Quantum Ramifications Two: Mysterious
Title: Quantum Ramifications 2 - Mysterious
Author: Tacit Hooligan
Disclaimer: No ownership, no profit.
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: Part Two of the multiple alternate universes story.
Summary: Matters become even less clear.
‘Dear God - what is going on here?’ Helen Magnus asked herself - and any benevolent deity that might be making the time to eavesdrop on the cogitations of direly perplexed teratologists.
The battered and injured young woman lying before her in the infirmary bed, newly bathed, sutured, strapped, wrapped and bandaged, while IV’s dripped blood and antibiotics into her arm, and monitors beeped around her, was her daughter - even the preliminary genetic tests and scans were identical. The same moles, the same birthmark on her right hip, the same dark freckles on her throat, all in exactly the same places. The same marks from broken bones , seen in her x-rays. Even the lack of a uterus -
‘Removed by her own mother when she was fifteen,’ Helen thought with a tinge of age-frayed emotion that might once have been some species of regret. ‘Do they intend this girl to stay long enough that her lack of menses would become apparent of necessity? Whatever could possibly be of sufficient value that sterilizing a young woman would be worth the price of getting it? No one would go so far as that, would they, in creating a double as some sort of cat’s paw? And if they were mad enough to do so, why would they use a surgical technique that would leave this one with visibly different scars than those of my Ashley? And why imagine that the scars would not come to light - and be noted when they did? The girl is fond enough of bikini bathing suits, and disinclined to heed showing her scars, that anyone with a telephoto lens could see the difference. And why go so far as to sterilize this one, and then commit errors at all? Much less such trivial ones as those, and these others?’
She touched the smooth arch of silvery metal that pierced the top of this Ashley’s navel, quite a sizable black pearl, blooming with rich, peacock iridescence, tucked into its hollow, and what appeared to be a sky-pale star sapphire flush against her lean belly at the top of the jewelry’s curved bar.
‘The notion that Ashley’s edged-bohemian taste in jewelry is quite well known comes as no surprise, of course. I’ve no doubt she’d wear something just like this - if her navel were pierced. It is rather lovely - in a vaguely savage way.’
Helen pulled the girl’s top down again. Lovely as the strange child’s jewelry might be, allowing her to catch a chill while admiring it would not do.
The palm-sized skull and cross… Glocks… tattoo that she’d noted covering the birthmark on the girl’s hip, however, was nothing Helen could bring herself to admire, not even with the undeniably consummate artistry of its execution.
‘I’ve seen more than enough x-rays to know that the skull drawn on her hip is her own,’ Helen thought, fingering the fabric that covered the design. ‘And that says a great deal of planning went into that tattoo. I do not like what that implies about this Ashley. Not at all.’
And this one… weighed a touch more than her own - though her face was thinner under the swelling and bruises, her body just perceptibly more muscular and her full breasts that small bit… smaller.
‘Muscle weighs more than other tissue, and I do not like what that implies about this Ashley, either,’ Helen thought, touching the stringy tangle of the girl’s shadow-blonde hair to rake it into something approximating its normal fall. Now that she’d rinsed the blood out of it and stapled and stitched the girl's scalp, it was apparent that the style was slightly different, as if someone had used a single photo of her own Ashley as a guide to cut this one’s hair, and muffed the details in consequence.
And her hands -
Her nails had been cut back to the quick even before her callused, battered little hands had been abraded so severely the skin might have been removed from her fingertips and the heels of her hands with 40 grit paper and a belt sander.
‘And the Devil’s own time I had cleaning the wounds before I bandaged them,’ Helen thought, lifting one small, square, cold hand, careful of the gauze wrapping the raw fingertips and palm and the stitches seaming the split skin of the bruised and swollen knuckles.
‘And that wrist - ‘ Helen thought, reaching to touch the girl’s immobilized left wrist, strapped into a padded, aluminum brace. ‘That will be some time and pain in the healing.’
“You obviously gave someone a terrible fight,” she murmured. “Whatever you are. And that is exactly like my Ashley, just as you are like her in every way beyond the most personal details. Your scars, your piercings, your tattoo, your calluses… My Ashley has no such calluses, especially not that little pen callus on your middle finger. It’s hard to even imagine her as such a habitual writer that she’d ever develop a clerk’s callus. And yet, it is just as strange to see your hands without a single nick from cutting wire or chiseling metal, not a single little burn from solder…”
Carefully, Helen laid that small, limp hand back on its owner’s thigh, and smoothed the Velcro seam of the soft, white wrap top she’d put on the girl over warm, drawstring bottoms. When she tucked her fingers under the edge of the top, the skin of the girl’s hollowed, taut belly was only marginally warmer than her battered hand had been.
Helen sighed and shook her head, smoothing the top down again. She drew the sheet up and over the blonde before she pulled the blue, electric blanket from the foot of the infirmary bed and tucked it close around her, careful of the tubing and needles dripping blood and antibiotics into the girl’s arm from the bags on the stand beside the bed.
She clicked the blanket on, and twisted the control dial to a high setting, staring down at that pale, battered face.
“If I don’t keep you alive, I’ll never find out what you are, will I?”
The infirmary door banged open and Helen whirled, grabbing for the Sig Sauer that had resumed its place in the waistband of her slacks.
Dr. Zimmerman burst through the doors, waving at her.
‘As if he thinks I could fail to notice him - after that entrance,’ Helen thought, rolling her eyes.
“Magnus! Come see what we found!” he yelled, his flailing arms fragmented into over-sized tesserae in the reflections that flitted across the wall tiles. “We - “
Dr. Zimmerman stopped short, staring at the dark muzzle of the gun pointed at him.
“Um…”
“Dr. Zimmerman. How many times must you be told that banging doors and bursting in on people is a dangerous lapse of manners in the Sanctuary?” Helen asked, keeping her tone deliberately crisp as she safed the weapon again.
“Oh. Um. Yeah. I’m just not used to living in an armed society, I guess.”
“Apparently,” Helen agreed, returning the Sig Sauer to the waist of her slacks. “What has happened?”
“Um - Ashley sent me, and, um, Bigfoot back down to the crypt to see if we could figure out how the other her got in there.”
Helen cocked a brow. That hadn’t been why - or not the whole reason, or list of reasons, why - but if Dr. Zimmerman hadn’t yet discerned how devious the workings of her daughter’s mind could be, or how fond she was of Bigfoot - she certainly saw no reason to enlighten him.
‘Attainment by one’s own efforts is always infinitely more educational,’ Helen thought, suppressing the urge to smile.
“Indeed? And what is it that you’ve discovered?”
Zimmerman boggled. “How did you know that!”
Helen Magnus rolled her eyes. ‘He really does believe the world - and everyone in it - will conform to his expectations, doesn’t he?’
“Perhaps your boisterous entry, shouting that you’d found something, offered me the tiniest of clues?” she suggested, in that tone of ‘and did you even consider applying deductive reasoning?’ that only twenty years of raising a reckless imp as skilled as she was deadly, or irreverent, could have hoped to perfect.
“Oh,” Zimmerman acknowledged with a groan.
“Quite. And what is it that you’ve discovered?”
“What? Oh, yeah - um, there’s some anomalous readings. Ashley sent Bigfoot to give the portable scanner to Henry.”
“Indeed…” Helen said to herself, already pondering the probable anomalies and their possible meanings.
“And a bunch of - of luggage.”
Dr. Helen Magnus blinked, darted a glance at the young woman unconscious in the bed behind her, and turned to frown delicately at Zimmerman, images of monogrammed steamer trunks, shabby portmanteaus and designer cosmetic-cases improbably heaped on the grimy floor of the crypt suddenly occupying her imagination.
“’Luggage’ you say?”
“Yeah - we brought it back to the lab. There’s a little backpack thing. A weird roll-bag. Two bags on the ends of a strap. A - “
“Perhaps you’d best show me,” Helen interrupted, the imaginary luggage heap in her basilica's crypt abruptly transferred to the floor of her main lab and still evolving by the second in her mind’s eye.
“Okay.”
He waved her toward the door, and Helen went, pausing to cast a look back at her unconscious patient.
“Concierge,” she said to the air.
“Yes, Dr. Magnus?” her own voice replied, and she watched Zimmerman wince out of the corner of her eye.
“Guard my patient.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Who is to be allowed access?”
“Myself, Ashley, Bigfoot, and Barney.”
“Hey! What about me!” Zimmerman complained.
“I'll add you later, as circumstances dictate,” Helen told him. “Myself, Ashley, Dean and Barney are to be allowed access, Concierge.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Level of defense?”
“Discourage and escalate.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Level of escalation?”
Helen looked at the girl, so still, pale as death under the bruises, despite the second unit of blood dripping into her arm, and thought of the gash in her scalp and the hairline fracture under it, and her abject terror when she’d opened those hugely dilated blue eyes to see Helen’s face inches from her own.
‘If I don’t keep her alive, I’ll never know…’ she thought with a dark twist of curiosity.
“Lethal,” she said to the computer, over Zimmerman's editorial squawk.
“Yes, Dr. Magnus.”
“And... if the patient tries to get out...”
“Dr. Magnus?”
“Keep her in the Infirmary, Concierge. Dart her with the piperidine.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus.”
“And, in that eventuality, call me - immediately.”
“Magnus!” her protégé protested. “What's this piperidine? Get the butler up here to watch her if you're that worried she'll try to get out. You can't dart her like a - like a - rhino on the plains of Kenya!”
“The directive stands, Concierge. Call me if my patient attempts to exit the infirmary alone.”
“Of course, Dr. Magnus.”
“That’s all, Concierge.”
“Thank you, Dr. Magnus.”
“Very good. Carry on, Concierge.”
She heard the minuscule click of the system arming as the doors of the Infirmary swung to behind her.
Helen Magnus ignored her protégé’s continued complaints, and smiled to herself as she walked.
“Now what’s all this about?” Helen asked, stepping up to the pair of people crouching and sitting by the long and cluttered table in the corridor leading into her lab.
Dr. Zimmerman jumped at her sudden resumption of verbal communication. Ashley just said ‘Mother” without looking up from where she sat on the floor before the small heap of bags, gear and objects she was digging through, and Barney grinned up at Helen from his seat by the deeply cluttered table.
“Hello, sweetheart. Come see what Will found.”
Helen walked up to the old man - seated in her chair from the main lab - and rolled her eyes as she leaned in to peck a kiss on his cheek.
“Hello, darling. Please remind Ashley to return the chair when you’re finished with it.”
Barney chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“See? It’s all kinds of bags,” Will prompted. “Ashley says they’re hers.”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong,” the blonde said, stuffing something in her pocket and standing up abruptly with a silver and turquoise bracelet in her hand, and the tail of her fraying braid swaying across her tense shoulders, that shadow-blonde hair vivid against the royal-blue silk of her tunic.
“Ashley - if you must do something so unattractive with your hair, can't you at least remember to keep a proper tie to hand to do it with? Henry will have an apoplexy if he sees that you've purloined yet another of his velcro cable-ties.”
“Helen,” Barney chuckled. “I thought we had the hair argument once and for all when she turned sixteen.”
“Yes, well - it does escape me on odd occasions, much to my chagrin.”
“And Ashley's.”
Helen pulled a face at the old man.
“As always, I am well reminded who it was taught the girl to be so exasperating, Dear.”
“Is that more exasperating than talking about someone as if they didn’t exist, right in front of them, or less, Mother?” Ashley asked, turning to hand the bracelet to the man beside her. “I can hear all this, you know.”
“Thus are a mother's pains rewarded,” Helen declaimed.
“Dear, we both know precisely how bad your labor pains were,” Barney said, accepting the bracelet with a guffaw.
“And we both know the pains I was forced to take with the little animal thereafter,” Helen countered. “I often feel as if I didn't see my husband for the next fifteen years after I brought that infant barbarian home.”
“Hello! I can hear this, too, you know,” Ashley said, grimacing at Zimmerman's jaw-dangling fascination.
Barney snorted. “Sometimes the old folks need reminding of that, Kitten. So what did you want to show me about your Navaho bracelet here?”
Ashley rolled her eyes at Barney and tugged up the sleeve of the blue silk, Cossack style blouse she wore, stripped the silver and turquoise Navaho-style bracelet off her right wrist and handed that to him, too.
“Hmmm. Interesting. Kitten - these are identical. Down to the wear patterns and the misaligned teeth on the settings, here, and here.”
Ashley nodded shortly.
“So she’s a thief? The other one?” Will asked, looking over at Helen for an answer.
“I don’t believe so. Ashley has only the one Indian bracelet that I know of,” Helen murmured, as Ashley fished something out of her pocket, and held out her hand to Barney. When he offered her his, she dumped a rope of filthy, fiery diamonds into it.
“Holy Shit,” Will muttered.
“Is that - the Tears?” Helen asked, leaning down to look as Barney gave the silver and turquoise bracelets back to Ashley.
“Mmmm,” Barney said. “I saw a magnifying glass somewhere in the rubble. Would you find it for me, please, Kitten?”
Ashley nodded again, poking through the jumble on the ebonized worktop. She pushed a kerosene lamp closer to Barney, plowing a trough in the clutter, so that she could move the notebook computer that had been perched behind the lamp onto the open space in front of Barney to get at the magnifying glass that had been poking out from under the Dell. She extracted the implement and passed it to the old man, ebony handle first.
“Thanks, Ash.”
She gave him a thin smile, quick and tight, and Barney squeezed her small hand for a second, eliciting a shaky smile, before turning back to the jewels she'd passed to him.
He shook out the handful of fiery stones, and Will realized it was a necklace, a big, fiery, vivid, purplish-red heart set as a drop, with trios of pear-shaped diamond drops mounted with lavishly rose-pink, glittering stones on either side of it. The old man held the center stone up to the light of the kerosene lamp on the lab table, studied it with the magnifying glass, then frowned, and rubbed at the dirty stone with his thumb, waking fiery reflections in the lamplight, and tried again.
“Barney?” Helen asked as he grimaced and examined another stone, a tear-shaped drop beside the heart, in the same manner.
He didn’t answer, going on to the next tear-drop with something like shock developing on his lined face.
Helen cast a worried glance at her daughter, who raised a brow, and pointedly looked back to Barney.
“Barney - what is it?”
Helen put a hand to the old man’s shoulder, and he put the magnifying glass down, reached up to her hand with his gnarled fingers, still staring at the necklace.
“You know - how I’ve always said that gems are like people - they may be similar, but even cut from the same matrix and book matched like veneer, they’re always unique?”
Helen flicked another glance at Ashley, and received a sober nod this time.
“Yes…”
“Well - this is the Coeur du Graal,” he said. “And these are the Tears of Jaipur. This is Love’s Tears. This necklace is Love’s Tears. It’s been in my family, in some setting or another, for… centuries.”
“But - “ Helen began.
“So she is a thief!” Will exclaimed. “Some kind of Abnormal that can disguise itself, or shift shape, that got in here to rob - “
“No,” Barney interrupted. “She’s not. This same necklace - more or less - is upstairs in the vault, right now.”
“Maybe she took it - “
“No! No, because I got it back from Daumier's this afternoon. They'd just finished setting the rest of the diamonds I'd collected for it. I got the last of those just this fall.”
“Right after I finished that... design exercise... you set for me,” Ashley murmured.
“So she took it and - “
“No. The necklace that's upstairs has twenty-some more diamonds in it,” Barney told Zimmerman.
“Twenty eight,” Ashley said to no one in particular, staring up at the chamfered arches dissolving into invisibility in the shadows of the corridor's ceiling. “Major stones.”
“This necklace is the core to which those stones were added,” Barney declared. “Nobody disassembles a necklace before they steal it, William. Nobody. They take it in one piece and run with it like that.”
“No duplication. No disassembly required,” Ashley quipped, her tone as sharp as the acid glare she aimed at an oblivious Zimmerman. “All that comes later.”
“Exactly,” Barney said.
“Then it's a copy?” Zimmerman asked.
“I think Barney has established that it's not a copy,” Helen murmured, watching the old man examine the glittering thing.
“Maybe they didn't know he sent it out to be reworked,” Zimmerman suggested. “I mean - all those diamonds... it has to be valuable. They made a copy to leave in place of the original when she stole it, but they didn't know you were collecting diamonds to update it, so they made the copy like the old necklace - “
“No,” Ashley interrupted. “Barney.”
Ashley fished the object she'd stuffed in the pocket of her jeans out again, and handed it to him.
“Even if the stones didn't match - and they do - your theory fails, Zimmerman. They had this to consider.”
“What's that?”
“The glassine envelope I kept the stones in until I accumulated all of them,” Barney muttered, peeling a decrepit rubber band off the crumpled, dirty translucent stuff, and unfolding the harsh creases in a slithering rustle.
“You keep diamonds in some grubby old envelope!”
“Why not? They're just shiny little rocks,” Barney muttered, dumping the contents out on the palm rest of the computer, in a mound of glittering, shattered fire.
Zimmerman blinked at that, and Helen raised a brow at him as Barney tipped the gems into piles with his gnarled fingers.
“Sixteen,” he murmured. “There haven't been sixteen since you were eight, Kitten.”
Ashley grimaced. “But the other me isn't eight.”
“No. There's more to this.”
“What does it mean?” Zimmerman asked.
“The password on the computer will be same, won't it?” Ashley murmured, biting her lip. “She has my favorite clothes - this blouse I have on is in that bag, splotched with blood. This is my whole portable arsenal, except in chrome. She has the same everything, just like my stuff - but different. There're two of everything. Including us. We're - “
“Doubles. Dopplegangers,” Barney murmured, staring at the blonde woman without seeing her, or her silent nod of agreement, his eyes hooded.
“What the hell - “ Zimmerman sputtered.
“There must be some rational explanation,” Helen said briskly - before the least pleasant, and most likely one, occurred to her husband. 'And his lamentable habit of telling 'his' daughter everything... Though the presence of my protégé might inhibit his tendency to blurt. Or not. Still, its amazing how level a tone of voice one may maintain after a century and a half of practice, even whilst one’s guts feel like jelly.'
“I am not going to be part of one of those idiotic WE-style ‘separated at birth’ stories!” she suddenly heard Ashley declare.
Helen repressed a sigh of relief and her daughter gave her an odd scowl.
“Mother - “ Ashley began.
“You watch WE?” Zimmerman snickered.
“Only under duress,” Ashley growled, shooting Helen a truly evil glare.
Barney raised his brows at his wife. “Helen?” he asked in a richly leading tone.
Dr. Magnus rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear. I shall leave the psychology to the experts from now on.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Barney countered, both white brows lofted on high.
Ashley snorted and crouched to stuff chromed Glocks back into one of the bags on the floor.
“What? How - when?” Will asked, looking from one doctor to the other.
“If he was an Indian, his name would be ‘Always Looks Confused’,” Ashley muttered, without looking up from fitting weapons back into the black leather roll case.
“Behave,” Barney directed, nudging her with one foot.
“Let us say that my attempts at ‘girls’ time with my daughter are normally quite ill-fated,” Helen told Dr. Zimmerman.
Zimmerman cast a glance at said daughter, whose expression said she was planning on taking one of the Glocks in her lap, loaded with hollow points, to her Mother’s next attempt at ‘girls’ time’.
“Maybe that’s because your daughter isn’t a normal girl,” he suggested with an expectant smirk for that girl.
Ashley dissolved in laughter.
“You mean you just now noticed, Billy Boy?” she crowed. “Can you say ‘slow on the uptake’? Or is that too many syllables for you?”
Barney snorted and reached out to poke Will gently with the tip of his cane.
“Hey!” Will squawked, startled out of boggling at the blonde still chortling over the roll of guns.
“Take my advice, Dr. Zimmerman, one professional to another. Don’t cross words with her any more than you would swords. She had a genetic aptitude for sarcasm as you know from working with her mother, and - “
“BARNEY!” Helen yipped.
“ - I’m afraid that tendency has been encouraged by her upbringing to the point that you see this impossibly snide little witch before you today.”
“I thought religion was off limits in family arguments?” Ashley mused silkily.
Helen snorted as Barney sputtered at the girl.
“We seem to be quite an unruly lot,” she observed to Will.
‘And easily distracted on some subjects,” she added to herself while Barney made much of his performance on the subject of respecting one’s parents to a delightedly grinning Ashley. ‘Thank God. Though that might be about to change. What if we discover that this other Ashley is - as mine would say - a separated at birth tabloid baby? I was not present when Maya delivered. Twinning would be a far more palatable alternative to the girl having attained her father’s powers - let along the involvement of that father himself.’
“Um - I’m a Methodist,” Will said, nervously, in response to some question from Barney.
Helen grimaced as she realized she’d missed that question in its entirety whilst lost in her own thoughts.
“One for Helen’s team!” Ashley laughed.
“Damn!” Barney exclaimed. “Helen, next time you’re picking up a nice Jewish boy!”
“What?” Will said.
“Oh, God.” Ashley actually sounded prayerful.
Helen raised a brow at her daughter. “Should you be calling on a deity in which you profess no belief?”
Ashley snorted. “Whom, Mother. And how d’you know which Deity I mean?”
“But - “ Will began.
“Maybe I meant Durga, protector of children in danger.”
Barney started laughing again, and Helen watched Dr. Zimmerman boggling at all of them, open mouthed, and turned to her husband, raising a brow over her most calculatedly sweet and serious smile.
“And what do you mean by telling me that next time I’m to pick up a nice Jewish boy, when I’ve already discovered that roguish Jewish boys are far preferable? As well you should know. Dear.”
Barney and Ashley both howled with laughter.
Helen snorted, turning to her protégé, who now wore an expression of woeful bewilderment.
“As you have doubtless gathered, Barney follows the faith of Abraham, whilst I am a member of the Church of England, and Ashley is a heathen.”
“Pagan, Mother,” Ashley said in that particular tone of someone who’s heard it all before, and has no interest in hearing it all again in the present moment.
“As I said, a godless Heathen,” Helen repeated triumphantly, with a smirk, raising her brow as Ashley’s mouth tightened, and the blonde looked away, back to the arsenal she was stowing in the rollbag in her lap.
Dr. Magnus gave up trying to catch the girl’s eye as a bad job, and turned back to Dr Zimmerman and Barney, aiming another raised brow at her husband’s cocked head and cool expression.
“With you as Chapel and me as Church, that makes a nice assortment. Well, perhaps mostly nice, if one discounts the unsavory behavior of the heathens - past and present.”
“Do you want to have all that stuff out again? The Crusades, the craze for burning witches, forced conversions, the Moslem habit of raping anything that couldn’t outrun their conquering armies, human sacrifice in the Bible, the variety of holy writs that sanctioned slavery and the entire Inquisition? Really, Mother? Not to mention all the dangerous Abnormals you’ve maimed or killed without a qualm in your own career, Dr. Magnus, or had me maim or kill for you, for no other reason than that you didn’t have a humane - or even just handy - means of capturing them available?” Ashley snapped without looking up. “Or can we take it as read that monotheism is no more guarantee that its devotees will be nice, ‘godly’ people than any other form of religion, and talk about something meaningful instead, like what are we going to do about my double?”
Barney snickered as Helen bridled.
“I will remind you that I am - “
“Not above common courtesy yourself, Helen, are you?” Barney interrupted.
“I beg your pardon, sir. My courtesy is quite uncommon these days,” Helen began.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Ashley said, in the space where Helen drew a breath. “I wonder why she’s so determined to change the subject. Maybe she knows something about the other me that we don’t.”
And, of course, all three of them picked that moment to turn around and stare at her.
Author: Tacit Hooligan
Disclaimer: No ownership, no profit.
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: Part Two of the multiple alternate universes story.
Summary: Matters become even less clear.
‘Dear God - what is going on here?’ Helen Magnus asked herself - and any benevolent deity that might be making the time to eavesdrop on the cogitations of direly perplexed teratologists.
The battered and injured young woman lying before her in the infirmary bed, newly bathed, sutured, strapped, wrapped and bandaged, while IV’s dripped blood and antibiotics into her arm, and monitors beeped around her, was her daughter - even the preliminary genetic tests and scans were identical. The same moles, the same birthmark on her right hip, the same dark freckles on her throat, all in exactly the same places. The same marks from broken bones , seen in her x-rays. Even the lack of a uterus -
‘Removed by her own mother when she was fifteen,’ Helen thought with a tinge of age-frayed emotion that might once have been some species of regret. ‘Do they intend this girl to stay long enough that her lack of menses would become apparent of necessity? Whatever could possibly be of sufficient value that sterilizing a young woman would be worth the price of getting it? No one would go so far as that, would they, in creating a double as some sort of cat’s paw? And if they were mad enough to do so, why would they use a surgical technique that would leave this one with visibly different scars than those of my Ashley? And why imagine that the scars would not come to light - and be noted when they did? The girl is fond enough of bikini bathing suits, and disinclined to heed showing her scars, that anyone with a telephoto lens could see the difference. And why go so far as to sterilize this one, and then commit errors at all? Much less such trivial ones as those, and these others?’
She touched the smooth arch of silvery metal that pierced the top of this Ashley’s navel, quite a sizable black pearl, blooming with rich, peacock iridescence, tucked into its hollow, and what appeared to be a sky-pale star sapphire flush against her lean belly at the top of the jewelry’s curved bar.
‘The notion that Ashley’s edged-bohemian taste in jewelry is quite well known comes as no surprise, of course. I’ve no doubt she’d wear something just like this - if her navel were pierced. It is rather lovely - in a vaguely savage way.’
Helen pulled the girl’s top down again. Lovely as the strange child’s jewelry might be, allowing her to catch a chill while admiring it would not do.
The palm-sized skull and cross… Glocks… tattoo that she’d noted covering the birthmark on the girl’s hip, however, was nothing Helen could bring herself to admire, not even with the undeniably consummate artistry of its execution.
‘I’ve seen more than enough x-rays to know that the skull drawn on her hip is her own,’ Helen thought, fingering the fabric that covered the design. ‘And that says a great deal of planning went into that tattoo. I do not like what that implies about this Ashley. Not at all.’
And this one… weighed a touch more than her own - though her face was thinner under the swelling and bruises, her body just perceptibly more muscular and her full breasts that small bit… smaller.
‘Muscle weighs more than other tissue, and I do not like what that implies about this Ashley, either,’ Helen thought, touching the stringy tangle of the girl’s shadow-blonde hair to rake it into something approximating its normal fall. Now that she’d rinsed the blood out of it and stapled and stitched the girl's scalp, it was apparent that the style was slightly different, as if someone had used a single photo of her own Ashley as a guide to cut this one’s hair, and muffed the details in consequence.
And her hands -
Her nails had been cut back to the quick even before her callused, battered little hands had been abraded so severely the skin might have been removed from her fingertips and the heels of her hands with 40 grit paper and a belt sander.
‘And the Devil’s own time I had cleaning the wounds before I bandaged them,’ Helen thought, lifting one small, square, cold hand, careful of the gauze wrapping the raw fingertips and palm and the stitches seaming the split skin of the bruised and swollen knuckles.
‘And that wrist - ‘ Helen thought, reaching to touch the girl’s immobilized left wrist, strapped into a padded, aluminum brace. ‘That will be some time and pain in the healing.’
“You obviously gave someone a terrible fight,” she murmured. “Whatever you are. And that is exactly like my Ashley, just as you are like her in every way beyond the most personal details. Your scars, your piercings, your tattoo, your calluses… My Ashley has no such calluses, especially not that little pen callus on your middle finger. It’s hard to even imagine her as such a habitual writer that she’d ever develop a clerk’s callus. And yet, it is just as strange to see your hands without a single nick from cutting wire or chiseling metal, not a single little burn from solder…”
Carefully, Helen laid that small, limp hand back on its owner’s thigh, and smoothed the Velcro seam of the soft, white wrap top she’d put on the girl over warm, drawstring bottoms. When she tucked her fingers under the edge of the top, the skin of the girl’s hollowed, taut belly was only marginally warmer than her battered hand had been.
Helen sighed and shook her head, smoothing the top down again. She drew the sheet up and over the blonde before she pulled the blue, electric blanket from the foot of the infirmary bed and tucked it close around her, careful of the tubing and needles dripping blood and antibiotics into the girl’s arm from the bags on the stand beside the bed.
She clicked the blanket on, and twisted the control dial to a high setting, staring down at that pale, battered face.
“If I don’t keep you alive, I’ll never find out what you are, will I?”
The infirmary door banged open and Helen whirled, grabbing for the Sig Sauer that had resumed its place in the waistband of her slacks.
Dr. Zimmerman burst through the doors, waving at her.
‘As if he thinks I could fail to notice him - after that entrance,’ Helen thought, rolling her eyes.
“Magnus! Come see what we found!” he yelled, his flailing arms fragmented into over-sized tesserae in the reflections that flitted across the wall tiles. “We - “
Dr. Zimmerman stopped short, staring at the dark muzzle of the gun pointed at him.
“Um…”
“Dr. Zimmerman. How many times must you be told that banging doors and bursting in on people is a dangerous lapse of manners in the Sanctuary?” Helen asked, keeping her tone deliberately crisp as she safed the weapon again.
“Oh. Um. Yeah. I’m just not used to living in an armed society, I guess.”
“Apparently,” Helen agreed, returning the Sig Sauer to the waist of her slacks. “What has happened?”
“Um - Ashley sent me, and, um, Bigfoot back down to the crypt to see if we could figure out how the other her got in there.”
Helen cocked a brow. That hadn’t been why - or not the whole reason, or list of reasons, why - but if Dr. Zimmerman hadn’t yet discerned how devious the workings of her daughter’s mind could be, or how fond she was of Bigfoot - she certainly saw no reason to enlighten him.
‘Attainment by one’s own efforts is always infinitely more educational,’ Helen thought, suppressing the urge to smile.
“Indeed? And what is it that you’ve discovered?”
Zimmerman boggled. “How did you know that!”
Helen Magnus rolled her eyes. ‘He really does believe the world - and everyone in it - will conform to his expectations, doesn’t he?’
“Perhaps your boisterous entry, shouting that you’d found something, offered me the tiniest of clues?” she suggested, in that tone of ‘and did you even consider applying deductive reasoning?’ that only twenty years of raising a reckless imp as skilled as she was deadly, or irreverent, could have hoped to perfect.
“Oh,” Zimmerman acknowledged with a groan.
“Quite. And what is it that you’ve discovered?”
“What? Oh, yeah - um, there’s some anomalous readings. Ashley sent Bigfoot to give the portable scanner to Henry.”
“Indeed…” Helen said to herself, already pondering the probable anomalies and their possible meanings.
“And a bunch of - of luggage.”
Dr. Helen Magnus blinked, darted a glance at the young woman unconscious in the bed behind her, and turned to frown delicately at Zimmerman, images of monogrammed steamer trunks, shabby portmanteaus and designer cosmetic-cases improbably heaped on the grimy floor of the crypt suddenly occupying her imagination.
“’Luggage’ you say?”
“Yeah - we brought it back to the lab. There’s a little backpack thing. A weird roll-bag. Two bags on the ends of a strap. A - “
“Perhaps you’d best show me,” Helen interrupted, the imaginary luggage heap in her basilica's crypt abruptly transferred to the floor of her main lab and still evolving by the second in her mind’s eye.
“Okay.”
He waved her toward the door, and Helen went, pausing to cast a look back at her unconscious patient.
“Concierge,” she said to the air.
“Yes, Dr. Magnus?” her own voice replied, and she watched Zimmerman wince out of the corner of her eye.
“Guard my patient.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Who is to be allowed access?”
“Myself, Ashley, Bigfoot, and Barney.”
“Hey! What about me!” Zimmerman complained.
“I'll add you later, as circumstances dictate,” Helen told him. “Myself, Ashley, Dean and Barney are to be allowed access, Concierge.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Level of defense?”
“Discourage and escalate.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus. Level of escalation?”
Helen looked at the girl, so still, pale as death under the bruises, despite the second unit of blood dripping into her arm, and thought of the gash in her scalp and the hairline fracture under it, and her abject terror when she’d opened those hugely dilated blue eyes to see Helen’s face inches from her own.
‘If I don’t keep her alive, I’ll never know…’ she thought with a dark twist of curiosity.
“Lethal,” she said to the computer, over Zimmerman's editorial squawk.
“Yes, Dr. Magnus.”
“And... if the patient tries to get out...”
“Dr. Magnus?”
“Keep her in the Infirmary, Concierge. Dart her with the piperidine.”
“Yes, Dr. Magnus.”
“And, in that eventuality, call me - immediately.”
“Magnus!” her protégé protested. “What's this piperidine? Get the butler up here to watch her if you're that worried she'll try to get out. You can't dart her like a - like a - rhino on the plains of Kenya!”
“The directive stands, Concierge. Call me if my patient attempts to exit the infirmary alone.”
“Of course, Dr. Magnus.”
“That’s all, Concierge.”
“Thank you, Dr. Magnus.”
“Very good. Carry on, Concierge.”
She heard the minuscule click of the system arming as the doors of the Infirmary swung to behind her.
Helen Magnus ignored her protégé’s continued complaints, and smiled to herself as she walked.
“Now what’s all this about?” Helen asked, stepping up to the pair of people crouching and sitting by the long and cluttered table in the corridor leading into her lab.
Dr. Zimmerman jumped at her sudden resumption of verbal communication. Ashley just said ‘Mother” without looking up from where she sat on the floor before the small heap of bags, gear and objects she was digging through, and Barney grinned up at Helen from his seat by the deeply cluttered table.
“Hello, sweetheart. Come see what Will found.”
Helen walked up to the old man - seated in her chair from the main lab - and rolled her eyes as she leaned in to peck a kiss on his cheek.
“Hello, darling. Please remind Ashley to return the chair when you’re finished with it.”
Barney chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“See? It’s all kinds of bags,” Will prompted. “Ashley says they’re hers.”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong,” the blonde said, stuffing something in her pocket and standing up abruptly with a silver and turquoise bracelet in her hand, and the tail of her fraying braid swaying across her tense shoulders, that shadow-blonde hair vivid against the royal-blue silk of her tunic.
“Ashley - if you must do something so unattractive with your hair, can't you at least remember to keep a proper tie to hand to do it with? Henry will have an apoplexy if he sees that you've purloined yet another of his velcro cable-ties.”
“Helen,” Barney chuckled. “I thought we had the hair argument once and for all when she turned sixteen.”
“Yes, well - it does escape me on odd occasions, much to my chagrin.”
“And Ashley's.”
Helen pulled a face at the old man.
“As always, I am well reminded who it was taught the girl to be so exasperating, Dear.”
“Is that more exasperating than talking about someone as if they didn’t exist, right in front of them, or less, Mother?” Ashley asked, turning to hand the bracelet to the man beside her. “I can hear all this, you know.”
“Thus are a mother's pains rewarded,” Helen declaimed.
“Dear, we both know precisely how bad your labor pains were,” Barney said, accepting the bracelet with a guffaw.
“And we both know the pains I was forced to take with the little animal thereafter,” Helen countered. “I often feel as if I didn't see my husband for the next fifteen years after I brought that infant barbarian home.”
“Hello! I can hear this, too, you know,” Ashley said, grimacing at Zimmerman's jaw-dangling fascination.
Barney snorted. “Sometimes the old folks need reminding of that, Kitten. So what did you want to show me about your Navaho bracelet here?”
Ashley rolled her eyes at Barney and tugged up the sleeve of the blue silk, Cossack style blouse she wore, stripped the silver and turquoise Navaho-style bracelet off her right wrist and handed that to him, too.
“Hmmm. Interesting. Kitten - these are identical. Down to the wear patterns and the misaligned teeth on the settings, here, and here.”
Ashley nodded shortly.
“So she’s a thief? The other one?” Will asked, looking over at Helen for an answer.
“I don’t believe so. Ashley has only the one Indian bracelet that I know of,” Helen murmured, as Ashley fished something out of her pocket, and held out her hand to Barney. When he offered her his, she dumped a rope of filthy, fiery diamonds into it.
“Holy Shit,” Will muttered.
“Is that - the Tears?” Helen asked, leaning down to look as Barney gave the silver and turquoise bracelets back to Ashley.
“Mmmm,” Barney said. “I saw a magnifying glass somewhere in the rubble. Would you find it for me, please, Kitten?”
Ashley nodded again, poking through the jumble on the ebonized worktop. She pushed a kerosene lamp closer to Barney, plowing a trough in the clutter, so that she could move the notebook computer that had been perched behind the lamp onto the open space in front of Barney to get at the magnifying glass that had been poking out from under the Dell. She extracted the implement and passed it to the old man, ebony handle first.
“Thanks, Ash.”
She gave him a thin smile, quick and tight, and Barney squeezed her small hand for a second, eliciting a shaky smile, before turning back to the jewels she'd passed to him.
He shook out the handful of fiery stones, and Will realized it was a necklace, a big, fiery, vivid, purplish-red heart set as a drop, with trios of pear-shaped diamond drops mounted with lavishly rose-pink, glittering stones on either side of it. The old man held the center stone up to the light of the kerosene lamp on the lab table, studied it with the magnifying glass, then frowned, and rubbed at the dirty stone with his thumb, waking fiery reflections in the lamplight, and tried again.
“Barney?” Helen asked as he grimaced and examined another stone, a tear-shaped drop beside the heart, in the same manner.
He didn’t answer, going on to the next tear-drop with something like shock developing on his lined face.
Helen cast a worried glance at her daughter, who raised a brow, and pointedly looked back to Barney.
“Barney - what is it?”
Helen put a hand to the old man’s shoulder, and he put the magnifying glass down, reached up to her hand with his gnarled fingers, still staring at the necklace.
“You know - how I’ve always said that gems are like people - they may be similar, but even cut from the same matrix and book matched like veneer, they’re always unique?”
Helen flicked another glance at Ashley, and received a sober nod this time.
“Yes…”
“Well - this is the Coeur du Graal,” he said. “And these are the Tears of Jaipur. This is Love’s Tears. This necklace is Love’s Tears. It’s been in my family, in some setting or another, for… centuries.”
“But - “ Helen began.
“So she is a thief!” Will exclaimed. “Some kind of Abnormal that can disguise itself, or shift shape, that got in here to rob - “
“No,” Barney interrupted. “She’s not. This same necklace - more or less - is upstairs in the vault, right now.”
“Maybe she took it - “
“No! No, because I got it back from Daumier's this afternoon. They'd just finished setting the rest of the diamonds I'd collected for it. I got the last of those just this fall.”
“Right after I finished that... design exercise... you set for me,” Ashley murmured.
“So she took it and - “
“No. The necklace that's upstairs has twenty-some more diamonds in it,” Barney told Zimmerman.
“Twenty eight,” Ashley said to no one in particular, staring up at the chamfered arches dissolving into invisibility in the shadows of the corridor's ceiling. “Major stones.”
“This necklace is the core to which those stones were added,” Barney declared. “Nobody disassembles a necklace before they steal it, William. Nobody. They take it in one piece and run with it like that.”
“No duplication. No disassembly required,” Ashley quipped, her tone as sharp as the acid glare she aimed at an oblivious Zimmerman. “All that comes later.”
“Exactly,” Barney said.
“Then it's a copy?” Zimmerman asked.
“I think Barney has established that it's not a copy,” Helen murmured, watching the old man examine the glittering thing.
“Maybe they didn't know he sent it out to be reworked,” Zimmerman suggested. “I mean - all those diamonds... it has to be valuable. They made a copy to leave in place of the original when she stole it, but they didn't know you were collecting diamonds to update it, so they made the copy like the old necklace - “
“No,” Ashley interrupted. “Barney.”
Ashley fished the object she'd stuffed in the pocket of her jeans out again, and handed it to him.
“Even if the stones didn't match - and they do - your theory fails, Zimmerman. They had this to consider.”
“What's that?”
“The glassine envelope I kept the stones in until I accumulated all of them,” Barney muttered, peeling a decrepit rubber band off the crumpled, dirty translucent stuff, and unfolding the harsh creases in a slithering rustle.
“You keep diamonds in some grubby old envelope!”
“Why not? They're just shiny little rocks,” Barney muttered, dumping the contents out on the palm rest of the computer, in a mound of glittering, shattered fire.
Zimmerman blinked at that, and Helen raised a brow at him as Barney tipped the gems into piles with his gnarled fingers.
“Sixteen,” he murmured. “There haven't been sixteen since you were eight, Kitten.”
Ashley grimaced. “But the other me isn't eight.”
“No. There's more to this.”
“What does it mean?” Zimmerman asked.
“The password on the computer will be same, won't it?” Ashley murmured, biting her lip. “She has my favorite clothes - this blouse I have on is in that bag, splotched with blood. This is my whole portable arsenal, except in chrome. She has the same everything, just like my stuff - but different. There're two of everything. Including us. We're - “
“Doubles. Dopplegangers,” Barney murmured, staring at the blonde woman without seeing her, or her silent nod of agreement, his eyes hooded.
“What the hell - “ Zimmerman sputtered.
“There must be some rational explanation,” Helen said briskly - before the least pleasant, and most likely one, occurred to her husband. 'And his lamentable habit of telling 'his' daughter everything... Though the presence of my protégé might inhibit his tendency to blurt. Or not. Still, its amazing how level a tone of voice one may maintain after a century and a half of practice, even whilst one’s guts feel like jelly.'
“I am not going to be part of one of those idiotic WE-style ‘separated at birth’ stories!” she suddenly heard Ashley declare.
Helen repressed a sigh of relief and her daughter gave her an odd scowl.
“Mother - “ Ashley began.
“You watch WE?” Zimmerman snickered.
“Only under duress,” Ashley growled, shooting Helen a truly evil glare.
Barney raised his brows at his wife. “Helen?” he asked in a richly leading tone.
Dr. Magnus rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear. I shall leave the psychology to the experts from now on.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Barney countered, both white brows lofted on high.
Ashley snorted and crouched to stuff chromed Glocks back into one of the bags on the floor.
“What? How - when?” Will asked, looking from one doctor to the other.
“If he was an Indian, his name would be ‘Always Looks Confused’,” Ashley muttered, without looking up from fitting weapons back into the black leather roll case.
“Behave,” Barney directed, nudging her with one foot.
“Let us say that my attempts at ‘girls’ time with my daughter are normally quite ill-fated,” Helen told Dr. Zimmerman.
Zimmerman cast a glance at said daughter, whose expression said she was planning on taking one of the Glocks in her lap, loaded with hollow points, to her Mother’s next attempt at ‘girls’ time’.
“Maybe that’s because your daughter isn’t a normal girl,” he suggested with an expectant smirk for that girl.
Ashley dissolved in laughter.
“You mean you just now noticed, Billy Boy?” she crowed. “Can you say ‘slow on the uptake’? Or is that too many syllables for you?”
Barney snorted and reached out to poke Will gently with the tip of his cane.
“Hey!” Will squawked, startled out of boggling at the blonde still chortling over the roll of guns.
“Take my advice, Dr. Zimmerman, one professional to another. Don’t cross words with her any more than you would swords. She had a genetic aptitude for sarcasm as you know from working with her mother, and - “
“BARNEY!” Helen yipped.
“ - I’m afraid that tendency has been encouraged by her upbringing to the point that you see this impossibly snide little witch before you today.”
“I thought religion was off limits in family arguments?” Ashley mused silkily.
Helen snorted as Barney sputtered at the girl.
“We seem to be quite an unruly lot,” she observed to Will.
‘And easily distracted on some subjects,” she added to herself while Barney made much of his performance on the subject of respecting one’s parents to a delightedly grinning Ashley. ‘Thank God. Though that might be about to change. What if we discover that this other Ashley is - as mine would say - a separated at birth tabloid baby? I was not present when Maya delivered. Twinning would be a far more palatable alternative to the girl having attained her father’s powers - let along the involvement of that father himself.’
“Um - I’m a Methodist,” Will said, nervously, in response to some question from Barney.
Helen grimaced as she realized she’d missed that question in its entirety whilst lost in her own thoughts.
“One for Helen’s team!” Ashley laughed.
“Damn!” Barney exclaimed. “Helen, next time you’re picking up a nice Jewish boy!”
“What?” Will said.
“Oh, God.” Ashley actually sounded prayerful.
Helen raised a brow at her daughter. “Should you be calling on a deity in which you profess no belief?”
Ashley snorted. “Whom, Mother. And how d’you know which Deity I mean?”
“But - “ Will began.
“Maybe I meant Durga, protector of children in danger.”
Barney started laughing again, and Helen watched Dr. Zimmerman boggling at all of them, open mouthed, and turned to her husband, raising a brow over her most calculatedly sweet and serious smile.
“And what do you mean by telling me that next time I’m to pick up a nice Jewish boy, when I’ve already discovered that roguish Jewish boys are far preferable? As well you should know. Dear.”
Barney and Ashley both howled with laughter.
Helen snorted, turning to her protégé, who now wore an expression of woeful bewilderment.
“As you have doubtless gathered, Barney follows the faith of Abraham, whilst I am a member of the Church of England, and Ashley is a heathen.”
“Pagan, Mother,” Ashley said in that particular tone of someone who’s heard it all before, and has no interest in hearing it all again in the present moment.
“As I said, a godless Heathen,” Helen repeated triumphantly, with a smirk, raising her brow as Ashley’s mouth tightened, and the blonde looked away, back to the arsenal she was stowing in the rollbag in her lap.
Dr. Magnus gave up trying to catch the girl’s eye as a bad job, and turned back to Dr Zimmerman and Barney, aiming another raised brow at her husband’s cocked head and cool expression.
“With you as Chapel and me as Church, that makes a nice assortment. Well, perhaps mostly nice, if one discounts the unsavory behavior of the heathens - past and present.”
“Do you want to have all that stuff out again? The Crusades, the craze for burning witches, forced conversions, the Moslem habit of raping anything that couldn’t outrun their conquering armies, human sacrifice in the Bible, the variety of holy writs that sanctioned slavery and the entire Inquisition? Really, Mother? Not to mention all the dangerous Abnormals you’ve maimed or killed without a qualm in your own career, Dr. Magnus, or had me maim or kill for you, for no other reason than that you didn’t have a humane - or even just handy - means of capturing them available?” Ashley snapped without looking up. “Or can we take it as read that monotheism is no more guarantee that its devotees will be nice, ‘godly’ people than any other form of religion, and talk about something meaningful instead, like what are we going to do about my double?”
Barney snickered as Helen bridled.
“I will remind you that I am - “
“Not above common courtesy yourself, Helen, are you?” Barney interrupted.
“I beg your pardon, sir. My courtesy is quite uncommon these days,” Helen began.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Ashley said, in the space where Helen drew a breath. “I wonder why she’s so determined to change the subject. Maybe she knows something about the other me that we don’t.”
And, of course, all three of them picked that moment to turn around and stare at her.