When the glass cracks, it's not from gunfire or claws or even a tantrum of hydraulics—just a tremor in the architecture, that weird microquake-thrum that means some deeper part of the building wants you in and not out. The blue-eyed hybrid waits for me to notice, and when it does, it taps the glass again. Slowly. That same three-count—like a mother's knock at bedtime, or a prisoner's code. I can't tell which.
I look for Anna in the tank. She floats, peaceful, like she's dozed off mid-swim, but something in the way her eyes drift along the seam of the glass says she's not dreaming. She's remembering. I want to remember too, but the only thing my brain will feed me is the last argument we had in the kitchen, her accusing me of running from everything harder than I ever tried to fix it. Now she's in chloroform blue and I'm the one knocking on the glass.
"How—how is this possible?" I stutter. The hybrid tilts its head, amused, and then the speakers pipe on, some back-of-throat static that almost deciphers as a laugh. This close, I see how the mouth is cut sidewise, as if it practiced smiling with fishhooks for ligaments.
The blue eyes focus on me. "I'm merely a clone of the original, much like the one you encountered before," it says. The voice is Anna's and not Anna's, still tuning its vowels like a songbird learning English from ambulance sirens.
Every story I ever told myself about being unique, about being the only one who ever loved too much and lost too hard, just caves in then. I want to punch the glass, but my hand is already bleeding and I know better than to mess with the only thing that separates us.
"Which—" My words stick. "Which Anna are you?"
The thing's mouth splits further. "Anna used to work for us," it says, tongue serpentine, vowels bubbling in air that can barely keep up. "I know what you're thinking. How in the fuck did that happen? She was one of the lead geneticists. She found out she had cancer. The organization figured, why not clone her, get rid of the cancer genes. It took a while. But now I'm here—every bit of Anna as the original, and more."
That's the line that does it. I fall to my knees, the floor still cold and sticky from Anna version one's blood. The physical pain is nothing; I've been shot at, gnawed on, bored to death by government trainers. But this—this is a cavity drilled in the soul, and I can't find the nerve to scream.
Sloane tries to approach, hands up, as if the hybrid will listen to reason, but the thing just shakes its head and taps the glass again. Tap. Tap. Tap. Behind it, the tank bubbles. Anna's body—no, not body, specimen—drifts up, mouth open, hair floating like a red jellyfish. For a second I see the woman I married, and then the current spins her away, and I see only the replica, hands neatly clasped, eyes hungrier than the day we first met.
"That's not possible," I gasp. "Anna never worked here. She never even mentioned—"
The hybrid shrugs, and in that gesture is everything I should have known about people who keep secrets for a living. It lays a clipboard on the chrome table, slides it through the pass-through slot, and gestures for me to take it. I fumble, hands shaking, and scan the top of the form: Mitchell, Anna L., Embryo Series 003/Falconer. Below, photo after photo of Anna at stages—child, college student, researcher, patient. All annotated and time-stamped. There's a signature line, too, but the name at the bottom is not hers. It's mine.
My vision tunnels. At the edges, the hybrids are swarming the glass, blue eyes and split lips pressed so hard it warps the light. Sloane is screaming behind me, something about backup, about protocol, about getting the hell out alive, but I barely hear it.
I flip the next page, and it's a checklist: Integration. Maturation. Adaptation. Final Protocol: Reunion.
"Ask me anything," the hybrid says, voice almost gentle. "I am every bit Anna as the original, and more."
So I do. The first date, the color of the truck we drove to Denali on our honeymoon, the story about her father and the bear. Every detail is there, pitch-perfect, until I ask about the time we lost the baby.
The hybrid pauses, just a nanosecond, then plasters over the gap with a generic "It was for the best." Anna never would have said that. Anna never forgave herself.
That's when I know. I draw the knife from my ankle, rush the glass, and with everything left, slam the blade through the feeding hatch at the base. The hybrid laughs, a high, silly titter, even as the edge of the knife slides between its ribs.
"Don't you see, Kamen?" it chokes. "Nothing in this building ever truly dies."
It pulls the knife out, no blood, just a dribble of blue fluid, and throws me across the room like a toy. I hit the wall, vision blanked white, and when I come to, the hybrid is standing over me, clipboard in hand, Anna's signature practiced to perfection.
Sloane is on the floor, shotgun spent, face obscured by a rip of blood and hair. The rest of the team is gone—dragged off, maybe, or lured to the next floor by the matron hybrid. I try to crawl, but the hybrid puts a foot on my spine and holds me down with a bureaucrat's patience.
"Rest now," it whispers, voice finally losing the illusion of Anna and settling into something bigger, older, amused. "Your part is over. The new world belongs to creatures that can survive it."
There is no mercy shot, no fade to black. Only the slow, deliberate sound of the hybrid filling out the paperwork, page after page, using my hand as a signature guide when the tremors get too bad.
Outside the tank, the Anna clone floats, eyes shut, mouth a soft crescent. There's peace in her expression, and for a second, I let myself pretend it's because she forgives me. The blue-eyed hybrid watches me, the glass between us thin as a lie; I see myself reflected there, all the flaws and holes and every secret I thought would keep me safe.
Above us, the pipes hum and the building settles. Tap. Tap. Tap. End of the line.
I blink—no, not yet. Before the world snaps off, I see Anna's body float up from the tank, mouth open in a zero, hair plastered to her jaw. Her eyes catch mine, and something lazy and loving moves in the muscle around her mouth, like she's about to tell me it's okay, or to get over myself, or to just grab a cup of coffee and call her when I'm done being an idiot. The glass spiders, a tight starburst right over her face, blue-white veins blooming outward.
Then I pass out, or maybe just change channels. The new world smells like latex, and under that, the faint numinous sting of antiseptic. My arms are locked, shoulders burning. I try to move and get nothing, not even a twitch except the clench of my jaw.
I'm strapped to a gurney, wrists zip-tied, ankles cinched with surgical tape, the surface waterproof and slightly inclined. I rock my head and the world shifts: two more tables, Sloane and Tran on deck, both cocooned tighter than a SWAT team's Christmas roast. Sloane's vest is off, showing pale skin gone gray with blood loss, his eyes rolling in the socket with microdose-wildness. Tran is awake but unfocused, lips peeled in a rictus of what might be humor or total despair.
Movement at the foot of my bed. Anna, not in a glass, but here, corporeal and dressed in a lab coat over hospital pajamas. She sits on a rolling stool, one leg crossed, hands folded in her lap. Her hair's still wet, eyes bright with the hollow intensity of a bonfire. She spins the stool so it faces me, then parks her chin in her hand, a posture so familiar my stomach tries to climb out my mouth.
"You dream with your eyes open," she says, voice smooth as ever. "Always did. Even before." She glances at Sloane and Tran, then back. "You never did trust protocols. I love that about you."
I work my jaw, spit tastes like copper and plastic. "Why?" It comes out as a hiss more than a word.
She cocks her head. "Why what, baby?"
I try again, slower, chewing each syllable: "Why are you doing this. If you were really Anna, even just a mimic, you'd know you loved me more than anything."
She laughs, and it's sixteen years of holiday mornings compressed into a single nasal snort. "I do love you. That's why you're here. I needed you to see it—see us."
Her pronoun is cutting, and I flick a glance at Sloane, hope he's lucid enough to take notes. The Anna-thing uncrosses her legs and stands, gliding to the foot of Sloane's table. She takes a pair of surgical shears and snips the tape at one ankle, then the other, then lifts his head careful as a puppy, propping him up. "He's your friend. That's sweet. You always wanted friends more than you would admit."
Sloane's face goes slack, and he blinks slow. "We're dead, right?" he whispers.
"No, honey," Anna says, brushing hair from his forehead with clinical tenderness. "You're potentials. They built all this for you."
I try to bite her hand, but the zip ties won't give. Anna comes to me, loops a thumb behind my ear, the way she used to when I was cycling through the storm. "You can't stop it, Kamen," she says, voice gentling. "Hybridization is just a word for the way the world wants more of itself. This place is the last stage—after this, there's no more old lines."
She leans close. Her breath is hot, cinnamon and blood. "But you get to see it. That's a privilege. Even the real Anna never got that far."
Sloane starts to sob, a thin animal whine, but Anna hushes him with a pat. Tran just gags, dry-heaving against the tape.
The door opens, and two shapes shuffle in: both hybrids, tall as linebackers, the new model with those blue-pearl eyes and hands articulated for fine motor work. They smell like bleach and musk and something still-learning. One goes to my table, untethers the wheels, and starts rolling me down the hall. Anna floats alongside, hands folded, her bare feet slapping the tile in a syncopated rhythm.
The hall is endless. We pass rows of mirrors, and what glares back is not a man but a stretched, waxen mannequin, blood painted in cuffs around both wrists, an expression like someone trapped in the joke just before the punchline. Anna's reflection hovers behind me, all warmth and murder and possibility at once.
They wheel us into an auditorium—high ceilings, banks of screens gleaming with seismic charts and fluorescent images of DNA loops. The room is full: dozens of people in lab coats, none familiar, all with the same hollowed-out eyes and thin, mean lips. Some wear badges, 'DARPA' and 'CDC' and one with the old Whispering Pine logo, faded to nothing.
Anna stands at the podium, taps the mic. "Final cohort," she says. Her voice echoes. "Please observe."
The hybrids arrange us in a row, Sloane and Tran beside me, all three of us biting geysers of fear and disbelief. The screens flicker—images of the town, streets empty, police tape flapping in the wind, a time-lapse of the woods pulsing closer and closer to the city limits. In one, I see my own house, lights off, mailbox yawning open. In another, a map pocked with heat blooms—individuals moving, then merging, then gone.
Anna cues up the next slide: a diagram of the new genome, mapped in technicolor. "Self-propagating," she says. "Programmable, but self-determined. There's no off switch."
She turns to me, then to Sloane. "We needed you to show us what real resistance looked like. And you did, right up to the end."
A hum starts in the walls. Not just an air handler—something alive, a bass note with teeth in it. The hybrids fan out, ushering the lab coats to their seats.
Anna looks at me one more time, and her eyes gleam with that old love, stretched thin by something deeper than reason. "Thank you for coming," she says. "Thank you for loving me enough to try."
The hum spikes. Every screen turns blue, the same color as Anna's eyes, as the hybrid's, as the impossible cold thread spooling down my tongue at the last second.
Sloane reaches for my hand. I clamp his, more afraid than I've ever been, and hold on. The blue light eats us whole and leaves nothing but the echo of Anna's last smile, alive and terrible and infinite.
Nothing. There's nothing at all, then: a crash, like a shelf of sheetrock giving way, maybe four doors down. The sound runs twin lightning rods up my eardrums. Anna signals the two hybrids, their faces candlelit blue by the screens, and all three vanish through a side exit, white coat flapping like a surrender flag. The moment the door eclipses her, I yell—raw, animal, more vibration than language—but the only answer is the glossy whine of the fluorescent tubes.
Not quite. The next answer falls from the ceiling.
A panel slides, then splits, and what drops out is another Anna. Different from the one at the podium, this one is in hospital scrubs—she lands hard, cracks her ankle sideways, and hobbles to my gurney like she's got nothing left but nerve endings. Her face is ruined by crying. Mascara in the eyes, lips blue and chewed, but her hands are all gentle as she paws the locks on my wrists.
She gets one free—my right, the dominant hand, Anna always knew what to prioritize. She leans down, face so close it's basically overlay, and plants her lips against mine. There's blood on her teeth and a sweet, terrified shake to her tongue, like she's trying to taste a whole life in three seconds.
"I'm sorry, baby," she whispers, voice ruined by snot and the heat of panic. "I never wanted this. I thought you'd have left town by now, that you'd be a thousand miles gone." She's choking, really croaking, but her hands work the next tie loose, and then I'm free in the arm but deadweight in the chest.
"You have to come with me right now," she says. Her head flicks, checking the corridor, the bulbous shine of tears warping her eyes into globes. "We only have a little before she notices. You can get your stuff—there's a service elevator, if we get to the bottom I can lock the last doors, maybe stop them."
She undoes Sloane's and Tran's, too, fast and with panic-perfect accuracy. Sloane comes around snarling, expecting a fight, then just stares, dumb. Tran clutches his arm, looks at the Anna clone, then at me, and says, "Is that really—"
"It's not," I say. "But it's not not her, either."
I hate myself for how much I believe her.
Anna grabs my hand, gentle this time, sets it on her sternum, above the thrum of her heart, then says, "We have to hurry, okay?" Behind us, the door to the auditorium is already sparking, some monster-sized pulse slamming the keycard dead.
We run.
The hallways are empty, for now, only the echo-pulse of alarms growing louder than the footfalls. Anna leads—she always was the orienting animal in a runaway, north-sensitized, never looking back. Sloane stays close on her heels, Tran a shade behind, teeth knocking together like a Morse code for despair.
We duck through a maintenance closet, Anna's arm looping mine like we're prom-dates at the end of prom. "Service stairwell," she pants. "It's old, predates the other lockdowns. The hybrids can't always track through the vents—their olfactory's better but the wiring interferes."
I want to stop her, want to shake her shoulders and make her tell me when she became the Anna who could say sentences like that, but the world is already erupting at both ends, so I just run.
On the next landing, she turns and grabs my face, nails scraping just a little in the old way—the way she'd steer me into an argument, or a kiss, or both at once.
"Everything I said. Before, in the room. That was Her. Not me. I'm the fail clone, Kamen. The gingerbread prototype. They let me live in case the others couldn't pull off the performance. When I saw you on the camera, I made a plan—I had to try."
She's crying now, full-body, the kind that shakes off even the anesthesia. Blood from her cheek wounds the collar of my shirt. I want to say "it's okay," want to say "I love you," but the words come out collapsed, like air being punched from a lunch bag.
Another sound in the stairwell. Wet, quick, like a rat on a squeaky toy. The blue-eyed hybrid—probably the matron, or whoever won the last round of predator selection—is perched five flights above, teeth bared, hands set for sprinting. It blinks, and for a second I think it recognizes the Anna clone as kin—it hisses, then drops down the gap, body torquing to hit the landing just above ours.
We scramble. Anna heel-kicks the emergency hatch, Sloane shoulder-tackles it open, and we drop into a sub-basement corridor lined with rolling racks of body bags and cracked sample freezers. Tran spins and fires a shotgun blast up the shaft—pure noise, no hit, but enough to choke the hybrid with freezer ice and mummified rats. We run, high steps over spilled glass, low steps under hanging pipes, keep running even as the blue light of the hybrid pulses down behind us like a searchlight with entitlement issues.
At the end is a fire door, big and old, "Research - GROUND FLOOR" in paint so faded I have to squint. Anna shoves me through first; her hands are everywhere, pushing, pleading, pulling—she is Anna again, in all the bullheaded ways that count. On the other side, a cave of darkness, then the click of a maglight, and then the smell. Not copper this time but sulfur. A reservoir, flooded to thigh with saltwater, the chemical kind that stings open wounds and seeds every pore with doubt.
Anna leads us through. The hybrid's scrabbling above, but it can't fit through the old crawlspace the right way. It howls, a noise so loud it breaks the plaster in the ceiling, rains stuff down on Sloane's head, but Sloane just laughs, crazed, and says, "Not today, fucker."
Ahead is a loading dock, or was once, now half-flooded and stacked with thirty years of broken farm equipment and dead snowmobiles. Anna slides behind a stack of boxes—"Holy shit, we made it"—and gestures for us to duck.
We all crouch, breathing through noise and exhaustion, and I realize: Anna's hands are shaking, her face a riptide of relief and dread.
"We can get out," she says. "But I have to tell you some things, and you have to listen. No matter what you see down there, or what happens, you have to finish the job."
I blink, try to focus. My ears are ringing. "What job?"
She swallows, skin flash-bleached by the maglight, then says, "You get to the bottom, and you break the cycle. You kill Her. If you don't, this never stops. They learn and adapt. You're the only one she can't out-predict."
Tran, leaking from beneath the ear, says, "Is this the plan, then? We shoot our way to the last level and hope the monsters haven't already eaten our faces off?"
Anna smiles. The real one, at last. "That's always been the plan, Tran. Just no one told you out loud."
We move, single file, Anna and me at the front, Sloane and Tran rotating rear guard. Every step is more animal, less human, like the light and good air of the world above don't even exist. The only thing that keeps me upright is the feel of Anna's pulse against mine, how she keeps squeezing my hand even though she's not sure if the bones in her palm are still hers to command.
After a mile of subbasement, the tunnel doglegs right, then opens onto a vault. In the center is an elevator shaft. No car, just a ladder running down into a cone of pitch. Anna looks at me, hands the maglight, and says, "I don't want to go any further. I'm scared, Kamen."
I take her chin, moral support in the way men are only trained to do when it's too late. "We do it together," I say. "Or not at all."
She nods, but then, as if she forgot how to be a person and remembered how to be a weapon, she kisses me again, fast and harder. Then she leans in and bites my earlobe, sharp enough to draw blood.
I yelp, confused, but she's already at the ladder, climbing.
We go down. Sixty, seventy feet. I keep expecting the blue-eyed hybrid to jump in after us, but the only thing that follows is the smell of ozone and the relentless, thrumming hum that means the building is still alive, and so are we, at least for the next five minutes.
At the bottom: a hallway made of cinderblock, the kind that makes you think of state prisons or old bomb shelters. The only light is a dying sodium bulb, flickering out a Morse code of warnings none of us has the time or the stamina to interpret. Anna is three paces ahead, but keeps looking over her shoulder like she's worried she'll outpace my will, not my steps.
We come to a door. No markings. Just steel, cold, and way too thick for a research facility. Anna plugs in a passcode from memory; she doesn't even hesitate. It slides open so slow I want to punch it.
Inside is an office. For a second I think: this is it? All this for a broom closet with a battered Lenovo and a chair that still has the plastic on it?
Then I see the woman at the desk.
It's Anna again, of course. But older, tired, wearing a suit jacket over a hospital gown. Her eyes are glassy, mouth etched with permanent smile lines. She looks up when the door opens, fixes me with a gaze as cold as the ocean, and says, "Welcome, Kamen. We were waiting for you."
Anna-the-Clone squeezes my hand, but I can feel her shifting, can feel her will collapsing into something like pure animal fear. She whispers, "You have to kill her. I can't do it."
I nod. I reach for the knife, but the woman at the desk is already standing, hands spread, palms up in a gesture that is not a threat, but a benediction.
"You think you know the story, Sheriff," she says, and her voice is not Anna's, but it has Anna's lilt, the old music in her vowels. "But you don't. You're just another vector, another data point. And so am I."
She pauses, then: "Would you like to understand?"
"No," I say, and drive the knife at her throat.
She is faster than any human. She catches my wrist, torque-pivots me into the wall. Anna screams. Sloane and Tran both aim weapons, but the woman ignores them, all her focus on me.
"Listen," she hisses. "You're the last generation. This world is leaving you behind. I wanted you to come home so we could do it right—finish with dignity." Her fingers dig into my wrist, nails slicing skin and ligament, but I push back, teeth bared, every cell in my body singing with the need to win.
"I won't let you," I manage, and then Anna—the clone, my Anna, the only Anna left—comes from behind and wraps both arms around the woman's neck. She pulls, and the three of us go down together, cracking tile and shattering old bone.
I'm up first. The suit-jacket Anna is trying to crawl, blood seeding the grout with bright dots. I don't hesitate. I pin her, drive the knife into the base of her skull, and don't let go until she stops convulsing.
For a minute, it's just silence. Smell of ammonia, and the taste of my own blood in my mouth.
Anna in the suit coughs, shakes her head, and with a bored elegance, rises to her feet. The knife in her skull is a rumor, not a fact—when she stands, she dusts her blazer, checks for blood like it's spinach in her teeth. The clone Anna is still hugging my legs, face caked with terror, but the matron looks straight past us, eyes locked on a dream only she sees.
"You're really persistent," she says, voice flat. "You're really something, Kamen."
"I'll keep coming," I manage. "You'll have to kill me."
She tuts, a sound more sad aunt than monster. "No. I just need you to watch."
My arms are numb, wrists singing with adrenaline and the scrape of zip tie. I try to stand, but Anna (the failed clone, the scared, the maybe-best version yet) pulls me back, arms wired tight around my gut.
"You don't get it," says the matron. "You're the reason we sent the first prototype to Alaska. All that bush-league heroism, all those rescue attempts. You built the narrative for the next cycle. Now the only thing left to do is see how many times you'll adapt before you break."
The pain in my wrist is white-hot. I move my fingers, and for a wild second, I can feel the pulse in hers, beating faster than I can match.
"No more lectures," I tell the matron. "You want me to see, so show me."
She smiles, warm enough to thaw the air. "All right."
She puts two fingers to her neck, as if checking her own pulse, and then—impossibly—her skin twitches. Her entire face shivers once, then resets, as if sloughing a mask. She looks less a person and more the blueprint of a person. She walks to the side wall and hits a button. There's a hiss, the smell of ozone, and a bank of lights flares behind a mirrored panel.
Through it, a room: dozens of Anna clones, all in hospital green. Some are agent-bright, pacing in precise circles. Some are half-formed, slumped in corners, twitching like rewound larvae. Some are—God help me—curling around one another, mother and child, or mother and mother, a braided chain of terrified, brilliant, impossible Annas.
They open the cage with a noise halfway between a kiss and a bone saw, and I realize I'm back under. No, not back—never left, only climbed a rung higher on the bad dream's ladder. The cell is glass, but the shape of it isn't right: too narrow at the feet, too wide at the shoulders, fit for an animal that never learned to stand. My hands are free, but the air stinks of acetone and freezer burn, so thick I can already taste the memory loss coming for me. There are others next to me—shadow cages, each pulsing with its own cold rhythm, but the glass is mirrored and my eyes won't focus beyond my own face. My own mouth is grimy, the teeth full of blue gel, but when I run my tongue over them, nothing bleeds out. Not yet.
The Anna in the suit stands at the observation port, hands folded, eyes on some middle distance that doesn't include me. She's flanked by two of the hybrids, less wolf now and more person, but with a way of holding still that's all wrong for mammals. She gestures, and a speaker hums. "You're lucky, Kamen," she says. "Most of them never get this much closure. You, though, you get the full arc."
I try to move, but my knees buckle. The padding on the cell floor is an afterthought—just enough to keep what's left of me from rattling the glass. Through the speaker, her voice is doubled, the afterimage of Anna's old warmth infecting the steel.
She launches into the presentation, like it's the last round of Jeopardy and I'm a favored contestant who can't help but lose. She tells the room—maybe the world—about the project: how every failed clone made the next one hungrier, how the selection bias gave birth to me as much as it did her. "You always want to hunt, Kamen. Always want to find the end."
A panel slides open in the wall, and a steel tongue delivers a tray of food. Not slop, not pills—just a single bowl of what looks like ramen, thin and clear and steaming. I stare at it. The hunger is real, a marrow-deep prairie fire. When I ignore it, Anna smiles a little.
"You're designed to survive, Kamen. That's what all this was. We just needed to see how many times you could wake up in a new cage and keep fighting to get out."
Something cracks in the next cell—a fist, or a skull, or a slow surrender. Sloane's voice, ragged and low, says, "Sheriff? You good?"
I bite off a yes, because it's the only discipline I have left. "Yeah."
Tran is somewhere, too, but I can't hear him. Maybe the hunger got him. Maybe the next cell down the line is full of a different Kamen, and this one doesn't get a neighbor. A trap that needs fewer rats, every round.
Anna watches, arms folded, like a zookeeper explaining enrichment to the interns. "This is the experiment, Kamen. Not the monsters, not the clones. The experiment is you—the curve of your hope, the half-life of your guilt. The next iteration will be better. It always is."
I close my eyes, try to dream myself somewhere warm, but every time I do the bowl of soup gets closer, until I can smell the salt and the aftertaste of something that is not quite meat, not quite memory.
I eat. I want to say I refuse, that I spit in the face of the last test, but I eat as if it might be my first and last meal. Anna's eyes shine, and behind her, the hybrids pull back their lips in a grin.
I don't know how they get me out of the glass cell. Maybe I sleep, maybe time edits itself, and maybe there's a door that only opens for people who have already lost the argument before it begins. The first thing I see when my eyes click open is Anna, hunched over a stainless autopsy table, both hands in the guts of a dead hybrid. Her face shines with sweat, lips moving in a mantra I'm not invited to hear. I want to vomit. I want to run. But the hunger in my hands is more patient than the disgust in my gut. I shuffle closer, dragging the cell blanket, and fixate on the way her wrist bones pop white through the latex, the way she slices the diaphragm in a single, practiced stroke. A wolf-man-thing, blue eyes unfixed to the ceiling, ribcage split wide and wet. Anna leans in with a scalpel and a pair of forceps, and plucks out the heart, weighing it like an avocado at a supermarket.
She catches me staring and grins. "They never made you do this in high school biology, huh?" Her hair's tied ragged, face painted with streaks of blood she's wiped away too late. I muster a reply, but all that comes out is "Why?"—not just why the vivisection, why any of this, but why the world kept going forward when it had so many chances to just bleed out and die.
"Because she's hungry," Anna says, nodding down at the hybrid's face. "Not just food-hungry. Idea-hungry. The matron. You saw her upstairs, right?" I nod, taste the blue tar of the soup still burning up my appetite. Anna sets the heart in a metal pan, wipes her hands, and gestures for me to come closer. "I'm running out of time, Kamen. She's taking me over. I can feel her—feel myself—slipping into her head. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's the design."
She thumbs the scalpel, wipes it on her wrist, and gestures at the corpse's open ribs. "They grow in pairs, you know. Twins. First the prototype, then the controller." She says that last word with such icy calm I nearly piss myself. "I wasn't supposed to last this long. But I held out for you, because I thought maybe you'd want to see the trick from backstage." She peels back a sheet of muscle, teases out a twist of lymph tissue, and lays it on a slide for the dissecting scope.
I'm not sure if she wants me to stop her, or to keep her company. Either way, I'm useless, too hollowed out for outrage or grief. I watch as she swaps the blade for a pair of sewing scissors and starts snipping at the hybrid's brain stem, each snip as sure as a tailor hemming a funeral suit. "It's a feedback loop," she says. "Every time you fight, every time you make the impossible choice, the protocol sharpens. They watch through me. I watch through you. It's elegant." She giggles—almost a schoolgirl sound, except for the splat of hemisphere on steel.
"What happens now?" I manage, voice dry as the prayer beads in my mother's dead hands.
Anna shrugs, slides the soft gray matter into a plastic envelope, and tapes it with her thumbnail. "Now you get to be the controller, too. They want to see if you're smarter. Hungrier. Fucked up enough to break more rules."
I step back, away from her and the meat, but my feet stick to the tile in patches of cooling blood. The door behind us opens with a hiss, and in shuffle two hybrids—one with a face like a collapsed lung, the other with Anna's cheekbones but a man's frame. Both are dressed in orderly blues. They nod to Anna, ignore me, and load the corpse onto a rolling gurney.
Anna watches me while she strips off the gloves, her eyes too bright, too dry. "This is the part where you're supposed to kill me," she says, voice flat. "But you won't, not even now."
I want to tell her she's wrong, want to reach for the scalpel and draw the old, red line that makes life divisible from death. Instead, I look at the hollow of her clavicle, at the way she's already planning the next three moves. I reach for her hand, and she flinches, but I curl her fingers into mine anyway.
"I'm not coming to your next wedding," I say, and almost laugh.
She leans in, less a kiss and more a press of bone to bone, a collision of two people who already know the ending and are too tired to stage a second act. She tastes bitter, salt and regret and a little bit like rain on old snow. When she pulls away, her face is all business.
"You're going down, Kamen. All the way to the engine room. It's where they finish the cycle. The matron's waiting."
She hands me a badge. "Level Six," she says. "You'll need this."
I nod. In the hall, the lights pulse with that clinical, dental-nerve blue. Sloane is waiting, gunless, eyes brimming with a resolve I envy. We walk together, Anna's badge cold and heavy in my palm.
"What happens if we win?" Sloane asks, not hoping for an answer.
I say, "We'll never know," and the walk takes us deeper into the mouth of what's left of the world.
A flash in the periphery—my own hand, maybe, or Sloane's, or the memory of Anna's teeth on my ear—a nothing, until pain erupts like a barrel breach in my chest. I look down and there's an edge of black glass, or maybe bone, shoved straight through the ribs just below the heart. Veins bead on either side; the blood isn't red this time, but a chemical blue. The sensation is so total it blanks out the ceiling, the hum, even Anna's voice—there's nothing left but the cold, and the knowledge that I was always supposed to lose to something smarter.
I try to fall, but never land. Everything slows, unspools, colors thin from lacquered white to the gray between television channels. My hand flinches, goes slack, and the world freezes, the last image burned in: Anna's eyes, pale and endless and no longer sad, but curious, patient, expectant.