Replication - chapter 21 (with images) (Patreon)

The windshield wipers scrape a dry arc across the glass. I turn the wiper stalk to the off position. The engine idles.

I'm parked across the street from Kate's building. The dashboard clock reads 7:12 PM. The light is failing, the sky a bruised gray pressing down on the roofs of the cars lined along the curb.

Claire sits in the driver's seat. I've been holding her face since I left my apartment. The rounded line of the jaw. The widened eyes. The cheeks with their harmless slope. The face of the woman who sat on Kate's sofa, drank peppermint tea, and talked her out of an abortion clinic. The face of the friend who listened.

I'm wearing a beige blouse. The shoes pinch the toes. I bought them because they looked like what she would wear, practical and unthreatening.

I turn the engine off, exit the car and cross the street.

The lobby of her building is empty. The radiator near the mailboxes hums. I press the elevator button and wait. The doors slide open and I step inside. The metal box smells of wet wool and ozone.

Third floor. The doors open.

The carpet in the hallway is dark blue with a repeating gold diamond pattern. I count them as I walk. Fourteen diamonds from the elevator bank to her door. The fabric absorbs the sound of my footsteps.

I stop in front of her apartment.

I run the internal check. The bone structure is locked. The skin tone is stable. The breath is even. I pitch my vocal cords up, locating the steady register Claire uses.

I knock twice.

The deadbolt slides back. The door opens.

Kate stands in the frame, wearing jeans and a gray oversized t-shirt. The fabric stretches tight over the dome of her stomach. She stands with her feet planted wide, her arm at her side.

Kate looks at my face.

Her eyes are dead. The lines around her mouth are tight, pulled into a hard bracket.

"Kate," I say. The voice is soft.

"Do not speak to me." She puts her hand on her stomach. She doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't need to.

"I just came to check on you. Please."

"I changed the locks," she says. "I spoke to the building manager. If you come into this hallway again, they're calling the police."

She grips the edge of the door. Her knuckles go white. "You sat in my house. You held my hand. You listened to me talk about my baby. You are sick."

"It wasn't like that."

"You are sick," she repeats, and doesn't look away. "Do not come near me or my child ever again."

She shoves the door forward. The heavy wood slams into the frame. The deadbolt throws with a metallic crack.

I stand on the blue carpet, the silence of the hallway ringing in my ears.

She didn't hesitate. Claire is a burned asset. I could stand here and bleed from the eyes and she wouldn't open the door.

I turn around. I walk the fourteen gold diamonds back to the elevator.

In the car, I start the engine and turn the AC on. The stale air blasts against my cheeks. I let the hold drop.

Claire dies in the driver's seat. The jawline collapses, the bone melting back into sharp curves. The cheeks recede. I lean my forehead against the steering wheel. The leather is warm.

I sit up. I put the car in gear and pull away from the curb.

I drive back to my apartment. The streets are clogging with the early evening traffic. Red brake lights across the glass of the windshield.

I let myself into my unit. I don't turn on the lights in the living room. I walk straight to the bedroom and kick off the shoes. I leave them in a pile on the floor.

I go into the bathroom and turn on the overhead light.

I look at the woman in the mirror. The dark hair. The brown eyes. The stranger.

I grip the edges of the sink and close my eyes.

The build takes everything I have. The brown first. I force the melanin up from the deep tissue, dragging the color of the construction site and the comal back into the skin. The pale vanishes, replaced by the copper-brown of my own flesh.

I target the jaw. The cartilage resists. It grinds and aches under the skin, but I force the bone outward. I square the corners and widen the chin.

I shorten the hair, pulling the keratin back into the scalp until it sits in a dark crop. I push the stubble out along the jawline and the upper lip.

I thicken the arms, forcing the shoulders wide.

I open my eyes. Julian Reyes looks back at me.

Holding it pulls tight at the base of the skull. I ignore it and pull on a pair of boxers.

I walk into the bedroom and pull my old jeans from the back of the closet. The stiff denim slides over the hips. I button the waist. The flat crotch of the jeans presses flush against the female anatomy. The brass zipper grinds against the pubic bone.

I put on a gray t-shirt. It pulls tight across the arms and shoulders. The shirt smells of the hospital. It smells of the life I had.

I grab my keys.

The drive back across the city is a blur. The tension in my skull turns into a throbbing migraine.

I park two blocks away and walk.

The lobby. The elevator. The third floor.

The fourteen gold diamonds.

I stand in front of her door. The gray t-shirt is damp at the collar.

I knock.

I hear footsteps inside. Heavy footsteps.

The door opens.

Kate stands there, holding a glass of water.

She looks at my face.

Her face hollows out. All the color drains from her cheeks. The exhaustion of the pregnancy seems to crush her spine in real time, her shoulders slumping under a weight she can't carry anymore.

"Julian," she says. The voice is devoid of life.

"Kate." I keep my hands at my sides. "I had to come. I couldn't leave it how we left it."

She stares at me. She looks at the broad chest bound under the shirt. She knows what is underneath it. She felt it in the dark of her bedroom. The soft mass of the lie. The empty space behind the zipper.

"I told you to leave me alone," she says.

"I know. But I'm here. I am the man who loves you. I'm the father of that baby."

She shakes her head. A mechanical motion.

"You aren't a man," she says.

The words hit the breastbone. "I am. Inside, where it matters, I am exactly who I was."

"That's the problem."

She looks at my eyes. The horror in her expression isn't aimed at the female biology hidden under the denim.

"You stood in my apartment," she says. "You wore those clothes. You lowered your voice. You manipulated me into a bed and you tried to trick me into touching a body you were hiding."

"I was terrified."

"You were managing me." She takes a step back. "You haven't changed. You just found a new way to lie."

"Kate, please."

She pulls the door shut.

I put my hand flat against the wood. "Kate."

"Remove your hand," she says through the crack. "Remove it or I will start screaming."

I drop my hand.

The door closes. The latch clicks.

I stand in the hallway. The gray t-shirt is heavy on my shoulders.

I walk to the elevator and ride it down.

I drive back to my apartment. The city outside the glass is a collection of lights and concrete.

I unlock my door and lock it behind me.

I go into the bedroom and pull the gray t-shirt over my head.

I push the jeans down and step out of them. I strip off the damp underwear.

I stand naked in front of the full-length mirror.

I am Julian, mostly. The brown skin, the stubble, the jaw.

I slide my hand down my stomach, reaching between my legs to find the folded tissue of the labia. The flesh is cold.

I press my fingers against the clitoris.

I apply friction. I move my hand in the circular rhythm that used to send heat through the lower abdomen. I rub the nerve node.

Nothing.

The flesh is inert. Nothing swells, nothing gathers. My fingers register as pressure and nothing else, meat against meat.

I drop the male form.

I let the jaw soften. I let the stubble melt away. I pull the keratin out, letting the dark hair fall past the collarbones. I let the brown bleed out of the skin, the breasts and hips reform, watching the pale baseline return to the mirror.

I look at the pale woman.

I touch the curve of the left breast. I pinch the nipple, hard enough to hurt.

The pain registers as a sting. The wire that ran from the nipple to the groin is dead. No heat follows. The body does not care.

I shift the face again.

I build Leila.

I bring the copper-brown skin back. The asymmetric cheekbones. The lean of the nose. The inviting mouth. The face that sat across from Mark Calloway and made him feel like the only man in the room. The face that pulled him into a bed and ruined him.

I look at her.

I slide my fingers down the stomach. I press two fingers in. Dry, unyielding. The muscle doesn't answer, the friction just shy of painful. The flood that used to take me over against my will isn't there at all.

I shift again.

I build Claire.

The soft cheeks. The harmless eyes. The beige neutrality.

I trace my hands over the hips. I touch the inner thighs.

Nothing.

I cycle them. Julian. Leila. Claire. The pale baseline. Julian again.

I stand in the cold bedroom and shift the bone and skin, watching the faces slide over the skull like slides in a projector.

With each face, I touch the body, searching for the spark. The heat. The wanting. The involuntary betrayal that used to infuriate me.

I want the betrayal now, I want the body to want something, any proof that something in this flesh is still alive.

There is nothing.

It doesn't matter what face I wear. None of them can be loved, or trusted, or get anywhere near the woman I actually want.

I drop the hold.

The mesh settles into the pale, dark-haired woman.

I pull my hand away from my groin. I let my arms hang at my sides.

I stand there, naked and cold, and I feel exactly how little I matter to any of it. I've exhausted every mask. All that's left is the biology, and the biology has finally gone quiet.

The coffee maker drips for four minutes before I notice I forgot to put a mug under it. The dark liquid pools in the warming plate and runs off the front edge and down the machine onto the counter. I watch it spread for a while, following the grout line, before I get up to wipe it.

I've been sitting at the desk since before six. The clock habit. Nothing to do with it except wake up at the same time and sit somewhere.

I get a mug, stand at the counter and let the fresh drip finish. The kitchen window faces the alley and in the mornings there's nothing to see out there except the brick of the next building and a dumpster lid and, when the wind moves, a plastic bag that has been lodged against the chain-link for a week. I look at it while the coffee drips. It hasn't gone anywhere.

I carry the mug to the desk and sit.

Doctor. The credential is valid for another eighteen months. The cases have been redistributed. The referral network took eight years to build and it closed itself in the same week the resignation went in. You don't rebuild a urology practice from a kitchen in a female body with no institutional backing and a name that isn't attached to any record anywhere. That door is not just closed, it's in a different building.

There's a medical forum notification on my phone. A thread about minimally invasive urological repair, a debate I've had arguments in, a conversation I no longer belong to. I read three lines and set the phone face-down on the desk.

The child is the one thing that isn't gone.

He's at thirty-one weeks, roughly. Term is forty, give or take. Nine weeks of margin, somewhere between close and not close enough to be useful. I know the building where he'll be delivered, the floor, the nursing staffing ratios, the attending rotation schedule, how that wing runs on overnights when the day team hands off, all of it left over from eight years in the same institution.

I don't get to Kate from here. That's been established.

I can get to the building.

The thought arrives flat and functional. A nurse on an ob/gyn floor is invisible in a way doctors aren't. A doctor makes the rounds, has the chart, enters and exits with the institutional weight of the role announcing itself. A nurse does the actual labor, the vitals, the monitoring, the prep, the hands-on care that runs hour to hour while the physician sees a patient for nine minutes and moves on. A competent ob/gyn nurse moves through every room on that floor and nobody clocks the movement as noteworthy.

If he can't be mine, he can at least be near.

The thought completes itself without permission. I think through it for a moment, the mug going cool in my hands.

The NCLEX. The nursing license board. The credentialing cycle. I open a browser tab. The practical mechanics are a problem I can solve.

The body is the first problem, and it's not a difficult one. Every other face I've built was built for someone, for their attention, their desire, their softening toward me, their trust. The body I need now is built for no one. The requirement is the opposite of what Leila required: a face no one retains an image of after the hallway, a build that telegraphs competence and nothing else, a woman who does excellent work and whose colleagues, if pressed, would say she's great, very competent and then pause slightly before they could find any specifics.

I take my coffee to the bathroom.

The mirror. The pale woman looks back. The dark hair, the brown eyes, the face I've spent months mapping other things onto. I study it for a minute.

I start from the bone.

Height comes down first. Two inches off the baseline, shortening the limb proportion, adjusting the lumbar. The mesh resists, it always has its own preferences, but it yields when I hold the pressure. The sensation is a dull ache through both knees, the joints recalibrating under the new geometry. I wait for the pain to settle and then move on.

Shoulders narrower, pulled in, rounded forward. The curve of someone who has spent a long time leaning over beds and charting on workstations not set to the right height. Not a slouch, just the neutral posture of a body that has logged a lot of clinical hours.

The face takes longest. I work the cheekbones inward, reducing their width, softening the forward plane. The jaw I bring to something unremarkable, balanced, without any feature that grabs attention. I widen the bridge of the nose slightly, move the eye spacing a fraction. I am aiming for the center of distributions I spent months working away from. I want the face that reads, when glimpsed, as just a woman, maybe thirty-five, probably tired. A face you'd pass in a corridor twice a day for three years and never quite register as a specific person.

Forty minutes, maybe more. The fatigue sets into the base of my skull and radiates forward. I ignore it.

The hair at collar length, dark, nothing styled about it. I put it in a low bun. The height unremarkable. The face that does its job and no more than its job.

She looks like a nurse. She looks like a woman who wakes up early and parks in the garage and eats lunch at the station and knows the housekeeping staff by first name. The background of the room.

I hold her for a while and feel the fatigue in it. The fatigue arrived on its own, I didn't build it, and that's correct. A nurse on a thirty-six-hour stretch doesn't have to construct her tiredness.

The name takes me longer than the face. I can't hack the national nursing database, so I open the public verification portal for the Indiana State Board of Nursing. I cross-reference active, clean licenses with dormant digital footprints. I need a ghost, someone who exists in the registry but isn't using her credentials.

Page fourteen gives me what I need. Linda Walsh. RN class of 2022, active license, no disciplinary actions, no LinkedIn presence, no recent employment footprint. I run the name in my mouth a few times.

The timeline makes sense, the graduation placing her at enough experience to be credible at a large urban hospital without enough experience to be recognizable in any records system I can't reach.

The background check is the next problem. A fake transcript won't clear a federal HR screening. I open a secure browser, navigating through forums I usually avoid. It takes an hour of searching and a crypto transfer to an identity broker to secure a synthetic SSN and a backstopped credit profile, tethering them to Linda's license number. It's a hit to my accounts, but the number will read as active when HR runs it.

The rest of it takes the morning and most of the afternoon. I draft reference letters in some professors' voices, matching their published syllabi and the syntax of their academic correspondence. I build the transcript. I know the formatting because I've spent years reviewing credentials across an admissions committee table.

I've been in enough rooms with enough administrators not to believe any of this is impenetrable. I just need it to be boring enough that no one looks.

The application is in at 6:51 PM. The nursing director at the hospital is Garcia, a woman I've nodded at in the corridor near the east elevator bank roughly forty times over eight years. I typed her name into the To field without looking it up.

I close the laptop.

The room is dark. I didn't turn on a lamp. The screen went to sleep and now the only light is from the window, the amber city spread outside, the alley below going orange at the edges where the street light reaches. I stand up. There's a dull ache low in the back from the hours of sitting.

I press my fists into the lumbar.

I cross to the window. Down in the alley, the plastic bag is still there. In the amber light it's white and moving, the wind pressing it against the chain-link and releasing it. One of those things you stop seeing until something makes you look at it.

My son is inside that building eleven blocks east and I will be there when he arrives. That's what there is.

I go to the kitchen. I turn the burner on under a pan. I crack two eggs because the grocery situation has lapsed and I don't have the ambition to fix it tonight. The eggs go in and I stand there watching them firm up at the edges.

Linda Walsh is the first self I've ever built without wanting anything from anyone.

Every face before this one was aimed at someone. Leila was built to draw Mark. The administrative woman in the pencil skirt was built to move through a building without being stopped. Claire was built to fit the cavity that Kate had been walking around with for two years, the warmth and attention that Kate needed and I'd had the whole time and never once pointed her direction. Even near-Julian, even the effort to reconstruct my own coloring and bone structure, was aimed at recognition, at Kate finding in my face something worth keeping.

Linda doesn't want anything. Linda is just going to do the work.

The child needs someone in the room who knows how to do the work well, and Linda can do it, and the competence is real even if the name isn't and the history isn't and the face isn't.

The eggs are done. I plate them and eat at the counter with the lights finally on, too bright after the hours in the dark.

The application is in.

I put the dish in the sink.

Garcia will respond within a week or not at all. If she responds, there's a phone screen, and then a skills assessment, and then a conditional offer pending credentialing, and then credentialing. I know what the credentialing process looks like from the inside. It's long and procedural and susceptible to a well-assembled file.

I've had worse odds.

I turn the kitchen light off. The apartment goes back to city-light dark, the amber through the windows.

I go to the bedroom and lie down without taking my shoes off.

I fall asleep faster than I have in months.