She led us through the front door. Cassie gasped when she stepped outside. The dirt road was obscured by a scrim of fog that refracted the amber torch flames. I didn’t know if it was closer to midnight or morning. The moon was hidden and the forest was quiet except for the occasional chirp. There was a faint static buzzing in the air that seemed to be silence itself. Malia lifted her skirt as she stepped down to the road and her boots sank into the mist.

“You guys piping this shit in or what? Steam machine, dry ice?”

“It’s the Smoky Mountains, smarty-pants,” Malia said, and I could see the humor in her eyes. We followed her off the porch, turning right and traveling up the road away from the depot. I took a close look at one of the torch-bearing statues as we passed by and would have sworn it was chiseled stone. But it wasn’t. One wrong move and these cloned men would leave their posts and swarm Cassie and me and burn us alive. I wondered if they were separate individuals or if they shared a hive mind. If one eye opened, would they all open at once?

I sped up to walk next to Malia. “Where’s the other you?” I said.

“There is no other me.”

“The younger one. The one I met. Come on, you’re going to tell me the resemblance is coincidental?”

“Different body, same person.” She gave me a knowing look, one of a secret lover.

More connective threads.

I stopped talking, fearing what my questions might reveal. I took Cassie’s hand and our fingers intertwined. Walking together down a street that had a ceremonial feel. More so than our wedding, which had felt more like a house party. The two of us and our closest friends, who were really cling-ons in retrospect. Our matrimony just another excuse to get wasted. It had been out on a little farmland at a place in Chattahoochee Hills owned by a friend of Caspian’s, under a sprawling oak tree. Cassie had just started to show, but you couldn’t tell in her dress. Her folks were the only family there, and they split right after the ceremony, which we had both laughed through so hard we barely heard anything the officiant said. Tripping on the absurdity of the situation. The embarrassment of having everyone’s eyes on us as we went through some farce ritual. Both of us mutually unorthodox yet wanting to perpetuate systemic order for our offspring. Kids in adult costume.