Chapter Text
“She’s my sister, Paul.”
“Sarah, from what Siobhan said, you’re better off without—”
“Mrs. S doesn’t know her like me!” On the other end of the phone, he heard her hand slam into some defenceless piece of furniture. “She’s not—she’s not crazy, yeah? Those religious nut jobs did a number on her, but it’s not her fault. She’s all right when she’s with me. I can keep her— I can make her safe.”
“Sarah—”
“She’s my twin sister, Paul. She’s like me. I’m getting her back.”
He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, exhaling sharply through his nose. He knew he’d lost. He’d lost as soon as he’d answered the phone. “All right. Just don’t...do anything. Let me take care of it.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks, Paul.” He could hear the relief in her voice, in the slow release of breath. It made his heart lift. He told his heart to stop being such a sap, but it didn’t listen.
He put on a jacket, scooped his keys out of the dish, and went for a walk. The local convenience store was a fluorescent-and-linoleum beacon in the dark, promising lottery tickets and all the newspapers nobody wanted to read anymore. He picked up some milk, eggs, and a burner phone, and was rung up incuriously by the hijab-wearing cashier. On the way back to the condo, he pulled out the new phone and dialled a number.
“Yes,” said a voice on the other end of the line.
“It’s me.”
A pause. “What do you need?”
“A favour.”
***
The army truck rattled along the road and Helena’s head rattled with it, lolling against the wall behind her. She was sitting on a bench, her hands and feet cuffed and a guard on either side. Two more guard dogs were in the front of the truck, where she couldn’t see them, but she could hear them yapping on the crackling walkie-talkie.
They were passing through the barrier now: she heard the soldiers in the little huts, probably checking papers, and the gates in the electrified fence swinging open. She’d made three escape attempts, each time getting a little farther from the army village in spite of the snow and the cold—it was as cold here as back home, maybe colder—so now they were moving her somewhere new, somewhere more secure. This was good luck. She smiled secretly to herself. Four was not very many at all.
The soldier on her right stared straight ahead, one hand resting on his rifle. The other one kept giving her quick, sharp glances. He was sweating nervously; she could smell it. He must have heard about Dr. Ferber. Dr. “Call-me-Julian.” She frowned. She had not liked Dr. Ferber. He had smiled too wide, like a wolf, and said, “I’d like for us to be friends, Helena.” He gave her a chocolate bar, which she ate immediately. The sisters used to say, The devil always takes back his gifts.
Dr. Ferber made notes on a clipboard that said “Defense Research and Develpment Centre” while he asked her question after question in his careful English voice. Some of the other doctors had the same kind of accent, but most of them sounded like the soldiers with the little red-leaf flags on their uniforms, or the ones with no flags who sounded like American movies. Right away they had given her many tests, and then they had taken her baby away from her and put it into someone else. It was “safer,” they said. If she was good, they would bring her baby back to her after it was born. Black souls wear white shirts. That was something else the sisters used to say.
Dr. Ferber was a psychologist. “I’m a psychologist, Helena,” he said, “but don’t let that scare you!” Then he laughed like he’d just told a joke. She didn’t join in. To his questions she responded with silence, or with meaningless fragments of stories, but he never got angry, just clicked his slim, golden pen and made another note. Once he brought her chocolate-covered donuts with cream inside. Those were good.
One day the soldier at the door was called away for a moment by his urgently squawking walkie-talkie, and she leaped across the table and pierced Dr. Ferber-call-me-Julian’s carotid artery with his golden pen. She got as far as the fence that time. Six soldiers brought her back with their rifles carefully trained on her, and there had been a new doctor. She didn’t miss Dr. Ferber, but she missed the donuts.
She opened her eyes as the truck slowed and came to a halt. The soldiers spoke back and forth on their walkie-talkies: there was another army truck in the road, some kind of checkpoint. Unscheduled. Quietly, she slid her feet underneath her. Yap, yap, went the walkie-talkie. Muffled voices, a thump. Silence. Her guard dogs pointed their rifles at the back door and waited, tense. The moment the handle turned, she was pulling herself up by a crossbar and kicking the M16 out of the nearest guard’s hands with her chained-together feet. She dodged his clumsy recovery as she landed, slipping the chain of her wrist cuffs over his head. She tightened it as they both fell, pulling his body between her and the door to shield her from fire.
But there were no bullets. There was no sound at all, except for the gurgling of her asphyxiating soldier. When he was dead, she looked up to see the newcomer had shot the other guard neatly between the eyes. He was standing in the door now, in a uniform identical to her guards', holstering his silencer-tipped pistol. “Which one has the keys?” he asked her.
She pointed to the soldier he’d shot, unable to speak. It was her brat-sestra, Felix.
Of course it wasn’t really him. He didn’t sound like him, or walk like him. His hair was soldier-short and his eyebrows were too thick. He was another copy, a clone. For the first time she understood how odd it must be for people who knew one of her sisters to meet another, to see a face so strange and so familiar at once. She stared at him rudely while he unlocked her cuffs.
They dragged the bodies of the two soldiers from the front into the back of the truck with the others and parked it behind a snowy hillock of yellow grass. Not-Felix had brought another, similar, truck, which was stopped sideways across the road. As they both climbed in, he said, “I’ve got a car twenty clicks down the road. They won’t expect you at the transfer point for approximately three hours, so that should give us enough time to get to Calgary, where I've got a private flight lined up.” He looked at her to make sure she understood, but all she could do was duck her head and snicker. This serious soldier-Felix was hilarious! He narrowed his eyes at her in a way that was almost familiar and put the truck into gear without a word.
The car waiting for them was a little Honda, like the motorcycle. Not-Felix popped the trunk at once and started changing into new clothes: dark trousers, a crisp white shirt, a scratchy suit-jacket with patches on the elbows. He must have been freezing—his skin was coming up in gooseflesh—but he didn’t shiver or complain. He handed her a dark woolen cap (“Here, cover your hair”) and a red sweatshirt with writing on it, which she put on over the army clothes they’d given her at the base. He also put on a pair of glasses that he pulled out of the car's glove compartment. They had thin, expensive frames, like a doctor would wear. He hadn’t needed them to shoot the soldiers, so they must be part of his disguise.
Inside, the car was navy blue and smelled like old cigarettes. While they sat waiting for the engine to warm up, she puzzled out the foreign letters on her sweatshirt. University of something. “University of A-la-ba-ma. Alabama.” She liked that. It reminded her of Ali Baba, who’d tricked the forty thieves. Sister Irina had read them the story twice, before Sister Olga threw it away because God didn’t like it. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the golden treasure-cave from the illustrations. “We are in Alabama?” she asked.
Not-Felix looked at her from behind his doctor-glasses. His face was entirely still except for one eyebrow, which had escaped his control and was making its way slowly up his forehead. “Not even close,” he said.
The engine warm, they pulled out onto the highway. There was nothing around them but long, snowy fields and a line of big blue mountains on the horizon. She turned on the radio and began rolling the dial through static and bursts of music. Not-Felix turned it off. Her hand was halfway to the dial again when he stopped it with an iron grip and said, “Turn it on again and you’re walking to Calgary.”
She rifled through the glove compartment instead, but there was nothing except some papers, the glasses-case, and a pencil stub, which she pocketed. They passed a sign that said “Elk Crossing” above a silhouette of a magnificently antlered deer, but the only animals she could see were groups of shaggy cows. She breathed on the window until it was foggy and began to draw on it with a finger.
“You haven’t asked who sent me.” His voice was quiet and even, without any of Felix's entertaining leaps and dives.
She finished the first stick figure and began drawing a second. “I know who sent you. My sestra, Sarah.”
“Your sister. Is she like you?”
“Yes. We are twins.” A third, smaller stick figure joined the first two. She hesitated, then drew another full-sized figure, followed by two more. Finished, she sat back and admired her family portrait: four sisters, a niece, and a brother-sister. What riches!
Her brother-sister’s clone was watching her from the next seat. “You’ve seen me before.”
His hands were grasping the steering wheel lightly, but she could see the strength in them and the calluses on the knuckles. She tried to imagine them holding a paintbrush. “No. I don’t know you.”
“But you recognized my face.” He glanced at her again. The road was straight and empty, which gave him a lot of time to watch her expression.
“Yes,” she said, slouching down in her seat. “You are another sheep.”
“A sheep.”
“Baaaaa.”
That shut him up. She flipped down the visor in front of her and found a mirror on the underside. Her dark roots were really showing. Maybe she would let them grow out and have brown hair again, like Sarah.
“Your name is Helena, is that right?”
She flipped the mirror closed. “You already know this.”
“True, but we haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Leon.”
That meant lion. Which fit, except it was too big: he was a leopard, maybe, or one of the black ones—a panther. Definitely a big cat, though. The thought made her smile. “Mrrrooww!” she said, and watched with amusement as his eyebrow did its dance again.
“Maybe I should call you Old MacDonald.”
Was that a joke? It wasn’t very funny.
“What was his name?” he asked. “The other...sheep.”
Felix was no sheep—he was a cat too. An alley cat. When she got back, she would call him that and watch him bristle. “You are taking me to my sestra?”
“I’m taking you to Vancouver. It’s relatively big, a port city. You should be able to get wherever you need to go from there.”
She nodded. A port meant cargo ships, which meant freight trains. She would ride them back to the city, make sure Sarah and Kira had stayed safe in her absence. Then maybe her sisters could help her find out who had her baby and get it back.
There were levers under her seat which moved it forwards and backwards and up and down. She tried out all possible combinations while Leon drove and said nothing. When that became boring, she used her pencil to draw sisters all over the papers in the glove compartment. She added a few brother-sisters in for good measure.
After a while the road became busier and started to climb into the foothills. “We are going to the mountains?” she asked.
“We’re going to fly over them. There's another mountain range past this one, and Vancouver's on the other side of that.”
That was a lot of mountains. “This country has much distance,” she said.
“Much, much distance,” he agreed, with what might almost have been a smile. She suspected he was laughing at her. “We'll go through Calgary first,” he said. “The guy whose plane we're taking has an airfield thirty minutes outside the city.”
“We are stealing plane?”
“What? No. The owner is a...business associate. It's one of his regular flights; we're just hitching a ride. You know, hitchhiking?”
“Yes, I know this,” she said, demonstrating with a thumb.
The road was even busier now, with more and more exits and low buildings whipping by on either side. Soon they were surrounded by wide streets, car lots, and fast food restaurants with bright plastic signs. The snow was mostly grey.
“You hungry?” Leon asked.
“Yes,” she said, because only fools turned down a chance to eat.
They pulled into a drive-through, and she ordered one of everything on the board. Both of Leon’s eyebrows went up at that, but he paid without saying a word. She arranged the white bags on the dashboard and started eating as they pulled back onto the freeway. Now the car smelled of French fries instead of cigarettes, which was a big improvement. Leon had a hamburger and a soft drink, but he let her finish his fries. “Thank you,” she said sincerely.
By the time she was slurping at the bottom of her milkshake, the city was receding behind them. Pieces of greasy paper and ketchup-stained napkins lay crumpled all around her. She poked at them to make sure she hadn't missed any bits of food.
Leon pulled off the freeway and onto a smaller road with snow-covered trees close on either side. “Are you going to be okay in Vancouver on your own?” he said. “I can give you some cash for a bus ticket, but I wouldn’t advise trying to cross the border—it’s pretty tight these days.”
“No, I will ride on the train.” He looked skeptical, so she explained, “I can jump.” She mimed hopping onto a train car by making two fingers into small, nimble legs. Hop, hop, onto the dashboard.
“Have you done that before?”
“Many times,” she said loftily.
“Okay, then.”
Maybe she’d been too hasty. “The train, it goes to Toronto, yes?”
“Yes, lots of freight heading cross-country.”
“Okay then.” They fell back into their accustomed silence as Leon turned them onto an even smaller road. This one was paved with loose gravel, which pinged on the undercarriage. She watched him shift the gearstick and coax the little car further uphill. He wasn't so bad, as sheep went, even if he wasn't her brother. He had been pretty helpfull, all in all.
“I will tell Felix,” she said after a while. “When I am there again.”
“Who?”
“Your brat, your brother. I will tell him about you, and I will say that you are a good cat.”
The car skidded to a halt on the ragged verge, scattering gravel into the snow. Leon slammed it into park and whipped around to face her.
“He’s alive?”