I Reached For My Gun — Then Realized My Own Hand Wasn’t Fully Human
My body moved before my mind caught up, which is the only reason I’m still around to tell you this part.
I grabbed her wrist before she could get to my weapon, twisted, drove my elbow into her chest as hard as I could. It was like hitting a wall. A wall that talked back.
«Your reflexes are slowing,» she said, watching me the way you’d watch a machine sputtering out. «The breakdown has already started.»
I didn’t get to ask what that meant. Her free hand caught me in the chest with something that felt less like a punch and more like a small explosion, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, sliding across cold stone, a tray of surgical tools crashing down around me.
That’s when I saw the arm.
It was hanging off the edge of that operating table. Pale. Still. With a scar across the knuckle I recognized instantly, because I got that exact scar during a firefight over a decade ago, in a place I try not to think about.
I looked up at the face on that table.
It was mine.
Same jaw. Same broken nose I never got fixed properly. A heart monitor next to him was beeping in perfect time with the pulse I could feel hammering in my own throat.
«You’re not thinking clearly,» the woman in the lab coat said, stepping closer with a scalpel like it was a pen she was about to sign something with. «This happens every time the original meets the copy.»
I told her to shut up. My holster was empty — she already had my gun, pointed at my head, looking almost bored about it.
«Do you know how many times we’ve pulled you out of that forest?» she asked, like she was making small talk. «Six. Every single time, your mind breaks the moment you get down here. Every time, you swear you’re the real one.»
«I am real,» I said, and I meant it with everything I had left.
«You’re a container,» the other one said quietly. Gently, almost. «Built to carry something. He never needed a bodyguard. He needed a delivery system.»
She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Empty chamber. I don’t know if I’ve ever moved faster in my life — I grabbed the nearest thing on that floor and drove it into her leg.
No blood came out.
Instead, something gold and glowing sprayed out of the wound and hit my face, my chest, and it burned — not like fire exactly, more like it was sinking into me on purpose, looking for something.
She barely reacted. Just glanced down like I’d spilled a drink on her.
Then she kicked me, and I went rolling toward the base of that enormous glass container with the mechanical heart pulsing inside it. My skin — everywhere the gold liquid had touched — started pulsing in the exact same rhythm.
Then she kicked me, and I went rolling toward the base of that enormous glass container with the mechanical heart pulsing inside it. My skin — everywhere the gold liquid had touched — started pulsing in the exact same rhythm.
And then the pain hit. Not physical pain. Something worse.
I saw things that weren’t mine to see. Endless hallways of glass chambers. A cold metal chair in a facility that had nothing to do with the place I thought I’d spent my career guarding.
I saw myself sitting in that chair.
A voice — one I recognized, younger, sharper — said something about a subject number. Said something about deploying me to «the perimeter.» Like I was equipment being checked out of storage.
«Look at the glass,» she told me, calm as ever. «Look at what you actually are.»
I wiped my eyes and looked.
The reflection staring back wasn’t a man. It was some kind of outline, chest wide open, with something glowing and mechanical where my ribs should have been.
I touched my own throat. My fingers went straight through it — through an illusion of skin that had been sitting over wires and fluid this entire time.
«The real one died a long time ago,» she said, no cruelty in her voice at all, which somehow made it worse. «You’re just what’s left carrying his key.»
That’s when the doors at the end of the hall blew open.
The blast knocked both women off their feet and shattered a wall of glass behind them, spilling amber liquid everywhere. And walking through the smoke, completely unharmed, was Marcus — the man I’d just watched bleeding out minutes earlier.
He was carrying the trunk. The one from the forest. The one the scarred woman had died trying to protect.
«Get away from him,» he said, and his voice didn’t sound like one voice anymore. It sounded like several, all speaking at once.
He dropped to his knees and threw the latches open.
I expected documents. Money. Some kind of proof.
Instead, there was a face inside that trunk. A young girl’s face, eyes open, suspended peacefully in liquid like she was only sleeping.
And she spoke to me. Not out loud. Straight into my head.
«Don’t let him turn the key,» she whispered. «The man on the table isn’t you. It’s your father.»
I still don’t know what I am. Some days, I’m not sure «who» is even the right question anymore.