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When the guard comes and tells her she’s gotten a visitor, her first, in nearly ten years of wasting away in this pit, Kendall dares to hope that Siobhan has forgiven her. All those letters unanswered, even turned her sister-in-law against her, the ungrateful twat, but Kendall still prays that it’s Siobhan coming to meet her behind the partition.
Bloody fool, she is—it’s not Siobhan come to see her, but that miserable doctor. Professor Ethan Duncan—if she had anything on her, she’d kill him, five years and she still remembers the needles in her skin, the cuts and white suits. She doesn’t know what the bastard had wanted from her, only that she was different from everyone else in this bloody chokey.
“Why are you back here? You already got your pound of flesh, haven’t ya?”
“Mrs. Malone, I—“
“You what? They had to sedate me the last time you came with your guns and your needles. But you got nothing to protect yourself with this time. What makes you think I won’t kill you with my bare hands.”
“Please.”
“Oh now you remember your bloody manners! Do you know what happened to the last man who stole from me?”
“No—“
“Ended up with some garden shears in his drunk ole neck. Took my daughter, he did, so I took his life.”
“Mrs. Malone, please--“
“What do you want, Professor Duncan?”
“Forgiveness,” he admits. Kendall wonders how close to death she can get him before the guards pull her off. Forgiveness. She nearly died after all his testing and shite. A hand here, a needle there, none of it done with her permission.
“Piss off. I’m not hearing your bloody confession—“
“I’ll tell you all of it, Mrs. Malone.” He interrupts and her eyebrows raise at the proposition. She wants to know the story, why they kept her in that laboratory for months, taking until she had barely anything left to give.
“Oh, doin’ me a favor by letting me in on the reason for this after the fact, are ya?”
“I—I made a terrible mistake, this whole experiment. I see that now.”
“Experiment, is it? Experiment for what, hm?” Kendall spits, glaring at him from the other side of the glass. “Left me for dead, all that poking and prodding, you did.”
He sighs into his palm and she rolls her eyes at the dramatics. Always so dramatic, these men, they take and take, and then they want you to see they were just trying their best. Worthless pieces of shits.
After a moment, he spins his story, bout how she’s got two cell lines—absorbed a twin, she did—how bloody special she is, how valuable—but all Kendall can think is that there’s one less man in the world to muck it all up because of it. Then it shifts and Kendall’s lost in the thick of it, genetic material and all this horseshit about cloning and the military and how she’s a bloody treasure trove of shite from that Star Trek that git Martha demands they watch on the telly.
She’s had quite enough of this, thank you very much. “Oh come off it, enough of the bloody tales. You’re no H.G. Wells, you useless kook.”
“My wife, my—my Susan,” he stammers, unaccustomed to being interrupted. Of course he isn’t, he’s a bloody man. “They ruined her.”
“She leave you? I would too—vile man.”
The hurt look he gives her provides Kendall with some amount of satisfaction.
“No. Aldous, he tainted her, with this Neolut—pseudo-science,” Professor Duncan cries and she scoffs at his tears. He won’t get her pity, she’s not some lackwit falling all over a man’s bloody sobbing. “Self-directed evolution, she wants to alter the natural order of things, of life itself!”
“Might as well let her. She could be famous, you know. More famous than that upstart twat Diana—“
“No, you don’t understand! We have a daughter, Rachel—“
“So what’s all this got to do with me?”
“Everything, Mrs. Malone! Simply everything!”
Now, he’s simply being cheeky about this fantasy novel he’s crafted for his own amusement. She’s got about twenty years left—he might still be alive when she’s through here, and then, she’ll kill him for toying with her like this after everything he'd put her through years back.
“You see, Mrs. Malone, these children, these girls, my dear Rachel—they’re from you,” he adds, and the anger coursing through her shifts to fury. This isn’t—this is satanic—this isn’t bloody possible! Her hand drags across her chest, horizontal, then vertical, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. May they be more forgiving than her ungrateful daughter, considering Kendall'd had no willing part in this.
“They aren’t any blood of mine, you hear me!”
“I—I’m sorry, but they are,” he whispers, and he has the decency to look apologetic. Perhaps his mother had tried to teach him some manners, but like her own child, they chose not to respect their elders.
He rifles through his wallet and she frowns, before pulling out a photograph of a little girl with two long plaits in her hair. It looks nothing like her, and yet, Kendall finds herself thinking of Siobhan. Kendall’d do her hair when she’d sit still, whisper stories of worthless princes and the princesses they didn’t deserve, her blood. Hers.
“How many are there?” She asks, softer than she intends, as if she can’t believe it. Her blood, her—if this kook is telling her truths, there’s a second chance for her, a way to make amends, even if Siobhan won’t see her.
“Thousands—and if Neolution and Aldous Leekie have their way, thousands more. All identical, and all in danger.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Kendall whispers, doing the math in her head. “Thousands of them?”
“Yes, thousands. All accounted for—all except one.”
“Well it isn’t your bloody daughter, now is it?”
“No,” he agrees, mournfully. He cared for this little monster he’d created—much as she does, despite herself. They’re little girls, parts of her, all around the world, all victims of this man and his ego. The only devil in this is the man in front of her.
“This one is outside of the experiment—lost in the foster system. The Neolutionists have been searching for you both for years, you know. I’ve hidden your identity from them all this time, made it seem the source material was dead—“
“If you’re expecting me to thank you, you don’t know me that well, Professor Duncan,” Kendall interrupts. “I won’t give you the bloody absolution you want.”
“Perhaps not,” Professor Duncan frowns, furrowing his brow. “Although I don’t expect it, or deserve it. I mean to warn you, is all. I’ve been salting petri dishes, ruining attempts for several years as it is, but my time may be at an end. That’s why I came to you.”
“And the girl, this lost one of mine,” Kendall begins, the first bits of a plan forming in her head. This girl, this bit of her; Kendall won’t let it fall victim to this part of their shared history. “Where is she now?”
“I—I plan to hide her away.”
“Well, you do have a bloody lick of common sense, after all. But where can you put her so she stays buried?”
“I don’t know, I’m on borrowed time as it is—I just found her,” he stammers. She watches him shift his weight from side to side like a child. Men, pathetic, the lot of them.
“You’re goin’ to just put her somewhere, and hope that it keeps her hidden away, aren’t you?” Kendall accuses; she can read between the lines—she is the prize, not this little girl, another in the crowd of thousands. “She’s got the same face as a thousand other girls, and you’ll just hope for the best because you don’t bloody know what you’re doing, do you?”
“I—No.”
“Where is she now? Is she safe, this bit of my blood you stole and then lost?” May the Heavenly Father forgive her, but Kendall feels protective of this wild thing, lost in the world without anyone to care for her.
“She’s safe, Mrs. Malone. Forgive me, but I don’t wish to share the specifics—“
“Oh, piss off with your MI-6 fantasies,” Kendall snaps, and his features shift slightly. “My daughter used to run guns for the nationalists, now she’s running people, from what I hear. You get her to my Siobhan—she’ll be safe there.”
“You’d give this girl to a terrorist?”
“You watch your bloody tongue—“
A terrorist! This horrible man dared to call her daughter a bloody terrorist? She is the only person alive who is allowed to criticize her daughter and her actions—it’s all that Nora’s fault, helping Siobhan find peace and move past John by getting her involved with that crowd. Siobhan had been a good girl, strong, smart—too good for a bunch of idealists, and certainly too good for the likes of John Sadler.
“My apologies, Mrs. Malone, however—“
“This girl, this child, she’s in danger, you say? Then who better to give her to than someone who knows how to use a bloody gun and hide people who need hiding.”
It’s a weak argument, she knows, but it’s all Kendall’s got, and the more time this idea has to take shape, the more right it seems. Siobhan might be running from her own mum, and her past along with it. But she can’t run from family, from her blood, and while this child isn’t the same, it’s all Kendall has left to give Siobhan.
Kendall just needs him to agree. Siobhan’s a protective thing, like her mum. She’ll take this girl in, raise her like her own. Kendall can give her daughter that—a bit of her, untainted by their history and the deserts that fall between them.
“Well, Mrs. Malone, you make a good argument. I will need the particulars, and then—“
“And then you get the hell out of my sight,” Kendall interrupts, with less malice than before. Professor Duncan nods as if he understands, as if he knows what this truly means to her, that he holds the key to the closest thing she has for redemption.
Without another word, he heads for the door, and she’s escorted back to her cell. In the darkness, her mind wanders back to that bloody bar fight, John Sadler and the rest of it. John Sadler may have taken her daughter from her, ruined her fragile relationship with Siobhan beyond all repair, but he’d also given her a chance at redemption. Without his bullshit and those bloody shears, she wouldn’t have been here in the first place—wouldn’t be bits of her to give back to her daughter to hold in trust, keep safe.
In an odd way, John Sadler had given her a second chance.
Not that she’d ever thank him for it.
After all, he started it in the first place.
She’s just ending it.