Aaron and Derek were led to a comfortable waiting room further down the hallway from the director’s office, the tall woman monotoning to them that their patience was appreciated until it was time for their appointments. As soon as the two collectors left, Aaron turned to the distraught clone.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as hell not waiting around to get dismantled,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter anymore…” Derek moaned. “I knew the process he used was imperfect… I knew he could’ve done a better job creating me.” His chest shook with the beginnings of a second panic attack, and he gasped, “It’s all ending!”

“No, it’s not—it helps to remind yourself that it’s not a heart attack, and it can’t actually kill you, and it’ll pass in a few minutes,” said Aaron, who had been about to have a panic attack himself but managed to forestall it to tend to the inventor.

“I thought he’d try to fix me—we were researching better cloning techniques! Instead what does he do? Makes himself a new one and lets them put me away here, where he’ll never have to think about me!” Derek wheezed and coughed into his sleeve.

“It’s really easy to lose hope when it’s happening, but if you can try to deepen your breath and focus on something simple, like your feet on the floor or how your shirt feels or whatever, it can help calm you down. Mindfulness, you know? Also, telling yourself that nothing about this defines you, and there are people who love you—or, um, it seems like you at least have some really nice friends here—” Aaron was surprised to find himself in his element.

“He probably couldn’t bear to watch it happening, so he used our money to make her instead—Erica… And he let me disappear here, and he f—forgot about me…”

“See, what makes it spiral out of control, is that you allow yourself to get anxious about being anxious. You try to stop it and it makes it worse. If you’re able to pause and examine your thoughts, and ask yourself: Is this negative self-talk actually true? Where is this coming from? Is there really a reason to panic? Could this be an opportunity to work on my coping skills?” Aaron watched the clone for some sign that the attack was dying down. “Ok, I don’t know if what you’re saying about Eric is true, since I don’t know him at all. And as for our situation right now, yeah, we’re maybe about to die…”

“There’s no point trying…”

“But most of the time, it’s something much less significant, and the problem is these repeating thought processes. Usually, like, some socially awkward thing happened. Or you have a show or a job that’s making you overwhelmed, or there was some miscommunication—”

The clone finally looked him in the eye, his expression conveying desolate annoyance. “Ok, kid. Shut the fuck up. Let’s get out of here.”

Aaron gave a determined nod, re-postponed his panic attack, and went to check the door to the hall. He saw the tall woman’s leather sleeve brushing against the window, and carefully angled himself for a better view. She slouched over her phone. Something on the screen made her raise her eyebrows, and she glanced around, looked at the door she was guarding (Aaron ducked below the window), and then swore under her breath and strode off down the hall with a nervous jounce to her step.

Aaron didn’t know it, but this was the first time she’d checked her phone all day. She’d worked very late the previous evening collecting the two Five-O clones, stayed up for a few Saturday night beers, slept in until her shift, hurried to work, and left the phone charging in the office for an hour. Now she’d finally had found the message from her co-worker telling her they’d made a mistake and the clone that said he was a twin really was a twin.

Unfortunately, Spencer was a noob and failed to remember that literally every clone in the building had insisted to her that it was a twin. She grunted in frustration.

And what had become of Spencer, anyway?

As it turned out, many citizens were eager to take advantage of the Clone Department’s new weekend hours. As soon as Jaymie and Jymmy had left, a woman came in to inquire about the status of a payment plan application she’d submitted ages ago and received no response about; four separate people phoned to ask probing questions about the penalties of illegal cloning in a way that led Spencer to believe they had either made an illegal clone or were planning to do so; an email sent in the night from his colleague reminded him there were a few hours’ worth of paperwork to fill out for the two new clones she’d collected; a man registered a clone he insisted he’d invented before the laws against home-cloning were set in place—the clone was, remarkably, a woman. Spencer didn’t ask how he’d done it.

It was past dinnertime when he finished, and he felt even worse about the misunderstanding. He decided he’d take Jaymie to get his brother himself, and if the government had a problem with it, he’d remind them that they’d accidentally incarcerated someone’s innocent human family member. He parked on Pandora Street just before 7 p.m. to pick up the man he thought was Jaymie.

When the woman guarding Aaron and Derek saw the message telling her she’d collected the wrong guy, she sent a reply reading, “Which one?????” and went to consult the other collector on duty about whether it might be a joke.

Perhaps Aaron would have been better off taking his chances in the warm waiting room. The woman might have postponed their “appointments” and given Jaymie enough time to sort things out. But he didn’t know any of these details, so he and Derek seized their opportunity as soon as her back was turned, sprinting down the hall toward the office of the director, who didn’t work on Sundays and who had the one large window Aaron knew of in the building. He cranked it open and kicked the screen out and wished he had his Sorels as he prepared to jump toward another terrible, grinning danger.

***

Jaymie lurched down the front steps and into the garage, fumbling in his coat pocket for his keys and cigarettes. He flicked his lighter, swore when it didn’t catch, and then swore again as he stopped short to avoid kicking a strange heap on the floor. He stumbled, bashed his funny bone against the side of the van, landed hard on his knees, and sent his lighter skittering beneath it.

“Motherfrugger! Sonofabitching—” He lay on the damp, dirty concrete floor, groping under the vehicle, only to feel the keys snatched out of his other hand.

“You’re not driving,” said Rex.

“I have to save Aaron! Jymmy, that bastard!” he panted, scrambling to his feet, his sleeve soaked and grimy and his hands lighter-less.

“You’re drunk, you wino!”

“I tripped!”

The heap he’d nearly bulldozed turned out to be the three elderly cats, who’d decided that a few hours in the chilly garage would be preferable to a reunion with the Brzezinskis’ grandmother, who always greeted them with cold, closed-fingered, featherlight strokes on the back that made them feel weird and icky deep down.

“Go around.” Rex stood stony-faced, pointing to the other side of the van. The sleet-filled squall was sculpting their clean, combed hair back into its spiky halo, and their unzipped, too-large winter coat winged around their skinny frame as the wind hit them. Light from the porch gleamed off their septum ring. Three shadows prowled around their firmly planted boots.

“Dropped my lighter…” he said feebly.

“You can use mine. Go around.”

“Why do you have a lighter!” He took it from Rex. “God, thank you—we’re going to talk about this later, though! I’m keeping this!”

Jaymie nearly tripped over the cats a second time as they gave up seeking pettings from Rex and tried to elicit a few cuddles from him instead. He clumsily moved them away from the van and got in the passenger side. He drew a cigarette with shaky hands.

“Rex, you have no idea how bad I needed one of these. I didn’t even realize it, I was so distracted in there—I was thinking about Aar, and I was sure Jymmy was going to fuck everything up—oh my god—how could they all go on thinking he was me? This—” he waved the cigarette, “—is what I wanted the whole time, and I just forgot that’s what I wanted—”

“Are you wasted? How would you forget? You were chain smoking all afternoon!” Rex snapped, carefully backing out of the garage. Jaymie cracked his window and blew out a stream of smoke, which was immediately regurgitated back into his mouth by the storm.

The front door opened with a warm flash of light, and Jaymie flinched as though someone had taken a photo at an inconvenient moment. Their mother leaned into the wind and called, “Are the cats out here? It’s too cold for them—they’re as old as you are, Rex!” She padded down the steps to collect them, hunched against the wind, hair blowing across her face, rubbing her upper arms and trying to smile, and it occurred to Jaymie, in a distant kind of way, that she’d been enjoying the soft, southern, early winter sunshine until that afternoon, and she’d just voluntarily deposited herself into the middle of a nightmare.

“It starts at ten, right? You’re on first?” she asked.

“You got it, Ma!” he yelled out the window, wincing back at her. “We’ll see you there!”

***

“It’s too far to jump,” said Derek, still short of breath. “And it’s freezing.” Outside the window an empty parking lot was dimly made visible by a light perched high on a pole. Colossal pine tree silhouettes swayed like tipsy sentinels at the other end of the lot.

“We stand a better chance against the cold than against them,” said Aaron. He peered into the darkness, gauging the distance to the ground. It was the kind of jump that wouldn’t kill you, but could casually break your ankles before sending you on your way. “I’m gonna go for it.”

A female voice shouted from down the hallway. Derek clasped his shoulder and began to gasp again.

“It’s ok, stay calm, we gotta go,” Aaron whispered, feeling his own hysteria welling in his chest. A tiny mewl sounded behind them—his therapist had abandoned professionality and followed him to provide moral support in his time of need. He scooped her up without thinking and stuffed her into his shirt, tucking the bottom firmly into his belted jeans.

He swung his legs over the sill. Heavy wind pummelled him. He twisted himself around, dangling by his elbows and then by his fingertips. The cat complained half-heartedly against his stomach. “Here we go,” he muttered, and dropped.

The impact was jarring but not painful; his feet hit wet snow on a bed of pine chips, from which some brambly plants sprouted in the summer months.

“It’s safe,” he hissed up to Derek.

Derek was panting again. “They’re coming,” he rasped.

“Ok, well, hurry up!” said Aaron, starting to shiver. “We’ve got to keep moving!”

“I can’t…” Derek breathlessly lowered a leg over the ledge and pulled it back again.

“Derek for christsake they’re going to take you apart!”

The scientist edged his feet over the sill, still gasping.

“I’ll try to—look, hang by your hands, like I did, and as soon as you drop, I’ll grab your legs and help you. I’ll basically be catching you!” Aaron removed the cat and put her aside. He pushed his sleet-soaked hair out of his face, wondering how long he’d still be able to feel his arms, and reached encouragingly toward the clone.

“It’s over!” Derek suddenly howled, toppling forward from his seat on the ledge all at once and without warning, so that Aaron was forced to throw himself out of the way or be struck in the head by a pair of pointy-toed brown shoes. Derek fell as a dead weight and landed in a formless jumble on the ground.

“Aahhhthat’s not what I said to do!” Aaron cried in horror. He scrambled to Derek’s side and rolled him, as carefully as he could, onto his back. There was little he could have done; the clone was dead—as they say—before he hit the ground. He’d reached his time of expiration, having lived the usual, healthy lifespan for a being crafted of rubber and dye and a handful of chemical elements.

As he looked at the clone, Aaron realized the truth about his friend’s demise; what he’d thought were panic attacks were possibly a signal that Derek’s hand-crafted form was beginning to fail. He briefly wondered if he’d have guessed sooner, had he bothered being a better listener.

Derek had no visible broken bones, but the rubber mask of his face had been knocked off-kilter by the short fall, skewing his features just one notch away from human, like one of your action figures after your very young sibling has gone unsupervised for two minutes and put it in the oven with some baking cookies to see what would happen.

In the weak light, the folds of his mouth had grown shadows in odd asymmetrical places. One of the open holes for his eyes had become slightly unaligned with where his actual eye was, catching him in an involuntary wink that was neither the non-creepy nor the non-awkward type. It was as though he were a reflection in a fun house mirror—not the skinny or fat ones but the one at the end that just makes the subject look vaguely wrong. A rivulet of sleet ran down his forehead and melted into the socket. Aaron heard himself emit a small whimper. He gripped his wet cat and began to shiver in earnest.

A shadow fell over him. “Oh, shit,” said the collector.

Aaron looked up at the window and made eye contact for a split second before they both bolted—she to a safer exit and he to wherever she was not. He stepped on a stone, cursed, and turned back to tug the shabby dress shoes from the feet of the deceased clone, mumbling, “I’m a terrible person.” He tucked them under his arm and promised his panic attack one final rain check. The gale blew him toward the towering pines at the other end of the lot, and he ran sock-footed for their cover.

He could have perished in a matter of minutes had it still been minus forty, but the weather had broken its days-long cold spell, done a total about-turn, and decided to have one last wild night before it really committed to the bitter-arctic-winter business. Unfortunately, it no longer knew its limits. It spewed freezing rain down on the escaping drummer in a way that made you seriously hope it had someone holding its hair back.