Page 11 of Double Bind

“No! The water closet triggered it.” A muscle ticked in his cheek. “The lavatory reminded me of the cloning tank.”

“Oh…” She widened her eyes.

“They say clones don’t recall their gestation, aren’t conscious until after birth, but I remember the tank, being closed in, seeing people outside.”

“How awful.” His experience sounded like a sci-fi horror vid. “You must have felt like a fish trapped in an aquarium.” She could imagine how claustrophobia could develop from such an experience.

“A very small aquarium.”

“Wombs are small.” Did fetuses feel constricted? Did they forget, or did they not have any awareness?

“Fetuses mature naturally and are born as babies. I went through infancy, childhood, and adolescence in the tank. Iachieved sentience in the tank. And by tank, I mean glass cylinder, about the size of the lav in the cabin.”

“How long was the gestation?”

“About a year and a half. Scientists figured out how to accelerate growth.”

“It’s still a long time to spend in a tank.”

“Yes. I wanted you to know that the abruptness of my departure had nothing to do with you. The tightness of the lav brought on a flashback.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“We got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

Whose fault is that?Still nursing hurt feelings, she had a snarky retort at the ready, but she stifled it. He seemed to be offering an olive branch. It would behoove her to take it. For better or for worse, they were stuck with each other for a year. Why not make the best of it? They would never be a real married couple or lovers—too much had happened for that to occur—but maybe they could be friends.

“Maybe we did,” she said.

“Do over?” he asked.

“Do over,” she agreed.

“So, you emerged as an adult?” she asked. “Like how old?”

“They matured me to the age of twenty-five—the age the previous Marshall Clark clone was when he died. I don’t know what happened to the original, the progenitor, why he died at such a young age.”

“And you were in Dark Ops how long?”

“Two decades, marked from my emergence from the tank. The anniversary of my tank release is on the seventeenth. I’ll be forty-five or twenty, depending on how you count.”

“Let’s go with forty-five; otherwise, I’m a cradle-robber.”I went from spinster to cougar.“You’re not going to continue to mature at the same rate as you did in the tank, are you?”She imagined herself waking up next to a septuagenarian one morning.

“Thankfully, no. Without them pumping in the growth acceleration hormones, I’ll age at a normal rate.”

Half her meal was gone. She’d eaten the whole time they’d talked. The conversation was so fascinating, she hadn’t been aware of how much she’d consumed. “John took his own name. But you kept your progenitor’s?”

“At the time I came into being, clones were not permitted to have their own identities, but then there was an internal campaign to allow clones more autonomy.” His mouth twisted. “All hype, no outcome. The only thing clones got out of it was the right to self-name. By that point, I figured, what difference did it make?”

“Hey, sorry we’re so late!” Faith and John appeared at the table, trays in hand. “Thanks for saving us a seat!”

Enthralled by Marshall’s story, she’d forgotten about her friends. She kind of regretted they’d arrived when they did. Marshall’s expression had closed up; there would be no more personal revelations.

At least she better understood what drove him, why he’d done what he’d done. Freedom and autonomy meant everything to him. Yet he’d risked his liberty to rescue John, and he’d married her to ensure her safety. It was almost…noble. Perhaps she hadn’t been fair to him.

They picked up their coats and scooted over so their friends could sit. “Did you find what you needed?” she asked.

“Actually, yes,” Faith replied. “We found a container that’s the right size, which we filled with a seed grain to use as litter. They let us have it on credit. We ran to the cabin to set it up for Rusty—that’s what took so long.”

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