“When the virus hit the city, it was easy to find each other. There weren’t very many people left standing, after all, and a disproportionate number of them looked like us. Until then we had no idea how many of us there were in New York. Once we found each other — there are eight of us, spread out in pairs — and we knew we were immune, we decided to take action.”

The Wiley citizens were regrouping, tending to cuts and scrapes from those who had tripped and fallen in their frenzy to escape. The driver of the white car had given up, sped off in retreat. When we didn’t follow it, the motorcycle women understood that we weren’t in cahoots with the escapee. They removed their helmets and approached us.

The one who did most of the talking introduced herself as Jo; the other one, Mina, said a brief hello and then moved away to make some phone calls. I didn’t know who they were, but I knew where they came from several decades ago. “You, too,” Jo said to me. I nodded. I heard Ruth’s intake of breath, but neither of the Lao women seemed to recognize her. They paid no attention to her, in fact; they only looked at me.

“It was a risk to band together like this given that we’d make things a lot easier for our little serial killer friend,” Jo continued. “But what else could we do? We had to try to stop the virus from spreading — and then help the victims when it did spread.”

“Who exactly is spreading it?” I asked. Normally Ruth or Harrigan would have been the one doing the questioning, but Ruth had remained mute since the Lao Baby women approached us and Harrigan was off with Jimmy attending to the Wileyans.

Jo shrugged. “Anarchist groups mostly. They’re a ragtag bunch, not a lot of money, mostly operating on the sheer desire to cause chaos. I’m guessing they must have been given a vaccine, or what they’ve been told is a vaccine, since none of them wear masks. A few have been caught but of course they aren’t talking much. For all their supposed disdain for authority, they all end up pretty saying the same thing: they were following orders from someone else.”

“Someone who no doubt would say the same thing,” I added.

Jo nodded. “Yeah, there does seem to be quite a chain of command. Most of the ‘foot soldiers’ aren’t too bright,” she smiled humorlessly, “but obviously this thing has been carefully organized and planned for some time. Somebody is clearly in charge of the apocalypse.”

Still Ruth said nothing, had no expression on her face, but we were both thinking the same thing. We knew who was in charge.

As if we hadn’t experienced enough strangeness and surprise that day and the ones prior, at that moment someone began to sing.

Si, Mi chiamano Mimi…

It was Jimmy. A clear, sweet tenor, singing, of all things, the famous aria from La Boheme while he held the hands of a little girl and boy who had been crying a moment ago. Even though the part demanded a soprano and was close to the oddest thing he could have been singing at the moment, everyone, every last person there, stopped what they were doing to listen.

Jimmy, unaware of the attention, stopped singing momentarily and bent to his two young charges, whose mother was being treated for a turned ankle. “Can you hum that?” he said. He hummed the melody slowly to them.

They hummed it back to him.

“Awesome!” he beamed. “Next time I come back I’ll teach you the words.” They nodded in unison.

He straightened up and turned to join us but stopped when he realized the attention on him. He looked around, shrugged, and made his way back to me. “I used to study opera before I went to chef’s school,” he said. He stood before me with a sheepish grin.

Behind him, the weirdness continued. The boy and girl were being mobbed by other children demanding to know what Jimmy had taught them. Within a minute or so, a small grammar school chorus was humming Mimi’s song. The adults listened, rapt with delight, as though the children sang cheery Christmas carols. Most of them did, at least, though I noticed a small group of older men looking on with stern disapproval. Eventually the other adults took note of these men and hastily — guiltily, it seemed — put an end to the singing, bringing everyone back into the grimness of the moment.

“OK, so you were right,” I said to him. “People do need to enjoy life.”

“Now more than ever,” he said, his grin fading a little. “Some of those people inhaled what came out of the canisters before they exploded. They probably have the virus. And unless Dr. Baxter’s vaccine really works, I might have it too.”

He spoke quietly so that only I heard him. I took his hands in mine. “It works. There’s no point thinking otherwise.”

He smiled and kissed both my eyebrows, for no particular reason. Then he nodded in Harrigan’s direction. “Check him out,” he murmured.

I wasn’t sure what he meant; Harrigan was just standing there, but then it occurred to me that he had been watching Jo discretely for some time. Harrigan caught us watching him. He looked away and actually appeared, of all things, sheepish, then busied himself with something in the trunk of the car. “She does look like Maggie,” I said softly to Jimmy.

I hadn’t told Harrigan that I remembered Maggie mentioning some guy she’d been seeing, right before she died, a guy I realized now could only have been him. Maggie was always seeing some guy, of course, though she seldom differentiated between them and usually talked about them with the same level of cheerful nonchalance she might use to talk about anything she was into at the moment. “This one?” I recalled her saying a few days before the café. “Intense. Comes on all strong and silent but really very sweet. Kind of way too into me, even though he doesn’t completely approve of my lifestyle. Hilarious, since I’m sure this guy is into some shady shit himself, but then who isn’t these days. You should meet him, but,” and she cackled, “you probably won’t.” I knew what she meant by that: she figured she’d be moving on to something else before long. As it turned out, she had been right, though not in the way either of us expected.

I turned away to give Harrigan a moment to collect himself and realized that Ruth had joined us, I had no idea when. “There’s a reason they look alike,” she said, in as quiet a voice as I had used.

I looked carefully at Ruth. For the first time since I’d seen her again, strong emotion seemed to threaten to intrude into her impassive exterior. She met my eyes. Some struggle was going on behind hers. She looked over at Jo, and then Jimmy, whose presence seemed to merely annoy her. Finally she spoke.

“All of you look alike, and it isn’t just because of your shared ethnicity. There’s something else — something you need to know.”

+

The mothers never knew. They’d only been told that the experiments prolonged the gestational period and that was why they remained pregnant for so long.

The truth was the original fetuses had all been aborted. Gerald’s idea. Nobody objected. The mothers had been implanted with zygotes that were partially theirs, partially from another source — that other source being a different egg, one that had undergone the DNA sequencing.

The Lao Babies had no fathers.

Ruth had always seen that as the best irony of them all: the perfect beings had two mothers. A lot of the men in the lab were surprisingly angry about that part of the experiment, and only that part — as though it had been some vast conspiracy to phase men out. It wasn’t that at all. That was just a happy coincidence, she often thought wryly.

The Lao Babies had different birth mothers, of course, but their second mother, the one who provided the modified DNA, was the same.

“You,” I said.

Ruth nodded.

“Well. That explains why I have freckles,” I blurted, because I didn’t know what else to say. “So we’re all sisters.” I didn’t add that this meant Ruth was our mother, though the omission still screamed its truth.

“Yes,” Ruth said. An all-encompassing yes. “And.”

There couldn’t possibly be another and.

“And there was a boy. Much later. Your — brother. I believe you’ve already met him.”