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been
anyone.”
    James shrugged. “It was probably more hope
than anything else.”
    They drove the rest of the way in silence. If
she was Elizabeth, would her memory ever come back? She and Hannah
had done plenty of research on amnesia when Hannah had first taken
her in. One man lost forty-six years of memories after slipping and
hitting his head. The cause of the amnesia was probably from the
lack of blood flow to his temporal lobe, but when Hannah paid for
Fiona to have a few scans on her brain, the scan didn’t detect
that. She did have a bad bruise on her head when Hannah first found
her and a mild concussion from it, but no lasting brain
damage.
    The psychologist she’d met with for about two
months said she probably had dissociative amnesia, which was caused
by extreme psychological stress. That definitely made sense,
considering what had happened to her. She seldom had a sound night
of sleep. With other cases of amnesia, sometimes the memories came
back, sometimes they didn’t.
    But if she was the replica… that was
completely different. Elizabeth thought the replica wouldn’t have
memories. What would make her think that? They had never done it
before. It wasn’t as if memories were in a separate area from the
rest of the brain. Fiona knew that from the last four months. Small
things could spark a memory of a nameless face. Everything held
meaning, even if she couldn’t describe why. Some things had been
explained since she’d met James: why she wanted to go to Florence,
Italy; her reaction to Indian food; why she’d chosen the name
Fiona.
    Fiona remembered the successful cloning of
Dolly the sheep, but the cells’ biological clocks, unable to reset,
gave the clone a short life. But this was obviously different. If
the Remus project sought true replication and achieved it with
Fiona, then her genes were identical to Elizabeth Normans’s genes
on the day the replication happened. What did that mean for her
telomeres, her biological clock?
    “ We’re almost there,” James
said.
    She saw the cemetery ahead as James looked for
a parking spot. It took up nearly two blocks, the statues and
tombstones visible through the brightly colored leaves. After they
parked, they approached the cemetery’s large iron gates and checked
in at the office.
    “ This place is huge,” James told
her as they strolled onto the path. “It’s the only active cemetery
in Manhattan.”
    When the breeze blew through the trees, leaves
sprinkled down onto the tombstones. The sun shone down in cracks
through the branches, spreading kaleidoscope designs on the grass.
The tombstones were old and intricate; on some of them Fiona
couldn’t even read the text. They followed a stone path, passing
tourists who stopped to take pictures of angelic statues, crosses,
and other monuments.
    James led her to a free-standing building
where engravings ran along the stone in rows and aisles. There were
small cracks in them; there must have been niches for the remains.
She looked at him questioningly.
    “ Walter decided to cremate the
bodies,” James said quietly.
    “ Oh.” Fiona had expected a grave to
visit.
    He cleared his throat. “It’s just… the fire
was so bad and it destroyed a lot, you know? Plus, the house cost a
lot of money, and we all tried to chip in, but, well…” James
motioned to one block of stone just below eye-level. Richard
Normans lay in the middle with his daughter and wife on either side
of him. They all had the same date of death, and Elizabeth was born
April 3rd, 1991, just as Fiona had remembered.
    There were small vases along the wall, and
some of them were filled with flowers. Fiona wished she’d brought
something.
    She had spent all summer wondering if she had
any family. Elizabeth was an only child and her parents were now
dead. Fiona fought back tears. She remembered that crushing weight
from her nightmares as she ran down the steps, the knowledge that
something was lost. Something irreplaceable. The hopes