They think Sydney resisted the brainwashing, that she's clean—because that's what Julia wanted them to think, that's what she told them—but Sydney didn't, she isn't, not exactly. They wanted to believe her, and her behavior, her choices, wouldn't make sense otherwise.
But they cannot conceive what it is to have another person inside of them, to be a two-headed monster, to have two faces emerging from the same twisted body. And because they could not conceive of it, they could not find any evidence of Julia's existence—if it weren't for Sydney's father's tape, if it weren't for Lazarey, they'd have no evidence of her at all.
Sydney was sleeping. Sydney didn't know any of this.
It is Julia that is Rambaldi's Chosen.
Elena knew precisely what she was doing when she created her out of Sydney, molded her from a life Sydney did not live but could have. Julia was impressed upon Sydney, like a stamp onto clay, but it was those details inside Sydney, the ones Julia clung to, that made her stick. Sydney and Julia both like cherry popsicles the best. Sydney and Julia both prefer nineteenth century literature to twentieth. Sydney and Julia both like it when they make their lovers scream.
They have the same training, the same build, the same capacity for violence.
But Julia is angry. Julia is Sydney's anger, sharpened and clarified into a light that burns so brightly you can feel the heat merely standing in her presence. She is righteousness, but twisted, an undeniable life force.
Julia has never seen Mt. Sebacio. Sydney's memories are her own.
During the brainwashing, it was Julia who kept Sydney alive.
This is something Elena didn't know.
Julia, growing already inside her, was the one who soothed her into letting go. It was Julia who went to the CIA. Julia who chose to continue to work, undercover, with the Covenant.
Julia who, by destroying herself, brought Sydney back to life.
The package came one day, months after the last time Sydney had thought of Julia, long after she had folded herself back in to the life she should have lived so nearly seamlessly that sometimes even she could not feel the disjuncture. Inside was a tape. Setting the rest of her mail on the dining room table Sydney moved straight to her living room, to the VCR tucked beneath the television she rarely used, and slid it in. She reclaimed her glass of wine from the kitchen and sat warily on the edge of the couch cushion, tucking her hair behind one ear.
She pressed play.
A woman was sitting in a chair, in front of a camera. It was Sydney. Except her hair was ash blond, half of it pulled back from her face to show the sharpness of her eyes.
Julia, Sydney thought. She fumbled the wine glass, but caught it just before it fell.
"Sydney," Julia said, voice husky, leaning forward into the camera, and a rush of moisture collected at Sydney's thighs.
As if she knew, Julia smiled, a slow curve of Sydney's mouth. She was wearing the same clothing she'd worn in the video Kendall had shown Sydney on the plane. It was obviously the same day. The day her memory had been erased. No: the day she had erased her own memory. Erased Julia.
"I know you wouldn't like me doing this." Her smile grew teasing, wicked, hot. "If you had your way I'd just disappear, but sacrifice isn't my style. I want you to remember me—the way I remember you.
"I'm going to see Simon after this. He's going to be a loose end, Sydney. You'll have to take care of him. You won't remember, of course. Though let me tell you—you're missing out." Smug, blatant satisfaction flickered across her face, and turned Sydney's stomach in a way that made her ache. "I've left you clues. You'll have followed them already. You'll have found everything I needed you to find. This isn't about that. This is about us."
Julia leaned forward, just slightly, eliciting in Sydney something Sydney doesn't want to acknowledge. "I found out why they did this to you."
Sydney imagines that sleeping with Simon was like a threesome: him and Julia and Sydney a passenger along for the ride.
Julia, she imagines, was the one who made her moan. When Julia ran her hands along her stomach, cupped her own breasts in her hands, she was making love to Sydney, with Simon none the wiser.
Sydney recalls on occasion the ghost of her own hands on her skin, familiar touch paired with the illicit thrill of not knowing what they would do next. She replicates it in her own bed in the dark, rain skittering rhythmically across the roof, and when she comes she cries out Julia's name.
In her required meetings with the CIA shrink immediately after her return, Sydney was preoccupied with the idea of Julia. Not with the idea there were things that Sydney did which she could not remember, but with the idea of Julia herself.
"Julia was just another alias, Sydney," the woman tried to tell her. "Longer-term, but no different than the rest. It was still you. You, Sydney, were in control. Even if you can't remember it."
She tried to believe that. But she couldn't. She couldn't help feeling as if she hadn't been in control at all. In her mind it had been Julia who had chosen to go the CIA, because no one told Julia who she worked for, not even the people who had made her. Julia that had teamed up with Lazarey, but because she thought he could help her with Rambaldi, not because the CIA had told her to. Julia that had decided to erase herself—and restore Sydney.
What Sydney didn't know was why.
Sydney watches the end of the tape again and again.
"Poor sweet Sydney," Julia clucks, the same way she has a dozen times before. "And the Chosen and the Passenger shall do battle, and only one will survive," she intones. She reaches up unfastens her hair, lets it fall free around her face, a cloud of blond around her too-sharp face. "Which one of us do you think it should be?"