“You think she solved it,” Con said. The implications were staggering. She wondered whether Franklin Butler would still be happy with his ten million dollars. If Fenton was right, then he’d made the worst deal since the Louisiana Purchase.
“I can’t think of anything else worth the trouble Vernon Gaddis has gone to.”
“Unless it’s you who’s gone to the trouble,” Con countered.
“I know you don’t trust me, but regardless, I believe we can help each other.”
Someone began clapping slowly in the darkness.
A woman’s voice—a weirdly familiar woman’s voice that made every hair on Con’s body stand up—spoke. “Well done, Dr. Fenton.”
They both looked toward the voice. A figure emerged from the gloom like a spirit summoned by an uneasy séance.
“I really didn’t think you were clever enough to figure it out,” the voice said. “Serves me right for underestimating you.”
Then the damnedest thing happened. The figure stepped into the light. In the woman’s hand was a small gun. It was pointed in the general direction of Brooke Fenton, but Con didn’t get the impression it would play favorites.
“Hello, everyone,” Constance D’Arcy said with a sundown smile. “I’m the other shoe.”
PART THREE
THE MOUNTAIN
Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.
—Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Since her revival inside Palingenesis, Con had viewed her own corpse, met the man who would have been her husband, heard her songs sung in a voice that was hers yet not. Again and again and again, she’d been told who she was and who she wasn’t. What she was and what she wasn’t. It had made her question whether she was nothing more than a medical parlor trick fooled by the seamlessness of its own illusion. Her mistake had been in needing the answer to be simple: she was the Con D’Arcy or she wasn’t. A binary yes or no. It had taken a child to remind her that complexity wasn’t necessarily something to fear. A definition of herself, one that allowed her to accept both who she’d been and who she was now, had begun to come into focus.
And then another Constance D’Arcy had strolled out of the dark holding a gun. The punch line to a long, grim joke told by an unsmiling comedian. Fenton wasn’t having an easier time of it. The doctor stood there, mouth agape like someone seeing a dinosaur for the first time in a Steven Spielberg movie. The way a person did when confronted with something they believed impossible.
“Hello, Brooke,” the other Constance D’Arcy said.
The sound of her name jarred Fenton from her bewildered stupor. “How is this possible?”
The other Constance D’Arcy simply shrugged and circled the doctor.
“Answer me!” Fenton demanded. “That son of a bitch built a cloning womb? Where were you created? Do you know how many laws you’ve both broken?”
The other Constance D’Arcy gave her a pitying look. “I’m afraid there isn’t time to play twenty questions. Besides, it doesn’t matter. You won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”
Con stared at this other Constance D’Arcy—who hadn’t so much as looked at her, by the way—and fought a rising tantrum. One of the few things she’d thought she knew for certain was that her original was dead and that made her the only Constance Ada D’Arcy. So what did it mean that this other Con had a perfect sleeve of tattoos running down her left arm? Not for the last time, Con wished she had accepted Stephie’s invitation and stayed in Charlottesville. Anything would be better than this.
“What do you want?” Fenton said.
“I’m here for her, same as you,” the other Constance D’Arcy said.
“So I was right. Abigail didn’t destroy her research.”
“Of course not. And it’s been right there in Palingenesis all this time. If only you’d been an actual scientist and not a feckless bureaucrat passing off another’s genius as your own, you might have recognized what was right under your nose.”
“What’s in the clone’s head? What did Abigail discover?”
“The key to everything,” the other Constance D’Arcy said.
“Whatever he’s paying you,” Fenton said, “I’ll double it, triple it. Just name your price.”
The other Constance laughed. “It’s not for sale. We just wanted you to know what has slipped through your fingers.” She leveled the gun on the doctor.