Since I can’t get through, I’m left with two options, but I’m not going to Tamara’s tamara factory, where she and her mass-produced army will be ready for me. Instead, I find my way back to Vitali’s house. The ghost mollys and I watch it for ten days and take notes on his comings and goings.
“Should we go in and look around while he’s away?” asks the nearest ghost.
I shake my head. “Not enough information. Too risky.”
“So we search, get more information, and make it less risky,” she says. “We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
“What if we can’t lock the doors after breaking in?”
“Then we make it look like a robbery,” she says.
Breaking into places is not as easy anymore as it was in my mother’s day. Technology has advanced way beyond her imagining. Pressure-sensitive sensors, motion detectors, infrared cameras, temperature-activated tear gas. Some of what she taught me is still relevant. Patience, watching people, getting as much information as I can before attempting to break in, expecting anything once the door is open. Compared to all of this, Vitali’s place is uncomplicated, probably because he doesn’t expect us, or anyone. It’s relatively straightforward to get in.
It’s a two-story building and we don’t find anything unexpected on the ground and top floors. The office is the same as when I last saw it. Then I remember the noises and his basement printing press.
The ghost mollys find a door beneath the staircase, and I find the key in the back of his precious picture frame. The lock looks old, and I expect to have to jiggle around, but the key slides home like it’s planing on oil. The stairwell that descends from the door is narrow, even for me, and I can’t imagine how Vitali manages. It’s dark, although there’s a glow from the basement landing. No handrail, and I have to guide myself with the walls. At the bottom the level opens into a single wide space lit with fluorescent tubes. I blink from the change in illumination, but I still can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.
Two mollys, alive, with severe burn scars and caged like animals. Two tamaras leap from the chairs they lounged on, intent on stopping me. They are talking, but all I can hear is the blood singing in my ears. They’re unprepared, and are more like caregivers than guards. I weave in and out of their swings, assessing their skill first, then striking back, straight midsection kicks that send them both to the floor.
I’m so taken by the sight of the mollys that neutralizing the tamaras is automatic, lizard-brain activity. I tie the tamaras up without breaking a sweat.
Two mollys, alive, in Vitali’s basement. I was here. I was here and I didn’t feel them. I walk toward the cages in a trance. They do not react to me, or to the violence I do to their guards. Maybe drugged. One does not have a left eyelid, and that side of her face and cranium is smooth, hairless, skin all corrugated. Tears flow from that eye in a steady stream that she does not wipe away. The second has a withered hand and leans to one side like she’s had a stroke.
I reach out through the bars, with both hands.
“Hello. You are safe with us, with me,” I say. I don’t know if they can see the phantoms. Probably not.
I embrace them both the way I have seen Tamara do with her own duplicates, the cold of the bars pressing against me as I press against them. A part of me isn’t sure this will work; a part of me just believes mollys are evil and violent, and no Kumbaya can change that, but I am determined that I will never kill another molly.
I whisper in their ears, “I love you. I will always fight for you, not against you.”
“Hey! You never told me you loved me,” says one of the ghosts.
“I love you, Molly-in-My-Mind.”
“Good. Let’s free our sisters and get the fuck out of here.”
“I like this plan,” I say.
But there’s more beyond the cages, vast numbers of boxes and filing cabinets, all full of information about me and Tamara and others like us, watched, “culled,” kept safe, employed. I read as much as I can, but it’s too much, and I’ve already dawdled too long. I’m not leaving this information here, and I can’t take it with me. My life started with fire.
I take a trip to the kitchen. . . .
* * *
I can’t take the burned mollys to live in the bush with me. If I did, they would cope, but they have a shell-shocked feel to them. I need more.
I don’t feel sorry for myself, my mother trained me for worse, but I do realize I can’t exist like this. I think of Southbourne Farm and discard it instantly. That’s where Tamara picked up my trail, and the government would clearly be watching it at least intermittently.
I need someone who might still care for me.
* * *
I have to seek out James Down. We did not part on the best of terms: he ended things with a letter and lab results showing a molly cocoon growing within his abdomen. The last time I saw him was just before I went into the mental hospital, back at the university, where he was feeding like a caterpillar.
He still lives in the house I remember where we fucked and fought at times. His car is in the driveway, and lights come on at night, so I know someone’s home. I survey the neighborhood for three days, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s being watched.
All the phantom mollys disappear when I near the house. I do not know what this means. I make the burned mollys stand guard outside. I ask them nicely.
Close up I can observe the layers of filth on the car, like it hasn’t been wiped down in a long time. There is nothing in the rubbish bin. A few charity appeal pamphlets are scattered around the front door. The garden has gone back to bush. I creep around to the back door and find it ajar.
Stench. Not of death, but of neglect, which is consistent with the outside of the property. Dust everywhere. Every surface has discarded food containers. I can hear the hiss of an untuned radio or something similar. I have to pick my way carefully, because sharp edges of broken bottles and opened sardine cans litter the floor.
“James?” I say. “Are you in here?”
The carpet looks like mud, water damage, and dirt matting the fibers together.
There are marks on the ceiling, watermarks that show splash patterns. The walls are covered in similar stains, some wet. Impact, then dripping down. I stop to examine a patch. It looks like vomit. Smells like it too.
“James, it’s Molly Southbourne. Hello?”
I think I hear a voice from upstairs, so I go that way. I’ve been there before, naked, kissing James, giggling, slipping down when distracted by his ministrations. We made love on this very staircase once or twice. In addition to the radio, the TV is on, so I switch it off before going up. I steal up the steps. I have to hold my nose now because the smell intensifies. It is now more feculent and . . . fresh, rather than stale.
“James?”
“. . . here . . .” His voice comes from his bedroom.
I hesitate briefly, then I push the door with my foot.
Before I see anything I choke on the intensity of the smell of wrongness and rot. The room is dark, a bedside lamp struggling valiantly. All I can see of James is a distended belly, larger than the rest of him, about six feet in diameter, tight as a drum, reticulate with veins. The skin is thin as a teenager’s pimple. James twitches feebly at the side of this tumorous mass. His arms and legs are like twigs with crumpled skin, and his rib cage appears tiny, spread at the bottom to make way for the belly. He is naked, but his genitals are shrunken and soaked in a pool of piss and excrement.
“. . . Molly . . .”
A change comes over the mass. There is movement under the skin of the bulge, in multiple places. James’s mouth opens in a silent scream. His tongue flicks out, dry and pink, ineffective. I am frozen to the spot, trying not to breathe, upset that there are no phantom mollys to block my view.
The skin on James’s belly points and ruptures. Straw-colored fluid sprays outward in all directions, pressure relieved, and I am drenched in it. A molly pulls herself free, hair
plastered to her skull, blinking away blood so she can see, scrambling toward me. I recoil, slip, and fall into the muck. She follows and is on me. The shock of physical contact paralyzes me—a part of me thought her a phantom until that moment. She slams my head into the floor, which wakes me out of my trance.
As my head spins and my vision blurs, all my instincts and training tell me to use deadly force, yet my time with Tamara makes me hesitate. Despite all Molly Southbourne’s sins, I have never killed my own duplicates. Is now the time to start? My mother’s voice bubbles up with lethal combat advice, and I tamp it right down again. I force my yammering nerves to calm.
With the slipperiness and the fact that this is a molly, a furious creature that wants to kill me, I have a harder time than Tamara subduing my copy. The molly shows no restraint, and comes at me with everything she has. I dodge, parry, take some hits, looking for an opportunity. She never backs down, never flags, and to calm her I have to break her right forearm and dislocate her left shoulder. I am about to break her knees when she goes limp from the pain. I collapse beside her. I feel a flood of gratitude that I did not have to kill, and I burst into tears, hacking sobs that come from a deep well of sorrow and loneliness.
I check on James—he is still, dead. I put gentle pressure on his neck, but the carotid is now quiet. I killed him, just like he said.
I tie up the molly with strips of curtain, feeling intense déjà vu for what Molly Prime did to me, and I strip off, then enter the shower. I wash with the door open so I can keep an eye on the molly.
She is awake by the time I’m done.
* * *
“Hyperalimentation,” says James.
He recorded some videos before he died and I am watching them with one eye on the molly. She’s gone still, not wasting energy on unyielding bonds.
“Let’s say Molly is sixty, seventy kilos. If I put on that amount of weight, and don’t destroy my heart with the strain, the cocoon inside me will have enough mass to build a molly, and leave enough of me to survive. Theoretically.”
Oh, James.
I find medical records that show he was assessed by a surgeon. The mass had vascularized, diverted the aorta, and the surgeon had no confidence of removing it without killing James.
He continues talking on the screen, unshaven and gaunt. The video shows some snow on the bottom, needs tracking, but it doesn’t matter. He had bigger problems.
“I may have miscalculated,” he says in the last video. His skin is papery, streaked with black veins. The whites of his eyes are green and ringed with capillaries. “I didn’t factor in that as the mass grows, my ability to keep food down reduces. Everything I eat jets out of me like I’m possessed. If I can’t maintain the hyperalimentation, I can’t create the bulk. I—”
The image stops there and I can’t find any more tapes. Poor James.
I turn to the molly. “Can you talk yet?”
“Yes.”
“You know what you are and who I am?”
“When are you from? You have more of her in you, like you’re older than me,” she says.
“Not by much, a few days at most.”
“Are you going to kill me? I have memories of the others you killed. I know how it goes.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” But I don’t know that to be true. I don’t know if she will ever relax around me.
“I don’t believe you.”
I hear Molly Prime’s voice: You don’t have to believe my story, but you do have to remember.
You guys don’t all behave the same. You’re the eleventh one I’ve tied up and tried to reason with like this. It didn’t end well for the other ten.
I crouch in front of the molly. “I don’t want to fight you. I want to tell you a story. Afterwards, I’m going to release you.”
“Death can be a release,” she says in my voice, with a thought that I had when I was in her shoes.
“Just listen, okay? The story starts with me holding a telephone and watching a house burn. . . .”
Eleven
We go south, four hemoclones looking for a new and peaceful life, settling into new names: me, Mollyann, Moya, and Molina.
I’d like to say we lived rough for a while, but this place is so beautiful that it would give lie to that truth. There is game, there is fertile soil, there is solitude, which is all we need.
It’s sunny. We both look beaten up, but Molina’s right arm is in a cast, her left in a sling. She got the worst of it. We’re both wearing sunglasses, but she has short hair because I cut it.
She hates the name Molina, hates being derivative. Tough shit. I know what’s going on in her head, she feels like a molly, and the self-preservation instinct is strong. All she knows is that to survive, she has to kill me. I’ve confused her by telling her why that’s not so. Molina is less feral, less angry, with each passing day, becoming, in spite of herself, more like Molly Prime. I have found her quite libidinous, having walked in on her at the wrong moments. She is not shy about it, and thinks we’re the same, which we kind of are. I’ve grown fond of her.
I leave the three mollys safe and phone Tamara’s factory. It goes straight to voice mail.
“You know who this is. You also know by now that I know all of your plans and I want no part of them. If you let this go, I will, and we can all get what we want. If you try to follow me or impede me in any way, I promise you, I will murder you all. Test me, and see.”
When I hang up the phone, I feel her watching me, feel the hate behind her eyes.
“Molina, we’re family now. We have to look after each other.”
She grunts. “You want to be Molly. You feel remorse for James Down. I remember the time he and Molly spent the night fucking one of our kind, killing her in the morning after, so excuse me if I don’t feel bad that he’s dead.”
I remember that too, but I say nothing about it. She’s not wrong.
“I was inside him. Do you know how disgusting that feels?”
“I was there, remember?”
“You were not inside someone’s abdomen, so don’t try to equate our experiences.”
“Why did you come out when you did?”
“I felt you. It was intense. I wanted to kill you, like you were Molly.”
“I’m not her, though.”
“You’re trying to be her,” says Molina, exasperated. “To be Molly Southbourne. You can’t. You’ll always be a molly. Stop trying to be something, someone, you’re not. Be yourself, be true to your self.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I say.
“Dude, find out. That’s what I’m doing. Jesus, do you know how hard it is to wake up every day and not murder you? Your face is the visage of everything I hate, everything I have to defeat in order to survive. If I can overcome that daily, you can overcome your fixation with Molly Southbourne.”
“All right, I get that. I can work on that.”
“What about them?” She juts her chin toward the burned mollys, Moya and Mollyann, who tend to be quiet and look inward. I swear they are seeing things, like I did. My phantoms have gone for good, and a part of me suspects it was Molina drawing me to her.
“They’re our family too,” I say.
* * *
We go into town in Exeter, and we do odd jobs and occasionally steal until we have enough money and forged documents to rent a house. It is a bright and cold spring day when all four of us arrive at the cottage in Dorset. The city is in decline: the young have gone to London for work and excitement, the older folk are quietly dying of beautiful landscape poisoning. It’s the perfect place to hide.
I’m in my Buffalo Gal guise again. Molina wears men’s clothes, while Mollyann is more traditionally feminine and wears her hair pulled back. The two of them hold hands and wait a few paces behind me. Moya is in the car under blankets, hiding her burns from us and everyone.
The estate agent meets us at the small green gate that breaks the picket. She is smiling, though puzzled.
“Trip
lets?” she says. She gathers me into the folds of her clothes in a hug. She smells of rosemary and love. I’ve met her only three times. This must be how they do leasing in the south.
I shrug. “Kind of.”
“Are they simple?” She cranes her neck over me to the girls. They are silent.
“Quite the opposite,” I say. “Well, except maybe the frizzy-haired one.”
“I heard that,” says Molina.
We settle in, the four of us. I run a self-defense place in Exeter and I use what I’ve learned from Tamara to manage our finances and our lives.
I write now. It seems to help me, having all of this out of my head and on paper, like the weight of it no longer pulls me down, like I’ve exorcised my demons.
I cut away the tattoo on my forearm.
I change my name too. Molly Southbourne is finally dead, and Molina approves.
My new name? No.
I’d have to kill you.
Acknowledgments
The two most important people in the shaping of this book once I created the protoplasm are Aliette De Bodard and Camille Lofters.
A whole bunch of others were instrumental in ensuring that I didn’t give up when the Weasels of Doubt came calling: Kate Elliot, Zen Cho, Likhain, Liz Williams, Cindy Pon, Victor Ocampo, Vida Cruz, Alessa Hinlo, Jide Afolabi.
Thanks to Mr. Tom Ilube for being a patron of the (African) speculative fiction arts and funder of the Nommo Awards.
Thanks to the fans who bought and reviewed the first Molly Southbourne book, without whom we wouldn’t even be talking about a second book!
Finally, Mission Control: my family (Beth, Cillian, Hunter, David); my agent, Alexander Cochran; my editor, Carl Engle-Laird.
The Survival of Molly Southbourne Page 6
