by Sarah Gailey
“She’s probably wrecked,” he said, watching as Martine lathered her forearms with antimicrobial soap.
“Probably,” I murmured. I was watching her too. The firm, unhesitant motion of her hands. The angle of her neck over the sink, as she watched the soap run down the drain. The slight, satisfied lift at the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry,” I added. “I’ll check in on her.”
But that night, when I asked Martine how she was doing, she smiled at me. She was absently rubbing the underside of her belly, pressing on a place where I suppose the baby was pressing back. Spirals of steam rose from her peppermint tea between us.
“I’m wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful. How are you doing?”
“Are you sure?” I asked, squinting at her. “Because conditioning can be difficult to watch. Or to participate in.”
She shook her head and reached for her tea, lifted it to her lips to blow across the surface of it. Her lips nearly touched the edge of the mug. “I don’t mind,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to set Nathan right.”
“Zed, you mean?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Although I think we should start calling him Nathan soon.” She sipped her tea with her eyes closed. “So we get used to it, for when he wakes up. We want him to respond to the right name, don’t we?”
“Soon,” I said. “But not yet. Not until the conditioning is done. What did you mean, ‘set him right’?”
“We’re putting him back the way he’s supposed to be,” she said. “We’re making him into the man we loved.” The heel of her hand palpated her belly again, a long, firm press.
“Did you love him?” I asked. She nodded, her eyes still closed.
“Very much,” she whispered. “Did you?”
I hesitated, stared into my cooling tea. It was hard, after the year it had been, to remember the way I had loved Nathan when things had been good. Or when things had been bad, but still worth fighting for. It was hard to remember what that had felt like. “I think so,” I said. “Yes, for a long time. I loved him, when I loved him.”
“What about when he died? Did you still love him then?”
I looked up from my tea and found her staring at me, her gaze intent. “I don’t think I did,” I said after a moment. “I think that, by then, I hated him.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Me too. I hated him too.”
“At the end?” I asked.
“Every second.” She shook her head. Her eyes shone with tears. Belatedly, I recognized the restrained fury hidden in the set of her mouth. “I hated him every single second.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Martine took to the work of conditioning Zed with startling enthusiasm. She never flinched. Not when we pulled out his appendix, not when we took a brûlée torch to his hand, not when we broke his collarbone. She never hesitated, never looked away.
There was one last piece of work, the most delicate procedure—the thing that would, if all went according to plan, turn him from Zed to Nathan. The scar on his eyelid. I had saved it for last because it would heal the fastest, and because it was small enough that if we ran out of time, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. It was a tiny scar, one he couldn’t recall the origin of—a little puckering at the corner of his left eye, mostly covered by lashes, but white enough to show up in photographs. I was doing the close-up work, cutting a deep valley into the flesh next to his eye. Martine held his eyelids open wide with one gloved hand.
He stared up at us, unseeing, his brain still wrapped tight in the heavy blanket of sedation.
“Hemostats,” I said, holding a hand out behind me. Seyed dropped the tool into my palm. I gripped the wedge of skin I’d cut loose and tugged at it.
“Will he remember any of this?” Martine asked. She was so close to my face that she whispered. Her breath was warm on my temple.
“No,” I said. “He won’t remember anything before waking up in the hospital suite.”
“So he won’t know that we made him?”
I shook my head. “We programmed him to respond to any stimuli as though he has organically formed memories. His brain will fill them in, for the most part. He’ll think that he’s Nathan. He’ll think he remembers the things that Nathan is supposed to remember. We’ll tell him that he got hit by a car, before we drop him at the hospital, so if he has any neurological weirdness, they’ll think it’s a concussion. Easy.”
Martine was quiet.
There was a tension there, thick and snarling. It made the room feel humid. It plucked at the place just behind my navel, the place where old fear lived. Heavy-falling footsteps and the sound of a key in the front door and my mother looking over her terror-straight shoulder at me, seeing me peeking around a doorframe, shaking her head so I’d know to creep away to bed.
I breathed in slowly through my nose, out through my mouth. I tugged on the strip of flesh again, and it pulled loose with a sound like tearing silk. I dropped the hemostats onto Zed’s chest and replaced them with a fresh set, these ones gripping a compress.
Blood climbed up into the white fibers of the gauze.
“Is something wrong, Martine?” Seyed said it so casually.
“No,” she said, the lie obvious. I switched the saturated compress for a fresh one.
“It seems like something’s wrong,” I murmured. “You can let his eye close now.”
Martine sighed, lifted her hand away from Zed’s face. I risked a glance over at her. She was pushing her palms into the small of her back, stretching, making her belly surge toward me. “I didn’t know,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Didn’t know what?” I asked. I risked removing the gauze from the wound I’d made, but blood welled up fast, and I pressed a fresh compress to it fast.
“I didn’t know that I was a clone. Not for the first few months,” she said. “Nathan told me that—that we were married, and that I’d been in an accident. He told me that I might not remember things.” She paused. “I believed him.”
“Good,” I said. “That means it works. I wasn’t sure if it would, to be honest.”
After a moment, Martine excused herself, said she needed to use the lavatory. I watched Zed’s blood slowly wick up into the compress I held, and I listened to the sound of Martine removing her gloves, washing her hands, walking out through the airlock.
Seyed took her place beside me at the table. “Nice one,” he muttered.
“What?” I asked. “Was I supposed to tell her how sorry I am that Nathan lied to her? I don’t see why that should rank, compared to everything else he did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”
The bleeding had slowed enough for me to remove the compress. Seyed handed me a syringe filled with liquid adhesive. Carefully, carefully, I began to fill the little valley next to Zed’s eye.
“Why are you so invested in her well-being?” I asked. “She’s a specimen. It’s not like she’s me.” Steady hands. That’s the way.
Seyed didn’t say anything. I finished applying the adhesive. It would need three minutes to cloud over and get tacky, four minutes to fully set; then I could put a bandage over it, and we would be finished. I hit start on a timer that would click every minute, reminding me to check. “Hey, answer me,” I said, straightening up and pulling my surgical mask down around my neck.
I looked at Seyed for the first time that day—maybe, I realized, for the first time in a while. I’d been around him, but we had been orbiting each other loosely during the conditioning process. He had been handling the things that I couldn’t. We’d been acting as a relay team more than we’d been acting as partners.
I’d been giving most of my attention to Martine.
Seyed didn’t look well. He’d grown a patchy reef of stubble across his cheeks and neck. He was bloated, and his lips were badly chapped—bitten, maybe, or just neglected. His eyes were hollow. He looked permanently hungover.
I cleared
my throat loudly, and he jumped—but still wouldn’t look at me.
The timer clicked. I glanced down at the adhesive. A couple of pink threads of blood had wound their way up into it, but it was still largely clear. When I looked back at Seyed, his eyes were squeezed shut.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Are you still stealing from me? Because—”
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not. I mean, I stopped after you found out. It’s not that.”
“Get on with it, then,” I said.
His breathing was loud enough that I could hear it over the monitors in the room. “It’s about Martine,” he said. “You asked why I’m so invested in her.”
I swore. “Don’t tell me you have feelings for her, Seyed, that’s such a massive ethics violation—and also, God, it would be weird, you can’t just—” The timer clicked again. I checked the adhesive, which was starting to cloud over.
“Let me say it, please,” Seyed said. “I have to say it.”
I waited, but he didn’t speak. The silence stretched between us, interminable, as he gathered his courage. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to slap him. Out with it.
I wish I could say that I already knew.
“I helped.”
That’s all it took. Two words, and I saw it all. Still, I waited, as though there were any explanation he was going to give me other than the one I knew was coming.
I wanted to give him a chance to lie.
I would have accepted the lie.
I would have known he was lying to me, and I still would have pretended not to know, because then he could have stayed. He could have kept my forgiveness. We could have pretended that nothing had happened, nothing beyond the stealing, and that was small, really. Compared to anything else, the stealing had been nothing.
But of course, Seyed didn’t want to lie. The not-telling had been corroding the meat of him already, and I hadn’t noticed.
I never notice. Not when it matters.
“I helped Nathan make—” he said. “I didn’t know at first. I didn’t know that she was what he needed the supplies for. He just asked me to take some things, things you wouldn’t even miss, for his own research. And I owed him,” he added, his eyes pleading with me to understand. “He’s the one who introduced me to you, he got me this job, in a way. I just wanted to pay him back.” He licked his lips, swallowed hard. “But then he had a hard time with some of the sequencing, and then he had an emergency with the protein chains and he called me, and it’s—I owe him so much, you know?—and I knew how to help, and he offered me so much money, all under the table, and.” He stopped himself midsentence, took a shaky breath.
The timer clicked.
The adhesive was cloudy. I touched my glove to it to check the set. It was tacky.
Almost there.
“You made her,” I said. “You made Martine?”
Seyed shook his head fast. “No, I just—I helped Nathan out with his project. I assisted. That’s all.”
The absurd thing I thought first was, Seyed’s seen Martine naked. Then, less absurd: Seyed’s seen Martine’s sequencing.
“So you knew?” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I wanted it to. It came out soft and dangerous, like it had when I was trying to make Martine put her seat belt back on, but I wasn’t doing it on purpose this time. “When we sequenced that hair, and I saw the marker on it. You knew that was Martine’s hair?”
“I suspected,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty sure. But I didn’t think he was … doing anything. With the project, I mean. I thought it was just labwork, seeing if he could pull it off. I always thought he failed.”
He let out a deep sigh, one that was tinted with relief. He was relieved to have told me. He’d transmuted his guilt into my anger, and now I was the one who had to carry it, and he had the audacity to be relieved.
“Did you help with her programming?” I asked. I wanted him to say yes, wanted to give the rage that was winding tighter and tighter in my throat something to strike at.
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “that was all handled before the protein-chain thing. I didn’t even know it was going to be you until—the sequencing was all methodology, and—”
“God,” I said, “of course he needed your help with the sequencing. I knew he couldn’t have done it on his own.”
Seyed laughed, a short breath, and I looked up at him sharply.
He wasn’t allowed to laugh. We weren’t comrades in understanding Nathan’s incompetence. We weren’t on the same side of things, not anymore.
He’d had his chance to stay in my good graces. He’d had his chance to lie.
The inner door to the lab opened. Martine walked in, stopped after a few steps, looked between us.
The timer clicked.
The adhesive was set.
“Martine, please come help me bandage this wound,” I said. She walked over slowly, not looking at Seyed. Her eyes were locked on me.
She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t ask anything. She helped me tape a patch of gauze over the adhesive. She stayed silent. She stayed calm.
She moved when I asked her to, but otherwise, she was very, very still.
My brain spun. Had Seyed helped bring Martine out of sedation? Had she recognized him? I remembered the horror on his face when he’d realized who she was—had that been real? He must have thought that he was caught, must have thought that I knew. I remembered the way his face went gray at the sight of her belly.
The anger in my throat coiled tighter, tighter, tighter.
Once the gauze was in place, I stripped my gloves off. “Seyed,” I said, “please clean this up.”
“I’m so sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—I never would have—I didn’t realize what he was doing, I didn’t know that she could get—that he would—have a baby, I didn’t—”
“Thank you,” I said. Soft, clipped. The way my mother had always thanked any nurse who lingered too long over either of us. It was the opposite of an invitation. The conversation was over.
The drive home that night was quiet.
Martine kept her hands in her lap, her eyes downcast. When I parked in front of my house, she didn’t get out of the car. I didn’t either. After a minute, she whispered an apology.
“What are you sorry for?” I asked.
“Whatever I did,” she said.
I was about to tell her that she hadn’t done anything at all. Then I hesitated, because maybe she had. “Did you know Seyed? Before the night we went to the lab?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “That was the first time I met him.” She didn’t ask why I’d asked the question. Her eyes were still on her hands. She was sitting so, so still, and I could read my mother’s prey-animal fear in the angle of her shoulders, and abruptly, the coiled-up thing in my throat unraveled.
The next few minutes are divided into vivid snapshots in my memory. Martine’s hand on my shoulder, heavy enough that she must have been pressing hard. The sound of the passenger door closing. The smell of her hair as she reached across me to unbuckle my seat belt. Stumbling a little next to her as she helped me through my own front door. Wine splashing into a cup in front of me, red as the blood that had welled up next to Nathan’s eye.
I was not crying. I would not cry.
After she coaxed me into the first sip of wine, though, I told her. I told her everything that Seyed had told me, and all of the pieces that it had snapped into place. I told her about how Seyed had given Nathan access to my supplies, had helped Nathan understand my research, had made it possible for Nathan to betray me. Had made it possible for Nathan to create her—a better version of me.
She topped up my wine, laid her palms flat on the table. “So when you asked if I knew Seyed, you were asking if I knew that he was … in on it.” I nodded. “I didn’t know,” she said simply.
It was as though some piece of scaffolding had been taken out fro
m under me. My anger at Nathan’s deception, at Seyed’s betrayal—it all felt so brittle. It fell away, just for a moment, and then I was able to think back to the time before I had found out what Seyed had done.
Martine had been out of the room.
Because I had hurt her.
“What I said before,” I started. “I should have been more sensitive to what you were dealing with. The whole process is…” I swallowed hard, took a sip of wine to move the words in my throat. “It can be difficult. I can’t imagine what it was like to realize that Nathan lied to you the same way we’re going to—the way we’re going to lie to Zed.”
She nodded. “It was upsetting,” she said. “But I understand.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe I’m just programmed to think I understand. Maybe it’s a reflex. Maybe I can see both sides of things because it’s the best way to make sure I never get angry. But even if that’s true, I still understand. I can see why it’s necessary.”
I reached for her hand. She let me take it, and I looked at her, and she nodded.
“I know,” she said. “You don’t have to say it.”
I should have said it anyway. But, like a coward, I accepted the pardon with gratitude. I held Martine’s hand as I finished my wine, and she poured me more, and I did not apologize.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The last time I saw my father alive, we were in his study.
I was due to have my wrist cast removed the next day. I was asking him to explain body fluids to me. I was confused by the different systems. I didn’t understand the difference between lymph and plasma, couldn’t sort out why they needed to be separate. We talked for an hour, and when the hour was up, he reached as always across the desk to shake my hand.
I aimed the webbing between my thumb and forefinger at his, just like he’d taught me. I gripped his palm, firm but not tight, and I pumped his arm twice. Three times, he’d told me, makes you look nervous. He gave me an approving nod—I’d gotten it right—and then he let me leave.