Author's note: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The road we traveled could barely be called one. Packed earth with some gravel that ticked against the undercarriage of the car until it ran out, leaving us rocking through dips and furrows of dirt and mud with patches of tall grass that whisked under the bumper and wheels and was punctuated by the occasional rap of a small tree branch hitting the roof. Michael was used to navigating country trails in his old truck, but this was something different, his hands white-knuckled as he kept us to a steady but slow pace that felt both like it would take us too long and would never keep us far enough from our destination. He was protecting his precious cargo, but it couldn't feel like enough, considering our situation.

After who-knows-how-long the terrain began to slant upward into a hill, the tires slipping slightly until Michael switched into a low gear. There was a hint of grey light ahead, indicating that we might be coming to a gap in the tunnel of trees, and as we crested the top if the incline we burst through a heavy-dipped bough sodden with previous rain, droplets and wet, detached leaves spattering across the windshield with a patter.

I caught my breath. There was a clearing before us, populated by a low, crumbling building with rusty metal doors, a retired power sub-station, it looked like, and this was confirmed by a single deteriorating power-line pole beside it, tilting drunkenly and missing cables, although a few insulators remained perched on its crossbeam.

And beside them, a black SUV.

We rolled to a stop, regarding the vehicle with dread and caution. The glare of white light leaking through the high, dove-grey, backlit clouds above reflected on the SUV's windshield glass, obscuring our view into the front seat, and it seemed empty, quiet. Then there was a startling knock on the window beside me that thrust my heart into my throat, just catching a glimpse of the man in the black suit and raincoat who must have emerged from out of the tree cover, slipping along the side of our car and peering in at us before stopping at the front, driver's-side corner and tucking his hand into his coat front, the tiniest sliver of a shoulder holster revealed by the motion.

"Get out," he said. "Slowly. "

Teo glanced back at me, eyes wide. None of us said anything. Michael and Teo opened their doors and stepped out, Teo's hands instinctively rising up, palms forward, beside his ears.

"Hands on your head, slowly, " the armed man said, nodding at Michael. I couldn't see Michael's face, but there was a tiny pause and tightening of his shoulders before he complied.

"Now you and the boy, Ms. Niehaus," the man said, looking through the window at me. My legs felt frozen, and my arms convulsed briefly around my son. I didn't move, and Sevvy leaned back to look at me again.

"Mommy, " he whispered, and he looked so brave I couldn't help but focus on him.

"Okay. I love you," I told him quietly.

"I love you, too," he said, and I opened the door slowly, easing him down so he was behind me, holding my hand, as I stood in the protection of the metal door. The man's eyes might have squinted, just barely, for a moment. Then:

"All the way," he instructed me. "Close the door behind you."

I hitched in a breath and did it, carefully keeping Sevvy behind my legs as I did.

"You can't blame her, " a voice said, and my blood ran cold to hear it. The rear window of the black SUV was just a little bit open, and the voice floated through it. There was a click and the door latch disengaged.

"It's the instinct of a mother, and it's as it should be," that unbelievable, dreaded voice continued. "Mothers should always put their children first."

I felt light-headed as the rear door to the SUV swung fully open. Someone stepped out, but it wasn't who I expected.

The voice was so familiar, it seemed unmistakable. I knew it almost as well as I knew my own voice, because the vocal cords that shaped it were identical to mine. Nevertheless, there was a flatness to it. An affect of calm laid over possibly limitless violence beneath, all with the distinct, crisp diction of received English.

It was the voice of Rachel Duncan.

But it wasn't Rachel Duncan before me.

The clone who stepped out of the SUV looked too young to be Rachel. At first I thought, holy shit, is that Rachel, but she's found some Neolution youth serum or moisturizer or something? But then I realized it couldn't even be that. This clone looked like maybe I did in college or a little older… but you could chalk up a bit of how old she looked to the way she was dressed. Her suit was perfect, crisp and tailored. She wore all black, which I thought maybe was a bit more than what Rachel would have done, and her makeup was definitely more prominent than Rachel used to wear. And her hair… it was in a sort of bob like Rachel's, but more undercut, and it was not blonde, but a shade of red I never thought would have worked with our skin, except she was pale, paler than I've been, since I was really sick, anyway.

All this time I was looking at her, she was looking at me, and she had that same predatory, almost reptile-flat stare Rachel had. My mind turned over and over, taking her in, wondering how in all my searching I could have missed out on another clone. I thought my quest had been exhaustive, and I'd had Mika's help, among others, to seek other Ledas out. But here was someone before me I knew I hadn't met before. Could it… could she? I felt like I almost had it, like I was mentally grasping in the dark but there was suddenly a faint light. And then…

"Hello, Cosima," she said, and her lips pressed together in a line, like she was trying to smirk but something bitter in her tainted it further. And I saw how youthful she suddenly looked, because her face was so soft, and her eyes looked vulnerable, yet defiant. And I wondered…

"Are you… Charlotte?" I asked, almost swallowing the name as I squinted at her.

"Very good," she answered. "I suppose at least now your remember I exist."

The other man in black had exited the driver's seat of the vehicle, and now he rounded the fender and stood by her. He was clean-cut in that too bland, unsettling, almost Secret-Service-y way the other guy was, except he was more muscular, his neck barely breaking from the slopes of his shoulders. He leaned over to her and said something too lowly for me to hear, and she shook her head once. He straightened up and looked at us, seeming to size us up, paying close attention so he could take out his weapon the second any of us moved.

Teo twisted around to look at me, his hands still up, his eyes wide, confounded. I could tell he wanted to ask me who she was, what was going on, but we couldn't exactly have that conversation right then.

"Let me see the boy," she suddenly commanded, and I focussed back on her.

"He's right here," I said, my hand tightening on his and keeping him behind me. "Charlotte, what… what's going on? What do you want with him, with us?"

Her mouth tightened and her eyes went cold. This was the kind of shark-like look I remembered from Rachel, and I knew the next step with her had been rage, the kind that gets the bone marrow that could save us clones including her, herself, stomped beneath a business-appropriate heel. But Charlotte wasn't wearing pumps. She was wearing heeled boots that went slightly above her knee, over tights. It made me wonder…

"Robert," she said, tersely, and the man closer to us, the one who had given Sevvy the note at the playground, reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. He moved economically, like someone who was used to turning a firearm on anyone he was ordered to, even a family with a small kid. I saw Michael's shoulders tense and Teo let out a gasp, but Robert seemed calm, almost lazy as his arm settled into position, the muzzle aimed to hit Michael, and possibly me, if it went through him.

"Alright! Shit, alright!" I found coming out of my mouth. I felt lightheaded, unable to catch my breath, almost like I had when my disease was at its worst. I had raised my left hand in a stop gesture, but I slipped my right from Sevvy's little hand and down his wrist, squeezing his forearm gently. Before I could say or do anything, he crept around my leg, still leaning against me, eyes wide but moving under his own initiative, becoming visible. I looked down at him in surprise and he darted a look up at me. He was so brave… and I could swear he was telling me to be brave, too, with his eyes.

Charlotte came forward, looking at each of us in turn, until she was close to Robert. The gunman twitched his head to his right, looking at Michael.

"Step to the side, so she can see him," he ordered, again more matter-of-fact than rough.

I could see Michael's shoulders heaving with his breath, and for a cold, tense moment I didn't know what he might do. He turned his head to look at Teo, then stepped sideways away from the car, as Robert had directed, angling his head further to see me and Severo. When he turned his head back to look forward, I could tell he met Robert's eyes, because Robert stared at him for a moment. Charlotte turned her gaze downward to take in my son, and smiled.

I hadn't expected her to smile. I don't know what I expected, if anything, but it wasn't that. It wasn't the slight tremble of her lips as they stretched, both happy and sad, as if overwhelmed. It was a smile I was familiar with, even down to how oddly broken it looked it some way, as my own had, in the mirror, after Delphine had split with me, when I went on the run.

Charlotte bent down, her hands on her knees, closer to his eye level.

"Hello," she said to him. "You're a very special little boy, did you know that? Not everyone knows how special you are, but I do."

Sevvy shifted his arm so he was holding my hand again. He looked up at me, and though he was pale, again I felt like he was reassuring me. I took a breath and gave his hand a squeeze, then levelled my gaze back at Charlotte.

"We all know he's special. He's our son. What do you want?"

Charlotte straightened up, her annoyed affect returning.

"The cure," she said. "You brought it? Place it on the hood of the car."

"I can't," I told her, "I don't have it," and instantly I saw her anger flare. "I don't, like, carry it with me everywhere," I explained quickly, "I haven't needed to, for years. I've got samples in storage, but they're not here. I do have the formula and the instructions, though, and I can tell you where to get the reserves."

There was a brief silence.

"If you had let us talk to you she could have told you that," Teo suddenly blurted. "We couldn't even get them because you had us under some kind of… of house arrest!" He took a step forward, and Charlotte looked at him, but Robert kept his gun steadily aimed at us, and the other man stepped forward and pulled out his own gun, levelling it at Teo. For a minute I thought I was going to lose it, lose my shit, fall on top of Sevvy or yell or lose control of my bladder or something, but Teo jerked his hands higher in the air and stepped back, shutting his mouth.

Charlotte sighed.

"Well," she finally said, "that's disappointing. But I'm sure you're right. I'm sure we can get the reserves. Especially since Severo will come with us."

"What?" Michael barked, and I found myself encircling my son with my arm and clutching him close again. Charlotte narrowed her eyes.

"Severo is coming with us. While we have him, I'm sure you will cooperate in any way you can to ensure we get what we need."

Michael sputtered, but I interrupted before he could lose his cool completely.

"Charlotte, none of this is necessary! I didn't know you needed it… I didn't even know you were alive! If I had, I would gladly have given it to you just like I did to the rest of our sisters I found."

"Really?" she shot back, and it wasn't a question. "I find that hard to believe after you let my mother die out of your petty resentment."

I was gobsmacked.

"What?" I managed. "I didn't kill your mother. I never even knew Marion Bowles!"

"Marion Bowles was not my mother," she stated coldly, between clenched teeth, and I was floundering, increasingly more weirded out and confused than ever before.

"What do you mean? She...she raised you until…"

"She never told me the truth. She never told me I would die, and she kept me from my real mother. I was made from Rachel. She saved me when DYAD was collapsing thanks to you and your sisters, and brought me to the one person who could stop the disease in me and fix my leg."

I must have been gaping like a fish. A small, cruel smile flitted across her too-young face, as if my confusion was something I deserved, or evidence of something wrong with me.

"Susan Duncan," she said simply. "She was able to slow the progress. But, with Neolution in disorder, thanks to you and your sisters," she continued, hissing the word like a curse, "she could only do so much." She tilted her head slightly, reading my expression.

"Do you really expect me to believe you're that clueless?" she asked, after a moment. She walked closer, a curious yet disgusted look on her face, like she'd discovered an unusual bug. "I have to say, your acting skills are far better than I expected. If I didn't know you were smart enough to develop a cure I'd think you were an imbecile." It was uncanny

. how smoothly her vitriol emerged, almost as if she really were Rachel.

"I may be dumb about some things," I finally managed, stuffing down the old ire that used to flare when I felt mistreated, "but the truth is I really don't know what you're doing here. I looked for you, and for Rachel, to give you the cure. I had people looking for electronic traces of you. I was worried about you. But I never found you. I thought you must be dead. How was I supposed to know you were hiding out with Susan Duncan somewhere?"

Her hand connected with my cheek almost before I saw it coming. The pain was brief but the shock brought me inside myself, wondering if it had really happened, as if there was some other reason my head had snapped sideways and I was now looking at the trees just past my shoulder.

"Liar," she accused, and I turned back to see her eyes rounded in outrage. Severo shifted from beside me and partly behind my leg again, clinging to my thigh. Charlotte took a breath, and I heard it: that distinctive rattle that I remembered from all those years ago, that sound that signalled trouble, fluid and tissue clogging my lungs and threatening to grow upward, the predecessor to a cough that could rumble once or twice or leave me on the ground, gasping, almost as if on a whim.

"You're sick," I said. It came out of me before I could register it. "You've got the disease."

"Very good, you're so smart," she said, and I could swear I saw a slight stain of blood on her teeth. "Of course I am. Do you think that Susan could find a cure without the samples you had, the science? Do you think we could manage it on the run while Sarah and the others exposed DYAD and took away our resources? You meant to bring my mother down, all of you. She told me how you and Sarah denied her, and because of that, she died."

"What?" I blurted. "What are you talking about? None of us even spoke with Rachel. I mean, believe me, Sarah didn't wish her the best, but she didn't stop me from looking. And nobody wanted any harm to come to you!"

"That's enough," Charlotte hissed, and her hand went into her jacket and came out with a gun, one she pointed right at my face.

Adrenaline turned my insides cold. It had been so long since I had been this scared.

"Oh, that's more than enough," came a voice from seemingly nowhere, and I thought I must be hallucinating, because it was my favourite voice in the world.

And then a little, bright red light appeared on the side of Charlotte's head.

A light that came from the direction of… the decaying shack. From behind which my beloved Delphine fucking Cormier had stepped, holding a gun, with a laser sight, pointed at Charlotte's temple.