Ifted his head, and revealed a face I hadn’t seen since my father’s funeral ten years ago.

“You’re late, Clara,” my father said, his voice as smooth and unaffected as if we were sitting in his study. He stepped through the frame of roaring flames, the fire wrapping around his coat like a tailored cloak without charring the wool. “Or should I say… Subject B?”

Mark lunged forward, throwing his weight against my father’s chest, but my father didn’t even flinch. With a single, fluid strike of his elbow, he sent Mark crashing back onto the frosted tile, the lockbox clattering out of his grip and skidding toward the edge of the balcony. Leo shrieked against my neck, his small body trembling as I stumbled backward, pressing my spine into the freezing iron railing.

“He isn’t real, Clara,” Mark choked out from the floor, spitting blood onto the stone. “Check his left hand! Look at his hand!”

I forced my eyes down to my father’s left arm. Below his tailored sleeve, where his forearm should have been, the skin was split open. There was no bone, no muscle, no blood—only a gleam of polished brass gears, silent hydraulic valves, and wires pulsing with a faint blue light.

“Your mother was a brilliant engineer, my dear,” my father murmured, stepping over Mark without a second glance. “She built two of you. One to stay here and safeguard the estate, and one to live a life in the real world. A baseline control.” He held up the second brass key, the cold metal glinting under the amber glow of the burning house. “Eleanor took the wrong key. She thinks she has the power to destroy the legacy, but all she took was the lock to the decoy.”

“Which one am I?” I whispered, my voice breaking as I clutched Leo tighter. Tears of pure terror blurred my vision. “Am I real, or am I the machine?”

My father smiled, a cold, practiced curve of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. “Does it matter? You bled when Leo was born. You felt pain when Eleanor burned her hand. You feel love for that child. Is humanity defined by flesh, Clara, or by the weight of your memories?”

He reached out his hand, his brass fingers clicking rhythmically in the freezing air. “Give me the lockbox. The real key belongs inside it, and it’s time to shut down the experiment.”

“No!” Mark yelled, diving across the frost-slicked balcony. He grabbed my father’s ankle, pulling with all his remaining strength.

My father lost his footing for a fraction of a second, his brass hand sweeping through the air and missing me by inches. In that split second of distraction, I grabbed the fallen lockbox from the edge of the railing, clutched Leo to my chest, and turned toward the fire escape attached to the side of the balcony.

“Clara, run!” Mark screamed, pinning my father’s leg beneath his body as my father’s metal arm slammed down onto Mark’s back with crushing force.

I didn’t look back. I threw my leg over the wrought-iron barrier and scrambled down the icy metal steps of the fire escape, my boots slipping on the frost. Behind me, the sound of tearing metal and shattered glass echoed into the night, followed by a deafening explosion as the nursery’s floorboards gave way, swallowing the upper floor in a column of blinding light.

I hit the snow-covered gravel of the driveway, my chest burning, my heart hammer-pounding against my ribs. The mountain road was pitch black, illuminated only by the orange reflection of the house burning on the cliff above. I sprinted toward Mark’s parked SUV, pulling the spare key from beneath the bumper, shoving Leo into his car seat, and slamming the door shut.

My hands shook violently as I shoved the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life, headlight beams slicing through the heavy snowfall that had begun to cover the mountain. I threw the car into reverse, tires spinning on the gravel before gripping the asphalt and plunging down the steep winding road.

In the rearview mirror, the estate was a towering beacon of fire against the black night. But as I rounded the first sharp turn, the headlights caught something standing in the middle of the road ahead.

A figure in a heavy trench coat.

I slammed on the brakes, the SUV skidding across the ice before coming to a halt just feet away from her. She stood unmoving in the high beams, the snow falling softly onto her hair.

She turned slowly toward the windshield. The headlights illuminated her face completely—the exact arch of her brows, the faint scar near her left lip, the identical brown eyes staring straight into mine.

It was the woman from Eleanor’s passenger seat. My double.

She didn’t run. She didn’t flinch. Instead, she raised her right hand and pressed her palm flat against the hood of my car. Through the windshield, I watched as she reached up to her left cheek, inserted two fingers into a tiny seam behind her jawline, and unlatched her own face like a hinged door, revealing a humming brass clockwork mechanism beneath.

And then, my phone on the dashboard began to ring.

The caller ID displayed a number I knew by heart—my own.