(I think it will soon become clear that I started watching Orphan Black last night)…

Some Time After the Apocalypse

“No.” The woman — girl, she was a girl, and Caitrin would do well to remember it — shook her head and looked away. “No. No, that’s not- I didn’t- no.”

Regine’s answer when Caitrin presented her with the children was less than reassuring. “I can work with that.”

It wasn’t enough that she’d gotten a letter on her seventeenth birthday, telling her she was accepted to a strange school, far away from everything, everything including John, to whom she’d been engaged. It wasn’t enough that accepted was a polite way of saying forced to go. It wasn’t enough that the place was underground. That it looked like a book plate of someplace rich, indulgent people spent far too much money, in the days Before the End Times. It wasn’t enough that she had to be here.

There was someone else here with her face.

Katharina stared at the girl. She knew that face. She had seen that face in the mirror every morning and every evening her entire life. Well, nearly that face. The girl in front of her was wearing make-up, visible and obvious make-up on her lips and around her eyes. And she had cropped her hair so short that it barely counted as hair.

The woman who had fetched Katharina touched her arm gently. “It’s all right.”

“She… she has my face.” Katharina had heard stories of twins, two people born sharing a single soul. The priest said they were to be pitied but avoided, because one needed an entire soul to be good and godly. Katharina swallowed. “She has my face.”

“I’m told,” Professor Valerian murmured gently, “that you get used to it.”

The girl with Katharina’s face winked, bold and brazen, and walked away. Katharina leaned against a wall and tried not to faint.

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