Counterpart

by Hayley Stone

  “We would have gone back for you.”

  “And risk losing your place as McKinley’s savior? Yeah, right.”

  I frown. “You have a pretty low opinion of me. And Samuel, too.”

  She cuts her eyes away from me. “Is that a question?”

  “Just an observation.” This is a dead end. Time to switch rails. “You said the rest of us. How many others survived?”

  “Hundreds,” she says, still grinning. It’s obviously untrue. Based on what Samuel told me, only three others could possibly exist, after her and whatever Rhona is broadcasting lies. “Thousands, even. Whole dumps full of pretty, redheaded Rhona Longs. I hear they performed badly at Christmas.”

  The joke’s in poor taste. Which pretty much confirms whose brain cells she has, if there were any lingering doubts. “Now you want to be cheeky. Where was this good humor five minutes ago?”

  “Not every day you get to chat with yourself.”

  “If you wanted to chat, you could’ve come without the knife. Why try to kill me, anyway?”

  She thinks for a long moment. “Highlander.”

  “What?”

  “You know. There can be only one.”

  I shake my head. Those words mean nothing to me, apart from their literal meaning.

  Other Rhona squints, slowly arriving at a smile. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Wow.” Her smile fades, her enthusiasm reduced to something more poignant. Something almost sad. “The machines were right. You’re defective, too.”

  “I’m not defective, and you didn’t answer the question.”

  She presses her finger against the point of the shiv. “There’s at least a few others. Heard they tortured one with a car battery. Bzz. The machines told her Samuel was dead, McKinley’s leadership corrupt, yada yada. She needed more convincing to play her role.”

  “Her role?”

  She stops toying with the shiv, perhaps realizing she’s said too much.

  A lightbulb goes on inside my head. “She’s the one who gave the fake broadcast. Who lured Wrangell base’s soldiers away.”

  Still nothing from the peanut gallery. Her silence is as good as confirmation.

  “Right. Fine. I get the point of that. But what about the machine with the digital face?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The doppelgänger machine. I don’t know what you call it. It has our face, our memories. Not to mention a really bad desire to wear people’s skin. Ringing any bells?”

  Her expression stays blank throughout my explanation, then she makes a great show of remembering. “Oh! Yeah, I might know a little something about that. Come closer and I’ll tell you.”

  “Nice try. What’s the point of that machine? Why make it?”

  “I didn’t make it.” She sounds offended at the prospect.

  “Then why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? To screw with you.”

  I frown. “I don’t think that’s it. At least, not the whole explanation. You know what I think? I think the machines sent it as a sort of…auxiliary power system. In case you failed, in case you had a change of heart and couldn’t go through with it. Or if you were stopped. Machines love their redundancies, huh?”

  She replies with a challenging tilt of her head, continuing to hold that grin like the rictus of a creepy doll. I’m pretty sure I hit the nail on the head; she just doesn’t want to admit the machines don’t trust her, or that she’s fallible. Or that she had a choice.

  “Maybe, in a worst-case scenario, they thought it could pass for you,” I continue, and then toss out some bait, to see if she bites. “Like down in Water Treatment. I mean, Larry was fooled. Was it also the doppelgänger machine’s plan to poison the water supply with fluoride? Pretty genius, actually.”

  “Please,” she says, scoffing.

  “What?”

  “I know what you’re doing. It’s not going to work.”

  “Fine. I know it was you on the biology level, talking to Larry. I know it was you planning to poison the water supply, but I’ve implemented regulations that will prevent that from happening. How’s that for honesty?”

  My doppelgänger lets out another raspy laugh. “You’re bailing out a sinking ship with a bucket. But whatever floats your boat.” I can tell by the way her cheeks lift slightly that she’s proud of the pun. Damn, she’s so much like me, it’s scary.

  “So what’s the machines’ endgame here?” I keep an eye on her while I pull my broken walkie from its holster on my hip. The damage isn’t as extensive as I initially feared. In fact, it looks as though only the battery compartment has broken open, the batteries themselves askew. A simple fix, if I’m right. “After you killed me, what then? Did they really think you could take my place so easily?”

  Her gaze focuses on the walkie. “Don’t,” she warns.

  I pop the batteries back into place. “Did you know Camus almost died in those attacks?” At the mention of Camus’s name, her entire expression shifts. Her shoulders visibly tense. “He had just been on one of the elevators before the explosion destroyed them. Seconds and luck. That’s the only thing that saved him.”

  “He didn’t die,” she responds after a beat. “That’s what’s important.”

  “Are you kidding me? What’s wrong with you? This is Camus we’re talking about. Did the machines carve that out of you, too?”

  Her fist chokes the rubber grip of the shiv. “I did this for Camus!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you dare suggest I don’t love him.” She bares her teeth. “I love him more than you ever will. And I’m going to be the one who saves him!”

  “Again—what? What are you talking about? You clearly don’t know him if you think terrorism is the way to Camus’s heart.”

  “He’ll hate me for a short time, but then he’ll see I made the right choice. The only choice.”

  However hostile my genetic twin is, speaking to this Rhona feels strangely like chatting with the original. I imagine this is the same attitude that helped her justify the decision to clone herself in the first place and not tell Camus. The same arrogance that told her she knows better. Loathing swirls around the pit of my stomach like molten rock, because I recognize the same flaw in myself.

  “Why don’t we just ask him”—I wag the walkie at her, ignoring my dry mouth—“and see what he thinks?”

  “I’m warning you…”

  “Warning me? Hate to break it to you, girlie, but you’ve lost.” She struggles to her feet, the skin around her eyes wrinkling in distress. “Come on,” I say wearily, “Don’t make this any worse than it already is. Let me help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Yes. You’re obviously sick.” In more ways than one. “Samuel and Matsuki can run tests. We have equipment and surgeons…”

  She laughs—really, it’s more of a cackle. Tears gather in her eyes, and she wipes a few that trickle down her cheek. Her fingers leave scars of blood. “God. I am such a moron. No wonder it was so easy to infiltrate McKinley. You actually think humanity still has a chance. You still believe in people.”

  Her tone, utterly condescending, cold and inhuman, chills me. “You say that like it’s a bad thing, but look around you. The resistance is stronger than ever, despite this setback. We’ve pushed the machines out of Alaska, we’re making headway in Canada. We’re winning the war.”

  “You call this winning?” She moves toward me, shiv tucked against her leg.

  “Hey. Not so fast. Stay where you are.”

  “This isn’t victory, Commander.” Not for the first time, the word “Commander” weighs me down, like a block of concrete tethered to my legs. One day I think it’s going to drown me. “It’s a slow, agonizing death for everyone you love. The resistance, as you call it, is just the wounded stag you’re dragging behind your car.”

  “Interesting point of view. Here’s my counterargument: screw you.”

  Juggling the knife, I smack the walkie a couple
of times before switching it on, and am pleased when I finally get feedback. I’m still on the same channel as before, as evidenced by the Polish voices discussing a matter of no small importance. I can’t understand the words, but I recognize the tone.

  “I don’t know everything that’s happened to you, and I doubt you’d willingly tell me,” I say to my fellow clone, “but let me tell you what’s happened here in your absence. While the machines were busy rinsing your mind of basic human decency, I was fighting tooth and nail for my old life. You were dealt a bad hand; so was I. When I showed up here, the council worried I was a machine plant, sent to sabotage the base. Camus could barely stand to look at me, let alone—” Touch me. Love me. I clench my jaw, heading off the memories. They’re in the past. They don’t have power over me anymore. Camus and I are fine. We’re fine.

  “My point is, returning to McKinley wasn’t easy for me either. I made sacrifices. Everyone in this base has. Now it’s your turn. So nut up or shut up, sister. Because whether you like it or not, you’re joining Team Human.”

  I cycle one channel down on the walkie, hoping to raise a council member.

  My doppelgänger takes another step toward me, backing me closer to the door. “Last chance,” she says. “Drop the walkie.”

  “Yeah. Let me just do that.” I raise the walkie to my mouth. Press the button to speak. “This is Command—”

  Even expecting her to do something rash, I’m not fully prepared when she dives at my legs. The force bends me in half, nearly sweeping me off my feet entirely. My arms fold over her as I try steadying myself, and I accidentally graze her back with my knife. If it hurts her, and it must a little, she issues no verbal complaint. Instead, she continues forging ahead, driving us both into the wall.

  Her focused silence is more disturbing than her constant pessimism and snark. This confrontation, unlike the first, has an alarming air of finality about it. I believe, deep down, that she didn’t really want to kill me until now—All evidence to the contrary, the reasonable portion of my brain quips—that she’s simply out of other options. Her plans to save Camus, to protect Camus, hinge on my death. The death of the resistance. I’m the pin in the grenade. I keep thinking she won’t do this because we share the same chromosomes, the same pulse, but the opposite is true. Any woman is capable of atrocity under the guise of devotion. Even me. At least this version of me, and she’s not totally unrecognizable.

  That’s what scares me most. Not the fear I could become her. But that I already am her. She’s just a little further down the cold, hard road I’m currently on, standing beneath a pole light, casting the shadow of a monster I know well. The demon, Preservation, who says all things are acceptable to save the man you love.

  Other Rhona tries to wedge the shiv up underneath my arm like an assassin’s dagger. I feel it tear through my clothes and some skin before I knee her in the groin, forcing her backward. It’s a blow I’m confident would debilitate a man, but I’m not so lucky here. She holds herself for only a moment—and then the shiv is coming back at me again.

  I raise the walkie, swatting off the attack, but she’s relentless. Again and again, she swings at me, first downward, then across, and again, and again. I either dodge the attack or block it with my arm or the walkie. After the fifth or sixth attack, her shiv breaks through the tender, glass face of the walkie with a little crunch, severing any hope of calling for reinforcements.

  “Why,” she says, her words broken up by every swing, “won’t, you, just, die?”

  The shiv bites into my hand, drawing blood and causing me to hiss. I drop the walkie.

  “Stop this!” I think I say, or “Don’t!” or “Please, Rhona!”

  Maybe it’s a sloppy combination of all three: hard, frantic syllables mangling one another like steel during a car crash. Whatever my words, she throws herself at me again, and with the shiv plummeting toward my face, I bring up the knife.

  Chapter 14

  I’m crouched over the body, performing chest compressions—twenty twenty-one twenty-two—when the door chimes. Once, twice. I cross my hand over my forehead, trying to starve my panic through activity. It’s not working. Nothing’s working.

  Twenty-six, twenty-seven…

  Beneath me, the clone’s eyes are lidded like coffins. They don’t react to sound. She lies still as death, her slashed neck continuing to pump blood, the carpet guzzling it down. Even if I had the stamina to keep going, I don’t have enough hands to stanch the flow and continue CPR simultaneously. It’s already been five minutes. Five minutes since she impaled herself on my knife and passed out, the sudden drop in blood pressure sending her urgently to the floor. Only five minutes.

  One two three four…

  The door chimes a third time or maybe a fourth time, I’m not keeping count, and a moment later slides open, admitting Samuel and Ulrich into the room. I glance quickly over my shoulder at them, knowing how bad this looks, and at the same time completely not caring. I can’t stop. If I stop, she’ll die. If she dies…

  If she dies.

  What does that make me?

  “Help,” I manage to gasp. The most simple, primal word in the English language. I dredge it up from the swamp of my thoughts. “Help. Please.”

  Ulrich’s hand comes down on my shoulder. I smack him away with bloody knuckles.

  Ten eleven twelve—

  Or, wait, no. I’ve lost count.

  “Rhona,” I hear Samuel call me, as if from a great distance.

  “You’re a doctor,” I blurt out, ignoring the dozens of times he’s corrected me on that fact. Not that kind of doctor, he always says. But I don’t care. Any doctor is better than no doctor right now. “Do something. I think it’s her carotid artery. That’s the one in the neck, right?”

  “Was ist das?” Ulrich asks, not sounding like himself. Shock or disgust or some other nameless emotion pours gravel into his throat. He has to clear it in order to add, “Is that…?”

  Samuel comes and kneels beside me. “Rhona. Stop.”

  “Her pulse,” I beg, still seesawing over the body. “Look for her pulse.”

  He lifts her arm gently, almost lovingly. I watch his fingers search the inside of her wrist. His features remind me of an ancient statue: pale, hard, refusing any hint of feeling. So unlike him, more like Camus. But his eyes betray him. His Adam’s apple bobs, and after a long moment, he shakes his head.

  I scrabble for Samuel’s hands, yanking him forward, and forcing him to apply pressure to the wound. Like he’s told me before, he’s not that kind of doctor. What does he know about reading pulses? “Here. Keep them here.”

  Horror finally cracks his strained expression, and he tears his hands out of mine. “Stop it,” he says harshly. “Rhona, I’m sorry. But she’s dead. She’s dead.”

  Samuel looks down, his hands frozen like they’re covered in stinging insects instead of blood. He moves them first toward his shirt, then his pants legs, but ultimately stops short of both. Anywhere he wipes the blood, it’ll still be on him. I’m covered in it, too. My blouse has been carved into two distinct sections, bisected by a dark crimson path in the shape of spray fired from a nozzle. My hands are red and sticky, like I’ve been devouring a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

  I think I’m going to be sick.

  Sinking back, I stare helplessly at the dead, balding woman in front of me. The one I killed.

  I don’t know what to do with my hands. My head aches, and I almost apply fingers to my temples and the back of my neck before remembering the blood. I suck down a breath, but the air in the room is viscous, hot and slimy, and sticks in my throat.

  Samuel’s voice shakes when he speaks, but he steadies me when I climb to my feet. “Rhon, what happened?”

  “She attacked me,” I murmur numbly.

  “Attacked you?”

  “When I got back, she was already here. Waiting for me in the bathroom.”

  “How did she get in?” Samuel asks before realizing what a stupid question it
is. As clones, our biometrics would be identical. “Sorry. Do you know why she attacked you? Did she give a reason? Any kind of explanation?”

  “She mentioned…Highlander?”

  “There can be only one,” Samuel mumbles.

  “Yeah. That’s what she said.”

  “Okay. So she ambushed you, and…” He rakes both sides of his face, ending at his mouth. Takes a beat. “You fought,” he finishes, eyes roaming over the tousled bedsheets, the damaged plaster on the walls. Even though I know he doesn’t mean it to be, his statement feels more like an accusation.

  I wrap my arms around myself, latching a hand on each elbow. It feels like a furnace in here, yet I can’t quit shivering. My teeth chatter. “It was an accident…”

  And that’s when I remember.

  The bed. Hanna.

  I rush past Samuel to the bed, falling to my hands and knees, before pushing back the comforter. I pause only long enough to shout, “Are you going to stand there or are you going to help me?” at Ulrich, who’s standing above the other clone. He toes the corpse’s side once, as if to make certain she is real. Or really dead. “Ulrich!”

  With Ulrich’s help and Samuel’s supervision—“careful of her shoulder”; “don’t pull so hard, you’ll strain her neck”—we maneuver Hanna out from underneath the bed, dragging half the comforter with her when her nail catches on a thick thread.

  Except when we turn her over, it’s not Hanna.

  This woman’s nose is too large, and her lips are too thin, while the bones of her face are hidden beneath fat, giving her a rounded look. She’s wearing urban military fatigues, which are grey and white, unlike typical camouflage, but even that isn’t much of a clue. Many McKinley personnel of various occupations wear these on base. As for how she died, a vast quantity of blood down the front of her uniform tells most of the story; her throat has been cut, the skin parted by a dull knife. Like the one I just used.

  But it’s not Hanna. It’s not Hanna, thank God. It’s not her. Ugly relief passes through me as I stand back up. The feeling is almost as powerful as vertigo, and produces a similar dizziness and confusion. Because I’m grateful, and I know I shouldn’t be. What kind of monster feels relief at the death of another human being? But I already know the answer to that question. The kind currently trapped in a zero-sum game.