---Spit---

---Xon’s perspective---

I look into the scowling face of the woman handcuffed to the table, opposite me.

Her skin is pale, the sides and back of her head are shaven bald and from the top of her scalp grows a narrow mohawk of curly scarlet hair, so voluminous that it gives the impression of her having a completely unshaven crown, despite only being a few centimetres wide.

Her eyes are an uncannily familiar shade of emerald green.

“So… how’s your nose, Ms Stellan?… Or is it Ms Thompson(?)” I smile.

“Fine. It’s Stellan.” she answers, curtly.

“Right, Ms Stellan then… would you mind telling me a little about yourself? How did you come to be mixed up with the Revanchists?”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, pig!”

I chuckle “Ms Stellan, right now, you are under citizen’s arrest… I’m not a law enforcer at the moment… this is just a friendly chat… ”

“Why would I want to have a friendly chat with someone holding me prisoner!? We’re not friends!” she spits.

“Well… how else are we supposed to become friends?” I smile.

She stares at me incredulously for a few seconds before bursting into laughter.

“That’s fucking rich! You are dreaming if you think you’re going to trick me into telling you anything about us!”

“I’m not trying to get you to tell me anything about the Revanchists… I’m asking you to tell me about yourself…” I say, sincerely.

She narrows her eyes and studies me, suspiciously, for several long seconds.

“Fine… if you must know, they raised me… I’m a War orphan.”

Confused, I ask “A War orphan? But you indicated that you’re only 26 when we processed you?”

“Yeah? So?” she shrugs.

“It’s just… the War’s been over for 28 years…”

She gives a sneering smirk as she answers “Maybe for you it has… Far as we’re concerned, it’s still going… just mostly on pause.”

“I… see… It couldn’t be that you’re perhaps a little older than 26?” twice as old, perhaps…

“What d’you mean? Why would I lie about that?” she asks, nonplussed.

“Well… I can imagine that the Revanchists are the kind of organisation most end up in with… less than happy backgrounds… Is it maybe the case that you wanted to reinvent yourself? Try and forget a past you’d rather not remember?”

She shakes her head “Don’t know what your talking about, lady. I’m 26.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

My intuition is that she’s telling the truth… or thinks she is at least?

“Alright, Ms Stellan, in that case…”

At this point, I’m interrupted by the door opening and a large man stepping into the room.

Turning her head to the newcomer, the girl recoils away from him so hard that the chains at her wrists go taut.

“What’s he doing here!? Get that fucking pervert away from me!”

“I’m not a pervert. I’m your son, Mum.” exhales Victor, exhaustedly.

“You have got to be at least as old as me, dude! I’m not your fucking mummy and I’m not interested in pretending to be! I don’t care how much you paid her to make your fetish vids for you! I don’t care how much she looks like me! I’m not Esme Reid! I’m not Esme Taylor either! I. am. Ka.ra… Stell.an!” she snarls, massively overenunciating every phoneme in her name, as if talking to someone stupid or hard of hearing.

“You’re misunderstandin’ on purpose.” he sighs.

“I understand that you’ve visited my cell half a dozen times since you captured me, called me ‘Mum’ and ‘Esme’ every time and kept trying to tell me about your damn videos!”

“If you’d just spit in a tube…”

“I don’t know what weird, freaky shit you wanna do with my spit! No way!!!”

“Ms Stellan…” I interrupt, seeing that the conversation is going nowhere between the two of them“…Victor here has explained the situation to me. I’ve seen the woman in the videos and, frankly, I agree that this looks like more than a simple case of his mother being an uncanny doppelgänger of yours!”

She opens her mouth to object but I continue before she can.

“I’m not calling you a liar, Ms Stellan. I truly believe that you believe what your telling me about who you are… but there’s something going on here and there’s one easy way to know for sure what that is… and it’s your DNA… Now, as I’ve said, we aren’t law enforcers… we aren’t legally empowered to sequence your genes without your consent… So, we’re hoping that you’ll give us your consent… after you’ve watched some of the videos…”

Screwing up her face, she asks “Why should I? Why should I humour this at all?!”

I shrug “Well… only that… Esme Taylor had friends… had a husband… has a son…” I gesture to the man sitting next to me “…if you had an entire life you don’t know about… don’t you want to find out?”

Her narrowed eyes flick back and forth between mine and Victor’s for a few seconds before she responds “Fine! But, I swear to god, if this woman starts taking off her clothes and talking about what a bad boy you are and how she’s going to spank you at any point, I’m filing sexual harassment charges!” pointing accusingly at Victor.

Flatly, he answers “Both you and Dad stay clothed for the full duration… There are 2 or 3 jokes it took me until my early teens to get but they’re some hours in and I don’t think we’re gonna get to ’em.”

“Go on then!” she says, waving to the wall.

---Kara’s perspective---

It’s… me…

That is… my face!

That’s what my hair looks like when I grow it long… but I’ve never grown it that long!

That’s my voice, even if it’s speaking a language that (while I can hear the ghost of English in it) I wouldn’t be able to understand, untranslated.

The babydaddy sat beside her is exactly my type!

My stomach turns nauseatingly at the fact that, until he started talking to me about what I mistook for his fetish, I thought the same thing about the man across the table from me!

Eugh!

But that’s less important than the fact that, even if this weren’t immediately identifiable as footage made, supposedly, before I was born… that woman is immediately identifiable as me! Doing things I have no memory of, speaking a language I can’t understand, talking to a son I’ve never had!

“That’s enough… stop it please…” I say, tearing my eyes away from the wall to stare at the table in front of me.

The footage is paused and I hold a chained hand out to the man, beckoning.

“Give it to me…”

He fumbles before producing the single sterile test tube that he’s had with him every time he’s come to my cell.

Placing its holder down, he stands it inside and slides the whole thing across the table to me.

I begin chewing my tongue without swallowing.

After about 30 seconds, the inside of my mouth is filled with enough saliva for me to pick up the tube, peel off the film, bring my lips to its rim and drool several mils into it.

I place the tube back down and slide it back across the table to the violet eyed woman and the emerald eyed man.

Looking up into their faces, I ask “Please… tell me who I am…”