“You’re my baby sister, all grown up and gorgeous.” Her teeth sat perfectly, one atop the other, and what little light there was made them glimmer. I found myself close to cringing at the thought that they might break.

I didn’t have a little sister. Not at nineteen, at least. I didn’t have any siblings at all. It seemed unlikely that any had been born later, but how could I know what happened after I was extracted? Perhaps she’d gained a sister in marrying Lyman, though how could that person possibly resemble me? Or perhaps her parents had an unlikely pregnancy later in life and kept me in the dark because of what I am. Because—no matter how remarkable—as Dolores’s Mem, I had no right to know. Because no matter what Dolores had become, she retained sole custody of the life that we had shared.

“If I’m your sister Emma, Dolly, then when was I born?” I asked, venturing to use Lyman’s name for her, widening my faltering smile.

And then her eyes jumped and her head with them. A moment after I’d spoken, she gasped, drawing in a sharp and short breath and looking at the empty space just beside me.

“Dolores?” said the attendant.

She jerked out of my arms, then shoved me hard enough that I would’ve fallen had I not stood from the sofa.

“Dolores!” the old woman spoke again, this time chastising, and I looked from her to the woman-child retreating backward into a corner of the couch. Standing between them, I felt a weakness threatening my knees and a hot pounding in my chest, unsure which one would overwhelm me first. There’s a chance that I was angry, that I had been all along. Even when I thought that I was tired of fighting, perhaps I was exhausted by having to. But I wasn’t angry at her.

“Where are you from, Dolores?” I asked.

It was the only question I could think to ask, the only one I thought simple enough that Dolores would understand, but I shouldn’t have. I knew that for certain as soon as the elderly woman struck me. Before I could turn to face her, the attendant’s closed fist thudded against my upper arm again. Then, as we locked eyes, the woman opened her palm and slapped me across the face. My skin sizzled and, scratched by her index finger, a well sprang from my left eye.

“How dare you,” she growled, as though incapable of opening her mouth any wider. “How dare you ask her that!” She crowded me so that with every phrase, her spit landed on my skin. “Speaking as though you’re one of us—as though she’s one of you!”

I hardly opened my mouth to respond before her closed fists pounded my shoulder.