The room was dim and surgical—white light bleeding through translucent panels above, shadows soft as gauze across the floor.
Amelia stood beneath one, staring at a monitor frozen mid-reel. Her own face stared back—except younger, thinner, colder. Less human.
Version Four. Terminated: failure to bond with Echo.
A tightness bloomed in her chest. Each record in this chamber was a piece of herself that never made it. Echo's voice stirred in her mind.
"You were never meant to see this."
"Then why am I here?" Amelia whispered.
Silence. Then—
"Because you're the first that lived."
She pressed forward, deeper into the vault-lined artery of Mirror Node 2. Glass tanks gleamed in half-light. Some still pulsed faintly. Others were cracked. A few were empty.
Every corridor felt like a graveyard.
Outside the node, Kestrel and Dominic sat in tense silence across from each other in the mobile command shelter Eris had set up among the crags. The mountains pressed around them like old gods. The wind howled, but not louder than the silence between the men.
"She shouldn't be in there alone," Kestrel finally said.
Dominic's jaw worked. "You wanted to send her. Don't turn into a savior now."
"I didn't send her. I trusted her to choose."
Dominic scoffed. "And look where that's gotten her—inside a kill-box built by a madwoman."
Eris entered then, brushing past the curtain with sharp efficiency, breaking the friction.
"Enough. She made her call. But she's not alone. I slipped a neural proxy into her comm band. If Echo overloads, I can trigger a blackout pulse."
Kestrel stiffened. "That wasn't part of the plan."
"It was mine." Eris' tone was flat.
Dominic's gaze snapped to her. "That's dangerous. You'll burn out her short-term memory—"
"She's already seeing versions of herself that shouldn't exist," Eris snapped. "The memory's the least of our problems."
A noise outside—the rustling of dry rock, wind splitting.
Then a silhouette staggered toward them from the west ridge.
Dust-covered. Bleeding from one leg. Eyes bloodshot, paranoid. Eris raised her weapon, Kestrel already moving, but the voice stopped them cold.
"Don't shoot." A ragged cough. "It's me."
Zahir.
He nearly collapsed as they reached him. Kestrel caught his arm.
"Where the hell have you been?"
Zahir's hand trembled as he reached into his coat and threw down a crumpled shard of optical fiber—burnt at one end.
"Node Three," he said. "It's not dormant. It's… it's alive."
Dominic's brow furrowed. "What do you mean 'alive'?"
Zahir looked at him—haunted. "The third node isn't just code and steel. They fused it with consciousness. A hybrid AI. One that remembers everything Amelia's ever done."
Kestrel stepped back like he'd been slapped.
Zahir looked at each of them in turn. "They call it Solas. And it's watching her."
Inside the core chamber, Amelia pressed her hand to the glass of a new tank. This one didn't show a version of her curled or unconscious.
This one… stared back.
The clone was awake.
And smiling.
The lights flickered overhead.
The clone pressed its palm to the inside of the glass—matching hers.
Then, slowly, it mouthed the words:
"You're not the original."