Before she buys furniture for the house on Hogarth Avenue, Molly sets off in search of a martial arts school. From her time at the university she knows she will never find a teacher like her mother, but she is a good enough student to know that some instruction is better than no instruction. She scrolls through various dojos and dojangs, as well as boxing clubs. She visits every single one on her list. She settles for a mixed martial arts club, and works mostly on her own, but spars once a week. She takes care not to show her true proficiency and smiles when the men go out of their way to teach her techniques she already knows.
* * *
Employment with the university is not so bad. Her official designation is lab assistant, but built into her contract is the ability to continue her studies in a modular fashion should she wish. She works with James for four hours per day. This generates one hour of paperwork. After that, she can pretty much do what she likes. She loses interest in the courses, though. Even Shakespeare holds no fascination for her.
She has a vague feeling that working with James will at some point equip her to understand the mollys. She does not know how, but human anatomy and physiology are about the only things she can focus on. She has no strong emotions, hasn’t since her parents died. She can function, but she is aware of the absence, like a psychic hunger. She looks around for Leon so she can fuck the emptiness away, but she cannot find him. James became businesslike once she accepted the job, and there have been no more invitations to coffee.
She bumps into Adele, says hello, but receives no response. She wants to say thank you to Adele, for saving her that night. Molly knows she should feel regret, but she doesn’t.
Regular work reduces the pain of her parents’ deaths to an abstract idea. As she cuts the cadavers on the slabs, she realizes there is no sense to be made out of life.
Three or four A.M. Molly opens her eyes as a molly comes into bed with her. It curls up into the hollow of Molly’s neck and sobs. Presently, Molly puts her arms around it. With time the weeping stops. It falls asleep and Molly stays in the same position until daybreak. She strokes its hair a few times. An hour after dawn, the molly’s muscle tension changes along with its breathing. It wakes.
Here we go again.
* * *
No matter how careful she is, a molly always appears. How is it that humans bleed so much? Or maybe Molly herself bleeds more than the average human. The rules are useless, an attenuation at best. Lifeblood escapes all the time, minor hemorrhages, a little a day. Maybe that is how we age. Maybe that is how we die.
* * *
Molly Southbourne dreams that she has a baby. She returns home to find the babysitter gone and the baby shrunk in the Moses basket. When she picks the baby up it is covered in a birth caul, except the caul is made of polyethylene wrap. Within the wrap the baby writhes weakly. There is mucus inside the caul with the child, who looks alive, but grey and diseased. Molly feels like gagging, but she cannot. She tries to scream, but nothing comes out. Then she wakes and a molly is on top of her, face contorted with endless rage, dripping spit and tears onto Molly, its hands tight around Molly’s neck. It is still dark in the room, so it’s night. The molly is naked, and must have formed within the hour. Molly’s blood sings in her ear, so it must have been strangling her for a while. Molly mentally congratulates the molly for choosing a relatively bloodless method.
Her left hand is free, so she punches the molly in the ribs, then thrusts her left hip up sharply. She pushes off the bed with her left foot, hurling them both over the right side. Molly’s head hits the nightstand, but at least the stranglehold loosens. Molly sees stars and the lamp is on its side, throwing crazy shapes on the wall. The molly takes a deep breath, steps back to control the distance, then lunges. Molly reaches under the mattress and unsheathes the dagger she has hidden there. When the molly engages Molly swipes for the side of its neck. She is wide of the mark, still seeing stars from lack of oxygen.
The molly blocks her knife hand, cutting Molly’s palm and sending the blade away. It punches Molly in the belly, then face. Molly blacks out briefly, but when she opens her eyes the molly is on top of her again. Why is it crying? No air. Might not be a bad time to die. She is about to stop fighting when she starts to see double. No. Not double. A new molly smashes a heavy object (the lamp?) into the one strangling Molly. It strangles the older molly with a gearlock, then snaps its neck. It stands, stares at the body.
Molly picks up the knife and stabs the new molly in the neck. It is not surprised. They are never surprised.
She sits on the carpet, takes ragged breaths. It is 0338 hours. Mollys fighting mollys. Who would have thought?
She splashes thick bleach on the bloodstains, and while she cleans, she wonders if she was born with a caul.
Later, she fires up the autoclave and the furnace.
* * *
Molly has been at her desk only two hours when Natalie from reception calls to say her sister is at reception.
Natalie babbles: “I don’t know, I think she’s your sister. She looks exactly like you. Is she your sister?”
“Yes,” says Molly.
“Does she have special needs?” Natalie’s voice goes up an octave, though the volume drops, like she is inviting a confidence.
“Yes,” says Molly.
“What shall I do? She’s just standing there. It’s weird.”
“Keep her there,” says Molly. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”
Molly closes the document she is in the middle of transcribing and locks her screen. She rips off a yellow sticky note and leaves something suitable for James. She expects to be back in a few hours. She gives her desk a once-over. The empty coffee cup is not clean, but she has no time to wash it.
In four minutes she emerges from the lift and sees the reception desk. The molly is there, standing roughly in the position soldiers would call at ease, unmoving. Its clothes do not match, and neither do its shoes, but at least it put some on. If it had walked barefoot Molly does not know how she would have coped with bleeding feet, or explained its nakedness. The molly sees Molly and its eyes widen with recognition.
It smiles, Molly does not. She used to smile at the quiet ones, but she can no longer be bothered. She wants this over and done with.
“Thank you, Natalie,” says Molly. She clutches the molly by the forearm and pulls it. It follows Molly into the car and automatically does up its seat belt. It does not talk during the drive home. Some of the mollys can be talkative in their confusion, but they always quiet down before they turn. Molly stays under the speed limit, but only just.
She parks the car and gets the molly out. The time is 1147 hours. She leads it into the house and it follows passively. Molly looks around for the hole, but sees nothing. She will return outside later for a more thorough search. For now she closes the front door after a quick glance. Nobody is watching.
“Are you hungry?” asks Molly.
“I could kill for some tea,” it says. It is something Molly says often.
Molly puts the kettle on, then leads the molly to a chair.
“Cream? Sugar?” Molly asks, but she knows the answer. Yes to both.
She stares briefly at the whorls of hair at the back of the molly’s head, then she reaches into a drawer and puts on workman’s gloves. They are yellow, stained, and oversize.
“Isn’t this nice,” says the molly.
“Yes,” says Molly. “It is.”
Then Molly flips the garrote wire over the molly’s head and pulls. She is unimpressed by its struggles, and falls back while keeping the wire taut. Noises come from the molly. It kicks and thrashes. Molly remains still and waits. Even after the molly stops gurgling and jerking, Molly waits for another ten minutes.
She shoves the body off her, pulls the wire free where it has dug into the neck, and waits for any movement. She feels for a pulse, opens the eye, and pokes it. No reaction.
She opens a cabinet and selects a jug of industrial bleach and lime. She drops the garrote into a basin and splashes bleach enough to immerse it. There is a little blood around the neck of the molly, but all in all, it is a neat job. She cleans the neck with bleach. She can find no blood on the floor. Just to be sure, she flips the lights on in the kitchen. Molly pulls off the tablecloth and drops it over the face of the molly. She cleans her hands carefully, checks her hands for cuts and blood smears. Finding none, she nods and leaves the house. She walks around the house and finds the hole at the back. She makes a note to buy seventy kilos of soil on her way home.
She will deal with the body when she comes back from work.
* * *
Molly works without a break for three hours to make up for the time away from her desk. She is about to start on a fresh report when James hovers. She takes the earbuds out and looks up at him.
“You’re . . . er, you’re working?” asks James.
“Yes, that’s what I’m paid to do,” says Molly.
“Right. Right. I . . . er . . . heard your sister came in. I didn’t know you were a twin.”
“She’s very quiet, but she misses me a lot. She doesn’t understand the city. We’re from the country,” says Molly.
“Right. Right.”
Molly does not know how to flirt, although she wishes she did. She has always known this time would come with James, but she had wanted to get close to him more naturally. She knows he wants to ask her out, but he is a professor and a nerd. Generally shy outside of his chosen field. She will have to initiate.
“James,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Would you like to have a drink after work?”
“I would like that very much.”
* * *
Molly returns home.
She fills the hole with soil from the gardening center. She knows the molly grew from where she threw the remnants from her monthlies. Which is odd, because she takes precautions against that kind of thing. Inside, she lays polyethylene sheets on the floor of her kitchen, then she carefully carves the corpse, the way her father taught her, the way James taught her. The head in one piece. She cuts off the arm at the shoulder joint, starting from the armpit and working her way around. Each arm she divides at the elbow and wrist joint. She takes off each leg at the hip joint, then separates the knee joint tendons. The ankle is fiddly, and even though she knows how to do it, she is in a hurry and does not bother.
She makes a Y incision on the trunk and empties the viscera into a bucket.
She treats all the parts with bleach, then lime. She mixes the blood with a chlorine powder that she sourced from a factory outlet.
She takes the parts to her furnace and lights it.
Molly strips off all her clothes and gloves. She puts them in her personal autoclave and starts the sterilization process.
She stops the plug in the bathtub and washes herself with a dilute bleach solution, then she steps out. She treats the collected water, then, satisfied, she drains it.
She showers again, gets dressed, and leaves for her date with James.
* * *
James is already in the restaurant. Their arrangement morphed from a drink to a meal as the workday progressed because neither James nor Molly likes bars. He has already finished two glasses of wine by the time Molly arrives. He offers a glass, but she declines. He is still wearing his jacket from work, but the shirt is different. He has also polished his shoes. This is important to him. Molly knows because she has seen him prepare for conferences in the same way. Most of the time he wears the first thing that he sees when he opens his eyes. Brilliant mind, but not great at grooming.
He is talking at her.
“What?” says Molly.
“I said, you look really good tonight.”
“Thank you, James.”
“I like your cheekbones. Slavic ancestry?”
“I don’t know. My mother spoke some Russian and Ukrainian, but I don’t know.”
“Did you know the word slave comes from Slavs because they used to be taken into slavery a lot?”
“Yes, I did. James, can I be honest with you? I don’t do small talk well, and I want to tell you something.”
“All right.”
“Let’s get the pressure out of the way first. I will sleep with you. Not because I want something from you, though I do. I’ll sleep with you because I like you. I like your unfashionable clothes and your eyes. Also, you smell real. I’ve wanted to sleep with you for a while.”
“Oh . . . okay.”
“But I also want to show you something.”
“Do we order first?”
“Just pay for the wine.”
* * *
“We should have ordered,” says James.
“Yes. I’m famished.”
It has been surprisingly good. James is not tentative in bed. Molly still feels like she can go again.
“Do you have anything in the kitchen?” he asks.
“I don’t cook.”
“I don’t care. I cook. I can make a feast out of scraps. What do you have?”
“I might have half a potato or something. And cornflakes. Butter, perhaps.”
He sits up in bed. “That’s pathetic.”
The time is 0138 hours, they cannot order out. Molly brings two bowls of cornflakes with cold milk, which they devour on the bed.
Molly finishes first. She says, “James, I want you to measure me.”
“What? Measure you how?”
“In every way, with every metric you know. Height, weight, arm circumference, blood, everything.”
“Why?”
“I want to know if I’m human.”
“Molly, what are you talking about?”
Molly starts talking. She does not tell him everything, just enough. Between her tale and his pointed questions, it takes the rest of the night.
* * *
James is not outwardly fazed by Molly’s story. He becomes dispassionate and professional. He takes her to his lab and starts with the basics.
He hesitates. “If I take blood won’t it . . . ?”
“The chemicals in the sample bottles seem to inactivate whatever it is. I tried it. Just don’t use any plain tubes.”
James takes the blood. “I’d like samples from a molly too. Tissue samples. For comparison. Do you have any prostheses?”
“No.”
“Good. I want to do some whole-body scans.”
“How long will this take?”
“A week. A month. Depends.”
“Whatever shall we do while we’re waiting?”
* * *
This is the first time Molly has felt happy since her parents died. In the daytime James experiments on Molly and the mollys—always talking about controls and calibration. At night they make love and eat food he cooks and discuss epigenetics and poetry.
Once, while they are sweating together, a molly appears in the doorway and joins them. It does not go bad while the three of them make love, and Molly kills it with regret and an ice pick the next morning.
“Has that happened before?” asks James. He does not help her dispose of the bodies.
“Not exactly,” says Molly. “The mollys aren’t all the same. Sometimes their personalities reflect my state of mind at the time. I don’t know why, or what circumstances trigger that.”
After this, James takes blood samples and biopsies at different times, depending on Molly’s emotional state. He deliberately provokes her to anger, then tries to take a sample. This does not quite work out, because Molly punches him in the face.
He will not discuss even preliminary results. “It might affect further samples and change the outcome. I’ll need to get a colleague to check my work when I’m done.”
“But . . . this is private. I don’t want other people knowing.”
“I’ve already involved other people. I’m not Victor Frankenstein, Molly, I need the expertise of others. I’m not a radiographer, or a chemical pathologist. I need colleagues to interpret the data. They don’t know what they’re looking at, though.”
Molly finds this unsettling, but she trusts James. She helps him stanch his bleeding nose.
* * *
Molly is unable to sleep, so she leaves James on the bed and does paperwork. She sees unopened letters, folders, bills, photos, and keepsakes from Southbourne Farm accusing her, so she begins work on them.
As Molly is finally getting to the end of the documents the lawyers left, she finds a dossier. It’s discolored and all the paper is yellowed with oxidation. The pages are full of tight, typewritten text. Some of the os and ps have solid windows. It’s faded, but generally legible. She sits down on the floor to read.
A Letter to my Daughter
I knew you would find this. I meant for you to find it. You know about my past, a part of it, at any rate. You know that I did work abroad, and that I was an information gatherer and observer. There are other words for such as I was, like operative, agent, spy, but I find these melodramatic and inaccurate. Observer is the term I would choose, although I sometimes intervened.
They quickly embedded me in a country which accepted my Slavic looks, which boiled down to high cheekbones and grey eyes. They considered dyeing my hair blond, but I would not have it.
I had been in place for sixteen years. I did not know the details of my mission at first. My instructions were simple: blend in, become a local. Gain idiomatic proficiency with the language. Make friends. Take lovers. Become a citizen of this country. Attend university, a broad scatter of subjects, do not excel, do not stand out. Tick along, be vague, obfuscate when asked.
I did this. I cultivated friends who exemplified the folk people. I spent time with such people in their homes. They kiss visitors. I don’t mean one or two. Every household member comes out and they kiss you one after the other. On the lips. It is beautiful.
The other people were less useful, by which I mean those who took on the attributes of our country. You see them, mimicking our fashions, our music, speaking our language in preference to their own. I could not learn from them other than to absorb a form of cultural inferiority complex.
We were taught to think of them as less than human, because of ideological differences, but they are just people. Like us. I reported back, told my handlers what I saw. This kind of feedback did not interest them. I had to talk about the locations of observatories and fuel stations. How many miles between such-and-such petrol station and the nearest conurbation? What is the height of the grain silos in this other place? What are the main sources of protein? Take water samples from this river at points X, Y, and Z, three days apart. I did not understand, but ours is not to reason why.
Then there was a fallow period where I had no contact from the home country. I sank into my role and began to think of myself as the cover story, as this student going native. I may have fallen in love briefly. You remember love, right? That thing you said was tight friendship and a little fucking? I slipped, and did well on my exams, found myself in danger of graduating with honors. It is hard to play dumb.
I received instructions. I had forgotten that I even knew how to recognize the code. A student walked up to me and said the most cryptic thing. It took me a few moments to recall the required response. My handler had gone grey and sported a nice beer belly.
“Start loading your courses with biomedical science,” he said. “Get good grades this time.”
“Am I to become a doctor?” I asked.
“No, but take all the genetics courses you can find. Favor the professors with strong research profiles.” He passed me a sheet. “Make sure these ones are on your list.”
I did what he said and did not see him for two years. When I did see him, it was over clear spirits in a dismal basement. He handed me a photograph. It was one of my professors. “Get all the information you can about her most recent project.” Then he let slip a curious thing that helped me understand my assignment. “It’s getting late. Last week there was a twenty-four-hour period where no child was born in our country.” He said nothing more, but seemed to drink a lot.
You probably live in a world where the fertility rates are so low that weeks without a child being born is a normal state of affairs. When I was young the total fertility rate was point-five per woman, and falling every year. If I’ve done a good job of schooling you, you should know what that means. Fertility rates worldwide plummeted, first in the developed nations, making scientists wonder if it was due to a modern toxin. They were on a hunt for it when it emerged that the same problems were shaking the developing world too. Bear in mind that some theorists believe the high fertility rate in some tropical zones was an adaptation to high infant mortality.
Anyway, nobody was having babies. The focus of my professor was not the cause, but the cure. I did not have access. I forwarded what I could, but I had taken enough classes to know it did not add up to anything.
My instructions came six weeks later. Steal it.
It sounds simple, but how do you steal an idea? Do you steal thoughts? Do you steal the realization of an idea?
I spent days deciding what I should steal, because this would be my final assignment. No going back afterward. They would know it was me. I mulled over my plan while one of my host families taught me how to make okroshka. Cooking is a great activity for when you need to get deep thinking done. I know it is the one skill I was unable to impart to you. I finalized my plan at the precise moment I measured out the dill.
After the household slept, I slipped out of the house, knowing I would never see it again. Entering the university was not hard, a student among other students studying or pretending to study. The laboratory was difficult, there were guards for a whole variety of reasons. There was some nuclear research done there, for example. I evaded them eventually. I knew my way around, could do it with my eyes closed. What I wanted was a vial, a sample. I brought an empty one with me. I would take a sample of the main fluid that was a distillation of the research, the embodiment, if not the thing itself. I drew it with a syringe and filled my vial. Then I got caught.
The laboratory lights came on and I became confused. The lab was secured by many identical unarmed women. I don’t know for sure, but I was on the other side of the room, yards away, and there was enough time to inject myself with the fluid. It wouldn’t matter if it was toxic—if they caught me I’d be dead anyway. Or I’d wish I were dead. The injection site hurt, but otherwise I felt okay. I don’t remember this part well, but I fought my way out. The guards, the ones in the lab, they weren’t well trained. Not like you, dorogoy!
I escaped alive enough to reach my contact. He was expecting a vial. He ended up having to extract me. I returned on a ship via merchant navy. Even from the dock I could see how much our country had changed, as you can imagine.
I felt overwhelmed and tired. I had broken ribs, a broken tooth that constantly bled into my mouth, blood in my urine, and a worrisome boggy mass on my left temple. I went to the nearest hospital, but when they asked my name, I would not or could not give the right one. I made one up on the spot. I sounded foreign, so it wasn’t hard for them to accept me. The medical staff thought I was escaping domestic violence. I did not correct them.
When I left the hospital a few days later I did what you did: I got on a bus. I changed my appearance, came to live here.
I never saw my handlers. Either nobody looked, or they had more important things drawing their attention. I know my handler filed a report, and when I phoned the number I was supposed to, there was just a hiss. These people would have found me if they wanted to, Molly. They are serious people with serious motives. Committed.
Why did I tell you all this? Maybe the fluid I ingested has something to do with your condition.
One last thing: I sometimes suspect that they are watching us. By “they” I mean the people I used to work for. I see people who seem to be working too hard not to look at me, a little too casual, a little too uninterested. I think they come onto the farm sometimes. If you ever run into a problem you can’t deal with, the number on your arm will sort it out. It’s a private security firm who have the utmost discretion and have been briefed on your condition. It’s all paid for.
I love you with everything I have, Molly, though I do not have much left.
Do svidaniya.
There is no signature, but Molly knows it is not fake. She even imagines she can smell her mother’s perfume on the paper. Most important, the letter reads like Ma spoke. A lot of the background information Molly already suspected, but this is her first hint that the mollys might be artificial, instead of some natural aberration or mutation.
Was I meant to populate the world with mollys to save the human race from extinction? That’s an absurd solution.
She does not know how to feel, and she is surprised when a heavy teardrop falls onto the paper.
* * *
Molly debates with herself whether to tell James about her mother’s history lesson. Her mind churns as she drives home after a busy day. She has not heard from James all day, but when she unlocks the front door he is waiting for her.
“Hi!” says Molly.
James nods. “You should sit down.”
“What’s wrong?” She sees the large plastic folder beside him. “Oh.”
James rubs his eyes. “Just sit down, Molly. Please. I . . . sit down.”
She sits opposite him, on the floor, legs tucked under her. Not an affectation; she does not trust herself to resist lashing out.
“I found Leon.”
“I wasn’t looking for him,” says Molly.
James hands her a photograph. It shows a mess, a round excavation bounded by four detached limbs, and a head that might have been Leon’s.
“What happened to him?”
“You did.”
“You mean a molly . . . ?”
“No. You passed something on to him, something that grew out of him eventually.” James gives her another photograph. This time it’s an abdominal scan showing an irregular mass.
“Leon had a tumor?”
“That’s not him. That’s me.”
She reaches for his arm, but he withdraws.
“I’m sorry. We can find a way to—”
“You did this, Molly.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I tested you I found foreign cells and a slightly enlarged spleen. The mollys don’t have those cells. Almost as a lark, I tested my own blood. I found the same foreign cells. I scanned myself and found the mass. And it’s growing rapidly. This is what killed Leon. It’s a slow-growing molly.”
“Wait. It can’t . . . I—”
He stands and drops the rest of the documents in front of her. “You’ve killed me.”
He leaves, and she does not try to follow.
* * *
Molly understands. Whatever else she is, she is now a weapon. She deals death no matter what, even when she does not know it. James will not, cannot, face it with her. She thinks she might have grown to love him and, perversely, is glad he made this decision. He would have been killed by a molly sooner or later. Like her parents. She takes the package downstairs, to the basement. She fires up the furnace, opens the door, and throws all the research inside. She watches it burn, feels the heat on her face, and coldly decides what comes next.
* * *
Her resignation from the university is handwritten. She does not need to, but closure is important. A part of her wishes she would bump into James while clearing out her desk, but it does not happen. She is too scared to ask after him, unwilling to deal with the guilt if he’s dead.
She then takes a week to build her dungeon. She has metal rings on the walls and floor, along with chains, handcuffs, and plastic ties. She piles all the furniture in the middle of the front room. She has cans and cans of lighter fluid.
Molly pricks herself with her hunting knife and sprinkles blood into the middle of the furniture.
Then she sits and waits.