informed.”
Helena doesn’t know, is what she’s not saying. I wanted you to be the first to know, but not Helena. The word “you” is surprising when used to refer to the singular. Vous/tu. Ihr/du. Voi/tu. You/you. You, you, you.
She must have taken too long to respond, because Marion’s reaching across the table to put her hand gently over Sarah’s own. (The touch is wrong, the touch is all wrong, and Sarah feels like screaming. Instead she does not move.)
“I know this may seem difficult now,” Marion says, “but trust me, Sarah, it is good news. You’ll be in a position to help all of your sisters – the both of you will.”
They’re not my sisters, a voice in Sarah’s mind wails. She screams it, they’re not my sisters, picks up the cut-glass tealight holder from the center of the table, slams it into Marion’s forehead. It gashes open the skin there and Marion starts gushing blood, bright red.
Sarah blinks. The blood vanishes off of Marion’s forehead, and it was never red at all.
“I look forward to it,” she says, and smiles.
+5 days, 11 hours (7:00pm/1:00 am)
“Pick up,” Sarah hisses into the phone. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.”
She had to spend the entire day swallowing that secret, smiling and feeling it climbing up her throat like something with tentacles. Something with spiny legs. She doesn’t know, doesn’t know the proper metaphor, but she has been smiling and smiling and smiling and now she is having a difficult time holding the leash on her panic. She keeps – every time she interacts with someone she can feel something like violence ricocheting through her limbs. A voice is hissing lash out; all she can see is a stream of violent pictures, where she rips people to shreds. It’s giving her a terrible headache. She needs an outlet. She needs something to pour all of this into. Soon she is going to do something she’ll regret.
So as soon as she got back she stormed past Sebastian – which will go on the report, she’s certain, an unusual spike of teenage melodrama, something she will have to explain to the psychologist later – and into the bedroom, grabbing for her cell phone with shaking fingers and holding down the first button. Now she is sitting and waiting as the phone rings, rings, rings.
“Hello?” says her voice on the other end, sounding vaguely irritated but otherwise perfectly fine.
“’lena,” Sarah sighs into the phone, letting those two syllables fill with everything she is not allowed to say. She wishes for one minute she could stop the surveillance. But wishes are stupid, and stupidity is for children. So she just swallows.
“Sarah,” Helena says back, abandoning all pretense. She doesn’t sound awake, anymore – Sarah can hear the familiar sleep-roughness in Helena’s voice, the way all the syllables soften and melt together. “It’s one in the morning here, why are you calling?”
“I forgot,” Sarah says, stupidly. I couldn’t wait would be more accurate, or I am panicking. She doesn’t know who gets their phone logs, though. Marion could never know. Marion could never know.
“I met with Marion today,” she continues, curling up on the bed, pressing her knees to her chest in a childish gesture of comfort that should never have to do. “She had good news.”
“We’re going to be in charge of the experiment,” she blurts out, letting the syllables crawl their spiny way out of her mouth. “Or at least – in a position of privilege. You’ll be in Europe, and – I’ll be—”
“…here,” she finishes softly. They sit there in silence for a moment, two. Sarah closes her eyes and leans back against the headboard. Slows her breathing, so the two of them breathe the same. In. Out. In.
“Do you remember when we were six,” Helena says, a desperate rush of static. “When we were angry about leaving, and we promised each other that we could do it, that we could be perfect, that we could lead.”
“Yes,” Sarah says faintly. “I remember.”
(What she remembers is this: when they were six years old, Helena wrapped her tiny hands around Sarah’s own and said we’ll never be separate. I won’t leave you ever, Sarah, I promise. They promised to look after each other. They never said anything about leading; neither of them have ever cared about power half as much as they have cared about each other.
What she remembers is this: the truth.)
“We’re going to keep that promise,” Helena says firmly. “We’ll become instrumental, irreplaceable, and they won’t be able to stop us.”
(We’re going to make them regret that they ever tried to separate us.)
“We’ll take this program somewhere completely new,” Sarah says. “We’ll be better than anyone who’s come before us. They won’t have a choice.”
(They’ll regret it. They’ll regret it. They’ll regret it.)
Helena yawns into the phone, a soft familiar sound, and abruptly Sarah feels terribly guilty for waking Helena up. Alongside that, she feels the entirely new guilt of waking Helena up to share something with her. This isn’t – she isn’t used to it. Abruptly whatever thin comfort she’d gotten from her sister’s promise crumbles, leaves her with the same screaming loss of control she’d had when she had held down the button on her phone for speed-dial. Helena didn’t fix it, Helena can’t fix it, if Helena can’t fix it—
“I’m sorry I woke you,” Sarah says into the phone, hollowly.
“It was important news,” Helena says back. “I’m glad you told me.”
Sarah’s overcome with a nauseating wave of homesickness so strong she can’t breathe. If only Helena was there. If only Helena was sitting next to her, her head on Sarah’s shoulder, her breathing the same. If Sarah could just touch her – if she could just be real – but Sarah can’t, and Helena isn’t, and her sister has no way of knowing that Sarah is sitting here on their enormous empty bed, hand clenching and unclenching on the phone with the desperate need to lay hands on her sister’s skin. When Helena left she took touch with her, and now Sarah is alone. Sarah is so alone.
“…Go to bed, Helena,” Sarah says, through a tight throat. “I’ll talk to you again later.”
“Goodnight, Sarah.”
“Goodnight.”
I love you, Sarah thinks desperately, and I miss you, and come home. There’s a dial tone on the other end; Helena has already hung up.
+11 days, 10 hours (6:00pm)
This time, Sarah’s ordered the salmon.
It’s a different restaurant, a different time of day, a different choice of dining partner – but the fish-flesh splits beneath her fork just as easily as it did beneath Marion’s fork, and that is all that matters. No one will ever put two and two together except her. That is all that matters.
She looks up from the perfect, bite-sized pieces she is cutting the fish into and eyes the boy across the table – he’s sweating, and she can see slight darkened patches under the sleeves of his (cheap) shirt. Honestly, he’s an incredible disappointment; she’s stopped paying any attention to his flimsy attempts at conversation starting, watched him do his best to saw through his steak – chosen in a desperate grasp at masculinity, she’d assume – with the bare minimum of amusement. The point is this: he came when she called, like all the best sorts of animals do. A few days sending thin sharp little smirks in the direction of the desk outside of Aldous’ office, several lingering glances…it wasn’t a difficult task, and when she made her leisurely way over to that same desk after the end of yesterday’s workday dinner arrangements were made with very little fuss.
Easy. Yes. This is exactly what she needed. Sarah takes a small sip of water, lets out a small hm at whatever he’s just said. Across the table the boy – Anthony, that’s his name – ducks his head down to look at the ragged remains of his steak. Sarah watches the strained tendons of his neck, spears a piece of salmon with her fork, and bites down.
+11 days, 12 hours (8:00pm)
He keens as she bites into his neck, like he wasn’t expecting it – as if Sarah’s brought him back to her apartment to do anything other than consume. Then again, she probably should have expected this fit of nerves: from the way he’s been staring at her all night, eyes lingering on the curve of her breasts and the sway of her hips, she might as well have been meat.
It’s ridiculous. She’s not a steak, to be clumsily sawn into whatever pieces look the most tempting.
But it’s just not satisfying – the warm hum of arousal in her stomach is untouched by the taste of sweat on her tongue, as pleasant as it is to reduce a human being to nothing but a quivering, desperate sound. His skin is all wrong under the pads of her fingers. Touching him does nothing, no matter how much she wishes it did; there is just nothing of him that she wants. She could cover every inch of his skin with the marks of her teeth, bruise him so everyone knows where he’s been and who with, and it wouldn’t matter. She doesn’t want him to be hers. She just wants to have power over him – not even that. She just wants to have power over someone.
Sarah takes a step back, looks at him. He’s shivering; his eyes are blown dark with arousal. The way he’s shaking, squirming – it’s satisfying and yet it makes her sick. How dare he stand here in the middle of the living room and make the air stink like fear.
What does she do with him? Kissing him has done nothing but make her want to reapply her lipstick (she’s afraid all the red is smearing off, and that won’t do), and she doesn’t want to put her hands on his skin. There’s little appeal left.
Sarah sighs through her nose, one short irritated huff of breath, and then rakes her eyes up and down his body. Object, noun.
“Take off your clothes,” she says.
“Wait, are you—”
“If you’re not going to do as I say,” she continues, threading iron through her words, I am more powerful than you, I could have you killed or erased, this is my game and you aren’t even playing it, “you may leave.”
They stand there for a moment, a frozen scene. Sarah pictures what it must look like from the security camera tucked away in the corner: the way they are posed, like dolls put down by her own hand. The contrast of her steel-spine to the limp curve of his back. The way all the colors are sucked out, so no one could tell what color her lipstick is at all. She can’t picture it precisely – the footage is off-limits – but it makes a pretty picture all the same. I chose this.
With shaking fingers, Anthony begins to unbutton his shirt. Sarah points to a chair across the room, says: “Sit there and wait, when you’re finished.” Thinks: stay.
She goes to her own room first, locks the door, sheds clothes like a snake does – like animals do, when it is time for them to change. The slip she pulls over her skin is like cool water; it is nothing at all like fingers.
Bathroom. She reapplies her lipstick and deliberately avoids the gaze of her own eyes in the mirror.
Other bedroom. In the table by Sebastian’s bed there is a drawer; Sarah rummages carelessly through it until she procures a condom. If she got a disease from this boy she wouldn’t ever forgive herself. How outside the natural order of things. She flips it back and forth between her fingers, watches the way they don’t shake. She is, abruptly, furious: furious because there is a part of her that is nervous about this, and that is the last thing she wants. She closes her eyes, sweeps everything off the top of the table; hurls the drawer at the wall, so hard it dents. Violence loosens her muscles, sends a scream slithering back down her throat, evens out her breathing. Bits of plaster flake off the wall and drift slowly to the ground below.
Sarah opens her eyes. The wall is undamaged. She is perfectly fine.
She leaves through the other bedroom door, clicks on high heels back to the living room. He’s sitting there, waiting for her. Good boy.
“Wow,” he says, eyes widening. “You look—”
Thankfully by then she’s crossed the room and can put her mouth on his to shut him up. She doesn’t want to know how she looks. She doesn’t want to think about how she looks. She kisses him and kisses him, slides the condom on and lowers herself onto him in one fluid movement.
It feels—
different.
Underneath her Anthony lets out a moan and she covers his mouth, instinctively, with her hand. She starts rolling her hips back and forth, slowly and then faster as she finds a rhythm. She can’t stop looking at her own hand – the nail polish on her thumb is chipped, just slightly. Just at the corners.
Sarah closes her eyes, concentrates on the warmth flooding her limbs. When she opens them again she doesn’t look at her hand, just takes in the sight of someone else underneath her. She’s on top. She put him here, just so she could get pleasure out of it. She’s in control. She’s in control. She’s in control.
He comes underneath her with a sad little mewl, but Sarah keeps riding him, rolling her hips forward over and over and over again.
+18 days, 19 hours (12:00am/3:00am)
Sarah’s eyelids keep drooping without her say-so; she’d slap herself in the face, were she not surrounded by other people. As it is she stays very still, breathes: in-through-nose hold out-through-mouth. She convinces herself she is awake. She’s perfectly fine. It’s just been a long week.
The week started with having to dispose of Anthony, which was a headache she hadn’t been expecting. Stupid. She should have known he’d care about her – after all, she’d done her best to make him want her. That was the point of the game. But still, every now and then she can hear some smothered sob in the echo-chamber of her mind, and her eyes roll. He’ll be fine, probably, in whatever dull job he is shuffled off to. It’s not her job to care. So she doesn’t care. Nothing has changed, for her – nothing has changed at all.
More than that – the more invasive testing is restricted to once a month, and all of the subjects’ tests are scheduled right after one another, bang bang bang. Sarah has been flying all over the continent so she can supervise. At first she thought they’d keep her in Toronto; Alison Hendrix is here, after all, with her immaculate bedroom and the synchronized rattling snores of her mother and father down the hall. But Antoinette (Tony) Sawicki is in Ohio, Jane Sanders is in Texas, Cosima Niehaus is in California.
So here Sarah is, in California.
By now it’s become a routine, of sorts – enter the house, enter the apartment, enter through the front door and watch the blossoming into reality of something previously seen on video tapes and still photographs. The entranceway of Cosima’s house is dark, smells faintly of beeswax and something herbal Sarah can’t place. There’s a stained glass window that’s casting an eerie light on the floor below and the vague lumpy shapes of the furniture. Sarah crosses through the light without looking, sees out of the corner of her eye her whole body stained red and then gone dark again as she passes. Cosima’s bedroom is down the hall – it’s all piles of dirty laundry and old coffee cups, textbooks scattered across the floor. Sarah could write a paper, most likely, on the reoccurrence of messiness in her genetic identicals. But she’s honestly uncertain if it’s due to genetics or simply something teenagers do. So she hasn’t put pen to paper as of yet.
She stands in the corner and watches the dance as it progresses. All the while Cosima’s breathing stays slow and even; Sarah realizes after a while her own breathing has settled to match. In. Out. In. She stays like that, a breathing statue in the corner, until the testing concludes. As the doctors make their way out the door Sarah uncurls her folded arms, takes a single step forward.
“Go on,” she says. “Wait for me outside.”
They leave, and Sarah holds her breath until the sounds of footsteps fade. Then, before she can stop to think about what she’s doing, she slips her feet out of her shoes and slides into the bed.
Cosima’s already fallen back into a deep sleep, curled up on the edge of her bed, one arm sprawled slightly from where the needle had been stuck in. Sarah holds her breath, the dizzying lack of oxygen playing counterpoint to the wail of wrong wrong wrong in the back of her mind. She curls up parallel to Cosima to watch her double breathe. Like this they are not womb-matched – if Cosima turned to face Sarah, rolled over in her sleep, they would be. Instead they are parallel lines: the same, moving in the same direction but never touching. Sarah thinks that’s sad. She reaches out and curls her fingers through Cosima’s so they’re holding hands.
Cosima’s hand is cold and limp in Sarah’s, but it fits alright. Sarah plays with their fingers absentmindedly, listens to Cosima breathe, tilts Cosima’s hand so you can’t tell whether or not it has nail polish on the tips of its fingers. The sensation of skin against her own skin makes her throat ache. She has been so desperately lonely.
“I slept with a boy,” she whispers. “I want to tell you about it, but I can’t, because it makes us different and we’re becoming so different already.” She pauses, bites the inside of her lip fiercely to keep from crying. Says it again: “We’re becoming different.”
This is stupid, and it isn’t working, and Sarah still feels monstrous and guilty for this thing she’s done. She made herself different. She changed the status quo, she did something she couldn’t take back out of something as stupid as desperation. And now here she is, lying in a strange girl’s bed, holding a strange girl’s hand. She shouldn’t interfere with the experiment. She shouldn’t be here. Were she religious she’d surely be penitent – forgive me, forgive me, I have sinned.
And yet.
And yet it’s so close – because she knows Cosima, knows her in a way she didn’t know the boy sweating in her living room. She knows Cosima, and Cosima’s hand fits in hers, and they breathe the same through the same lungs, and she fits in Cosima’s bed if she pulls her legs in. It’s so easy to close her eyes and pretend that she loves Cosima; it’s so easy to make herself believe it, feel love like a sick pulse in her chest for this girl who got a C in History and cried about it in this bed.
She opens her eyes and watches Cosima breathe.
“I love you,” Sarah breathes, and she pretends she knows who she is saying that to.
But the team will be waiting outside the house, and she has wasted too much time here not saying a name. So Sarah stands up, untangles her fingers and grabs Cosima’s wrist so she can pulls that limp hand back against the curve of Cosima’s body. Absentmindedly she smoothes the covers, so it’s like she was never there.
She closes the door behind her when she leaves, just the way it was when she entered. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all.
+21 days, 12 hours (8:00pm)
Helena comes home.
+21 days, 15 hours (11:00pm)
Sarah sits on the bed, swinging her feet, relishing the sting of old movement beneath her skin that Helena revives. She could say, right now, do you remember when we were younger and you used to do this, bruised your heels against the bars of chairs, and Helena would say yes. Sarah hadn’t realized what a luxury that was.
Helena’s pulling a brush through her (their) long dark hair, sitting on the padded bench at the foot of their bed. Sarah watches the stretch of her muscles, each movement perfectly and achingly familiar. She realizes that despite herself she’s looking for some visible sign of difference – Helena using a different hand, Helena arching her neck up instead of bowing it down to consider the flex of her toes against the carpet as she keeps brushing. There is no difference. Everything is exactly the same.
Then Helena pulls her hair over one shoulder and Sarah blurts, “Wait.”
She swings herself back onto the bed so she’s crouched behind Helena, on folded knees. Slips the strap of Helena’s camisole aside, and: there. On the skin above her right shoulderblade there’s a scratch – small and thin and white, like a feather blown from some distant wing that’s settled on Helena’s shoulder. Sarah presses the pad of her thumb to it; she can’t feel anything, can’t feel any change on Helena’s skin. Her sister’s skin is warm under her fingertip. It hasn’t changed, not really.
“It won’t scar,” Helena murmurs, the sound almost pleading. “I hadn’t thought it worth mentioning.”
She turns to look at Sarah over her shoulder; Sarah is still looking at her thumb against Helena’s skin, the increasingly-chipping polish on her nail. I slept with a boy. You have a cut on your shoulder, and I may never know where it’s from. I lost my virginity and you bled and I wasn’t there.
“Sarah,” Helena says, and Sarah blinks once, twice, takes her hand off Helena’s skin, slips the strap back absentmindedly. Helena turns around all the way, putting her brush down so she can take Sarah’s hands in hers. She’s looking at Sarah with some pointed sadness, as if she’s thinking the same thing Sarah is.
She leans forward and whispers into Sarah’s ear. Leans back, and watches Sarah solemnly.
“If you wanted,” she breathes.
Sarah’s hands are still trapped between Helena’s, their hearts beating against each other’s in a jarring double-time. She can’t meet Helena’s eyes; she looks at their folded hands instead. Thinks about what Helena had breathed into her ear, the breath of it still warm on Sarah’s skin. Seven little syllables. It would be easy, Sarah knows. It would be easy, and they would be the same – just one little cut and then the bright red well of blood. Red has always been their color. They would be the same.
“No,” she says, disentangling their hands. “We don’t need to do that.”
“If you’re sure,” Helena says with a furrowed brow. “It’ll heal soon, but I only – I couldn’t tell if you wanted—”
She stops, unable to get the words out. The two of them look down, one neat pair of hands folded in each lap. The polish on Helena’s left pointer finger has chipped; she’s reapplied it. Sarah can see the raised seam of the old polish under the new. They’ll have to repaint their nails tomorrow morning, before they leave. They’ll have to.
Sarah looks up first, watches Helena suck her unpainted lips between her teeth. She hasn’t done that in a long time – Sarah wonders if she started again while she was in Germany, or if it’s just this sudden inability to communicate that’s started her on the habit again. She supposes she’ll never know.
“It’s late,” she says, and Helena pulls her lips free, eyes Sarah. “Turn out the light?”
Helena stands up, puts the brush back, wanders over to the light switch. Sarah slides under the blankets and curls up on her side of the bed. The world goes dark suddenly, like going blind. She holds her breath so she can hear the sound of Helena’s footfalls, the soft non-sound of the blankets being pulled back, Helena sliding into her side of the bed. The sound of Helena’s breathing is loud, the rhythm to a song Sarah has forgotten all the words to. She doesn’t want to think it, but the thought comes without her say-so: she’d found it easier to breathe Cosima’s breaths than Helena’s. The thought terrifies. She lets instinct motivate her, reaches out and grabs for Helena’s hand in the dark. Their fingers still fit together. Sarah doesn’t know why she thought they wouldn’t.
“I missed you,” she breathes, but she’s held on to the words for so long that they are stale on her tongue.
“I missed you too,” Helena whispers back. She shuffles closer, so their knees are tucked together; Sarah shifts so Helena’s bones aren’t digging into her own. “I meant what I said, on the phone. They won’t separate us. They can’t.”
“Of course not,” Sarah says. “They could never.”
(What she doesn’t say: I don’t think it’s them that’s separating us.)
(What she doesn’t say: I think it’s already too late.)