“They always told me I was adopted.”
As she expected, he stiffened at that.
“At least,” she said, “that’s what they said my whole life, until yesterday. Then Papa told me you bought them in vitro fertilization with a donor egg because you wanted to be grandparents.” She was going to take this step by step, so she wouldn’t mention the supposed battle yet.
He nodded. “They wanted children, and we were happy to be grandparents, so we paid for it. We thought it would help them settle down, and we were wrong. Stupidly wrong. That never works. Children aren’t therapy. They asked … begged for our help to have a child when it turned out Jackson had a … fertility issue.” He shook his head as if to dismiss Papa as worthless in everything. “And we caved. We agreed, your grandmother and I, to get them the best. We learned about a lab from China, I think, offering not donor eggs but engineered zygotes, more expensive, but they came with guarantees.”
Engineered zygotes. That meant … Stay calm, breathe deeply. Slow and deliberate. Sip some coffee, dark-roasted, genuine, and strong. Go step by step. This was worse than she’d expected, much worse. “Guarantees?” she said.
“Healthy, most of all.”
“You said you knew I’d be smart.” She left out the pretty part.
“Oh, that was just a grandfather talking. You’re the smartest young woman in the universe. The most talented. The prettiest, by far. We knew you’d be intelligent, blond, healthy. That’s what you get when you buy an engineered zygote. It’s all there, sort of like a catalog. We picked out one that was tweaked to be perfect.”
“Tweaked.” From a catalog.
“Yes. I worked in cancer treatment, so I know about cells.”
Engineered. Duped.
The cart arrived carrying her soup, his salad. She swallowed a few spoonfuls, not tasting the broth and vegetables. She knew the laws about clones and how they were now second-class citizens. She knew what people thought about dupes—the same things that she herself thought.
He speared a wedge of tomato in his salad, thinking. He looked up and his expression changed. Maybe he’d noticed her shock. “It’s okay. Here’s how it works, simply put. The lab takes apart DNA, combines various bits, makes some changes, picks some mitochondria, too, puts it all in an empty ovum, and lets it divide like an ordinary fertilized egg. Those new cells get separated and then divided some more. In the end, they had ten viable zygotes.”
“There are ten of me?” Ten dupes. This was getting even worse.
“No, only one. This is where things started going wrong. We would have been happy with twins, and you would have been identical twins, just like identical twins the … traditional way when a zygote splits in the womb.”
He had shied away from the word natural, the politicized word in natural law. He knew what he was saying and what it really meant. But he wasn’t offering any empathy. Something was dangerously wrong.
“In this case, Olivia was implanted with two embryos, and usually only one takes, but this time two did, and she only wanted one, so the other one was injected with a drug and killed. We were heartbroken, but to her it was a triumph.”
Berenike almost had a twin. She waited for him to say more, meanwhile trying to think and not feel. She had always desperately wanted a sister, but not this way. No one would want one from cloning. Stay calm. Breathe. He was lying, he had to be.
“That’s when we first thought she wasn’t ready to become a mother.” He looked down, as if it hurt to remember. “She’d gotten clean, stopped using drugs for almost a year. We thought she was ready.…” He looked up, again with that odd expectation. “Are you all right?” He took her hand and held it tight. His was warm and moist. And if his concern had been sincere, he would have offered it earlier.
“I … well…”
“She got rehab, and she seemed better. She wanted to begin a new life. Be a normal person, that’s what she said, normal. And Jackson, we thought he was going to be okay, too. All I ever cared about is you.”
She gently tried to pull her hand back. He wouldn’t let go. She worked very hard to keep breathing.
“And,” he said, “it turned into a big fight. They went to court. And we weren’t allowed contact. We tried to keep an eye on you through third parties until we were sure they’d settled down and you’d be safe.”
“They told me I was adopted.” A normal child, not a dupe.
He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
Safe? Even her hand wasn’t safe with him. He was worse than Momma. Stay calm. Protect yourself.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes. Well … this is a lot to take in.” She was a dupe—if he was telling the truth.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
Too late.
“You should come and live with me.”
What?
“I know you have a miserable job. I can give you a much better life.”
No you can’t. “I’m doing okay.”
“Does AutoKar employ second-class citizens? Does anyone?”
She tugged to free her hand, groping for words. How did he know where she worked?
His grip squeezed painfully tighter, and he leaned forward with a smile, a horrible smile. “I’m not lying. I’ll send you the contract from the lab. You’ll see. You’re not a natural human.”
“Let me go.”
“Go where? Go home? You’re not going to have a home much longer.” But he loosened his grip on her hand.
She stood up. “We’re done here.”
She walked out as self-controlled as she could, and soon she was panting and trembling, but at least she’d restrained herself until she was out of his sight. AutoKar wouldn’t just fire her, it would demand repayment of all her wages and training on the grounds of misrepresentation of identity, and she’d wind up homeless and in the
