Chapter 7
"Hey, what's up," Beth held her cellphone up to her ear in the dark kitchen. "What? I thought you weren't flying in until tomorrow night? Shit, no you can't. Yeah, he's out of town for a few days but I still can't. Fuck, alright. Just cab it to a hotel for the night and we'll work something out in the morning?"
"Christ Childs, who the hell are you talkin to?" Sarah's raspy voice sounded through the room.
Beth turned around in surprise, phone still held to her ear. "Cos, I gotta go."
Sarah rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked curiously at her sister. The way she hastily hung up her phone was so unlike Beth's usually calm and cool demeanor.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up."
"Obviously. People don't make whisper phone calls at two in the morning and hope to wake someone up," Sarah replied.
"Right," Beth nodded and scratched her head uncomfortably.
"Who was it?"
"Hm?"
"Who were you talkin' to?" Sarah questioned slowly, completely confused by her sister's odd behaviour.
"Oh, no one. It was just – no one," Beth shrugged lamely.
Sarah furrowed her brow deeply. "What in the hell is goin' on with you?"
Beth glanced around the room in clear discomfort. She was actively avoiding Sarah's gaze and desperately wracking her brain for something to say to her sister. She had always been a bloody shit liar though and Sarah could already see right through her.
"Jesus, screw it," she muttered to herself. "Once I tell you, there's no going back, Sar."
"Okay…" Sarah hedged in concern and took a seat at the island when Beth gestured there. "How 'bout a cuppa?"
"Yeah," Beth nodded and ran a shaky hand though her hair. She placed the kettle on the stove burner and leaned back against the countertop next to it.
Sarah was still eyeing her curiously, trying to figure out what could possibly have her sister looking so anxious in the middle of the night. Beth was never one to let people see when she was shaken. She was always more the type to keep her emotions inside in fear that letting people see them would make her seem weak. Even more so since she entered the police force. Working in a man's world with a bunch of tough criminals had trained her to be as stoic as possible as often as possible. Sarah was one of the few people she ever let her guard down in front of and even this version of Beth was unprecedented for the twin.
"Is everything alright, Beth?"
Beth ignored her sister's concerned question as the kettle began steaming. She turned her back and poured the hot water into two mugs for them both, adding milk and sugar just as she and Sarah liked it. She placed the mug in front of her sister and took a seat next to her silently.
"No. Everything's not okay, Sarah."
"Whatever it is we can fix it, yeah? We just gotta stick together," Sarah tried to smile reassuringly, not at all used to being the one that has to offer comfort and support.
"It's not that bloody simple," Beth groaned and rubbed her temples slowly. "This entire thing is so fucked up, you have no idea."
"Is this about you shootin' a civilian?"
Beth visibly bristled at her sister's words. She slowly turned her head to look at Sarah again. "Who told you?"
"Paul," Sarah shrugged. "I don't think he even meant to. We just got talking and it came up."
"He shouldn't have," she shook her head angrily. "It's none of his business."
"He's your boyfriend, Beth and he was worried about you. Were you even gonna tell me about all that shite?" she demanded harshly, the worry over her sister steadily getting stronger.
"I don't know, okay? It's my shit to deal with – alone."
"So what, you were just gonna keep poppin' your pills behind everyone's back then?"
Beth looked darkly at her sister, the rage in her expression very evident. Sarah figured it would be the case before the words even left her mouth. Beth had always hated being vulnerable and bringing something like a prescription pill addiction up in conversation would not sit well with her. She wasn't about to tiptoe around the subject though.
"Back off, Sarah. Paul knows I'm not doing that anymore. It stopped once I got reinstated."
"I'm just confused," Sarah shrugged helplessly. "You're always on my ass about drugs but then you end up with a bloody habit too. You shoulda told me."
"When the hell was I supposed to tell you any of it, Sarah? When you had disappeared for ten fucking months while the whole shit storm was happening?! I handled it myself before you came back so there was nothing to tell," she finished calmly, her tone trying to convey finality on the subject.
Sarah sighed deeply and muttered out an apology. "It just scared me when he told me about all the shit that's been goin' on with you that I didn't know about."
"I know," Beth nodded calmly and placed a comforting hand atop her sister's. "You don't have to worry about me though. I'm all good now."
"Then what's with the late night phone calls?" Sarah asked gruffly, finding it difficult to believe her sister amidst all the secrecy going on.
"Sarah…" Beth hedged, not wanting to bring her sister into the drama that was rapidly unfolding in her life. Sarah quickly flashed a stern look at her twin though that told Beth her avoidance wasn't going to fly. "Fuck, fine. But you asked for it."
Sarah nodded warily, taking a sip of her hot tea to hopefully calm her racing mind.
"So about six months ago I was contacted by a woman and she said she thought we might be related."
"Shit, Beth! Like our bloody birth mother?" Sarah blew out in a mixture of shock and anger. Anger at the woman for crawling out of the woodwork after twenty eight years of silence and also at her twin for not telling her the second she came back to town.
"No, not a mother. Like a sister," Beth continued hesitantly, already seeing the emotions playing out across her twin's face. "She said she needed my help, that she was in danger."
"How the hell did she find you?"
"I don't know," Beth shrugged. She held a hand up softly to halt Sarah from further questioning and slid off her stool smoothly. She walked quickly to her bedroom and returned minutes later with a silver briefcase in hand. "I asked her to send me more information about herself just so I could know if she was legit. You know, like pictures, birth certificate and shit."
Beth unlocked the clasps on the case and opened it slowly so Sarah could no longer see the contents. She pulled out several pieces of paper and laid them out flat on the counter in front of her sister.
"Holy shit…" Sarah glanced up at Beth, looking for further explanation. The woman staring back at her in the pictures had the exact same fucking face as her and her twin. "Wha' the hell is goin' on? We were triplets?"
Beth gulped heavily, desperately wanting to keep the information to herself. She placed an additional piece of paper on the counter and shook her head helplessly while muttering, "just one, I'm a few, no family too."
"Beth. What the bloody hell is this shit?"
"We're genetic identicals, Sarah," Beth explained softly.
"Well, yeah," Sarah scoffed at the statement. "Course we are, we're twins. But this – this German. She looks exactly like us? Only her bloody birth date is three weeks before ours."
"We're genetic identicals," Beth repeated again, her tone just as soft in hopes that the more soothing her voice was the easier she could lay the revelation on her sister. "We're clones, Sarah."
"What the fuck?!" Sarah exclaimed and abruptly stood from her stool, nearly knocking her tea over in the process. "You're jokin' right? This ain't funny, Childs. Jesus."
"Does it look like I'm joking, Sarah?" Beth countered heatedly. "Sit your ass down and listen to me."
Sarah shook her head and began pacing back and forth. Her skin was practically itching with the urge to bolt. The only feeling she could seem to pinpoint was fear – which only served to spark more fear. Sarah Manning didn't do fear; never had, never would. Now she was though. The word clone left her mouth feeling like sandpaper. Her entire life was a lie then, wasn't it? All of a sudden everything she had believed to be true was coming into question. She returned her gaze to Beth with a completely lost look on her face and reclaimed her previous seat.
"You good?"
Sarah nodded in confirmation, not sure if her voice would hold the same affirmation.
"Okay," Beth sighed deeply. "So this German – Katja – contacted me six months ago and all this shit started. She said she was sick with a respiratory illness and that someone was trying to kill her and all the other European clones she knew of. Two were already dead, the German and a French one were left. There wasn't much I could do to help them but I ran facial recognition software to find anyone else."
Beth halted her words and pulled out several more photos and birth certificates. "I found you and me, obviously, along with Alison Hendrix, Cosima Niehaus, Rachel Duncan, Jennifer Fitzsimmons, and Tony Sawicki. All the same face, all have birthdays within a month of ours."
"Christ how many of us are there?"
"Eleven that I know of. I'm in contact with Cosima and Alison. You heard me on the phone earlier with Cosima, she goes to school in Minnesota but she just got into the city. Sawicki's trans and seems to like being a criminal so I've left him out of it, Jennifer has the same respiratory issues the German had, and Rachel Duncan is some corporate power at the DYAD institute."
"What do you mean the German had?" Sarah asked slowly, not liking where the conversation was headed at all so far. Not to mention hearing that her sister was in regular contact with their bloody clones.
"The German's dead. She came to Toronto a couple months ago hoping to get Cosima to research her illness back at school. She was shot in the head from long range while sitting in the back of my car. I guess whoever was killing the Europeans killed the French one off and followed Katja over here to finish the job. I managed to get away and deal with the body. We haven't heard anything on the killer front since then."
"Shite," Sarah shook her head in disbelief. She was still half convinced that all the shit Beth was telling her was some elaborate practical joke. The only thing convincing her otherwise was the level of seriousness on her sister's face.
"That civilian I shot wasn't an accident either. She was some woman that has been working with whoever's trying to kill us. She was some sort of tracker or something, so I tracked her right back and killed her. I called Art after it happened and he helped me cover it all up."
"Art knows?"
"Not about the clone shit, no. He still thinks I was just high on my meds and I mistook a civilian for a wanted fugitive. But he covered for me all the same," she explained patiently.
"Between the information Katja originally gave me and my resources at the station, I've been able to research and dig into this whole mess. Maggie Chen – the woman I killed originally worked for the DYAD institute. They're like this huge corporation that focusses on biotechnology innovation and shit and I'm almost positive it's them that started this whole cloning thing. Chen switched sides eventually and became some fucking religious extremist that wanted us all killed off."
"Jesus Christ," Sarah muttered out.
Beth nodded silently in understanding of her sister's shock. She had been in the exact same position only six months prior. It was a shit load of information to swallow and near impossible to wrap one's head around. The weight of the entire situation was why she had wanted so badly to keep it a secret from Sarah until absolutely necessary. Her sister was fresh off a drug addiction and needed to focus all her attention on rebuilding her relationship with Kira. She didn't need to worry about clone drama and possibly getting murdered by some religious extremist psychopath.
"Does Paul know? Or Mrs S and Fe?"
"Felix and Siobhan don't know."
"But Paul?"
"Paul knows something, I'm just not sure what or how much."
"Whaddya mean?" Sarah questioned. "If he knows anything then you told him, yeah?"
"No. See, since we're basically the DYAD's fucking science experiment, it would only make sense for them to plant someone in our lives so they could watch us. I'm pretty damn sure that Paul is my monitor and he reports back to someone named Olivier about me. The part I'm not sure about is if he knows what we are or why he's actually reporting about me."
"That bloody bastard," Sarah growled angrily. She knew he and Beth had had their ups and downs over the years but she never thought he'd be so shady.
"Yeah," Beth agreed with a resigned shrug. She had been stewing with that bit of information for so long now that it basically had no effect on her anymore. Paul was a certified asshole and that was that – except she couldn't keep a part of herself from loving him still.
"If we've all got monitors whose mine then?"
"I don't know," Beth shrugged. "In case you haven't noticed, you're kind of a nomad, Sar. Other than me, Felix, Siobhan, and Kira, no one is really in your life for a very substantial period of time."
"And Paul," Sarah added pointedly. "You think he's my monitor too?"
"Who knows? All I know is right now we can't trust anyone."
"And what's the deal with you being buddies with two of them, huh? You said Cosima just got into town, what about Alison."
"Lives in bloody Scarborough. She's about as local as you can get," Beth snorted in amusement at the irony that she had lived so close to a clone for so long. "I contacted them because I thought they should know they were in danger and hoping they might be able to help. I'm a cop, Cosima's a scientist, and Alison's a housewife that supplies the funds. We're trying to figure out what the hell is going on and what we can do about it."
"I can't believe this," Sarah muttered and ran an exhausted hand through her tousled locks. "So, this mean I get to meet my clones now too?"
"No," Beth immediately objected. "I don't want you involved. You need to focus on Kira, let me handle all this other shit for now. I can do it, I promise."
Sarah looked as though she were going to object for a moment but swallowed thickly and sat back again. She took a calming sip of her now lukewarm tea and sighed. Just when she had finally seemed to recover and get back on some sort of stable ground, the world was ripping the rug out from beneath her all over again. Only this time it was so much more severe than all the rest. Her life and her sister's life were suddenly being threatened and there was nothing either of them could do to stop it.
She was still scared and she still wanted to run. But she couldn't. Kira was here. Beth needed her, even if she claimed to be able to handle everything alone. All she wanted more than anything was to get far away from this place, far away from the drama that just exploded into her life, far away from women who were walking around with her face. She needed it, craved it. Her, Kira, Felix, and Beth – somewhere, anywhere that was remote and warm. It was always her desire to have that, but now more than anything, now when she knew it was absolutely never going to happen did it seem like her life depended on it happening.