Eva couldn't move.
The room beyond Chad was not a cell or an office. It was a laboratory—cold, sterile, humming with the quiet thrum of machinery. In its center stood a vertical glass tube, floor to ceiling, filled with a pale, translucent fluid that rippled with the slow pulse of a heartbeat.
A cloth covered most of it. But the face was visible.
Her face.
The same bone structure. The same platinum blonde hair, floating in the liquid like seaweed. The same mercury-sheened eyes—except these eyes were closed, peaceful, as if dreaming.
Eva's breath stopped. Her mind, her Prime-calculating, survival-optimized mind, simply stopped.
"That's..." Leo started, his voice strangled.
"Take the girl outside," Chad said quietly.
The young guard—he couldn't have been more than Lily's age, nineteen or twenty—stepped forward. His face was pale beneath the dirt, his eyes kind in a way that felt wrong in this place. He reached for Lily's arm.
"No!" Lily clung to Eva, her nails digging in. "Eva, don't let them—"
"It's okay." Eva's voice came from somewhere far away. She couldn't feel her lips moving. "Go. I'll... I'll find you."
The young guard met her eyes for a fraction of a second. There was something there—recognition? Pity? He nodded once, barely perceptible, and guided Lily from the room with a gentleness that made the horror worse.
The door closed.
Chad waited until the footsteps faded. Then he walked to the glass tube and took hold of the cloth.
"Eva, don't look," Derek whispered. "Please. Don't—"
Chad pulled.
The cloth fell away.
Eva's legs buckled. Leo caught her, his hands rough and grounding, but she couldn't feel them. She couldn't feel anything except the screaming silence in her skull.
The tube held a body. But it wasn't a body.
Below the floating face—her face, Eva's face—there was nothing human. A torso, yes, pale and suspended in the liquid. But no arms. No legs. The torso was open, split from collarbone to pelvis, the edges held apart by gleaming metal clamps. Inside, organs floated in the fluid—a heart that beat in slow, steady pulses, lungs that expanded and contracted, a liver, intestines, all connected not by flesh but by a web of translucent tubes and hair-thin wires that pulsed with colored light.
Above, emerging from where the top of the skull should have been, the brain was visible. Not contained, not protected. It sat exposed, cradled in some kind of transparent gel, its surface mapped with tiny, glittering electrodes that fed into a dozen different conduits snaking up into the ceiling.
It was alive. She was alive. The face proved it—the peaceful expression, the slow drift of hair, the occasional flutter of closed eyelids.
Surprised?
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It was her voice. It was her voice.
It's me, Eva.
The thing in the tube opened its eyes.
They were Eva's eyes—mercury-sheen, depthless. They looked at her through the glass and the fluid, and they were aware. Aware of the horror of their own existence. Aware of the woman standing frozen on the other side of the glass. Aware of everything.
Surprised? the voice repeated, and this time Eva saw the lips move, saw the throat vibrate beneath the exposed cavity of the chest. It's me.
"Who..." Eva's voice was a rasp, a thing dragged over broken glass. "Who are you?"
A smile. Gentle. Tragic. Mad.
I'm you.