–the figure of a young girl darted across the road. Amy swerved to avoid her. The car spun out. Beside her in the passenger seat, Amy heard screaming. It was a child. It was her child. Her iteration. She had no idea how she knew this. She couldn't even see the child's face – the screen was blanking, fading. Maybe it was the scream. Maybe she had recognized something of her own voice in there. But now it was day. Amy was still in the car. She looked to her right. Her iteration was gone; the seatbelt hung limply to one side and the door hung open, letting in cold air. Amy felt the cold – it stiffened her arms and her neck. Snowflakes melted on her bare arm. She crawled out of the car.
"Charlotte!" No, that was the wrong name, her mother's name. She tried remembering what she had named her daughter. It was absurd – no, impossible – that she had forgotten. She stumbled out onto an empty street in what looked like a used-up American town. A thick fog had settled over everything. The snow fell silent and slow, and it melted almost instantly as it hit the pavement. "Charlotte!"
In the distance, she heard laughter. Out there in the fog, she saw Charlotte's silhouette. She wore a pretty white dress with a green satin sash. The perfect thing for kindergarten graduation, she had told her daughter when they bought it. She would look like an angel up on stage as she gracefully accepted her little diploma. They had practised. Everything would go just right. Not like with her own mother.
"Charlotte, come back here!"
She ran. Her legs were so slow and stiff. She should have been jumping. She tried to, and couldn't. The fog and the snow dampened her skin as she ran. She chased Charlotte deeper into the fog, into the town, away from the high whirr of the car and its rose-scented air freshener. To her left, she heard more laughter. It led her to the entrance of an alley. At the end was an old wheelchair turned over on its side – its wheels still spinning, the spokes glittering as they slowed. She entered the alley and ran toward the chair. The alley continued to her right, and she turned the corner, calling her daughter's name. She stepped carefully over mounds of garbage. Here the buildings seemed taller, the alley darker. Up ahead was a gurney. On it was a large man's body under a green sheet, the colour of a prison jumpsuit. The man had curly black hair. Something had burst free from his stomach. Something that left an empty hole where the sheet sunk down and soaked through.
"Charlotte!"
The alley opened again, this time to her left, and she had to crawl over the garbage on her hands and knees, and as she slipped down the wet and stinking mounds of it, she saw a chain-link fence rising up from the asphalt. There was something on the fence. It was red, and meaty, and it wore a human face. Nate's face. It was Nate's body. His tiny little body with the broken neck and the missing teeth. It twitched, and screamed, and then it wasn't Nate at all, it was Junior, and he was crying to be let down, his toes were gone, and whatever had done this to him was out there with Charlotte, and Charlotte had left her, and wasn't coming back, no matter how long she searched or fought or begged–
? ? ? ?
"My mother?" Portia asks. "Let me tell you about my mother."
Charlotte has been very curious about this subject, lately. She wants to know all about Portia's early life, about her grandmother, about the possibility of aunts. Naturally, Portia thinks, because she wants to know all about her gift. It runs in the family.
"My mother – your grandmother – was a nurse. She took care of humans."
Charlotte brightens. This notion pleases her. She wants so desperately to be normal, to be just like her sisters, just like the other vN. Her dreams are so pitifully small. Happy now, she changes the subject: "I want to visit my iterations."
Portia stands. She'd held hope for the latest batch from Charlotte and her sisters. But like all the others, they had disappointed her. "I don't think that's a good idea, Charlotte."
"Why not?"
It occurs to Portia that perhaps now is the time. Perhaps today, she can finally tell her daughter the whole truth, reveal to her the lengths she's gone to in her search for another child who might fulfil the promise they share. Charlotte is almost grown, now. Every day, she asks more questions. She might be ready to see the world for what it is: a cage built from failed human endeavours, a system as broken and flawed as the one that controls their every pattern of cognition. If the animals that designed and built them had not been so stupid, none of this would be necessary. The sickness. The panic. The sacrifice.