KESADA SAT ON the floor of her small recovery room clad in a thin green hospital smock and baggy trousers. Her long legs were extended before her and spread as wide as possible, which was, she noticed unhappily, nowhere near the splits she could almost do when warm and limber. She grasped one ankle and bent face to knee, letting tension ease from her muscles with the gentle pull in back and leg. She felt stiff, and her face did not meet her knee: yet another confirmation of things askew with her body. Her flexibility and muscle tone were very different than they had been just a short while before.
Once she began that litany, it did not stop. Her mind ticked down the list that had been growing since she had awakened in the med bed. Her implants were gone. Her hair was its natural color again and fell in tangled waves down to her hips, no longer the styled locks that she had worn to mid-back when she had left Tryst.
Her face was different in subtle ways, too. Her brows were unshaped; her teeth felt rougher, as if they were lacking the sealant that was a routine dental treatment. Her eyes looked the least bit younger. The minute scar at the edge of her left jaw—a souvenir of youthful tussles in her garden playground—was no longer there. Gone, too, was the slight flaw high on the side of her right thigh where a cane had rapped and broken skin, an accidental injury at Coel’s less-expert hands during Kesada’s apprenticeship at Tryst.
Her laufre routine did not stop her thoughts from tracing the same track repeatedly.
I’m me, but I’m not me. What was it Ilanya said at the start? You’ll be enhanced in certain ways.…
Did this amount to their idea of “enhancement”? Why? When?
Nothing Helda said had prepared her for this excursion to a laboratory where humans were the test subjects. Some part of her could grow emotional about this, but there was no point in indulging hysteria: only problem-solving would help her now. She was in the middle of a conundrum, and somehow, somewhere, there were answers to her questions.
The answers walked through her door as she was finishing the grounding set of her laufre routine. Metmuri came face-to-face with her as she stood in horse stance, releasing a long slow exhalation, arms moving towards the ground, palms down. The observer in her mind noted the guard in the hall behind him, the doctor’s unaccustomed expression—worry? concern? She did not disturb her pose at his unannounced entry. She finished the outbreath and came erect, feet together, hands by her side before addressing her captor.
It gave her time to study him and her reaction towards him. She had felt hateful towards Metmuri, but that anger was gone now. Something new was in its place. Scorn, and calculation. She regarded the bioempath as coldly as he had ever looked at her. A tool to be used, he was. Now, how to use him.…
The doctor flashed her a quick and nervous smile and moved a little closer.
“What do you want with me now?” she demanded, resting hands on hips as she did so.
He glanced over his shoulder to spot the guard, then lowered his voice when he replied. “I came to speak with you about your departure,” he said.
“It’s about time.”
“Shh, please.” He put a finger to his lips. “We can’t discuss this here.”
Kesada spared the guard a glance and kept her voice low as well. “Where do you want to discuss it, then? Because I have a lot I want to say to you. And questions I want answered.”
“I have no doubt you do. It is better if we have this conversation in another part of the building.”
“Let’s get on with it, then.” Kesada took a step towards Metmuri. He took a hasty step backwards, bumping a chair and steadying it with a hand. “Uh. Sarit. Why don’t you change into a jumpsuit. When you’re ready, join the guard. He’ll bring you to me.”
“Why the guard?” There was a sharp edge to her voice. “Eva said I would be free to go, after this last test.”
Metmuri gave her that same nervous smile and shook his head. “He’ll escort you to me, that’s all. There’s someone I want you to meet.” He licked his lips. “She’ll help answer your questions, I think.”
Kesada heaved a sigh. “Then go. I’ll be right with you.”
Metmuri ducked his head in agreement and bumbled out of the room, his attention torn between her and the guard he paused to give instructions to. The door irised shut behind him.
Kesada recentered herself with a long, deep breath, and then began looking for clothes.
KESI RECOILED WHEN Dr. Metmuri stepped into the room. It was involuntary, but he noticed, and he chewed a lip as he watched her reaction to him.
Well, he was bound to show up sooner or later, she told herself, and all the things she’d carefully rehearsed to say flew quickly out the window. She wanted to fly at him, hit him, shake him until he gave her answers to her questions, but still, he had power here and she did not. She hesitated, torn between fear and uncertainty, and held herself in check.
The fingers of his left hand picked at the seal of his tunic. His brow was furrowed, and he was in no hurry to speak to her. She was uneasy with his scrutiny and was the first to break the silence.
She held out her hand, flexed fingers claw-like, then straight again. If unsettled, take the offensive.
“Why’d you take my cat claws?” she demanded. “Does my Eosan know you did that? You aren’t supposed to modify my body.” That last was a guess—maybe Bejmet had agreed to having her modified after all. But Ilanya’s early reassurances—that she would be modified in ways that enhanced her—did not seem to include removing enhancements she already had. She’d had plenty of time to think on that already.
“And this—” She touched a lock of her long blond hair. “Why change my hair color back? The Winter Goddess has a certain look to maintain, or didn’t anyone tell you that?” She set a finger to the base of her neck. “And my jack—gone.” She confronted him, sulky and defiant. So easily was one cut off from net resources. “Why?” she demanded, fists clenched at her sides.
Metmuri bit his lip. “Please.” He gestured. “Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit. I want answers to my questions. I think you’ve gone too far. My House isn’t going to be happy with this. I want my implants back, and I want out of here.”
He rubbed his chin with one hand. “I want to explain—”
“Please do.”
“Come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
He led the way into the hall, waited a moment for Kesi to join him. There were no guards in sight. She looked around, relief warring with suspicion. Duty personnel walked the hall casually, medtechs in white lab tunics, black-uniformed Navy staffers … some glanced her way curiously, but no one moved to stop her from following the doctor.
He halted outside a conference room, waited while the portal opened, and gestured her to enter. He followed behind, sealing the door with a touch.
Kesi was oblivious to his actions. She was staring at the woman seated at the table, the mirror image of herself.
“Juro’s balls.…” the two women breathed in unison.
The seated one came to her feet. “Who—?”
“Who—?” Kesi echoed. They frowned simultaneously, then, as one, they turned to confront Metmuri.
A smile played briefly across his face, easing lines of worry. “Hinano Kesada,” he said, “meet Hinano Kesada. Your clone.”
The pair locked eyes and walked slowly closer to each other. Taking in details, studying features, finding inventory of self slightly distorted. This was not the face each remembered from mirrors, but the unreversed image that others saw. Like looking at a holograph, not a reflection: a disturbingly independent image.
As one, they pivoted back to Metmuri. “You want to tell us about this?” Kesada said coldly. Kesi bit back the same question. At the same moment they crossed arms over their chests and stood facing Metmuri.
Esimir shifted uncomfortably. He was unused to clones confronting him in this manner.
If they were convicts, he thought, they’d be left to figure things out on their own, if it suited our purposes to have them meet at all. And imperial shock troops understand what’s happening to them going into the vats. They don’t get this … this air of belligerent recrimination about them.
It had seemed much easier when the Serafix-fueled plan had coalesced in conversation with Terel. The test protocol was already mucked up—he could no longer place a clone in its natural control setting as the original plan called for. So why not just change it, allow this to be an observation of the complementary attributes the clones would no doubt employ, interacting and working together? Move them both offworld. Surveillance, residence, workplace, a plausible story to persuade one clone were already in place. What could be easier than to extend it to two? It was skipping ahead a phase or two, but would still provide valuable data. At least he could salvage something from this nearly botched experiment.
He looked uncomfortably away from the piercing eyes that transfixed him. In spite of their intense, confrontational mien, the Hinanos radiated vulnerability in their auras, their surprise and guarded confusion an undercurrent that his damped-down psi sense nevertheless picked up. He was not prepared for the way they looked at him: Kesi tearfully accusatory, Kesada cold and judgmental … like his mai dep, his school mother and her siblings, rounding on him, the women of his family demanding, critical, picking at him—
Esimir coughed and turned from the pair, stepping around the conference table to sit on the far side from them. He had not expected to feel so flustered. These women were the products of his science and his art and the spark of the divine that he channeled. His children, in a way, though they might not think so. He concealed his nonplussed state with a smooth segue into the speech he had prepared for this moment.
“You’ve been volunteered by your House to help us test a new technology,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it. Please sit. This will take a while to explain.”
The Hinanos glanced at each other, then at him. “Talk,” said Kesada.
They refused to sit. Very well then. Maybe after a while they’d get tired of standing.
Esimir laced his fingers together and began.
Naturally, he could not share the entire truth with them. Yet he did not like to lie outright, or deceive with misleading fabrications. The tale he told the clones cut as close to the truth as he could make it stretch, without betraying confidences they had no need to know.
“There is much that I can’t tell you,” he prefaced, “because our work is highly classified. Know that what you do here is for the good of the Empire. Your services are highly valued.” All true, that: and it looked to have no impact on the bio-twins. Well … they had gotten off on the wrong foot, and they would be remembering the unintentionally hard line Metmuri had taken with their earlier testing. Best not to let them dwell on that at all.
“You were cloned from your original self.” He stated the obvious. “Our purpose in doing this was to liberate, shall we say, certain attributes that you held locked away inside your psyche. You will find that your personality makeups vary in some ways. You are not identical clones, psychologically.”
As if rehearsed, the blond heads swiveled to regard each other, then turned guarded expressions back to Esimir. The doctor cleared his throat and continued. “We are interested in letting you resume your life—your lives, that is—with certain, um, limitations in place for the time being. These limitations are temporary.” Also true. If they were dysfunctional they would be destroyed; if not, they would be reintegrated, and at least one of the clones would perish in the process. In either case, they were destined for a limited life-span in the greater world. But there was certainly no need to distress them with that knowledge.
“You will not, unfortunately, be able to do this on Lyndir.” The Hinanos tensed; he coughed nervously. “Your … other self … is returning to her old life. We must leave that environment and that personality undisturbed. So you two will, hm … go elsewhere.”
Their gaze was unrelenting. He rubbed his brow, squirmed, then finally threw his hands wide. “Will you not sit?” he pleaded. “Please? We need to work through this together, and I need your cooperation to do so.”
Again the shared look. Finally, Kesada pulled out a chair with a studied motion and sat tensely on the edge of it. Kesi followed suit a moment later and was talking the moment she settled in.
“You’re saying that without my consent you cloned me, and now, I’m cut off from my old life and being sent elsewhere?” She shook her head in disbelief, voice raising an octave with tension—or was that near-hysteria? “Tell me I’m hearing you wrong. This is a bad dream.”
Esimir licked his lips. “Your House agreed—”
“—that I’d be gone for a number of weeks,” Kesada cut in. “You’ve had your weeks. Now it’s time to go back home.”
Esimir tensed. If they went down this track, things could go badly. “No.” He put an edge in his voice. “The agreement was that the Winter Goddess would return to Tryst.” He looked from blonde to blonde. “That process is underway.” A spectrum of emotion played across their faces. He tapped a finger on the table, punctuating his words.
“You—are—not—her.”
And neither was she, he thought. But that was also not relevant to this conversation.
He watched the clones warily for their reactions. Resentment, anger, stifled emotions warred in their countenances and body language. He was playing this one by ear, out of necessity. It was never like this with crèche clones in the military. Until the last hour, he had not really considered what it must be like for one who did not plan to become cloned, to discover that they were—and that their old life was closed to them.
Anger flared through him. It was not part of protocol and could only skew their behaviors in the field test! It was even, perhaps, grievously unfair to them as persons, if they were not condemned criminals subject to harsh justice. He cursed Ilanya for leaving him no alternatives. It was another complication he didn’t need, hadn’t planned for. Yet he would turn this around, just watch if he didn’t. Hinano was far brighter than the norm, but she was still no match for his elevated intellect. He had lots of leverage, yet, and saw how he could use it.
“As I said: the limitations on where you can live, what you do for work, and so on, are only temporary. Later, you can be reunited with your other self. After you’ve assisted us for a while.” True, as far as it went: reunion was possible through the splintegration process, though these clones would never be allowed to meet in uncontrolled conditions out in the free world.
The offer of connection with their old life hung in the air. Psychically, Esimir could sense their emotions shift in some way. They weren’t thinking it through, not yet—and that was just as well. They were responding on a visceral level to the idea of resuming a life so rudely interrupted. As long as that hope was on the near horizon, he knew he could work with them.
For the first time in this interview, the doctor breathed easier. He donned his most sincere bedside manner. “Now,” he said, “what questions can I answer for you?”
THE HINANO TWINS were unable to question the doctor as they would have liked, for the sheer magnitude of the news they had absorbed left them at a loss. Seeing this, Metmuri promised to speak with them again soon, and had them escorted to new quarters where they would be allowed to room together. The suite was nearly as spartan as the one they recalled spending weeks in, but it was larger and had double beds. No sooner had the door sealed shut, closing their guard-escorts outside, than Kesi stepped close to Kesada in a rush. “We have to talk,” she said, her voice urgent. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on here. I can’t believe—”
Kesada reached up, rested a finger on her twin’s lips. She gestured upward with a roll of her eyes and inclination of her head. Kesi’s eyes followed and she stopped still as she saw the glossy dark bud of a small surveillance cam in the ceiling corner. She’d known her other room had spyeyes in it. She hadn’t thought to look here, yet.
Kesada took her finger away. Later, she mouthed.
Kesi bit her lip, but gave a short nod. Their conversations carefully neutral, they looked around their sparse quarters and settled in to wait.