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i.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Sarah says to Beth.
Beth, asleep, doesn’t answer; her eyelids flutter as she dreams. Sarah lets out a sigh and looks around the room. In a corner a clock is ticking precise military time, carving away each individual second where she should be somewhere else. Somewhere else besides here, confessing her sins to an unconscious copy. Like a ritual.
Like an obsession.
There are so many reasons why she shouldn’t be here.
“Aldous is upset that I continue to attend examinations,” Sarah tells Beth, watching the breath rise and fall in Beth’s chest. “He thinks he’s my father. Like he’s my family.”
“Are you?” she asks. “My family.”
Beth says nothing. Sarah presses a hand to her own chest, feels the pounding of her heart – the left side of her chest, the same place Beth’s heart is on the bed; the same heart, the same chest. Her heart – Sarah’s heart – is thumping. This is possibly because of what she’s feeling now, some sick mixture of guilt and love and excitement. The problem is: she knows who her family is. Her family is asleep, right now, in a bed that is too big for only one person. Her family thinks that Sarah is still in the middle of a routine medical examination, supervising the health of one of the subjects in preparation for her imminent rise to power.
Her family thinks this, because Sarah has been lying to her.
Beth sighs, makes a soft sound, rolls over to her side; thoughtlessly Sarah reaches out, pulls her back so she’s on her back again. While she does this she keeps murmuring.
“I’ve been lying to Helena,” she says. “I can’t stop lying to Helena. Something hasn’t been right since she got back from Germany.” And it hasn’t been: Sarah can’t quite get the words out, can’t talk to her, can no longer spill out all her thoughts effortlessly in the dark. Between the two of them Sarah has always been the mouth, the tongue, the speech. If speech fails her – who is she? Who is she? Who is she? She doesn’t want Helena to know, that the person who is Sarah is starting to erode.
“Do you think it’s my fault?” she whispers. Pauses. “Of course it’s my fault. Whose fault would it be? Yours?”
“What would you do in my position, Beth?” she asks. “If you didn’t know who you were anymore. If the person who knew you best didn’t know you at all. What would you do?”
10.
Elizabeth Childs has an overdose at approximately one in the morning. The police will decide it’s a suicide – what else could it be, after all, with the concentrations of drugs in her body, the way they match all of her overlapping scripts? What else could it possibly be?
Helena smears powder out from the underside of her fingernail as she pads her way through the dark of their apartment. Sarah is asleep now, in a bed that is too big for only one person. That’s alright. Helena will be in soon.
Sarah burbles sleepily when the door opens and Helena’s heart kicks once in her chest, knocking against the right side of her ribs. She’s beautiful, Helena’s sister. She’s beautiful and Helena loves her so much it’s eating her alive like a hungry mouth.
“’lena?” Sarah slurs. “Mm. ‘t’s late.”
“Wake up,” Helena whispers, sitting on the edge of her bed; she drops her shoes by the edge, curls her legs underneath her. Waits. Sure enough: Sarah sits up, blinks at her sleepily.
“Unless you’ve just gotten back from a red-eye flight,” she says, her own eyes brightening as she wakes, “there’s no excuse for you to wake me.”
“We’ll put more rouge on your cheeks in the morning, no one will notice,” Helena says calmly. Her heart is rat-a-tatting along, belying the calm she is trying her best to project. She can’t spook Sarah. Not now. She takes a second to look at Sarah, who’s watching her with what Helena assumes is calm expectation – she can only see her sister’s eyes in the dark, can’t quite make out what she’s feeling. She reaches out and grabs Sarah’s hands. Once they’re between her own fingers, birds in cages, she says it.
“Beth is dead,” she whispers.
Sarah tries to jerk her hands away instinctively but Helena holds onto them, keeps that part of Sarah grounded as the rest of her jerks apart. Sarah’s breaths are heaving in her chest; she’s cracking open, breaking into pieces. That isn’t what Helena wanted. The last thing Helena wanted was for her sister to break into smaller pieces.
“Beth,” Sarah whispers, a low anguished sound that makes Helena want to rip something to pieces. “Beth, Beth, Beth. Oh god.”
“I didn’t get a call,” she mutters to herself. “She’s mine, she’s mine, why did they tell you, oh god, Beth is dead.”
“I killed her,” Helena whispers, and Sarah goes very very still.
“Helena,” she whispers, slow. “What have you done?”
ii.
Helena frowns at their folded hands, her gaze directed somewhere near her own fingernail.
“I don’t understand,” she says, finally. Sarah lets out an exasperated huff of breath through her nose, releases Helena’s hands so Helena can throw herself across the bed. She looks strange there; it’s strange that the feeling is strange, but there they are. Enough gaps of time without Helena sprawled across the length of the bed is enough to erase the picture from Sarah’s mind. Sarah stays sitting, although Helena’s twitchiness settles in her enough that she pulls out a length of her sister’s hair and begins to braid it for something to do with her fingers.
“It’s simple enough,” she says. “We each pick one of the subjects and we learn how to be them. In case of emergency.”
“Don’t we already have enough safe measures, in case of emergency?” Helena drawls. “Riddles and ciphers and codes. What disaster are you imagining?”
Sarah lets her brow furrow, wears her annoyance openly on her face. Helena’s expression softens into something between love and guilt.
“Alright,” she says. “I’ll help you with your accent. Who were you considering?”
“Beth,” Sarah says immediately, casually. “No need for any sort of hair piece.”
Helena hums agreement, says: “Aryanna, then.”
“È italiana la tua migliore lingua?”
“Migliore della tua.”
“Vero,” Sarah concedes. “You’re practically a native.”
Helena smiles a little at the teasing in Sarah’s tone, soft and fond in the corner of her mouth. “E tu, Signorina Childs?”
“I got it. Thanks.”
The words come out stressed, bitter, thin. Most importantly, they come out in Beth’s accent. Helena raises her eyebrows: impressive. “Have you been practicing?”
“Un po’.”
“Without me.”
Sarah shrugs a shoulder, mutters, “You were at the institute and I’d finished work for the day. I was bored.” She watches as Helena’s fingers wrap around her wrist, like sped-up footage of creeping vines. She moves on to another piece of Helena’s hair. Little braids are beginning to form, small Medusa-tendrils. Sarah pretends she can’t see Helena looking at her. She already knows what she’ll see: a small, mute hurt.
“They keep shifting our schedules,” Helena hisses. “Tectonic plates, waiting to see what erupts.” Sarah makes a small mm noise, says nothing. It’s so easy to externalize the blame. So easy.
Silence fills the room for a second, and Helena’s hand tightens on Sarah’s wrist. An excess of action to make up for Sarah’s lack of speech. Helena pulls herself back up to sitting, her hands moving back to Sarah’s hands, her hands gently disentangling Sarah’s fingers from her hair. Quickly she undoes the braids, shakes her hair loose.
“Well,” she says. “At this rate, I suppose we could use some counter-measures. Do you know Beth’s makeup routine by now? Or do you need help?”
Sarah doesn’t refuse Helena’s help, and her sister’s fingers are deft as she flicks through reference pictures on her laptop, paints Sarah’s face into the same shape. While she’s shaping Sarah’s skin into Beth’s skin she fires questions at her: what’s your name, what’s your favorite color, what type of coffee do you drink, are you happy. Sarah’s vowels stretch and warp like taffy. Sarah stretches and warps like taffy. Sarah changes. She can feel Beth pushing under her skin, waiting to get out, so: she lets her. Beth settles into Sarah’s skin and Sarah settles into Beth’s skin.
For a moment, she looks at Helena and her first thought is who are you?
For a moment, she looks at Helena and doesn’t know who Helena is at all.
But it’s only a moment, and Beth blinks back to herself with that moment right in the middle of her tongue like a pill. Helena’s hand is wrapped around Sarah’s chin and she tilts her back and forth, frowns.
“That’s it,” Helena says, soft. Holds up the mirror.
She looks into it. She only sees herself.
9.
The world is streaming by outside the car window, and Helena watches the blurred individual shapes of trees and buildings and vague, anonymous people to avoid considering her own reflection. It’s not until she tastes the sting of metal on her tongue that she realizes that she’s gnawed her own lip bloody – a habit she thought she’d stopped, the second time she left Sarah for Germany. She brings her fingers to her lips and they come away bloody, red on the tips of her fingers. It’s always been their color.
She doesn’t realize she’s laughing until her hand begins to shake; then she realizes her shoulders are shaking, that there are soundless hysterical pants coming from the back of her throat. What is she doing? What is she doing? What will she do?
A part of Helena is hungry for someone to turn to, to say: do you think I’m doing the right thing, and – more importantly – will Sarah forgive me. The thought of her future actions is strangely removed, distant, like watching a film with no sound. But her heartbeat is pounding, over and over again: will Sarah forgive me will Sarah forgive me will Sarah forgive me. The cruel joke of it is that the only person she could talk to about this is Sarah; neither of them have ever had anyone to confess to, except each other.
She’s sure Sarah will. Forgive her. What else could she do? Turn around, and leave Helena alone? (Turn around, and leave Sarah alone?) It’s beyond Helena’s comprehension; it won’t happen, it can’t happen. It’s shivering under her skin, itching like feathers, it won’t happen, it can’t happen, Sarah will forgive her, Sarah will understand why Helena had to had to had to.
(Between the two of them, Helena has always been the body to Sarah’s mouth, tongue, speech. If one of them had to do this – it’s always been Helena. There has never been anyone but Helena.)
Her reflection stares at her dead-eyed from the car window. Helena presses her fingers to her lips, smears them across the accusing glass-glare. Shut up, she thinks, hysterical. Stop. She settles back in her seat to eye her handiwork: a garbled trail of blood all over the glass. It doesn’t form any sort of shape at all, and Helena’s surprised at her own surprise. Surely she isn’t at the point of using her own blood as ink – surely she isn’t that macabre.
Then again, perhaps she is. Helena’s starting to feel like she doesn’t know herself at all. Who is she? Who is she? Who is she?
Well, that’s easy: she is Helena, who is Sarah’s sister. And Sarah’s sister wipes the blood off the glass, carefully, adjusts her lipstick and has stitched the shaking pieces of herself back together by the time the car stops.
“Wait here, please,” she tells the driver. Gets out. Lets her mind blur – just briefly, as she makes the rest of the convoluted, paranoid journey to her destination. She almost wants to laugh at it, her own complicated scheme, but: she can’t be placed here, not tonight. No one can know.
(Except Sarah, her brain hisses.
Well. Yes.)
Helena arrives at the townhouse after midnight – there’s something amusing in it, that she’s here on the cusp of one night and another day. But now isn’t the time to get tangled in her own riddles. So. She turns the key in the lock and enters, pulling on gloves as she goes.
She’s always hated this flat on a sort of dull principle. This will be her first time visiting, her first time crossing these particular borders in this particular location. She should probably find the thought exciting – stepping into this life that she’s helped create. Seeing the place her double lives.
Sarah, she’s certain, would find the whole thing thrilling.
But isn’t that why she’s here?
She idly trails gloved fingers over the wall as she walks, just to see if there’s any hint of a spark, some rekindling of Sarah’s joy that will persuade her to call the whole thing off. But there’s nothing, just the drumroll of her heart and the low simmering in the pit of her stomach that is likely rage. Or nerves. Or perhaps excitement. What’s the difference?
She walks through the apartment, and her hands aren’t shaking until they are. Until her whole body is shaking. Until she can’t hold it under her skin anymore and it erupts – she picks up a picture of Beth and Paul and hurls it through the window, she rips open the fridge and rips into the chicken in there with drool dripping down her face like an animal, she screams her anger at this place – this hungry hollow shell that Sarah’s filled, this trap her sister has been caught in, this woman that Sarah—
She walks through the apartment. She enters the bathroom. She ignores the mirror, opens the medicine cabinet and finds the bottles of pills therein. Look at them, that identical army of bottles. Maybe if she stares long enough she’ll spot some difference in them. Maybe if she stares long enough, they’ll begin to matter.
But Beth will be coming home soon from her late shift, and Helena has to get to work. She reaches out and grabs a bottle at random.
It doesn’t matter, really. Any of them will do.
iii.
They’re all so different, Sarah thinks to herself, clicking rapidly through the sheer overload of information she’s received. Today marks the start of her new position at the DYAD – one that essentially outranks Aldous. Thank goodness. Sarah isn’t stupid enough to think herself free, but the chain around her neck feels – looser, without him hanging around and sighing everywhere. For the first time she has power unshared with anyone. There is something thrilling in it: having it all to herself.
Having them all to herself, really – Alison and Beth and Cosima and Jane and Jennifer and Krystal and Nadia and Rebecca and Tony and, and, and. All of them hers. All of them, reduced to data dumps on flash drives that have been given to her in a neat little box so she can learn them. All of them hers.
But it’s a dizzying amount of information, and a headache is nestled right between Sarah’s eyes. She lowers the lid of her laptop and presses cold fingers to her temples, pinches the bridge of her nose in an attempt to bring herself some relief. Abruptly she wishes that she’d never gotten this promotion – wishes she was still a teenage girl, with the freedom to sit in on medical examinations. She wishes she could talk to Beth. Out of all of them, Beth always listened best.
With a thrill of guilt she realizes that in a way she could. The laptop is new, with remote access to the security cameras tucked away discreetly in each clone’s living area. Of course the laptop is tapped, monitored, each keystroke logged somewhere (and she doesn’t envy the technician who has the job of sorting through that), but surely it’s natural that she’d be curious. Surely.
(She’s justifying it to herself, she realizes with a dull thud in the pit of her stomach. Like an addict, she’s talking herself into another hit. This is dangerous. She’ll get lost in this.
But it’s easy enough to shove that voice to the back of her mind. It settles there, right next to one single word: Helena.)
It only takes a few keystrokes and then there it is: the grainy camera in Beth’s apartment, hastily set up a few days after she’d moved in. Beth is asleep alone in the bed. It’ll be Sarah’s job to get her a new monitor, soon; Sarah will have to go through the line-up on people with…debts…and find out who would suit Beth best. It’ll be Sarah who gives Beth someone to love.
The camera is too far to watch the rise and fall of Beth’s chest on the screen, but Sarah leans in closer anyways just to see if she can see. There’s nothing. No sign of life; the woman in the bed could be a corpse, still and cold, and Sarah would have no way of knowing. She keeps watching, though. There’s no breathing for her to match but she tries it anyways – in, out, rhythm slow and steady and not as dead as the woman onscreen. She shrinks the window, opens another: scanned copies of the latest monitor’s reports, neat paragraphs on intense work ethic and difficulty maintaining long-term relationships. She looks back and forth: the woman, the data. The data, the woman. When she unfocuses her eyes they all blur, the minute shades of black and white fading to one great grey.
Sarah reaches out and closes the window – there’s nothing she can get out of it anymore, not really. She’s stolen Beth’s breathing and the rhythm of it floods her chest like tides; what more, really, could she get out of that image? So the picture flickers away to nothing, and Sarah turns to the lines and lines of data. She’s sure to anyone watching her monitor it looks like she’s picking the subject over the girl – and the thought is funny, because this isn’t about the subject at all. This is Beth pinned down in lines of text like a butterfly to a board, right there for Sarah to know. Better than the stilted childhood intimacy of creeping into a darkened bedroom, better than grabbing an unresponsive hand; this, she’s certain, is the best way to know Beth. Climb in Beth’s life and live inside of it, each minute and hour and day of it written down.
She reads and reads and reads – how Beth is holding herself differently, in her monitor’s words, how she sits stiff and ready to run. (Sarah shifts to the edge of her seat, just slightly.) How she says she’s tired, now, all the time. (Her shoulders lower.) On and on and on, until she can build a skeleton out of words. Data bones.
She’s used to this, by now. She and Helena would whisper their schedules back and forth at night, so that if anyone asked they’d know each other’s days forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards. Know each other that way: backwards. Forwards. Sarah could relive Helena’s day based on nothing but the story of it. There are pages and pages of text here, enough stories to bring an entire woman to life. Sarah could know Beth. Sarah could know Beth well enough to be her.
Her heart snags to life inside her chest – Beth’s heart, Beth’s chest. Sarah stares wide-eyed at the screen. The thought is a jangling war cry, no matter how hard she tries not to think it.
She closes the laptop’s lid, like closing a trap that’s about to snap shut on her. She’s starting to think that she might be in too deep.
8.
The office is empty when Helena enters it, which makes sense – she’d switched their schedules around, told Sarah she couldn’t possibly handle the head of McBradden Financial today. Sarah had looked at her oddly, face full of something like guilt. But she went, and now Helena is here: in Sarah’s office, her fingers steady typing the password into Sarah’s laptop. Files pop up, the kind Helena is used to seeing: itineraries, updates, proposals. She doesn’t know what she was expecting to find, really – she’s hungry for some evidence, something tangible, something she can touch—
The phone rings and she picks it up habitually.
“Yes.”
A tired exhale, and a familiar voice saying: “Hello, Sarah.”
“Aldous,” Helena says neutrally. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes,” Aldous says. “Have you seen the latest reports on subject 359M20?”
Well, no, she hasn’t. Helena navigates through the neatly-organized files – the same organization system as her own – pulls up Beth’s files.
Oh.
“The level of drugs in her bloodstream is…excessive,” she says carefully.
“I think it may be time to intervene,” Aldous sighs. “I can take care of it, of course, but I thought—”
“Don’t,” Helena says, before she quite realizes she’s done it. She tabs over to another page: Allevia, superprax, draxifil. Enough pills to be dangerous. Enough pills to be – to be – to be useful. Does Sarah know about this? She must, surely. Helena could wonder why Sarah hasn’t done anything to stop it, but in a way she already knows. Sarah’s been preoccupied. She lets out a laugh, a small hysterical bark into the mouthpiece of the phone.
“…Sarah,” Aldous says warningly. “Explain.”
Helena closes her eyes, pulls herself together. Her heartbeat’s beginning to pound faster and faster and faster in her chest. How does she explain that syllable leaping from her mouth? How does she explain, without saying: you have given me such a gift and you don’t even know what you’ve done? Without laughing into the phone, without screaming and screaming and never stopping?
“Her monitor has said the pills are a logical reaction to police stress,” she says, “yes?”
“Yes.”
“And of course it’s essential that we not intervene, unless there really is no other option.”
There’s a pause.
“It is essential, isn’t it?”
Another pause.
“…Yes.”
“I know it’s difficult to see her like this,” she coos soothingly. “I feel the same, you know I do.”
(She picks up the laptop and smashes it into the desk, shattering the screen.)
“But we can’t jeopardize the experiment—”
(She overturns the desk.)
“—over a handful of mood stabilizers.”
(She’s screaming.)
“Are you sure this is the best option,” Aldous says, and – oh. Helena can hear some aching vulnerability in his voice, some exhaustion. In a better time she’d tell Sarah about it and her sister would smile at her over the fallibilities of others. In a better time. In a. In a better time in a.
The silence she’s left is hungry, so she fills it, says: “I think it’s impossible to know.” Of course she knows what he’s looking for: faith, and relief, and the lifting of this burden from his shoulders. Sarah might offer it to him. Helena has no reason to. The inside of her head is still ringing with the echo of broken glass.
“Yes,” Aldous says. “Well.”
“She’ll be fine,” Helena sighs. “She’s overworked, the same as any of us.”
He takes the hint; they exchange goodbyes, awkward over the phone, his outburst of emotion still hanging like a smog in the air between them. Helena hangs up with a sharp sigh, more confident than the rest of her. The rest of her feels like she’s going to shake apart.
Reverently, with trembling fingers, she navigates back to Beth’s scripts. The list glares at her from the screen, neat black and white. There’s no messy grey to it: she could do it. She could not do it. There’s never been a middleground.
But really, she’s humoring herself by pretending there’s a black and white at all. There’s really only one option.
She’s never had a choice.
iv.
She can’t shake it. The thought, she can’t shake it, she can’t stop thinking it, over and over and over again. Well enough to be her. Well enough to be her. Days pass, weeks pass, months, and Sarah can’t stop thinking it low and hurting in the back of her mind. Well enough to—
She doesn’t realize how tightly she’s holding her glass until it shatters; glass falls everywhere, gin splashing all over the counter – the floor – the paperwork. The olive rolls across a stack of pages and stares at her, one accusing eye.
“Shit,” she hisses, and claps her bleeding hands over her mouth. That wasn’t her voice. Like that she settles back into herself, realizes she was sitting on the barstool in her kitchen with her legs planted solid, finds bitterness tucked under her skin instead of – instead of – what she usually feels.
(What is it that she usually feels?)
Sarah (Sarah) slips off the barstool, stumbles when she hits the ground – she’s taken off her shoes, at some point, she’s – and starts picking up the broken pieces of glass from the ground. Her reflection is broken into a thousand pieces and a headache is pounding away at Sarah’s temples. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
She smears blood all over the glass, from her own cut-open hands. She’ll have to bandage them. She’ll have to sweep up the glass. She’ll have to take care of this, because tomorrow Paul is coming home and if he sees her like this he’s gonna freak out again, the way he did three weeks and four days ago, the way he did six months and twelve days ago, the way he did—
Sarah’s head is full of data and her hands are full of broken glass. It all hurts. It all hurts. She throws the glass in the garbage without looking, sits back on the barstool. Absentmindedly she pops the olive into her mouth, eats it without looking. Her tongue tastes like salt and brine, a burial at sea. Liquid that isn’t salt water seeps into the pages and pages she’d spread all over the bar. She shouldn’t have taken the paperwork home. That was a mistake. She is making so many mistakes. Helena can’t know.
She folds her arms on the counter, rests her head on them. The world smells like salt water and blood. Metal and metal and metal and metal.
“This isn’t me,” she says, accent some soft and unformed thing. The sound echoes against her skin. This isn’t me this me isn’t isn’t isn’t me this me this. She wishes she sounded more convincing. She wishes she could convince herself. So she says it again: “This is not who I am.”
Better. At least she got the accent right – all crisp syllables. Years and years of work, her sister as her echo. Her sister’s echo. It was easy, then, but now Sarah is sitting in a wreck of blood and broken glass and Helena is nowhere to be found. It’s just Sarah, alone – and Sarah, not nearly alone enough. Alone with all these different versions of her in her own head. So that is to say: not really alone at all.
And that thought is still pounding pounding pounding—
“Fine,” she says abruptly, sitting up; the motion makes her dizzy, for a second, and all she is is hurt and confusion. “I know Beth well enough to be her. It would be easy.”
She stands up, walk shifting from the balls of her feet back down; flat-footed, movements sharp as machinery. They’re shaped by a ticker-tape of data, feeding into the back of her machine-mind – male-dominated home environment means squaring the shoulders; time in police academy means making everything a little bit sharper; history running means a bit lighter on the toes, as if every movement precedes flight. It’s easy. It’s easy. It feels like a skin she’s always been meant to settle in; by the time Sarah reaches the door of her bedroom, she’s breathless. Shaking herself back into Sarah feels like coming down from some brilliant, sparkling high.
(An addict. She’s an addict. She’s an addict.)
Her thoughts are calm. Orderly. Clean like the lines of a gun. Sarah feels like a snarl of thorns, a cloud of smoke from some desperate fire. She hates coming back to it.
So…she doesn’t.
7.
Helena’s pacing back and forth by the window, the sound of her heels like snapping jaws, a mouth that’s about to eat her whole. Out the window the skyline of Frankfurt is glittering. It’s nothing like Toronto. She’s going to scream. She’s going to hurl her chair through the window, carve herself open with the shards of broken glass, scream at the security camera: this is what you are doing to us. When are you going to stop giving us scars?
But she won’t. So.
She stands in the middle of the office and collects herself, fingers skittering over the skin of her stomach absentmindedly. She can feel the faint pressure of her hands through her blouse, hates herself for the nervous tic, continues anyways until she’s managed to soothe herself.
God. She’s in Germany, right now. She can’t be here. She can’t be here! Panic and anger are leaping beneath her skin. She’s being eaten alive by so many different mouths.
Helena sits down at the desk, trails her fingers along the cold glass. Back and forth and back and forth. Panic and anger and sadness and fear. What is she going to do? She has to do something, doesn’t she? She has to fix this. It’s up to her to fix everything – herself, and Sarah, and herself-and-Sarah. And for the first time it is just Helena in this. Helena: alone.
She feels the urge to call her sister, because she has no one else. No one else to talk to, no one else to make everything alright. Just Helena-alone, and feelings under her skin so strong they’re screaming to be let out. If only she could talk to Sarah. If only Sarah could reassure her that everything is fine – that nothing has changed at all.
But instead Helena is here. In Europe. Oceans away from anything that matters, and surrounded by women with her face and seas of paperwork to wade through. She knows she should be working right now, monitoring monitors and making sure that this precarious machine keeps functioning. There is no space in the workings of the DYAD for anything resembling a fire.
If only she cared. If only she could muster up some sort of excitement, some sort of love, something to make her invested in these copies of copies of copies.
Then again. Sarah did.
And Helena’s up and pacing again, back and forth like a caged animal. Her brain is running rampant, shoving image after image at Helena – everything that could be going wrong right now, without Helena to fix it. The experiment jeopardized, and her sister in danger. Aldous furious, and her sister in danger. Project Leto deemed a failure, and her sister her sister her sister her sister—
She’ll think of something, she tells herself. She presses her fingertips to the glass for the cold of it, the way it soothes. Holds her breath, as if she could feel the echoes of some distant catastrophe from here – rattling through the glass, telling her through touch that something has gone wrong.
But something has already gone wrong, hasn’t it? Helena is standing here, in front of this window, but the glass has already shattered.
v.
More and more the person who is Sarah begins to feel like a facade, something she pulls over herself to hide – well, Beth, really. Beth and flashes of Alison, sparks of Cosima, glimmers of that and-and-and. But Beth is where it started, and Beth is where Sarah hides. She knows Beth is not as strong as Sarah would like her to be – she’s read Paul’s monitor reports, has started to see something about abuse of prescription medication – but her mind is the same as it’s always been.
Or. It – it’s Sarah’s mind, reflecting what she thinks Beth’s mind would be like. But it’s still the same. Which is what matters. The same. As it’s always been the same.
She remembers to pull the tattered remnants of Sarah back on when Helena is around; she thinks Sarah’s sister can tell that something is wrong, but she can still pass their system of checks and balances well enough so Helena never comments on it. It’s not a problem. Really it’s not. It’s just – something she can do, to get by.
The problem is that it’s starting to not be enough. She is Sarah-as-Beth in Sarah’s life, and that isn’t what she wants to be; the drumming is back in the back of her brain, insisting that she’s good enough, that she could do it, that she needs to try something bigger.
Then she’s staring at Beth’s banking statement, the purchase for a plane ticket to Minnesota.
Then she’s doing her makeup in the mirror.
Then.
Then.
Then she’s walking through Beth’s apartment, hands in the pocket of her coat, stride solid. She shouldn’t be here, but she finds that she no longer cares. It’s thrilling, and it’s easy. It’s so easy, and it feels right, and – isn’t this what she’s been owed, all along? These women are hers, given to her by their creators; hers to watch after, hers to protect. Hers to be, if she chooses. She is they are her. So what’s the difference?
She opens and closes the fridge, noting food preferences. For the delight of it she grabs a beer; Sarah doesn’t like beer, but Beth is…inclined. (The contents of her recycling bin: an endless amount of bottles, brown and gold and glass.) She takes a swig as she makes another loop. Her fingers trail along the wall, tracing along a photograph of Beth for a second before she snatches her hand back. That isn’t something Sarah or Beth does, which means it has no place here. She takes another pull of beer, long and deep. She hates the taste until she doesn’t. Until it’s perfectly fine.
Key in the lock. She looks at the clock on the wall and – yes, that is Paul, right on time. Military punctuality. Is it funny or sad, that Beth finds herself drawn to men with a military look? Neither, maybe. She craves structure and organization and stability. She’s allowed to it.
There’s a grin rising on her face and she crushes it down – hours of footage show that Beth isn’t forthcoming with her emotions. Not really.
Paul enters, stage left. He blinks at her and she watches the corners of his mouth to see what it is he’s feeling. Unfortunately his face isn’t as easy for her to read as her own, but – he’s understandably confused.
“Hey,” she says from across the room. Her fingers twist on the neck of the bottle, around and around.
“Hey,” Paul says, throwing his keys in the dish by the door, taking a few wary steps into the room. “Thought you were going out of town for a few days.”
“My flight got delayed,” she says, like a liar. “Got an early flight tomorrow morning. I’ll try and be quiet when I leave.”
There’s a space where Paul should say something charming, something about how glad he is that Beth will be around for a few hours longer. That would lead to Beth laughing, which would lead to a moment of intimacy. But there’s nothing there. Which – of course there isn’t, because Beth and Paul have been fighting for weeks. His late hours. Her vanishing acts. His lack of care. Her “cold fish” routine. She knows this. She knows this because she – was there. Or. Saw it. Or. She knows.
“You complaining?” she asks, aiming for that knife’s edge between amused and sharp, mostly making it.
“I’m not complaining, Beth,” Paul sighs. “I’m just – surprised, that’s all.”
“Well,” she says, slowly, relishing the feeling of those syllables on her lips. “Here I am. Surprise.”
6.
It’s all over the second Sarah steps through the door.
The problem is: it isn’t Sarah. It’s Beth, opening the door to their apartment with Sarah’s key. It’s Beth all over, except for the small shivering part of Helena that says it’s Sarah, that it couldn’t be anyone but Sarah.
“Beth?” she says anyways. “You couldn’t think you’d get away with waltzing in here – you do realize I’ve caught you red-handed.”
The woman in the doorway stares at her, something frightened and shattered and wrong in her eyes.
“It’s me,” she says, key held in a death grip in her fist like a knife. Helena wouldn’t trust her even if she got the voice right, but: she hasn’t. Her accent wavers, her pitch shifts. Beth – Beth? – must be able to see the distrust in Helena’s face because she takes a step closer, reaches out a trembling hand, says, “shit – shit – it’s – it’s Sarah, don’t throw me outside to rot.”
Helena takes a single step backwards. It’s the only concession she’ll give, except her heart is pounding. It’s Sarah. It’s Sarah.
“When we were nine,” says – Sarah, desperately, as she takes a matching step forward, “we—”
“Stop,” Helena says. “When we turned fifteen you pulled something out of a box to give to me. What was it.”
“Lipstick,” Sarah blurts. “Helena, I’m sorry.”
It’s Sarah. It’s Sarah and Helena stops and just – looks at her, for a moment. Her sister, wearing clothes like Beth’s, makeup like Beth’s. Her lip gloss is smeared, slightly. Helena wonders what she’d see if she checked the footage in Beth’s flat. Wonders who she’d see.
“Sarah,” she whispers, “what happened to you?”
Sarah darts a glance over to the camera in the corner, twists her mouth. It’s familiar, it’s all familiar, and Helena wants to scream and weep and sob at it coming from Beth’s face, coming from Beth standing there in the door. Instead she grabs Sarah’s hand and pulls her sister into the bedroom. Closes the door.
“Explain,” she says.
Sarah sinks to her knees on the floor, like she’s praying. She shudders, once and again and again.
“It’s easy for you,” she says, finally, accent settling into something familiar but words on a knife’s edge of amused and sharp – which is like Sarah, but is not like Sarah at all.
“What is,” Helena tries, but Sarah’s still talking.
“Every morning you wake up,” she says, “and your heart is in the same place, on the right side of your chest. You could spend your whole life switching between us, day to day, and you would always – you would always know who you were.”
“Who am I?” she says, and her voice cracks so badly on the last word that Helena’s down on the ground next to her, reaching for her sister’s hands before she can stop herself. They’re like two birds in cages, but – Helena’s never wanted to be a cage for her sister, not really. What else could she do, though, but hold Sarah down?
“Who am I?” Sarah says again, desperate. “Am I I? Am I us? What is Sarah, but a collection of traits? There is nothing – there is nothing, Helena, that makes me special at all.”
“You’re Sarah,” Helena says, slow. “You’re only yourself. You hate beer, and you never eat the olives in your martinis, and your first kiss was with an intern when you were seventeen. Remember? We planned it, together.”
Sarah laughs, suddenly, a high hysterical jagged sound. She’s shaking.
“You’re lying,” she says, and to Helena’s ears she sounds uncertain, hopeful.
“I’m not,” Helena says. “I know you.”
“Maybe,” she says, slowly, “you should remove yourself from the project. Only for a little while. Until you can—”
“No,” Sarah growls, the sound feral. Her head jerks up; she looks at Helena, shaking and shaking and frantic and wrong. This isn’t a version of Sarah that should ever exist; Sarah should never look like this, like an animal.
“They’re mine,” she spits. “I’m not going to leave them.” She blinks, looks down at the way her hands are shaking Helena’s hands. Slowly, slowly, the shaking stops. Then Sarah just looks tired.
“I can’t,” she whispers. “I’ve forgotten how to be myself. I’m a mirror to reflect them. That’s all I am.”
You could reflect me, Helena thinks, but she’s not stupid enough to say it out loud.
“I’m so tired,” Sarah whispers, and Helena can’t stop herself from pulling on their joined hands, wrapping Sarah in an awkward and uncomfortable embrace. Her bones are jabbing Sarah, Sarah’s bones are jabbing her. They don’t fit together right, not like this. But Sarah heaves breaths into Helena’s shoulder and then she is crying, like a child needing the comfort of a family. Helena strokes her hair, whispers: shh, shh, shh. Something in her chest is keening, yelling for her to keep her sister safe.
She doesn’t know what to do. But she’ll do what she has to, to keep her sister safe.
“Shh, Sarah,” Helena whispers. “It will be alright.”
“I promise,” she says. “I promise you, I’ll find a way to make everything alright.”