Page 43 of The Echo Wife
TWENTY-TWO
Martine took to the work of conditioning Zed with startling enthusiasm. She never flinched. Not when we pulled out his appendix, not when we took a brûlée torch to his hand, not when we broke his collarbone. She never hesitated, never looked away.
There was one last piece of work, the most delicate procedure—the thing that would, if all went according to plan, turn him from Zed to Nathan. The scar on his eyelid. I had saved it for last because it would heal the fastest, and because it was small enough that if we ran out of time, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. It was a tiny scar, one he couldn’t recall the origin of—a little puckering at the corner of his left eye, mostly covered by lashes, but white enough to show up in photographs. I was doing the close-up work, cutting a deep valley into the flesh next to his eye. Martine held his eyelids open wide with one gloved hand.
He stared up at us, unseeing, his brain still wrapped tight in the heavy blanket of sedation.
“Hemostats,” I said, holding a hand out behind me. Seyed dropped the tool into my palm. I gripped the wedge of skin I’d cut loose and tugged at it.
“Will he remember any of this?” Martine asked. She was so close to my face that she whispered. Her breath was warm on my temple.
“No,” I said. “He won’t remember anything before waking up in the hospital suite.”
“So he won’t know that we made him?”
I shook my head. “We programmed him to respond to anystimuli as though he has organically formed memories. His brain will fill them in, for the most part. He’ll think that he’s Nathan. He’ll think he remembers the things that Nathan is supposed to remember. We’ll tell him that he got hit by a car, before we drop him at the hospital, so if he has any neurological weirdness, they’ll think it’s a concussion. Easy.”
Martine was quiet.
There was a tension there, thick and snarling. It made the room feel humid. It plucked at the place just behind my navel, the place where old fear lived. Heavy-falling footsteps and the sound of a key in the front door and my mother looking over her terror-straight shoulder at me, seeing me peeking around a doorframe, shaking her head so I’d know to creep away to bed.
I breathed in slowly through my nose, out through my mouth. I tugged on the strip of flesh again, and it pulled loose with a sound like tearing silk. I dropped the hemostats onto Zed’s chest and replaced them with a fresh set, these ones gripping a compress.
Blood climbed up into the white fibers of the gauze.
“Is something wrong, Martine?” Seyed said it so casually.
“No,” she said, the lie obvious. I switched the saturated compress for a fresh one.
“It seems like something’s wrong,” I murmured. “You can let his eye close now.”
Martine sighed, lifted her hand away from Zed’s face. I risked a glance over at her. She was pushing her palms into the small of her back, stretching, making her belly surge toward me. “I didn’t know,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Didn’t know what?” I asked. I risked removing the gauze from the wound I’d made, but blood welled up fast, and I pressed a fresh compress to it fast.
“I didn’t know that I was a clone. Not for the first few months,” she said. “Nathan told me that—that we were married, and that I’d been in an accident. He told me that I might not remember things.” She paused. “I believed him.”
“Good,” I said. “That means it works. I wasn’t sure if it would, to be honest.”
After a moment, Martine excused herself, said she needed to use the lavatory. I watched Zed’s blood slowly wick up into the compress I held, and I listened to the sound of Martine removing her gloves, washing her hands, walking out through the airlock.
Seyed took her place beside me at the table. “Nice one,” he muttered.
“What?” I asked. “Was I supposed to tell her how sorry I am that Nathan lied to her? I don’t see why that should rank, compared to everything else he did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”
The bleeding had slowed enough for me to remove the compress. Seyed handed me a syringe filled with liquid adhesive. Carefully, carefully, I began to fill the little valley next to Zed’s eye.
“Why are you so invested in her well-being?” I asked. “She’s a specimen. It’s not like she’sme.”Steady hands. That’s the way.
Seyed didn’t say anything. I finished applying the adhesive. It would need three minutes to cloud over and get tacky, four minutes to fully set; then I could put a bandage over it, and we would be finished. I hitstarton a timer that would click every minute, reminding me to check. “Hey, answer me,” I said, straightening up and pulling my surgical mask down around my neck.
I looked at Seyed for the first time that day—maybe, I realized, for the first time in a while. I’d been around him, but we had been orbiting each other loosely during the conditioning process. He had been handling the things that I couldn’t. We’d been acting as a relay team more than we’d been acting as partners.
I’d been giving most of my attention to Martine.
Seyed didn’t look well. He’d grown a patchy reef of stubble across his cheeks and neck. He was bloated, and his lips were badly chapped—bitten, maybe, or just neglected. His eyes were hollow. He looked permanently hungover.
