The lake was tranquil, and reflected alto-cumulus clouds, a sparrow. Chipmunks foraged nearby, chattering quietly, darting into leaves. White Ash and Sugar Maples, in various stages of development, filtered the morning sun, and danced gently in the sudden crisp breeze.

Parker shuddered reflexively, watched the reflection distort, the water's surface undulate. The peace wasn't taken for granted. She knew the importance of enjoying such moments while they lasted; they rarely did. She lifted her face, welcomed the kaleidoscopic shafts of sunlight, and Jarod. Parker felt Jarod's presence, noted intentionally heavy footfalls; they'd suffered enough surprises.

"This is my favorite spot, too," Jarod announced quietly.
"It's nice," Parker said amiably.
 "You know," Jarod remarked lightly, sitting beside Parker on the iron bench, and offering her a cup of tea. "I'd-- love to get used to this."

"I certainly have no objections to you bringing me tea every morning," Parker said, smiling over the steaming cup, "if you don't."

"If?" Jarod asked.

"I took your advice," Parker answered softly, and observed Jarod's expression of surprise. With a quiet snort of bewilderment, she asked, "Why does it surprise you that I took your advice?"

"Uh, I've always had the feeling," Jarod explained softly, "that you ignore at least half of what I say."

Parker tasted her tea, hummed appreciatively, and, after several moments, met Jarod's expectant gaze. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said with deadpan perfection, "did you say something?"

"All right," Jarod said with a quiet chuckle, "I deserved that."
"Mhm, you did. I always take your advice," Parker informed Jarod tartly, adding with a half shrug, "eventually. I watched more of Raines' home movies this morning."

"Oh, that advice."

Parker nodded. "Triumvirate delegates conducted a clandestine inquiry when I shot up the Centre pursuing you."

"Makes sense," Jarod said. "You discharged your weapon, a bomb detonated, and I'm sure everyone was curious to know how you and I—but no one else—entirely escaped injury."

"Pushing me into that dumbwaiter was a helluva plot twist; I thought those things were inoperable."

"They were," Jarod said, "for a decade."

"The tower and the entire Triumvirate commission wanted to know why, after running from me, running for your life, you saved mine, and not Sydney's. Or Broots'. I'm curious, too."

"Impulse," Jarod answered lightly. "Logic. I wanted to protect you. You were closest. Broots would've seen me coming, and successfully resisted being shoved into an unknown dark cavity just as you would've had I given you any indication of my intentions. Sydney planted the bomb; his conscience wouldn't have allowed him to leave you and Broots behind. There was also a strategic survival advantage involved in choosing you. Mr. Parker wouldn't shoot at you or allow Raines to."

"What if you'd been wrong?" Parker asked.

Jarod asked softly with a roguish grin, "When have I ever been wrong?"
"What if you're wrong now? Because I'm always going to be that woman, the one who almost got you, Sydney, and Broots killed, and not even you can outrun that, Jarod."

"Sydney planted that bomb, Raines hurt Timmy, and-- I'm in love with that woman. You were trapped in a life you didn't know how to escape from, and those files confirm it-- and that you were just as much a Centre prisoner as I was. That should be the primary take-away."

"So I shouldn't sling the laptop into the lake?"

"Hmm, the trout probably wouldn't appreciate that, but I trust you'll make the right decision."
"And you think binge-watching Raines' greatest hits is the right decision? Because this isn't how I envisioned spending my first two months of unemployment," Parker groused. "Not that I ever actually expected to outlast the Centre or outlive the ghoul or escape that god-forsaken hell-hole alive."

"Answers about your mother-- that you've spent most of your childhood, and your entire adult life searching for, could be in those files."

Parker shrugged noncommittally. "I suppose I can endure a little more madness."

"The offer still stands," Jarod said, "I can look at the files with you."
"Mm, no. You're still working that missing person's case with Susan."
 "Remotely," Jarod reminded Parker softly. "I'll be close if you want to talk or--  or not talk."
 "Mm, not talking," Parker hummed contentedly, lowering her head to Jarod's shoulder, and closing her eyes when he pulled her close, kissed her hair. I fucking love not talking.

Jarod believed several decades' worth of time stretched out ahead of them, more than enough for talking, and he remained unflinchingly confident until he knocked on the library door, and observed it open.

"I thought you might -" Jarod said, promptly falling silent when it became apparent the room was empty. He immediately dropped his gaze to the floor, upon which Parker had assembled dozens of printed documents in messy rows. Beneath each document were vertical columns of photographs and index cards that referenced video files.

The painting Lyle had thrust at Jarod she found it while stealing my car served as a perverse centerpiece, only, Jarod noted, the canvas had been rotated forty-five degrees and tilted back sharply.

Raines' grotesque pièce de résistance.

From every other perspective, the painting depicted a blood-splattered SL-27, dismembered bodies, and Lyle had given each limb and torso its own mouth, and all of them were stretched open, drenched with blood.

Parker had deciphered the code, untangled the inner maniacal—and surrealistic—workings of Lyle's mind. In Bobby's rendering, the Centre's tower was phallic, barbed, sheathed in bark. It's a building and a tree. Bodies and trees. Limbs and trunks.

Surrounded by crimson water, or blood the edifice was painted in shades of ebony, all shadows and incisive edges, and bore two faces that merged to create one. Each eye, a different color, stared out from the tower's two windows.
Blue.
Brown.
It seemed obvious to Jarod, initially, but only because he had fallen prey to confirmation bias.

Her face.

Mine.

The brown eye was, without a doubt, Jarod's--  in a face that belonged to the small child Sydney had cradled and comforted, given refuge. The blue eye was lined with pastels, and reflected terror.

Two sets of roots, or veins, Jarod couldn't be certain, shot through the tower's foundation, crisscrossed at the windows, entwined.

No, they're limbs. Of a tree. A family tree.

There, where the two veins collided, Lyle had painted what looked, in Jarod's opinion, like a poppy pod. Inside that pod—and the old adage wasn't lost on Jarod—Lyle had painted himself and Parker.

Jarod set the teacup and single gardenia on the desk, retrieved his mobile, and groaned when he was immediately diverted to voicemail.
He cursed, redialed, studied documents and photographs.

Of himself.

Catherine Parker.

"This isn't true," Jarod snarled.

It was all rather compelling nonetheless. Raines' successes—if they could be called successes—inducing and accelerating puberty, and his propensity for assaulting both unconscious and conscious women were all substantially documented, verified. The bastard used my sperm to fertilize my mother's ovum to create my clone, for God's sake. He's easily depraved enough to combine my DNA with Catherine's to-

 Jarod's conviction withered just as, he imagined, Parker's had, and he was eager to unequivocally disprove the lies, and surmised Parker was as well.
 They have to be lies.

"Of course," Jarod murmured, confident, at least, of one thing-- until he bounded down the back porch steps and his eyes met Parker's. Just beyond the porch light's reach, she shared a stone bench with his key fob and an empty plastic bag, and stared at him intensely.

"Just when I begin to think there was a limit to Raines' fucked-up-ness," Parker said with a strangled laugh, "a new level of hell creeps up over the horizon, and it's never going to end."

"It seems that way," Jarod agreed. "There has to be a limit- to everything," he assured her. "Everything ends eventually."

"I hope to hell you're right," Parker groused, and confirmed softly what Jarod had already concluded, "I considered it. When I heard Raines boast that you're my--" Parker drew a breath, continued, "I considered dropping your mug into a Ziploc, stealing your car, asking Broots to run tests again."

"So, that is something you've done before?"

"You're probably thinking I shouldn't need another test, and I shouldn't, but it's occurred to me," Parker explained, her voice brittle with rage, "that Broots and I were inside the Centre when I asked him to run those tests, and that he used Centre samples-- labeled by the Centre, obtained inside the Centre, used Centre equipment, didn't babysit the testing processes. Hell, if I didn't look exactly like my mother I'd doubt she's my mother."

Jarod frowned, advanced. "I'm sorry," he said. "That you're confused, afraid, angry, and I know how eager you must be to know the truth, so I have to ask. Why didn't you go to Broots?"

"What Raines did to you-" Parker fell silent, cleared her throat artificially. "Sit," she advised, rising.
"No, I'm all right," Jarod said, closing the distance between them, and covering her hand with his.
 "It's a private matter," Parker concluded at last. "Yours."

"You wouldn't have had to mention my name."

"You're right," Parker agreed, instinctively reciprocating, closing her fingers, squeezing Jarod's hand. "The ECG coffee mug would've been a dead giveaway."

"Sydney's a doctor, too. It could just as easily belong to him."

"Mm, no, it couldn't," Parker argued placidly, "not with the words sinus in the streets tachy in the sheets stamped on it--emphasis on tacky, Jarod."

Jarod smiled brightly, and with a soft laugh informed Parker, "I spent thirteen months trying to figure out what that meant."

Parker smiled as well, and, for another moment, remained optimistic, dismissive of Raines' self-aggrandizing proclamations, absurd publications. She'd hastily thumbed through thousands of pages of medicalese in search of a pithy synopsis, a definitive yes or no.

"Centre matters are hardly private," Jarod reasoned, addressing the lingering confusion and questions in Parker's eyes. "Broots is well aware of the weekly blood draws, daily urine collections, yearly seminal collections, the cloning simulation. For a brief time, during Sydney's absence, I handed over a specimen cup to Raines' people twice a day."

Parker frowned, and, thoroughly dreading the answer, asked, "When?"

"1964," Jarod answered unreservedly.

Parker's lips parted, and immediately closed, trapping the strangled whimper in her throat. A year before I was born. She widened tear-filled eyes, began to swivel. Hesitated. Her legs were poised to walk; her fingers, however, refused to loosen their grasp on Jarod's hand. Parker felt compelled to do both, perceived a violent tug in opposite directions, and the ground snatched from beneath her feet. She imagined her body twisted apart by indecision-- to accurately reflect her present emotional state.

"It's all right," Jarod whispered, depositing a hand on Parker's shoulder, gently steadying her. "We're going to get through this," he added, ushering Parker to the bench, and sitting, and mutely entreating her to join him, and no one, absolutely no one, could have been more astonished than Parker by her acquiescence. 

"Is it," Parker stammered forcefully, "possible?"

"It shouldn't be," Jarod answered delicately.

"W- what," Parker asked numbly, "does that mean?"

"Simulation 0-2140-EPR-2," Jarod explained somberly. "AKA Expeditious Population Regrowth secured billions of dollars in the name of national and global security and interests following a global catastrophic event, such as a war. "

Jarod observed Parker's frown deepen. She drew a breath, and said in fierce, faint voice, "So, because they feared able-bodied men would be killed they decided to let Raines determine whether or not it was possible to repopulate the country using—" Parker swallowed hard, blinked away tears. "Children," she concluded at last. "So, it is possible?"

"You and I both know that regardless of what DNA profiling reveals, I'm not, and can never be. That isn't who I am to you," Jarod explained, "it isn't who we are to each other, and even if all of the genetic markers match it won't change the way we feel about each other, or the things we've said and done."

"But," Parker argued softly, struggling to ignore Jarod's fingertips on her hand. Every caress was that of a lover's, each echoed and confirmed his words.

The things we've done.

Parker quietly contemplated things said and done, vividly recollected the taste of him, his mouth on her body. Things we can never undo.

She warred with herself, struggled to compose a coherent rebuttal.

"But it would change the way we feel about--  about the way we feel for each other," Parker challenged thinly. "Because it's wrong. Twelve years in Catholic school surrounded by incessant threats of hell only to fa—"   oh, it's hardly a fall from grace; I wasn't pushed. I didn't slip. I jumped.

Jarod recalled, with blistering disdain, the Catholic school uniform Parker had once worn, and the death of her curiosity; he had suspected all along that the latter had been a direct result of the former, but was nonetheless still alarmed and disheartened by the transformation. The little girl who had searched for a corpse and found Faith, voiced disappointments and frustrations when adults evaded questions about her mother's death had abruptly stopped asking questions, searching for truth, breaking rules for just reasons.

Jarod had been appalled to witness Parker defer to even duplicitous elders and authority figures, their statutes and whims, and adhere to their instructions with blind belief, obedience, obsequence. Religious indoctrination had laid the foundation for Mr. Parker and the Centre, served as a conduit through which any abuser could have passed. Questions and doubts were discouraged, disparaged.

Answers were provided by the church and by the Centre, and those answers were never to be doubted. It didn't seem like much of a coincidence either to Jarod that both religion and the Centre were established and governed by tyrannical patriarchs who subjugate women, use them as mere receptacles, and deem their pain a sacrifice to some greater cause- as if any cause entrenched in the oppression of others could ever be considered great.

His jaw clenched in anger, Jarod recalled one such sacrifice. A simulation. Sexuality. And, later, Parker's words, a first kiss, equal measures of precociousness and pretentiousness. Girls mature faster. Both the Centre and the church had deliberately inculcated in Parker their deficient ideologies, including the girls mature faster nonsense bestowed to secure her cooperation, although, Jarod theorized, Parker probably believed it was a compliment; after all, she'd proudly bordering haughtily spoken those words, someone else's words, prior to kissing him.

You're a woman, Angel, more mature than The Pretender, so we want you to kiss him.

Gendered stereotypes were double-edged weapons that denied Parker leadership opportunities and autonomy, while also holding her to a higher standard of accountability. Parker, evidently, according to both establishments, had only ever been mature enough to be coerced to participate in sexuality simulations—unlike her homicidal brother who was given power he didn't deserve and repeatedly abused—and when men inside the church committed unwanted sexual advances and refused to accept responsibility because boys will be boys, Angel; they simply can't help it.

Jarod was acutely aware that Parker couldn't comprehend those truths, that only years of work could provide clarity, and it was important to reinforce the basics:

"Perhaps I'd be inclined to hear Christianity's opinion on what is and isn't wrong," Jarod explained when it became clear Parker wasn't going to complete the statement, "if it didn't threaten children with hell. That's child abuse, emotional abuse, in addition to their illustrious history of sexual abuse, rape.

They're not a legitimate authority on morality, but you don't need me to tell you that, do you," Jarod continued hotly, "because Shifty G Giuseppe confirmed it years ago, and he's one of billions of charlatans who perpetrate and conceal crimes under the guise of religion, and they all deserve to have a hell of a lot more than a single digit broken.

What he did to you was wrong, what he continued doing to others while cos-playing as priest was wrong. You and I," Jarod added emphatically, "aren't wrong. The time we spent together in the loft wasn't wrong. I think you know that already, too, don't you?"

"I don't know," Parker said, her voice strained, tremulous.

"What are you going to do?" Jarod asked softly.

"I- I know what I'm supposed to do," Parker said after a moment, imagining buccal smears, an excruciating wait for answers.

"Supposed?" Jarod repeated irritably. "I'll rephrase. What do you want to do?"

"Destroy the discs, format the drives, excise the last seven hours from my mind, pretend we never had this conversation. Is that an option?"

"That depends," Jarod answered. "Are you afraid of the truth and want to run from it, or have you decided not to let the truth, regardless of what it is, control you? And are you comfortable destroying potential answers regarding your mother?"

Parker stared blankly at Jarod for a moment, contemplating the question, and finally asserted in a low, tremulous snarl, "I'm going to need a fucking second to catch my breath here, all right?" She observed Jarod's curt nod, and felt, rather than heard, his whispered apology.

"What about you?" Parker asked Jarod. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking each time happiness is within our grasp the Centre interferes. They've always done this, and always will if we allow it. I'm thinking that even if none of the markers match you'll never again look at me the way you did this morning-- because Raines included me in perpetrating crimes against your mother."

Parker recoiled from Jarod's words, drew a sharp breath. "I can't think about that."

"You're going to have to eventually, and confront it."

Parker recoiled from Jarod's grave insistence, closed her eyes, and rebutted testily, "Not right now. And you said if we allow it, as if nothing's changed."

"Because nothing has changed," Jarod argued, and softly whispered her name, "for either of us. You wouldn't be here if it had. You wanted to leave, tried, but couldn't make it any farther than this bench. Somewhere between Sydney's library and my car you decided you didn't want Broots to know the truth, that our feelings for each other matter more than any test result, more than anyone's opinion or self-righteous condemnation, and you're right. Nothing can ever change what I feel, and why should either of us feel ashamed, or any different about our feelings than we did this morning, last night? If we'd made love last night—"

Parker lifted a forestalling hand, and said quietly, "I know. You're the one that suggested waiting until the weekend."

"Another weekend destroyed by the Centre," Jarod murmured bitterly. "But that's what the Centre does. Do you regret the weekend we shared, the things we did?"

"We didn't know then that this was a possibility," Parker answered, still struggling to recover her typical composure.

"Are you relieved we didn't make love last night?"

"I should be relieved. I know that."

"Should?" Jarod repeated indignantly. "Why should you feel any way except the way you feel, do anything other than what you want to do? We're the victims in all of this. The Centre stole our autonomy, families, childhoods, happiness, hope, stripped of us freedom, violated our bodies, broke our hearts, shattered our minds, battered our souls, fractured our spirits, and still haunt our dreams. Are you going to let them take this from us, too?"