Whenever Silver is home, he spends most of his time in his private office. Kris had been hesitant to visit him there at first, but after not seeing him for days, she decided to go in anyway. There are questions she needs answered, even if it is rude to ask someone as busy as Silver.
The room is dark, the curtains drawn and the windows shut. The only source of illumination in the room is a lamp on the finely carved mahogany desk. When he looks up from the papers he was reading, the light casts eerie shadows on half of his face, the gray in his only visible eye shining with something indefinable.
"Why am I here?" she asks over the lump in her throat, wringing her hands behind her back nervously.
The happiest moment in her life was when Silver came to get her out of that place, but she knows that this isn't her life to live or her freedom to enjoy. She wasn't supposed to see the Outside with her own eyes. She wasn't supposed to breathe its air with her own lungs. Those were all privileges afforded to the other Kris – the real one.
"I'm not an Original," Kris whispers softly, "I'm not allowed to be here."
I don't even know what I am, she doesn't say.
"Does my Original need me?" she goes on to ask, the question making her throat unbearably thick and sticky, "Does – does she need me to…?"
The shadows have deepened and twisted around Silver's face. They make him look like a monster with half a face, sharp teeth gleaming dangerously in the lamplight.
"She doesn't need anything," Silver snaps harshly, "She's dead."
His eye has gone dark and opaque, even with the yellow light from the lamp shining directly on him. He still looks terrifying – like something out of a nightmare – but Kris isn't scared anymore. Her chest shouldn't feel as light as it does. She shouldn't feel like if she jumped off her balcony she would be swept up whimsically by the wind, feather-light and gloriously free.
Does feeling relieved at the news make her a bad person? Looking at the expression on Silver's face, she thinks it does.
"Oh," she says quietly, the feeling spreading to her head. She sways precariously on her feet, and puts a hand on the smooth surface of the desk to steady herself. She's trying so hard not to smile that it hurts, "Oh."
"It was terminal cancer," Silver continues, sucking in breath like it's physically painful for him to do so, "It started as a mole – a fucking freckle. Just a little insignificant speck on her back that ended up spreading everywhere. Her lungs, her chest, her kidneys... even her brain. We fought it with chemo and radiation but by the time we were done she was going into multiple organ system failure and she needed transplants."
"Then why wasn't I –,"
"Because creating something like you is expensive," he snaps angrily, hand tightening to a fist in the area right over his heart, "By the time I did get enough money, it was already too late. I paid them millions extra so that you'd be ready in time. But she gave up before you were ready," he pauses, single eye blinking rapidly. Kris expects him to cry, but instead, he barks out a laugh. It sounds choked, like he's gasping for air, "She wouldn't have taken them, anyway. She thought it was inhumane, 'morally bankrupt.' She wouldn't hear of it. Always the fucking goody-goody Champion to the very end."
The relief that had washed over Kris is replaced by something bitter and scalding. Her fake heart twists at his words, tears stinging at her eyes and threatening to spill over.
Something like you.
"So I'm here to replace her," Kris murmurs. It is not a question.
"You're here because I was the one that ordered you made," Silver says tiredly.
Nothing can ever replace her, he doesn't say. It doesn't make it any less audible, though.
He wants to say it and they both know it.
That's all that matters, anyway – intentions, reasons, purpose.
Meaning.
Kris thought she was different. In the end, it turns out that she was made for the same reasons all the others were – to save an Original, to find Meaning in continuing their laughably fragile lifespans.
She feels foolish to have thought any different. To have thought that Silver… that Silver might…
"c96565"
