“This is your fault. You just can’t stand to see me happy. It’s like your mission to destroy my life,” Rachel said, her face a mess of tears, mascara, and sweat.
“It’s not, actually.” I could not understand why everyone kept assuming that this girl, the closest thing I had to an archnemesis, quite frankly, meant anything significant to me.
I’d have been more upset over the death of any number of other people, as cruel as that sounded. Using Rachel had been a risk, an unnecessary one as far as I could see, but maybe the Committee had been aiming to hurt Jacobs as well. Who knew? It didn’t matter now, with more pressing matters at hand.
I turned my attention back to Ford. “What’s your exit—”
Laughlin laughed suddenly, a loud sound that echoed in the almost-empty room, drowning out the sound of activity in the hallway beyond.
I looked over, startled. I didn’t see anything particularly amusing about this situation.
“You don’t know, do you?” he asked me. His gaze bounced from me to Rachel and then back to Ford. “None of you do.”
Ford tensed.
Jacobs glared at Laughlin, his face red and the veins in his forehead an alarming shade of blue. “Don’t,” he said, staring down his former mentee. He sounded almost frightened.
But Laughlin ignored him. “Such a supposedly superior specimen and it’s taken you this long?”
Unformed instinct told me to shy away, to duck my head and cover my ears to stop his words from reaching me. Some might describe it as seeing a wave and knowing it will pull you under and yet being unable to do anything to escape. I wouldn’t. I still hadn’t managed to see the ocean.
“I’d have thought you’d piece this together on your own, even subconsciously,” Laughlin continued, and dread swelled in me, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop him, to stop whatever was coming next.
“That girl”—he tipped his head at Rachel—“is your niece,” he said, cracking my world open with his carefully enunciated words. “Or your half sister, depending on how you look at it. You are quite the twisted family.”
“What?” Rachel shrieked from her corner.
I didn’t move, couldn’t speak. Dizziness washed over me, and a high-pitched buzzing started in my ears.
“Shut up,” Zane snapped at Laughlin. “He’s lying. Ariane, don’t listen—”
Laughlin tsked at him. “I don’t need to lie, young man. Three DNA sources are required for this kind of work. The extraterrestrial source and a fertilized human egg. It doesn’t work any other way,” Laughlin said, shaking his head with a mock sorrowful look. “And Arthur here didn’t want to take any chances. He wanted to make sure he was using top-notch genetic material. What better than his own?” He laughed. “And it would have been a waste not to use the perfectly good daughter-in-law of childbearing age at his fingertips, wouldn’t it? Especially one with fertility issues who was eager to have another child right away, one who was already used to medical assistance and invasive procedures.”
My stomach churned. The blond woman in the photo, the one Jacobs had shown me. She’d looked familiar…because she looked like me? Or because she looked like Rachel? Like both of us?
“He used the harvested eggs she’d preserved as part of her previous fertility efforts in his experiment. When the most promising one split into twins, we…obtained the other half for implantation,” Laughlin said with a lurch of his shoulders that might have been a shrug had he been capable of such mobility.
I summoned the image from the photo in my memory. Her fair complexion and hair were nothing like Rachel’s, but those fine eyebrows, high cheekbones, and that smile, the way the lines broke between her mouth and cheeks, in the shape of perfect sevens, forward and backward…I sucked in a deep breath, struggling to get air circulating in my lungs again.
Rachel’s version of that smile was tighter, pissier, but it was the same. My own resemblance was murkier, harder to see beneath the alien influences, but still possible. I’d never had cause to look for it before.
But more than any potential resemblances, what made me believe what Laughlin was saying was that I could so easily see Dr. Jacobs doing exactly just that. Using his daughter-in-law because it suited his needs. His project. His pursuit of fame. He’d done it before.
My knees wobbled underneath my weight, as if the realization carried physical mass. Ford and I were twins; that was not news to anyone who looked at us. The fact that we were actual sisters—rather than clones—was new but within reason. The connection to Rachel, to Dr. Jacobs, though…my brain could not seem to adjust to that idea, finding it all sharp edges and slippery sides.
“Your criticism of my work and my methods is of little interest to anyone,” Jacobs snarled at Laughlin, but it was a weak, ineffective defense that everyone ignored, a papier-maché dam against a tsunami.
“It’s not true,” Zane said. “It can’t be. Rachel and Ariane are the same age.”