"That," she says, pointing at Ellie with the (closed) water bottle, "is a great question. We spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, back home. It turns out we were cloned from a woman who was what's called a genetic chimera. In people, it means someone who has cells from two or more zygotes. In this woman's case, it meant the people who made the clones could use her genetic material as a baseline for both male and female clones. They told her they were doing cancer research, which, I guess was technically true but a pretty fucking large lie of omission."

She rolls the bottle idly between her palms, looking at the fire as she thinks about Kendall for a moment. "They wanted to see how all kinds of things affected the baseline. How we were raised, yeah, but it turned out to be way bigger than that. Private futurists with ideas about transhumanism, and a whole military operation, it was ..." A pause. "It was a lot. And my sisters and I were never supposed to be aware of any of it."