“It’s hard for me not to be angry,” she said, her voice calm but her eyes wild. “You don’t even know who I am.”
“Sure I do,” I said. “You’re Hina.”
“No.”
“Her copy.”
She shook her head.
“Her sister, then. Her mother.”
There was a moment before the woman spoke again, when she just held on to me, and it was somehow as if I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“I’m not Hina’s mother,” the woman whispered as she bent against me. “I’m yours.”
It wasn’t true. That’s what I told myself. Tried to tell her that, too. My mother was dead. Always had been. She’d starved to death. Starved. But I was having trouble focusing now. I couldn’t think straight.
“Don’t make it harder,” the woman said. We were still wrapped together in the middle of the room.
I shrugged her arms off me. “You’re full of shit.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“You can’t know. How could you know?”
“I don’t need to know,” she said “The science knows for me.”
“Science?”
“Your genes.”
“My what?”
“They’re a perfect match to my DNA,” the woman said. “And your father’s.”
“My father?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s here.”
“He’s what?” My fists were clenched. My heart had shot into my throat.
My old man. Here.
“I’ll take you to him,” the woman said. “When you’re ready.”
“I’m ready now.” I started to shake.
“No, Banyan. You’re not.”
“Take me now,” I screamed. I seized a glass monitor and rammed it at the wall, smashing it into shiny pieces on the floor.
The woman tried grabbing at me but I slipped past her, making for a door on the far side of the room. I had her beat, but when I reached the door it came swinging wide open and Zee was bustling toward me, all wrapped in purple, big grin on her face. She started to say something but I cut her off.
“What the hell?” I said. “Get me out of here. Get me out.”
“I got you out,” she whispered, her smile vanishing like a sun gone down. I tried to push past, but she was all rammed up against me and I was suddenly so damn tired and my legs wouldn’t move.
“Take it easy,” Zee said, then she stared into the room. “What did you tell him?”
I felt the woman loom up close. “That he’s my son.”
“And his father?”
“No. Not yet.”
“You’ve seen him?” I said to Zee, but I was staggering now, slurring my words.
“Get him down,” one of them said. And everything turned to sludge.
When my mind came back, I was back in the bed and all the lights had been cut. I tried moving my limbs and each one was sore. I felt something pressed against my thigh, pinning the sheets, and I squirmed my hands free to grab it.
Metal. Cold and jagged. I felt at the metal. The ridges and curves. I drew blood as my skin snagged on thorny steel.
“It’s called a rose,” Zee said from the corner of the room. I looked for her, but she was all shadowed and black.
“He made it,” she said.
“Pop?”
“Yeah.” Zee shuffled closer and lit a low orange globe on the floor beside me. “Our father.”
“Ours?”
She nodded, but I looked away. My brain wouldn’t go there.
I tugged the flower to the light and studied the craftsmanship — barbed wire that had rusted purple, woven into a long stem and bunched into a ball of leaves. My blood was smeared upon the petals.
“He gave this to you?” I said, and it made Zee smile the way you do at something sad.
“No,” she said. “He made it for her. Your mother.”
“My mother’s dead. I don’t know that woman.”
“People here call her the Creator.”
“I think crazy is what she is. Besides, she looks more like your momma than mine.” I set the spiky flower on the bed and turned to Zee. She’d been dead enough to haunt my dreams, but now here she was, flesh and bones and GenTech purple.
“My mother was a replicant of yours,” she said.
“A replicant?”
“A copy. A perfect copy.”
“So how come I never heard nothing of it? How come we never knew?”
“Because our father wanted to keep you safe.”
“Safe?” My mind groped at each word, at each new bit of information. But it was like everything was slipping past me and shattering on the ground. I wanted my father. I wanted to see him. But at the same time, everything felt wrong. And he’d never seemed so far.
“You’ll see,” Zee said. She nudged me over so she could sit beside me.
“So what? You’re my sister?” My hands were trembling and I dug my fists at my side.
“I suppose,” she said.
But I’d never had a sister. I never had anyone except Pop. I tried to make sense of it. I kept trying to start at the beginning, but then I’d just lose my way all over again.
“I should have looked for you longer,” I told her. “On that slave ship. I got Hina out, though. But I couldn’t save her. Not in the end.”
Zee started to cry and it was enough to make me quit shaking. I tried to breathe proper, but I couldn’t slow down.
“I couldn’t do nothing,” I said, the words tumbling out. “For Hina. Or Sal. And I think it might be my fault. Dragging them along.”
“No,” Zee said, and she tried saying something else, but her tears messed the words and then she just cried till she’d drained herself out. And when she’d got done crying, I could hear her wheezing through those crusted lungs of hers. That tight, shriveled sound.
“Hina remembered,” I said. “In the end. Like she could see her whole life. And she was clean. Free of old Frost and clean of the crystal.”
“What about Sal?”
“He saved me,” I said, remembering him pulling me out of the mud pit. Remembering when I’d called him my friend.
“He used to try and hide me. When Frost got crazy.” Zee started sobbing again. And I reckon Sal had been like a brother to her. No matter the shit that he’d said.
“They took you to Vega?” I said, thinking about that spinning wheel that had arced across the plains. “The Harvesters?”
“I don’t know. I just woke up here.”
“I didn’t see one agent out there with a dust mask.”
“The air’s clean,” she said. “All the time.”
“So can it fix you up? Your lungs?”
“The Creator says they can’t get better. But at least here they won’t get worse.”
“The Creator.” I stood up off the bed, stuck my head in my hands. “Who the hell calls themself that?”
“It’s her title. That’s what everyone calls her.”
“Kind of like you still got a mom, I guess.”
“I told you,” Zee said. “She’s your mom. Not mine.”
“It’s impossible. My mom died. She starved herself so I could live.”
“That’s what our father told you?”
I rubbed at the back of my neck. I refused to believe that woman was my mother. The very idea sent a pain through my skull.
“Our dad came to build for the bigwigs,” Zee said. “For GenTech. They wanted statues of the people who found this place.”
“They’re making him build?” For a moment I pictured my father and a thousand others all slaving over some GenTech shrine.
“That was when he first came to the island. Your mother said that’s how they met.” Zee scooped up the rose and placed it on the bed between us. “He made her this. But he never built the statues GenTech wanted. Soon as you were born, he took you and ran. Stayed hidden.”