Chapter 16 · Shattered Mirror

"Stop looking at me like I'm a ghost," the other girl said. Her voice was my voice. Same pitch, same rasp, same cold edge. She stood ten feet away, mirrored in every jagged line of my own face, but her eyes were dead. Flat. Like two black screens with no signal.

I stepped back, my boots crunching on broken glass. "What the hell are you?"

"I'm the one who doesn't glitch," she replied. She didn't blink. She didn't even seem to breathe. She just raised her arm, and a blade slid out of her wrist with a clinical, metallic shink. "And I'm the one Victor actually wants."

Jaxon shifted beside me, his gun leveled at her forehead. His shoulder brushed mine, and for the first time, he didn't pull away. "Stay back, Kael. She's not human. She's a puppet with your face."

"Is that what I am?" I snapped, my voice cracking. I looked at my hands—shaking, blood-streaked, feeling too real to be a fake. "A puppet?"

"You're a prototype," the clone said. She tilted her head, a robotic, eerie movement. "A failed experiment in consciousness. You think those memories of a childhood are real? Cute.