Chapter 29 - The Mother’s Final Testament
The glass partition at the Fishkill Forensic Psychiatric Facility was three inches thick, reinforced with crisscrossing steel mesh.
Eleanor Vance sat on the other side, wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit that swallowed her frail, shrunken frame. Her once-immaculate silver hair hung in greasy, wild strands around her face. Her hands were shackled to the stainless-steel table, her fingernails chewed to the quick.
When she saw me, her bloodshot eyes didn't fill with guilt. They filled with a horrifying, manic triumph.
"You're walking," she rasped, her voice buzzing through the small metal intercom grille between us. "You shouldn't be walking, Elizabeth. The balcony was twenty-two feet high. The flagstones below were granite."
"Why did you do it, Mother?" I asked, keeping my voice steady, though my heart was pounding like a hammer against my ribs. "Why did you push me?"
Eleanor leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the glass until the skin turned white.
"You think I did it to kill your baby?" she whispered, a sickening, broken laugh bubbling up in her throat. "You stupid, arrogant girl. I did it to *save* you."
"Save me?" I spat, the rage boiling over. "You poisoned my pregnancy! You and Sterling used me as an incubator for a monster's genetic clone!"
"No!" Eleanor screamed, slamming her shackled fists onto the steel table with enough force to make the guards twitch toward their holsters. "Sterling wanted the clone! Arthur wanted the clone! They were going to let you reach thirty-eight weeks, take the child, and then inject you with potassium chloride to simulate an intrapartum cardiac arrest! Just like they did to your real mother!"
The air evacuated from the visitation booth. I stared at her through the scratched Plexiglas, unable to breathe.
"My... my real mother?"
Eleanor smiled, a hideous, weeping rictus of despair. "You aren't my daughter, Elizabeth. I was barren. Arthur brought you home from St. Jude's in an incubator thirty years ago. You were the first successful embryonic replicate of his own genetic material. You aren't his daughter. You are him. His female twin."
She leaned in closer, her breath fogging the glass.
May you like
"I pushed you off that balcony because if the child died inside you before the thirty-week threshold, the Prometheus trust legal covenants would automatically terminate. I tried to break the chain, Elizabeth! But you survived. And now... he knows."
***
