Ghost of Summer

By RJGlynn

Summer died in Autumn, a poetic and eternal truth. And one his mother denied still, after eighteen years of grief.

Tristan Keres' lips twisted as he scanned the autumnal reds, yellows, and oranges of the wild graveyard he stood in. The ancient trees of Mors-Angel Cemetery burned with the warm vibrancy of the past summer, slow to reveal the gnarled branches beneath, all soon to be dull and lifeless.

And that was as it should be; as it was supposed to be. There was a natural order to the world. To deny that was foolish and delusional. Cruel even.

Or monstrous.

Teeth clenched, he tried to ignore the small gathering beside him: five females all in sombre black, their heads bowed. At his feet, a marble plaque sat grey and cold amongst Autumn's bright detritus: his younger sister's grave. Her name, "Summer Mave Keres," lay carved in stone, bold and inescapable. The date range below it revealed a life cut short, at just seventeen years.

On this long-dreaded anniversary, she'd now been dead longer than she'd lived.

And his mother was no closer to letting her go, letting her rest in peace.

Bracing himself, Tristan looked up at the horror show that was now his 'family'. In the eighteen years since his sister's passing, he'd learn one truth: grief, if denied, could twist the world into a nightmare. Four teenage girls stood next to the brittle ruin of his mother, three of them identical but differing in age by a year: sixteen, fifteen, and fourteen. The fourth girl, older at seventeen, stood slightly apart from her sisters, her body language that of a kicked dog. Unlike her sisters' neat identical black braids, her raven hair hung tangled before her face, hiding water-blue eyes and the puckered, scar-like birth defect that marred the right side of her face.

Birth defect. Tristan snarled at the term as he eyed the girl then her perfect, carbon-copy sisters. 'Manufacturing error' would be more correct. Clones. Gods above, how could his mother have done this? How could she bare to see Summer's lake-clear eyes stare out of the faces of those wretched lab-grown monstrosities? Had she not learned yet there would be no perfect replacement? Forget Number One's physical imperfection. Physically flawless Number Two hadn't satisfied either—nor Three, nor Four—because there was no replacing the light and laughter that'd been Summer. There was no filling the bleak, bottomless hole she'd left.

Jaw hardening, Tristan swung away to stride for his car. Enough. He'd had enough. This would be the last time he came to his sister's grave; the last time he saw his mother and her pet monsters. He would not be part of this sick experiment. The ghoulish boffins his mother had employed should never have allowed her to create one copy, let alone a quartet. The medical value of the research, the lives cloned organs and tissue had since saved, didn't matter; couldn't justify the offense. Nor did he give a good goddamn about the researchers' desperate funding shortfalls, beyond the fact that lack of money had left them vulnerable to a mad woman's delusions. Hell, he'd have paid them double to burn the contents of their test tubes.

If he'd known.

Damnit. He grimaced, much of his disgust self-directed. He'd wilfully fallen out of touch with his mother, unable to deal with her suffocating version of grief. He hadn't learned of the monsters in his mother's house until she'd proudly presented Number Two at a dinner five years ago, on what would've been Summer's thirtieth birthday. To this day, bile still burned his throat anytime he recalled his first sight of that perfect monstrous face. His mother had expected him to be overjoyed—grateful. In that moment, as his stomach contents had lurched up, he'd realised his mother had never, would never, accept her part in her daughter's death: the exhausting drive for perfection that'd allowed a young ballerina no rest; no time to go to hospital when fever struck. And in her denial, Lilith Keres had committed far worse crimes than pride-bound ambition and blind neglect.

"Fuck this." Teeth set, Tristan lengthened his stride, crushing colourful leaves under polished dress shoes. He was disowning the whole mess—literally. He was a lawyer. He'd legally separate himself from his mother. Inheritance be damned. He didn't need anything from the mad woman. Didn't need the cruel, self-deluded shit she—

A pull on his sleeve; slim, pale fingers on his overcoat's dark wool.

He jolted to a stop; braced himself before he turned, his stomach knotting. Clear blue eyes, so like his own, but identical to his sister's, looked up at him, solemn in a way Summer's had never been. She'd loved life, despite the demands that had weighed down each graceful, fairy-like step.

The creature before him was no fairy. The loose dark hair had been tucked behind an ear, revealing distorted flesh: his sister's face in an alternate reality where life had not been kind, right from the moment of birth.

"What do you want, Number—" He caught himself before he revealed his own ugliness. "Sunny," he corrected, wincing inwardly. His mother had named this one Sunny because she'd not lived up to the standard needed to be considered a 'Summer'. The more perfect ones she called Summer-Day, Summer-Bell, and Summer-Song.

And each time he had to use those names, he wanted to spit.

"Mr Keres," the imperfect clone's half-distorted face creased with a faint grimace. "Might you spare me a moment?"

Damned if he would. Tristan pulled his arm free. All he was going to do was walk away; spare himself both aggravation and literal grief, because, Christ, even badly 'manufactured' as she was, this one looked like his baby sister. The defect on her cheek only emphasised the sweetness of the rest of that painfully familiar face.

But he didn't move, memory overwhelming him. Then gut-wrenching anger. His sister would never have called him "Mr Keres".

He forced his jaw to unlock. "I haven't got a lot of time to chat, so get to the point. If Mother's sent you to nag me about the remembrance dinner tonight, tell her Hell has the prior and favoured appointment."

The clone's lips twitched, raising the ghost of a familiar dimple. But again, this girl's eyes, while identical to Summer's watery blue, held nothing of his sister's warmth. Pale and clear as they were, there was darkness in them.

His gut lurched as it really hit him that this creature was not his sister.

The clone's smile carried a wry edge that contradicted memory further. "I'll pass on your apologies. But, um, it's not your mother's plans I wish to discuss, but my own. I need legal advice, Mr Keres."

Tristan raised his brows. "Do you now? I'm not sure I'll be able to help. Your, ah, 'situation' is unique, and I'm no expert in the relevant law." The courts were still debating corporate patent and property rights versus human rights. This clone was a 'product' bought and paid for by his mother, one created from someone else's genetic code. Clones had a right to breathe and live without cruelty, but beyond that? Much was up in the air. But one thing had been established: they had no claim on inheritance; no claim to call themselves family.

Tristan hardened his soul. He owed this creature nothing.

The clone ducked her head, setting all that raven hair falling across her imperfect face again. The move—one of discomfort, perhaps even shyness—hit low in the gut.

Tristan silently cursed. Lab-grown monstrosity or not, this creature, the first of his mother's wretched experiments, was mentally, emotionally, and physically just seventeen.

Exactly the age Summer had been.

As the clone stepped back, he saw his sister's face that last time he'd seen her: pale, exhausted, but still generous and strong enough to have fooled him with a bright smile as she told him she was fine, it was "just the flu." Every year, some seven hundred thousand people died because of that common little thing called influenza, some of them young people with promised decades of life ahead of them.

He found himself catching the clone's arm—the first time he'd ever made physical contact with any of his mother's 'replacements'. The thin flesh and bone in his grip struck him as unfamiliar; Summer had been wiry and strong, honed by unforgiving dance practices and performances. The arm he held felt frail in comparison.

"Does Mother not force you to dance?" The question left him before he could stop it. "I thought she insisted you all follow the same lessons and interests as Summer." How else did one obtain a proper replacement?

"I hate dance." Sunny lifted her chin, a gesture that jolted loose more memories: childhood arguments, full of stubborn defiance on both sides—most ending in comical attacks on a "singularly annoying" elder brother. "Mother doesn't make me take lessons anymore, since I'm useless anyway, but she makes the others."

Tristan felt his pulse boom in his skull. More memories he'd long buried rose: his little sister, age six, hiding her dance shoes in the hope she might miss ballet lessons, and all the tearful sobs he'd pretended not to hear over too many years. How many times had he skipped out, left the house, to avoid those desperate sounds and his mother's unrelenting demands to "Practice, practice, practice!" Lilith had almost touched greatness when she'd been young, and had been determined to recapture the chance through her child.

"Do they want to dance?" He shouldn't have cared. Those creatures weren't his sister; weren't even family. And hadn't he just declared himself done with his mother for good?

"Bell likes jazz better than ballet," the clone answered, her gaze returning to her shoes. "Day prefers skateboarding, and Song keeps up with the dance stretches only because it helps with the flexibility needed for rock climbing."

Tristan blinked. "Mother allows skateboarding and climbing?"

"No." A quick flash of clear-blue eyes. "But it's hard to keep track of 'four insufferably undisciplined failures' all of the time."

"She calls you that?"

"Hourly." A soft but taut reply. "It's a complement as far as I'm concerned."

Tristan almost smiled at that quiet defiance, but bitterness veered him toward a snarl. "Given her goal, I'm going to agree."

A slight smirk met and matched his cynicism, the clone seemingly in perfect agreement. Then she ducked her head, her confidence wilting once again.

An oath lodged in Tristan's throat. The girl's too-thin, hunched shoulders provoked discomfort he did not want to feel, because mixed up with trite human concern was a queasy swirl of guilt. At age twenty, he'd been too pissed off and self-absorbed to care about anyone's pain but his own. He'd easily walked away from his baby sister, letting her convince him she was fine. This instant, eighteen years later, with him again on the brink of turning his back on his mother's manipulations and drama, the old resentments still burned nuclear hot. Unfortunately, they now felt indulgent, worn, and—damn it—cruel.

Shaking his head, he looked away, then back to the clone nervously shrinking before him. Could he again desert a young girl who clearly needed help? His mouth twisted. If he was honest, yes. Hell, yes. He was a bastard; he'd had to be or he'd have been used up and taken for a fool by his mother and all the other emotional vampires in the world. The real question right that moment wasn't could he walk away, it was could he live with himself if he did.

Heaving out an aggravated sigh, he raked back his hair, ignoring its acute colour match to that of the girl's shaggy mop. "What advice are you after, kid? If I can't help, I'll refer you to someone who can."

The girl's shoulders hunched. For a second, terror, or something akin to it, locked her thin frame. "I—we..." She fell silent, her expression again lost to her hair.

Tristan shoved his hands into his coat pockets, cursing a maddening urge to hug the girl. Neither of them would welcome that nonsense. "Just spit it out, kid. I mean, what can you say that's going to shock me or piss me off more than what my mother has already done?"

The girl swallowed then lifted her melancholy gaze. "You're her only legal relative."

Tristan sneered. "Until I file the papers to disown the witch."

Fear flared in Sunny's eyes. "You can't. Not until—" She cut off, her whole body curling in on itself so starkly it struck Tristan as an attempt at self-deletion.

Tristan's stomach clenched, but he stomped sympathy under a mental boot. He wouldn't be manipulated by trembling, cloned bones. "Until what?" What scheme was this kid trying to drag him into? After decades dealing with his mother, he truly wished the girl luck with that shit.

Hunched and trembling, Sunny pulled in a sharp breath. "I'll be eighteen soon, an adult. I'll be able to leave, but the others..." She looked over her shoulder to the grave site. "I can't leave them. I want to be able to take them when I go, but..."

Tristan snorted at the clone's audacity, appreciating it, but—"Yeah, we both know that's not going to happen. Mother will—"

"She's going to make more." Sunny swung about; gripped his coat's sleeve, unfamiliar desperation in her too-familiar eyes. "She's drawn up contracts with the Cellular Innovation Group, promised them another research grant. Have her declared insane." It was a whisper, stark and brutal. "I'll take care of the rest. You'll never have to see any of us again."

Tristan stared, shock shattering his thoughts. More copies? His mother was negotiating the manufacture of more clones? His mind threatened to blank in sheer denial, but the girl's diabolical request registered next, a second hard slap. She wanted his mother declared mentally incompetent ... so all four clones could run away? "What the actual fuck?"

Sunny flinched back. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

Tristan caught her arm; yanked her back to him. As her frightened gaze jerked to his, he had to fight not to shake her—fight not to laugh breathlessly as his gut spasmed. "Oh, fuck." The first snort of mirth escaped him. The next threw his head back, bitter humour bursting belly to throat. "Oh, my god. Oh, my fucking god!" He barely caught enough breath to speak.

The girl tried to wrench free, but he grabbed her, hugged her—swung her in a wild circle whipping up bright leaves. "You're a goddamn genius! Why the hell didn't I think of that?" His mother was obsessed with replicating a dead child; had a pathological need for perfection that'd led to the abuse of multiple minors in her care. An intervention wasn't only morally and ethically justified, it was goddamn legally required!

Sunny wriggled loose, her eyes going wide. "You'll do it? You'll let me take my sisters?"

"Hell no." All humour drained from him, rage slicing through his gut, a hot knife. Summer hadn't expected help. Summer had tried to deal with everything on her own. And look where the hell that'd got everyone. "No eighteen-year-old should be left in charge of three other teenagers. Guardianship gets transferred to me, and I don't give two shits who climbs walls, skates, or wears a fucking tutu—though I'd be happy if you all tossed the damn pointe shoes. You're not Summer. Never can be, never will be, never should be."

Sunny jerked in a breath, hope flaring in her gaze before darkness again swamped it. "You hate us."

Tristan winced, unable to deny the disgust burning in his gut even now. "Yes." He met the accusation head on. "And we have that in common. Don't you hate what she's tried to make you? Isn't that why you want the old bat stuffed into a straightjacket and tossed out of your life like last week's Chanel-scented garbage?"

Trembling, her respiration hitching, the girl looked to the grave and the woman who, through research grants and obsession, had brought her into the world. "She really is a crazy old witch," she whispered, then looked back to him, autumn sunlight glinting in water-pale eyes. "So, I guess I can't hold your subpar personality against you."

Tristan snorted, grudgingly entertained, but amusement died as the girl's snark landed with a winding punch. Sarcasm didn't fit those sunlit eyes, but—"Shit." His smile faltered before it became a savage flash of teeth. "Kid, you're not Summer, but damn it if you don't remind me of me."