Counterpart

by Hayley Stone

  My cheeks burn. He’s right; it sounds stupid out loud, a sign of my insecurity in our relationship, not an honest reflection of reality. But what if it had been your Rhona? I want to ask him. What would have happened to us then?

  “Right.” I hold up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine.”

  I turn my back on him, pacing toward a counter nearby where a few medical supplies have been left out. Some iodine, a half-empty package of cotton balls, a pair of bandage scissors. Fiddling with the latter gives me something to do while I fight the urge to cut and run. That’s not an option here.

  Paper crinkles as Camus gets up from the exam bed. His steps echo loudly on the linoleum floor as he approaches. There’s an awkward pause, and the only sound is me shuffling the tongue depressors in a tall glass container, and him softly breathing next to me.

  “Would you please look at me?” Reluctantly, I set the container down and face him. This man I love, who sometimes I don’t know how to love, and who sometimes doesn’t know how to love me back. “Rhona. What’s this really about?”

  I take a breath.

  I mean to tell him about the doppelgänger machine, about risking Pan’s life to learn what happened at Wrangell base. Hawking’s cancer. The threat to Water Treatment. I’m ready to spill all the gruesome details of the cloning process like sewage—this nasty process that gave me life, by requiring the deaths of twenty-three other potential lives—and all the ethical lines I forced Samuel to cross in order to save me.

  But when I open my mouth, none of those topics emerge.

  Instead, I say, “Why don’t we have sex?”

  Camus glances at the exam bed, brow furrowing. “Right now?”

  “No. I mean generally.”

  “Generally.”

  I know he’s stalling, trying to collect his thoughts. I fit my argument into that space. “It’s been months since Juneau. You’ve recovered from your wounds. I’ve recovered from mine.” Or we had, before the attack. That’s irrelevant to my case, however. I move around him and plop down on the exam bed, tired of standing. “What are we waiting for, Camus?”

  He touches his forehead. “Of all things…this is what you want to talk about right now?”

  “If not now, when?”

  “Maybe when neither of us are suffering from minor wounds?”

  “It’s a simple question, Camus.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He takes a small lap of the room, walking back and forth in front of the exam bed before sinking down beside me. Near enough for our legs to almost touch, but not quite. It’s always distance with him. “I don’t understand. Are you unhappy?” he asks me quietly, brows furrowing.

  “No,” I answer definitively, scooting closer, taking his hand in mine. His thumb moves absently across my fingers, and I feel suddenly more awake. “I’m not unhappy. But impatient? Yeah, a little.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “What should I have said? Oh, yeah, love the whole drive-in movie thing. By the way, take off your pants?”

  He rubs his face, but I can see him fighting a smile.

  “I don’t know,” I go on. “I guess I was hoping you would make the first move. For once.”

  Camus lowers his hand, his almost-smile immediately absorbed into a frown. “For once? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Eject. Eject!

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  I get up from the bed and head into the small bathroom attached to the room, where the humming fluorescent lights offer a nice distraction from my buzzing thoughts. Me and my big mouth. To be fair, I’ve never been great at censoring myself, but being awake for over twenty-four hours is probably not helping the situation.

  I hear the door creak open and turn to find Camus standing silently in the doorway, arms crossed, head bowed, as if seeking wisdom in prayer. Several excuses flit through my mind—I need to wash my hands; I thought I heard the toilet running—but in the end, I say nothing, because for once there are no simple words to repair what has broken.

  When Camus finally speaks, his voice is low and his expression devastatingly earnest. “You should know, being near her,” he says slowly, “made my skin crawl. She wasn’t you.”

  “But she had my memories—Rhona’s memories. More than I had when I showed up, anyway. She was me.”

  Camus gives a violent shake of his head. “No. She may have started out as Rhona, she might have called herself Rhona, but no one stays the person they were at birth. From that first breath, life begins changing who we are. Sometimes it makes us better people, sometimes worse. In her case, she let the evil win.”

  “She didn’t exactly have a choice. The machines had her. Tortured her.”

  “The machines have tortured all of us,” Camus says seriously. “We’re all living in this prison of our own making; the machines our judges, executioners, wardens. Some cells are larger than others, certainly, and”—he rubs his thumb gently across the back of my hand—“some of us have better cellmates, but it doesn’t alter the fact we’re prisoners of this world. The only way out is through.”

  I hunch over the sink, trying to think of a response. But instead, my gaze remains fixed on the porcelain basin, the drain flecked with clear drops of water. How easily would that drain swallow my blood? As easily as my shower drain earlier tonight?

  While I’m moodily considering my sins, Camus’s arms come around me, wrapping me in the fragrance of some generic body wash. Spicy, warm, and oddly comforting. It brings me back to the other night, when I came back to our quarters after a long day, and found him hanging out in the doorway of our bathroom, finishing up his bedtime rituals. He had a toothbrush in hand and some foam around the edges of his mouth, looking perfectly ordinary in this incredibly messed-up world of ours. Sometimes it’s the simplest moments that resonate with me the most. Then, as now, I can’t help thinking, this is how our life would be. If it weren’t for the machines, maybe I would come home to him every day, without the threat of death constantly between us. We’d live somewhere nice, inexpensive. A two-bedroom in the city—there would still be cities. He would welcome me into our bedroom with a smile, his cheeks stroked clean by a razor, and when I laid my face against his, or trailed my mouth across his jaw, his smooth skin would sing of a sharp ocean breeze. Or whatever other fragrance he wore, from the aftershave on sale at the store that week. I wonder what it says about me, that even in my wildest fantasies, I dream of a practical life.

  Back in the real world, Camus and I merely stand there, aligned against one another. Together, and yet not. If he can feel me trembling, with cold or rage or sadness or fear, he doesn’t comment on it.

  His next words are worse: “You said, for once.”

  Damn. I’d hoped he would let that go. I release a slow breath, shaking my head. “I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “No? In all the time I’ve known you, before and after Anchorage, you’ve always spoken your mind. It’s one of the things I most admire about you. When it isn’t driving me crazy.”

  “Camus. Don’t.”

  “What?” Camus tries to make his voice light, but it sounds fake. I feel the tension in his hands, his arms. He’s asking a question he doesn’t truly want to know the answer to, and he knows it. “What could possibly be so terrible it gives even the fearless Rhona Long pause?”

  I spin around in his arms, forcing him to release my hands.

  He holds his hands frozen in midair, as though I’m about to attempt an arrest.

  “All right. You want the truth?” I swallow. “Sometimes…sometimes it feels like I love you more than you love me.”

  The moment the confession is out of me, sliding sick and ugly into the world, I suddenly understand Samuel’s fears. I owe him an apology for not taking them more seriously.

  Meanwhile, Camus’s look crosses from worry into simple confusion.

  “The grand romantic gestures are wonderful,” I explain, “but they also feel empty. For sh
ow. Like you’re trying to convince yourself that we’re a couple, and this is what couples are. But I don’t want to be characters in a movie, Camus, going through the motions.” I pause, allowing him an entrance, but he doesn’t take it.

  So I continue.

  “Do you know when I feel you most? In the little moments. When we eat meals together, and you ask me if there’s anything left on your plate that I want. When you make a space for me on the elevator closest to the door, because you know how much I hate riding them. When we’re in bed together, and you roll over in your sleep, resting your hand right here on my hip.” I smile, but it’s like trying to apply wet duct tape. It doesn’t stick. “I just want to feel like we’re moving in the same direction. Instead, it feels like you’re keeping the possibility of an exit open.”

  He opens his mouth, then shuts it. Then: “How long have you felt like this?”

  It’s a good question. The closest figure I come to is, “A while.”

  “I see.”

  Deny it, I think. Tell me I’m wrong, Camus. Tell me it’s all in my head.

  Tell me you love me.

  To Camus’s credit, he doesn’t move away from me, doesn’t retreat from the subject. But I see it in his eyes—the lonely, heartbroken look of someone who realizes they are not where they expected to be, and have no idea how to proceed. He takes a moment to order his thoughts. I finally understand the heavy fear a sudden calm must have brought to a homesteader living in Kansas.

  “What if she had been more like me?” I press into the silence like a pin into a balloon. “Exactly like me? What if the woman who strode back into McKinley last week was the same woman you lost near Anchorage? Are you telling me you wouldn’t be the least—tempted?”

  “Tempted?” I can practically hear his forehead scrunching into those familiar trenches, while his tone is slightly wounded. “Do you really think that little of me?”

  “I don’t know what to think!”

  He glances upward, directing his frustration toward the ceiling. “Did you question Samuel about his loyalty?” he snaps, and continues without letting me respond. “After all, he was the one so devoted to the woman I loved that he spent two years holed up underground, making clones of her.”

  “Now you’re jealous of Samuel?”

  “How could I not be?” His reply is fast, lashing out like a whip, and catching me by surprise. His eyes return to mine, carrying an injured look that squeezes my heart. “You trust him implicitly, you let him keep your secrets, but you would crucify me for a crime I haven’t even committed.” He shakes his head. “Tempted! As if I’m so changeable.”

  “My secrets?”

  It takes me a moment to track Camus’s train of thought, not the least because I’m barely keeping this argument from going entirely off the rails. Then it hits me.

  “The cloning. You’re talking about my decision to have him clone me.”

  He presses his lips into a thin line, saying nothing.

  “You said you understood why I didn’t tell you.”

  “I did,” he says. “I do.” His voice is hushed, but anger still penetrates his tone. “But it doesn’t erase the fact that I lived for six months without hope, without you. Samuel didn’t. He didn’t know six months of agony. Six months of being force-fed empty consolations and feeling pitied at every council meeting. Six months of lying awake at night, imagining everything I could have done differently. Do you know how many bullets I took for you in my dreams, Rhona? How many times I saved you?”

  My throat closes like a fist. “Camus, I—”

  He holds up a hand. For a long moment, he’s silent, wrestling with the memories. When he finally speaks, every syllable is deliberate, strained through his teeth. “I’m doing everything in my power to ensure that doesn’t happen again. The world can’t afford to lose you again. And neither can I.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His jaw twitches. “I wasn’t aware I needed to parade my misery in order to make you feel at ease. I’ll bear that in mind for future.”

  “Camus…”

  He breaks his stillness, pacing away from me, out of the bathroom.

  “Camus!”

  Near the door, he staggers and reaches out to a nearby counter to steady himself, no doubt still plagued by whatever drug Crazy Rhona used on him. My heart plummets as his shoulders slump, his forehead almost meeting a cabinet on the wall. “Perhaps we both need some space,” he says to the cabinet. “Just for the time being. The doctors want me to stay overnight for observation, anyway.”

  “Space? Were you even listening to anything I said?” I want my words to sound light, but instead my voice hits a note of desperation. “That’s the opposite of what I want.”

  “No? Then what is it you want, Rhona?” He sounds tired. Defeated. And I think, Why are we doing this to one another? Clawing at each other’s walls, exposing the insecurities, all the rot and mold beneath our carefully manufactured facades.

  I maneuver so I’m standing next to him, but I don’t dare touch him out of fear that he’ll pull away. “I want you to fight for me. I want to feel like you’re fighting for me. Not on my behalf, not for the resistance, its optics, but for me. For us. For this.”

  Camus shakes his head. “Everything is war with you these days, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I’m only saying, love shouldn’t be a constant battle, a game of one-upmanship. You should trust me, trust I care for you, even when I’m not screaming it from the mountaintops.”

  “I do trust you. This isn’t about trust.”

  “No? You just accused me of being faithless. You believe I would abandon you for another woman.”

  Before I can respond, the door slides open without warning, blasting cool air into my back. Camus leans away from me, and I back up from him. Is this how it’s going to be now? The realization is jarring, if not downright concussive. I feel dazed.

  “What’s going on?” Renee Hawking demands, folding her arms across a dark silk robe. She’s pinned her hair flat against the top of her skull, but it still poufs out at the back, making her look a little like a triceratops. Under different circumstances, I might find it funny, but currently my well is dry. “One of my assistants just informed me of your message over comms. You were attacked? The both of you?”

  I hear her speak, but in my head I’m thinking, Camus is wrong. The only way out is out.

  “Come with me, Councilwoman,” I tell Renee, leading her back through the door and into the hall. “There’s something you need to see on the dormitory level…”

  Chapter 15

  Several days later, the council’s still recovering from the shock of the killing, and the knowledge that other clones exist, while I’ve managed to plug the gaping hole in my conscience with a winning combination of sleep aids and enough hard candy to open a small Wonka factory in my stomach. Around this time, Zelda calls me down to the military level to discuss her findings regarding the doppelgänger machine.

  “Glad Her Majesty found the time to—hold up. Is that a candy cane?” Zelda asks me, straightening up from over a laptop computer when I step into the training room.

  “It is, indeed,” I answer without shame, sucking the striped candy.

  As far as sweets go, candy canes weren’t my first choice. I don’t hate peppermint like Camus does, but I’m a dark-chocolate gal through and through. Or I think I was. I haven’t tasted it since my second birth. That’s something they don’t warn you about the end of the world: the impending chocolate holocaust. While raiding the cafeteria pantry earlier for something to lift my spirits, I did stumble upon some old Hershey’s with almonds, but they were all so old that if they had been human children they would’ve been potty-trained and would already know their ABC’s. In my infinite capacity for optimism, I still unwrapped six of the expired bars before giving up; each was slightly discolored, and a few even wore white spots of mold. In lieu of chocolate, I’ve had to settle for stale gobsto
ppers, fireballs, and, today, candy canes. Because there wasn’t enough disappointment in my life already.

  Zelda slants her gaze toward Ulrich, who’s standing behind me nursing his own candy cane. It’s his third one. His fingertips are red and sticky where he’s been holding it, sans the plastic wrapper. “You, too?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

  Ulrich offers her a shrug, which rattles the Heckler & Koch G36 slung across his back, and continues eating.

  “Really, Long?” Zelda says.

  I pull the candy cane from my mouth, trying not to notice how I’ve managed to work it into a shiv, and wave it at her. “I don’t want to talk about it. What have you got for me? Where’s the machine?”

  “Somewhere in here.” Zelda gestures vaguely at the room.

  Instead of her research room, she asked me to meet her here, in one of the larger training rooms. This one has been designed to imitate the Alaskan tundra, preparing soldiers for combat out in the open. Apart from a few rocks, some phony trees, and raised ground, there’s very little in the way of cover. It’s also freezing. Zelda neglected to tell me I should bring a jacket. The longer we stand here, not moving, the more I feel it. Soon, it’s an effort to keep my teeth from chattering, while my fingers are already going numb around the base of the candy cane.

  “What do you mean, somewhere?” I shove my candy into my pocket, ignoring the messy consequences. In the same action, I drop my other hand to my waist, to the EMP-G holstered there, and scan the room corner to corner. “You don’t know?”

  “Calm down,” she tells me. In the history of that phrase, I don’t think it’s ever worked as intended.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I snap, backing up toward Ulrich and the wall. He doesn’t seem concerned, but maybe that’s just the sugar pacifying him. As I’ve recently learned, his sweet tooth is ridiculous. I shoot Zelda a withering glare. “You’re in charge of what might be the most important discovery in the past six years, and you’ve lost it?”