The sight of my own face staring out from two completely different people on that screen sent a wave of nausea crashing over me. The world seemed to stop, the roar of the river fading into a distant, muffled hum. The clone—or whatever the man was—handed a glowing drive to the woman who bore my features, while inside the glass incubator, my daughter’s chest rose and fell in unnatural, rhythmic intervals.

«Biological override in fifteen seconds,» the satellite phone synthesized, its cold speaker crackling with static. «Biometric alignment required for sync.»

I scrambled off the floating pontoon, my boots squelching on the slick wooden planks of the tidal marsh. Blood from the graze on my cheek mixed with river water, stinging fiercely in the biting wind, but I barely felt it. Adrenaline surged through my veins, hot and demanding. I sprinted up the embankment, past the rotting hulls of decommissioned barges, keeping to the deep shadows cast by towering stacks of rusted shipping containers.

Dock 14 loomed ahead, an isolated finger of cracked asphalt stretching into the murky bay.

As I reached the perimeter fence, the metallic clang of boots echoed across the open pier. I pressed myself flat against a cargo container, my chest heaving, and peeked around the corrugated edge.

Evelyn stood beside the open transport, her fingers hovering over a digital slate. «The signal was sent,» she said, her voice taut with nervous energy. «If Maya has the disruptor, the archive protocols are already downloading into her neural pathway.»

«She won’t make it in time,» the male duplicate replied. His voice was a frightening pitch-perfect echo of my own, pitched down just an octave. «The Director ensured her conditioning would trigger a shut-down the moment she saw us together. The shock is designed to induce an absence seizure.»

My breath caught in my throat. A shut-down? My head throbbed, a sharp, needle-like pain lancing behind my left temple. A sudden, heavy lethargy tugged at my limbs, my eyelids growing impossibly heavy as my brain recognized the faces before me. No. Fight it. I dug the sharp corner of the disruptor into the open wound on my cheek. The sharp burst of agony flared through my nervous system, instantly snapping the fog away.

I checked the phone screen. The timer hit 00:00.

A sharp, deafening chime rang out from the incubator. The glass hissed, releasing a plume of dense white vapor. Inside, the little girl’s eyes snapped open. They weren’t brown like mine, nor green like Julian’s.

They burned a vivid, unnatural violet.

«The subject is conscious,» the woman with my face announced coldly, reaching down toward the child. «Initiating extraction.»

«Stop!» I yelled, stepping out from behind the container into the harsh floodlights of the dock. I raised the satellite phone in one hand and the glowing disruptor in the other. «Touch her and I wipe the core!»

Every head turned toward me. The male duplicate didn’t flinch; instead, a slow, terrifyingly familiar smile spread across his lips.

«You’re too late, sister,» he murmured softly.

Sister?

Before I could process the word, a heavy hand clamped over my mouth from behind, dragging me back into the shadows of the container. A hard metal cylinder pressed directly against the base of my skull.

«Don’t move, Maya,» a voice whispered in my ear—Julian’s voice, but completely devoid of the warmth, pain, or desperation he had shown only minutes ago beneath the iron grate. His hold was precise, calculated, and unbroken by any injury.

I froze, my blood running instantly cold. «Julian… your ribs…»

«Nanite suppression,» he said casually, his grip like a vice. «A useful trick to fool your father. He thought he was playing the game, but he was always just the distraction.»

He reached around, effortlessly snatching the satellite phone and the disruptor from my paralyzed hands. He stepped into the light, pushing me roughly ahead of him toward the group. Evelyn didn’t even look surprised; she simply accepted the disruptor from Julian and slotted it into the side of the incubator.

The woman with my face looked up at me, her violet-lit eyes devoid of any human empathy. «Thank you for bringing the final key, Maya. We couldn’t bypass the parental lock without your active brainwaves.»

«Who are you?» I gasped, my mind spinning as the foundation of everything I believed shattered into dust. «What am I?»

The male duplicate walked up to me, extending a hand to gently trace the bloody graze on my jaw. I flinched away, but his grip on my chin was instantaneous and immovable.

«You’re the original,» he said softly, a dark, tragic sadness flickering in his eyes. «The rest of us are just the iterations that survived the facility fire ten years ago. And the child in that box?» He leaned in, his breath cold against my ear. «She isn’t your daughter, Maya. She’s your creator.»

A low rumble shook the pier beneath our feet. From the dark waters of the bay, a massive, silent vessel breached the surface, its obsidian hull dripping with ocean water as heavy spotlights swept across the dock, pinning us in blinding light.

The woman stepped toward the incubator, but as she reached for the child, the little girl sat upright, locked eyes with me, and spoke with a voice that wasn’t human at all.

«Initiate sequence,» the child commanded, her voice resounding with authority. «Terminate the duplicates.»

Instantly, Julian raised his weapon—not at me, but at the man and woman who shared my face. Two suppressed shots rang out in rapid succession, and both bodies dropped lifelessly to the concrete.

Julian turned the barrel slowly, pointing the dark cylinder directly between my eyes.