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0. Prologue.
Once upon a time, a scientist attempted to bring her sister back to life after a horrible accident. Instead, a child was born into the empty body, and her sister’s spirit was forced to watch. Though it could’ve been their undoing, both sister and child felt the grief and love of the scientist, desperately trying to reclaim her own missing half. So, the sister chose to guide her replacement through the motions of her previous life, lest the scientist question her handiwork and, unawares, tear her own child asunder in the search for a ghost.
But ghosts are not as gone as all that. Scientists can make grave miscalculations. And children do not often stay that way.
—
1. Frances
...Maura's body is preserved relatively well.
Frances and Gin don’t even have to sneak into the morgue to get it: her organs are far too damaged to be donated and the emergency services don’t even have the room to hold her for a whole day before the storage unit is needed for someone new. When they give them the option of cremation or burial, she spins some story about a new Chinese cemetery out by the old tree on the hill, to better sweep the graves. Over her shoulder, Frances can imagine Dottie and Asha critiquing her poor fabrication skills, but the morticians give her the go-ahead anyways, and then she and Gin load a body bag into the back of their borrowed motor-wagon and sits in the back beside the corpse that used to be her little sister. She prays to whatever ancestors will still listen to her that the decomposition is minimal and that her soon-to-be atrocities will be looked upon with indulgence. Or at least that no one will come to drag her away to prison until the resurrection is complete. Each revelation into the repair of a soul hits like a flash of inspiration, pulls her out of the bed beside Gin to the lab, ideas and epiphanies sparking like electricity arcing into the air above.
The second experiment is a success, and Maura Ai is reborn into the world, if a little stitched up and lacking her memories. It’s almost like living with a stranger: the gaze that passes over anything Maura would have loved, the strange preferences for anything she would have hated. Frances tries everything she can to repair the memories, to make her feel at home again in her own body. But even as Maura periodically ‘remembers’ vital facts of their lives together, her younger sister still remains distant, in way she hasn’t seen since before their parents died. It’s in the way she works in the lab, her over-enthusiasm to visit their neighbors, the long gaps of silence before she bursts into a story of their childhood.
It’s during one of these strange incidents that Frances first catches sight of the mirror, and the familiar spirit lurking inside.
—
2. M
When Maura chooses her name, it feels like a cosmic joke. A single letter, the shadow of her predecessor in the guise of endless potential. M is her prison as much as it’s her freedom to take her own path, but she becomes comfortable regardless. Her internal monologue catches on quicker than her actual family, and it becomes second nature to correct ‘Maura’ to ‘M’ in her thoughts. M, please don’t pour all of that milk in your coffee, you’ll regret it later. M, remember to change your gloves between radioactive fluids, don’t you remember the last cross contamination incident? M, aren’t you glad you’re getting back to normal? Doesn’t it feel just like old times?
M becomes an expert at illusions, only needing to peek at the spirit in her hand-mirror once during each conversation: a vital adjustment, as Maura’s eyes get more sorrowful with each passing day. She doesn’t know what to do with all of the guilt and all of the anger and all of the fear: she never asked for any of this. Why bother? Just dance like a marionette on the strings of your sisters and hope that will be enough to fill a life that was stolen from someone else.
—
3. Frances
Maura is dead; at the same time, she’s here right before you, tired eyes and dead weight and lively joy sucked dry by the coffin she resurrected her to drag around. The sister Frances had spent sleepless nights piecing back together is someone else entirely. Or at least some fragment of her, not the genuine article but real enough to see the ghost of Maura’s smile in a mirror, to hear her laugh echo through the halls, to feel her hand squeeze her shoulder as if to say, “It’s okay, you can let me go.”
The last remaining Ai is not gone, but still beyond wherever Frances can reach. Left in her place is someone else, an actress attempting to read all of her lines correctly the very first time. She puppets around your sister’s body, but misses all of the cues, tangled herself in marionette string. Dottie and Asha welcome her like long-lost aunties, and she comes home with embroidered handkerchiefs she doesn’t hide as well as she thinks she does. The stranger living in your house shoves sugar cubes into her coffee, laughs after Gin’s puns, avoids the lab like a death sentence. Even Maura’s old clothes fit differently on her; she wears dresses like a borrowed skin, chafes under bonnets and bows.
Frances can’t believe she didn’t notice before, curses her narrow focus and her scientific pride and the deep terror inside her gut that she really is alone now. She attempted to bring her younger sister back and just succeeded at replacing her with a shadow.
The first emotion to coalesce from the overwhelming mass, after the weeks of denial, is hopelessness. There are no solutions, no brilliant equations nor alchemical magic. Hopelessness is reliving every second of the ways Frances has ruined her sister’s life. It drives her to late nights at the lab, pouring over each and every detail of the resurrection process. Perhaps the lightning wasn’t strong enough, or the two souls had been tangled in restoration. Maybe everything their parents had taught them about the afterlife was false, and there was no end other than sweeping gently at a grave and hoping anyone on the other side could feel it. What ghosts can be hungry when there’s nothing to feed them, let alone satiate?
The burden is almost too great to bear and Frances trembles under the weight of the lives she’s ruined. Fury rises occasionally as she scatters broken vials across the walls and sits in the ruins of the machine that she never bothered to repair. Even in grief she is selfish and cruel, and even in death Maura is untouchable and irreplaceable. She must right this wrong, but how?
Before a solution can coalesce from the darkness, everything comes to a head, and she meets M, just M, for the first time. Maura’s ghost no longer tags at her reflection’s heels and Frances comes face to face with losing her sister for the second time, and losing M for the first.
“I’m just an acceptable loss.” M throws the words like a swordswoman in training, unaware of the sharpness of the blade but knowing exactly where it will hit the hardest. Why have her if she could have her sister? Why not tear apart another sister’s life as easily as she tore apart the other’s? What a monster Frances has made of herself. No wonder M wants to run as far away as possible from her, even off of a cliff.
“I don’t want to be nothing again,” M says, and she slams the door behind her. She doesn’t even know that without Maura, without M, without them, Frances will be nothing as well. Tears roll down her cheeks and messy sobs crawl their way out of her throat as Gin holds her in their arms. M is her sibling, her child, her creation and her undoing. The choice of caring is a worthy curse, and love may be madness after all.
The decision is made before she even knows it herself. A cosmic sense of the world righting itself at last. Above all—science, marriage, love, genius, guilt, grief—the foundation of her is built on the weight of sisterhood. It’s the beginning and end of everything, the fundament from which she spawned and will one day return. No matter the lies, no matter the making: M is her sister. And Frances’ very bones demand her pay that debt. It’s a siren call that tugs her breath from her throat, her strength from her limbs, her pride from her chest. Frances tore apart one life as she created a brand new one, in her hubris never asking whether those lives were hers to command. M needs a sister, and so does Maura. Maura needs a body, but so does M.
The math is simple enough, when it gets down to it. Why take apart a body with a resident when you have a perfectly good one taking up space underneath your own brain? The non-interchangeability of bodies is nothing to the determination of sisterhood.
There are lightning storms predicted for tonight. It has to be much easier to transfer life than create it, especially with a willing host. It’s the matter of moments to pull her devices from the walls and fasten them to her mobile lab pieces. M should be safe just long enough before the rain starts in earnest and what’s a few more minutes when otherwise everything would be broken until the end of time? An antennae to catch the spark, a canister to channel it. A mirror to reflect the past and a bit of magic to attract the hungry ghost.
She leaves a note for Gin after she kisses them on the cheek and promises to find her sister. Thanks them for everything and for the reality check about M. Reminds them of their vows—for better and for worse—and hopes they’ll at least hate her where M and Maura can’t see. Gin never did like her apologies, especially when she couldn’t deliver them in person. Tonight will be the last time she gets to annoy them like that. When you’re walking to your death, even betrayal is a wistful experience.
…Frances wonders what Maura feels about the afterlife. Being trapped to watch your killer ruin everything you’ve ever worked for. Living and dying on the altar of an older sister who always, inevitably, proves to be mortal. Caught between the underworld and purification and hell on earth. Well, no matter. Frances will understand soon enough.
The rain is pouring and the lightning has started in earnest when she finally finds her sisters. They’re underneath that same tree, the same moment where Frances learned how to take a body apart and the same moment Maura learned to put her trust in people that would inevitably fail her. M is so small in the branches, silhouetted by the sky. Just like Maura, but also not like her at all. It’s a struggle to batter her way through the wind with her machine wheeled under a tarp behind her, and she begs fate that lightning doesn’t strike the tree before she can pull her sister from the branches. Another lightning strike reveals the flash of the mirror, still in her hand.
“I’m coming,” Frances shouts into the storm. “Please be careful!”
She yanks the tarp off and it flies into the wind, as the electric coils charge behind her, waiting for the catalyst to set her plan in motion. M looks her way, and Frances sees the same fear she feels reflected on her face. “Why did you follow me? Why are you here?”
Her question strikes Frances silent. The world seems to slow to a crawl around them. In the moment, all that she can think to confess is the truth. “I didn’t know what else to do.” It’s the wrong thing to say among a colony of other wrong things:
“I never wanted children. I was too terrified they’d end up like me. I was afraid I couldn’t give them what they needed and they’d hate me for it and I could never fix it. But M, you don’t just want to be alive, you want to live and you’re a miracle. You’re everything I should have understood. You’re brilliant, all on your own. No Maura, no me required.
"I’m so, so sorry. I know you didn’t ask to be made, for your life and body and self to be a substitute for someone else. I should have seen it sooner. I should have kept you safe—I should have kept you both safe from the pressure, the expectations. Safe from me. I just missed her so much: Maura was always the best between us, and I just thought that if I could bring her back into the world, everything else would be better. That I could make up for what I’d done. But I couldn’t, and I can’t.
“And I figured out a way to fix everything, and you’ll probably hate me for it, and so will Maura, and so will Gin. But I can live with that, and I can die knowing that I gave everything I should have given you in the first place. I’m so glad I made you. I’m so glad you’re here. You don’t need to forgive me, but I’m so sorry. M—”
The clouds part and the air sings with anticipation for the strike. Frances closes her eyes, shouts one last time over the thunder.
“Say hi to Maura for me, okay?.”
—
4. M
The last words Maura ever heard from her older sister were: “Alright, whenever you’re ready!” The world disappeared into colors and light and a single stab of infinite pain. And then she was dead. She told M this one night, resting in the curve of her hand-mirror as the insects and birds came alive in the night outside.
The last words M ever heard from Frances Ai were: “I’m going to fix everything. I promise.” And then the lightning hit her contraption and she convulsed in a terrifying spasm and M clamored down the tree, just avoiding spraining her ankle. She rushed to catch her before her head hit the ground and—
The body snaps awake in M’s arms. But it’s no longer Frances inside. Her eyes are a different shade of brown, her limbs move like the operation of a novice puppeteer. The mirror lies shattered on the ground where it fell out of M’s pocket. What did Frances do.
A cough, and vocal chords stretch to accommodate new timbre and pitch. There’s devastation in the woman’s eyes, whoever she is, and M can hardly stand to bear witness.
“It’s me. Maura.”
…Sometimes M wishes Frances never brought her to life. Sometimes she wishes Frances would disappear and leave her to the ghosts of the girl she used to be and Gin’s smiles and Dottie and Asha’s firm but kind guiding hands. No one is obligated to love their maker, but god, M wants to. Frances’ love for her sister, in the dim light, almost felt like love for her. She wanted to be someone worth loving, worth smiling at, worth keeping in one piece.
And now M is the older sister: born into this new body a month prior to the amalgam sleeping in the bed beside her. She just has to take everything that's hers, huh. Everything she didn’t even know she had. Frances is her god, her greatest fear, her older sister, her mother, her undoing; a perfect stranger and the only woman in the entire world that might one day learn her from the inside out. And now she’s gone, her soul sent into the ether to slam Maura’s back in her place. M will never see her again except in the face of someone else. Gin will hover on the edges, tears behind their eyes and a measured smile for her and nothing left to keep their promise to. Maura will wake up and watch her own body live and grow and shift and carry her sister’s sins on her shoulders until the day the Earth stands still. M had scrambled for the mirror shards as soon as she’d realized what happened, expecting to see Frances there but it was empty. Only her own reflection stared back.
…Huh, M thinks she finally understands her now, even as Frances was too afraid to try and understand M. Funny, that. Just in time to live the rest of her life without her.
—
Epilogue: Maura
The first thing Maura does to her new body is cut her hair. She can’t stand the bangs or the ponytail that brushes against the middle of her back, so off it goes, a piece of Frances flung to the bathroom floor like a particularly annoying gnat. She instantly regrets it, sinking to the floor and sobbing, relieved yet terrified that she’ll look in the mirror and no longer see her sister staring back at her.
Maura’s memories of being a ghost are all too corporeal. Floating through a life she used to live. Only able to speak through a reflection. Forced to train her replacement and watch as M takes everything Maura built for herself and razes it to the ground. But that’s just what happens: she chose not to triple check the safety, and she chose to flick the activation switch and that means she no longer has a say in what the world chooses to do without her, no matter how much she wishes she did.
Wishes are a dangerous thing. Frances gave up her body and told Maura to do with it as she pleased and now all she wants to do is hack her life to pieces, just like M did hers. Preserve it like an altar or raze the temple to the ground. Curse Frances’ memory or venerate her like a god. Leave behind everything that ever mattered to them or make a home in a mausoleum. Live long enough and inevitably, you become the very thing you fear. A younger sibling once again. A new life born in the ashes of someone else’s.