"How many of you… us… I don't know what to call us… prototypes. How many prototypes are there?"
"I don't really know. Maybe twenty — twenty or thirty. Scattered all over the country. All are children of the original members of the Lab. I asked my father last weekend how they could have done it. As you can imagine, he didn't want to talk about it. What he finally said was that it was viewed as giving us a wonderful gift, the gift of extended life. They themselves couldn't live a long time, and back then — don't forget this was the late sixties — their own research was not that far along. They couldn't create clones of adults. In fact, most of them believed back then that couldn't be done, ever. But it wasn't all that hard to create clones of your children.
"As he explained it, he was almost proud. You take the fertilized egg, separate the cells out at an early stage, and put their nuclei into other eggs. You deep-freeze them and start them up whenever you want. Your mother gets the embryo implanted down the road. That's why Skyler is younger than you and Julia is… was… younger than me. If you think about it — and I've been thinking plenty about it — if you're raising clones to be organ donors, you'd want them to be younger. The organs would have to be vital and strong."
"But they'd be no good for inherited diseases. Because then the organ would eventually give out in exactly the same way."
"Yes, probably. But the organ wouldn't have any environmental component to disease. In that way, it would be stronger. And it would work for any disease caught by contagion. And of course for any accident."
She leaned closer toward Jude.
"You know, there's something else. There might even be still younger ones out there. You heard Skyler talking about the nursery, that place right next to the island. Maybe that's what that's for."
"Did your parents say that?"
"Not in so many words. But I inferred it."
"Why don't they tell you everything?"
"I don't know. They're scared of something. They've been scared for as long as I can remember. They had some kind of break with the Lab, too. It wasn't as dramatic as your father's and it wasn't a complete rupture, but they drifted away. It happened when I was maybe six years old. That's when we moved to Milwaukee. I don't know much about it, and whatever I did know, I've probably forgotten or repressed.
"But I recall some things. For one thing, there was suddenly money around. For another, my parents were distracted, bothered by things. They talked alone in their bedroom in low voices. And after we picked up and went to Wisconsin, we didn't lose all contact with the Lab. My uncle Henry used to come for visits, so I guess you could say it was an amiable parting. But it was definitely a parting."
"Tell me more about this uncle Henry."
"He's my mother's brother. He's been around as long as I can remember. I've never liked him — in fact, something about him is downright repulsive. I don't like the way my parents look up to him. I can't put my finger on it — but he seems to have something over them."
"What?"
"I don't know. I've thought a lot about it — he's on a power trip and they're on the losing end of it. They're ill and they seem to do whatever he says. He says they're working on a vaccination to cure them, and he uses that to pressure me. He came by the house last weekend and stopped me in the hallway. He said he had something he wanted me to do."
"What was it?"
"I'm not sure he said we'd talk soon. But he was sneaky when he said it. I bet he's going to ask me to spy on you."
"To spy on me? And what will you say?"
She shot him a cold look. "No, of course."
"Tizzie, you said before that you were afraid that they had followed me here. Who are they?"
She looked into his eyes. 'Jude" — she used his name for the first time—"believe me, I don't know. I've told you everything I know."
"Do you know where the Lab is? The island?"
"No, but we should be able to figure it out. We can piece it together from what Skyler knows."
"How has he taken all this?"
"You mean about me and Julia?"
"Yes."
"He's confused. He's angry. He knew from the first night he met you that Julia and I were exactly alike. He saw my photograph."
"He did? Why didn't he say anything?"
"I don't know. I guess he was afraid — he didn't know he could trust us."
"And now?"
"Now he knows that I didn't know about it — about her and how she was just like me — and that seems to make a difference."
"So you've talked about it?" Jude made an effort to keep his voice normal.
"Yes."
"I see. When?"
"Just yesterday. When you left us and drove off. And some before, bit by bit. Where did you go, anyway?"
"To the Verde Indian reservation. I looked up my birth certificate. Yours, too."
"And that's how you knew?"
"That's how I knew for sure. I'd been thinking about it for some time. Skyler acted strangely toward you from the start. When he's with you, he can't disguise his feelings, much as he tries to. He either never looks at you, or he looks at you all the time. And then there was your operation and Julia's — that was quite a coincidence. You weren't listed in the national registry of organ transplants — I got the information on that from Hartman — so I knew your operation had to be illicit. And some other little things that matched up — both of you being nearsighted, for example."
"I see."
"But beyond all that, there were two things that really disturbed me."
"What?"
"First, it was that you didn't tell me about it right off the bat, which indicated that you were probably in on the conspiracy. Then when Skyler told us the whole story as we were driving out here, he said something that stuck in my mind. Julia was killed because she had found something in the records — she knew too much and had become a threat. But as he described her body when he found her lying on the slab, he said all her internal organs had been removed. I asked myself: why would they have done that? Only one reason: they wanted to preserve them for some future use. They wanted them in case you needed them."
The horror of it all hit home, and Tizzie slumped against the rock wall.
"Jude, I feel so bad. I feel guilty about everything. What a grotesque, hideous thing to do, to make a clone. And I feel responsible for it. Julia was like a sister, a twin — only younger. I had nothing to do with creating her, but I feel that I did. It was done for me, so it's almost as if it was done by me. I took her kidney. I caused her to suffer. And then she died a horrible death, and I feel I'm responsible for that, too."
Jude went to her and knelt down beside her. She smiled up at him weakly.
"And you want to hear something strange? The whole thing is so upsetting I don't even want to think about it. But I want to know everything about Julia. When Skyler talks about her, when he describes her with such love, I could listen for hours."
Jude nodded.
"I think I knew, almost from the first time I saw him — well, not the very first, that was in bed, thanks to you — but from the first time I heard Skyler speak her name, I knew that she and I were the same."
"Not exactly the same. Remember everything you told me back when we first met."
"Right. Not the same. But similar — very similar, connected in some way. And I knew it from him. You're right — he acts strange in front of me. And when he looks at me that way — you described that look — it's a look of love. Just the way he must have looked at her. That's when I feel most connected."