1.
At first there is me and there is my sister, and then there is only me. Or rather, to put it more precisely, first there is me and I am observing my sister, for my sister is unstable. It is hard, sometimes, to believe we are siblings, and sometimes I, the stable one, do not believe so. Your task, my father says—if he really is my father—is to watch her, to observe her. If he is my father then he is probably not my sister’s father—which I suppose would make my sister something other than my sister. Perhaps she is my half sister, and we share the same mother. But we have never known a mother. Perhaps, as my sister used to suggest before her death, we were grown in a vat, not a womb.
Perhaps I, the stable sister, am not quite as stable as I have been led to believe.
To return to the matter at hand, my sister sits in a chair that is too large. Or, more precisely, it is a normal-sized chair, even though my sister is too small for a normal-sized chair. I, too, am too small for the normal-sized chair I am sitting in, which is positioned right beside my sister’s. Neither my sister nor myself are normal sized. In this, at least, we are alike.
We both stare at the blank wall. It is a whitewashed wall with a crack wandering across it. Sometimes I feel this crack hides a face. There are two larger holes where perhaps nails were once affixed, presumably to hang a picture. But there has never been a picture hanging on this wall in my lifetime.
My sister and I awkwardly grip the arms of our normal-sized chairs and stare in mutual silence at the wall.
From time to time, I cast a sidelong glance at my sister, to assure myself that she is still present in the chair beside me. It is my task to watch her. So says Father. As far as I can tell, she does not glance at me. Perhaps she does not care if I am still there. Perhaps, unlike me, she does not have a task.
I hear the buzzing of a fly. The creature passes before my eyes, a disruption in the air, and then circles, humming, above my head. It is behind my chair, then beside it, then comes to settle on the chair’s arm.
Carefully, I lift one hand, slowly, slowly. Then I bring it down swiftly, killing the fly, cracking the chair’s arm in the process. I am, as my father has noted, exceptionally strong and exceptionally swift—another sign, so my sister might suggest, that at least one of us—me—was grown in a vat.
I flick the dead fly onto the floor. Half smiling, I turn to my sister, eager for her to acknowledge what I have done.
But my sister is no longer beside me. While I have been engaged with the fly, she has left her chair and traveled to the far side of the room, clambering up into the open window. She is framed in it. As I watch, she throws herself out. By the time I have reached the window myself, she lies in the courtyard below, blood spreading in a puddle around her head.
I do what any faithful sister would do: I leap out after her.
When I come to myself again, I am lying beside my sister. The cobblestones where my body struck are cracked and buckled. I am unharmed, so far as I can determine. How can I be unharmed?
My sister’s eyes are open. For a moment I think she is still alive. But she is not alive. She is dead. I have failed in my task.
I do not know how long I lie there. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Long enough for the blood to stop pooling and to become tacky: it sticks to the side of my head and dries there. Long enough for my father to come looking for us and find us no longer in the room. Long enough for him to peer out the window and see us both lying in the courtyard, one of us dead, the other pretending to be dead, and to cry out.
“You had one task,” my father tells me. My sister’s body has been carried away, the blood scrubbed from the stones. I have been washed and brought back here, to this room. As I sit in the normal-sized chair, he walks back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. “You failed in your task,” he says.
“I failed,” I acknowledge. I bow my head.
“I no longer have a daughter,” he says.
“You no longer have two daughters,” I correct. “You still have me.”
He hesitates a moment, finally nods. His hesitation is not lost on me, nor is the fact that after I speak he seems confused then afraid, though I am not sure what I am to learn from this.
He walks back and forth. “How am I to know that you did not push her?”
“Why would I hurt my sister?” I say. “She jumped and then I jumped after her.”
“Why would you jump after her?”
“I was hoping to catch her,” I lie. “Absorb her fall.” But I was too far behind her to do that or even believe that it might be possible. The truth is I was hoping to be like her, to be dead with her. But I failed in that as well.
My father stares at me. “I wonder …,” he says absently. “What distracted you? What made you stop watching her?”
“A fly,” I say.
“A fly?” he says, surprised. “But there are no flies in this place. How do you even know about flies?”
I look on the floor for the dead fly, but there is nothing there. Could I have imagined it?
“I saw a fly, Father,” I insist.
“Don’t call me that,” he says sharply. “Impossible,” he adds. Then he sighs. “What shall I do with you? Shall I store you?”
“Store me?” I ask, confused.
“Never mind,” he says. He waves his fingers. “Carry on,” he says, and leaves the room.
But how am I to carry on? I had one task, as my father has always pointed out to me. Now that my sister is dead, I have no task at all. What am I to do with myself?
I spend a certain amount of time in the room, sitting in my normal-sized chair. If I look only at the wall, letting my eyes drift along the crack, there are moments, brief moments, when I can imagine the face of my sister caught in the crack and then I can extract it and float it away from the wall to reside here beside me. I can feel her. It is as if we are both still alive and together in the room.
But then I turn my head and she is not there. I am alone.
But does it have to be me? Why must I think of myself as me and not as her, as my sister? In so many ways we were so alike, weren’t we? Could I not be her? Would it not be possible for me to shift my thinking slightly and become the unstable one, the one who needs to be watched?
After all, I already know I am not as stable as I have been led to believe. How hard could it possibly be to no longer be me?
I leave the room. When I come back, I sit not in the normal-sized chair with the broken arm but in the other chair, the one closer to the window. This is my chair, I insist to myself. That other chair belongs to my sister.
I take my place and wait for my sister to enter. She will sit beside me and, as she always does, observe me. Why does she observe me? Because my father has told her to do so. But why would she listen to my father? And what manner of creature is she? Why is it that, though I am told repeatedly she is my sister, I have a hard time believing it?
When my sister does not appear, I close my eyes. I empty my mind of all thoughts. And then, slowly, I allow there to enter, from somewhere deep within my skull, the sound of footsteps. They move from the doorway past me, a child’s step but heavier than my own. And then I hear her take her place in the chair next to me.
I open my eyes. I do not look at her. I look instead at the wall across from me. It is enough to know my sister is there, looking at me, keeping me safe.
Or is it? What is she keeping me safe from? She looks like me and she does not look like me. Is she really my sister? Why does my father insist we call one another sisters? She is not encased in flesh but in some other substance that resembles flesh.
Once, a man broke into our room brandishing a weapon. He aimed it at me and fired, but my sister, impatient and quick, was already in front of me, shielding me with her own body, moving with a speed I did not believe her capable of. When the weapon discharged, it tore a hole in her flesh but revealed something unexpected beneath: another, harder rind that the discharge blackened but could not pierce. I remember that the man appeared first surprised and then very afraid. What in God’s name are you? I believe he managed to say. A moment later, moving even faster, my sister had done a sequence of things to the man that, by its end, left him little more than a sodden sack of meat. Like me, to his detriment, he did not have a harder rind beneath his skin.
I remember my father questioning my sister. Why, he wanted to know, had she done that to the man? Why hadn’t she kept him alive so that he could be questioned and we could determine which of my father’s enemies had been responsible? Did she think it was easy to govern in a place like this, so alien, so far away from the comforts of home? Perhaps you need to be recalibrated, my father said, half to himself.
If we are so different inside, beneath our skin, how can we be sisters? Surely we cannot be true sisters. But why would my father want us to address one another in this way?
Perhaps for her benefit; perhaps for mine.
No, certainly for hers.
I finger the skin on my belly. There is a slight irregularity to the skin there, from where the man shot me. I sink my fingers in and feel my harder rind beneath.
For of course, I am not my sister after all. I am just me. It does not matter what chair I sit in: a self cannot be shrugged on and off so easily as that.
Or, at least, if it can, it can be only for a moment.
I return to my chair, the one with the broken arm, broken by me. I close my eyes and try again to imagine my sister alive and beside me.
It is harder imagining her alive than it was imagining I was her. But in the end, if I keep my eyes closed I can do it. I can hear her opening the door. I can hear the sound of her steps, so much lighter than my own, as they cross the floor. I can hear the whisper of her soft limbs as they brush against the wood as she climbs up into her chair.
I revel in this moment of my sister being alive again.
Then I hear the buzz of a fly.
I hear it in front of me, behind me, above me. I keep my eyes tightly closed. I will the sound to go away.
But the sound does not go away. It maintains itself, a buzz and then a whine. And then I hear the thunk of a heavy hand slamming down, killing it, breaking the arm of the chair.
I open my eyes and see my sister, alive again, crouched in the window, ready to throw herself out. And then with a cry she does.
And here am I tumbling out into the air after her.
3.
When I come conscious, I am not in the courtyard. I am on a metal table, a bank of lights above me, burning brilliantly. Two men in white coats and surgical masks loom beside me. They are turned away from me and hunched over a set of instruments and parts, making choices. One of them, despite the way he is swaddled, I recognize as my father.
A large round mirror is on a telescoping arm next to me. Before they notice I am awake, I adjust it so that I can see myself in it.
In the reflection, parts of my face have been loosened, the skin peeled back to reveal the rind beneath. There is a square opening in my forehead and deep within I see a dim, throbbing glow.
My father turns around. With his tools he begins to reassemble my face. I remain still, as if, like my sister, I am dead.
“I don’t understand,” says my father to the man next to him. “Misprogramming? Some sort of bug? Why is it seeing things that aren’t there?”
The other man shrugs. “There is so much we don’t know,” he says. “Once activated, they begin to learn for themselves, in their own way. Maybe something is wrong, or maybe this is simply what happens.”
“Do you think it killed her?” my father asks.
The other man hesitates. “I … don’t think so,” he says. “The bond strikes me as too close, too personal for that.”
“What do I do with it?” asks my father as he continues to layer my face back into place. “Reset it? Then I lose anything it knows about my daughter’s death.”
“I don’t know,” says the man.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Of course it’s dangerous,” the man says. “But not dangerous to you.”
It is at this moment that I reach out and take hold of my father’s wrist. I do it very quickly but very carefully, and yet he still winces.
“Father,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. He is trying to keep his voice calm. The other man has stepped back and away. He presses his back against the wall.
“What is that man’s name?” I ask.
“Jensen,” my father manages.
“Tell Jensen to do nothing rash,” I say. “Perhaps he should sit down on the floor and put his hands on his head and just wait.”
Father looks at the other man, and nods. Slowly the man does as I have asked.
“I don’t intend to hurt anyone,” I say.
“That’s good,” my father says. “I am very glad to hear that.”
“But we need to have a frank conversation. Will you be frank with me?”
He hesitates, and then nods.
“You are not my father,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Not per se.”
“Do I have a father?”
“No,” he says. “In one sense, the closest thing you have to a father is me, but you do not have a father.”
I nod. “Good,” I say. “Yes, I knew that,” I say. “Somehow I knew that. Shall we talk about my sister?”
“You weren’t … exactly her sister,” he says.
“No,” I say.
“More like a … kindred spirit.”
“Like sisters without ever really being sisters.”
“Was she afraid of me?”
“I don’t know,” says my father. “You were there to protect her, so she should not have been. But perhaps she still was. Do you think that is why she leaped from the window?”
I do not answer. I let go of his wrist. “I need a moment to think,” I say. “Can you give me a moment?”
My father nods. He helps the other man to his feet and together, furtively, the pair of them leave the room.
I look at my face in the mirror. Parts of it are closed and look like my sister’s face. Other parts are open, revealing the rind and even something throbbing beneath the rind. Kindred spirit, I think. What does that mean precisely? Someone who is like you, who acts like you, thinks like you, resembles you in the most important ways. But what happens to the kindred spirit when the person they resemble is gone? Who are they kindred to then?
I leave my face as it is, partly open, partly closed. Like this, variegated, it better represents me, who I am, what I am feeling.
And what am I to do now? I can wait here for my father who is not my father to come back, bringing with him a contingent of armed men who will try—and no doubt succeed—to disable me. Or I can do as my sister did. I can still show that I am her kindred spirit, and leap out the window.
I shall keep in pursuit of my dead sister, my kindred spirit. I will not rest until, like her, I too am dead.