Constance (Constance #1)(4)
“No birth, no soul! No birth, no soul!”
“God doesn’t want you!”
“Pretentious meat!”
With each chant, the crowd took another step forward. By law, protesters were required to remain forty feet back from the clinic doors, but the police, who mostly sided with the demonstration, had better things to do than enforce the legal buffer zone. Normally it didn’t matter. No one who could afford Palingenesis’s services arrived on foot. The clientele was nine-digit wealthy and preferred the private underground parking garage to avoid all the ugliness out front.
Except for Con, of course. Her bank account rarely broke three digits and some days barely two. She couldn’t even afford a new used scooter after her last one had been stolen. So to keep her monthly appointments, she had no choice but to run this gauntlet. Not that running was something she did well anymore, but she still had a little fight left in her. Elbowing her way through a gap, she emerged at the front of the protest. The doors, and the safety of the guards, beckoned only a short distance away.
Con made a break for it, hobbling for the door and pleading with her reconstructed knee not to lock up. Realizing they had been deceived, the demonstrators roared. It was a terrible, prehistoric sound, and Con braced for the hands that would drag her back into the protest’s maw. This was the part she hated most. When all eyes would be on her. Ironic considering how much she loved to be on stage. She had sung for audiences as large as five thousand, yet this crowd, no more than four hundred strong, made her stomach seize up. But then the guards spotted her and rushed forward, each taking an arm, and bundled her inside as the crowd howled for blood.
The soundproof doors sealed closed behind them, silencing the din of the protesters. In the abrupt calm, Con looked questioningly at the guards.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked, trying to catch her breath.
“You didn’t hear?” the taller of the two said. “Abigail Stickling died last night.”
“Died?” his partner said. “You mean base-jumped off the Monroe Hotel without a parachute.”
Con was stunned at the news, but it explained why there were so many protesters this morning. Dr. Abigail Stickling, the mother of human cloning and co-founder of Palingenesis, the bogeyman who haunted so many conspiracy theories, was dead. A suicide. This would be a day of triumphant celebration for the CoA and anyone else who believed human cloning to be an abomination.
“Either that or she forgot her broomstick,” the first guard said.
His partner snickered and made a whistling noise of something plummeting to the ground. Con walked away without a word, and the guards fell silent behind her. Good, she thought. Abigail Stickling might be a controversial figure, but she was also Con’s aunt. So the hell with the guards and their petty cruelty. The irony, though, was that Con shared similar thoughts about her aunt, a woman she barely knew beyond what she read in the media.
The last time she’d seen her aunt had been the commotion at her father’s funeral. An ugly fight had erupted between her mother and her aunt before the service. To this day, Con didn’t know what had set her mother off, but having grown up with her, she knew it wouldn’t have taken much. The Sticklings were a large clan—two sisters and four brothers—that enjoyed the spectacle of taking sides. Con’s uncles had all rallied around the grieving widow and against Abigail, who everyone agreed had put on airs since moving to Boston for school. It was also agreed that her interest in human cloning, still in the theoretical stages, was a sin of pride—a wretched befoulment of God’s design.
In the end, Abigail had been permanently disinvited from her parents’ home. Her name wasn’t to be spoken, her existence not to be acknowledged in any way. Everything Con knew about her aunt she’d learned either from the media or else from Gamma Jol, her father’s mother. Gamma Jol had never wanted anything to do with the Sticklings in the first place, her son’s courtship of Mary an enduring mystery. Perhaps that was why she took such pleasure in answering all the questions her granddaughter couldn’t ask anyone else.
For her part, Abigail had taken her shunning in stride and left West Texas, never to return. It had made her an inspiration of sorts to Con six years later when she’d rebelled against her mother’s strict expectations and gone to live with Gamma Jol. She’d resolved to follow her aunt’s example by getting out of Lanesboro and making something of herself, only her route would be music, not science. Her aunt had gotten out alright. She’d become both world famous and phenomenally wealthy, and she’d never spoken to anyone in the family again.
Not one solitary word.
Until the letters arrived.
Two years ago, lawyers had turned up at the doorstep of every member of the family, bearing legal paperwork gifting each with a clone. Con had to hand it to her aunt. What was the market price of an individual clone? Twenty-five, thirty million? No one in the family had ever had money, so to an outsider, it would’ve looked like an extraordinarily generous and extravagant gesture. To the family, however, it was Abigail rubbing her success in their faces by offering the one thing that none of them would ever accept.
If there was any doubt of her aunt’s intentions, the accompanying letter was a masterpiece of score-settling that perfectly encapsulated the resentments that had riven the family for decades. Con remembered the last sentence verbatim: I hope this small token of my affection allows you all to live long, long lives wallowing in your collective mediocrity. Apparently, Con’s mother wasn’t the only one in the family who could hold a grudge.