The Carpathian Mountains did not welcome visitors. They rose from the earth like ancient guardians, their peaks lost in perpetual cloud, their slopes buried under snow that had fallen centuries ago and never truly melted.
Scarlett felt the weight of them immediately as the helicopter descended through turbulent air. The cold here was different from Prague's urban chill, different even from the hollow dampness of the islands she had fled.
This cold had memory. It had watched empires rise and crumble, had witnessed armies march and vanish, had kept secrets that no living person remained to tell.
The facility entrance was invisible from above. Zoya found it through thermal imaging, tracking the heat signature of ventilation exhaust that emerged from a granite face three kilometers from the nearest road. The mountain breathed, and she followed its breath.
"Automated defenses only," Zoya reported, studying her tablet. The screen cast green light across her features, highlighting the bone structure that matched Scarlett's own. "Drones patrol the perimeter. Sensors embedded in the rock. Human personnel minimal, perhaps twelve guards total."
"And the sisters?" Scarlett asked. She kept her voice low, though the helicopter's rotors would drown any conversation from ground level.
"Heat signatures confirm five subjects on level four. Plus two additional contacts in adjacent chambers." Zoya looked up, her green eyes meeting Scarlett's in the dim cabin. "I cannot distinguish identities. The signatures are too similar."
"Claire could be any of them."
"Or none. Or waiting elsewhere." Zoya closed the tablet. "This facility is larger than Elena described. Deeper. Older."
Dom leaned forward, his mechanical arm whirring softly as he adjusted his position. "Elena claimed she was a copy. If the template we knew was manufactured, what waits inside? Another Elena? Another layer of deception?"
"Then we cut through all of them," Inga said. She sat apart from the others, as she preferred, her knives already in her hands though they had not yet landed. "Copy the copy. Kill the original. The math is simple."
"Nothing here is simple," Jules said. He did not look up from his laptop. His fingers moved across the keyboard in patterns that Scarlett had learned to recognize as progress. "But I am inside their network. Cameras looped. Sensors receiving false data. We have twelve minutes before the security cycles refresh."
"Then we move now."
Scarlett led the descent from the helicopter. The rope was cold against her palms, burning where the wind stripped away warmth. She landed in snow that reached her knees, waded to the granite face, found the ventilation shaft that Zoya had identified. The cover was steel, rusted but functional. Inga's knives found the seams, pried it loose. Darkness waited beyond.
The shaft was narrow. Scarlett moved through it with practiced efficiency, her shoulders brushing metal walls, her boots finding purchase on rungs that had not been maintained in decades. The darkness was complete. She welcomed it. Darkness was honest. Darkness did not pretend to be anything other than what it was.
The facility revealed itself gradually. Concrete corridors gave way to steel passages. Steel gave way to glass walls that showed laboratories beyond. Then glass gave way to something else. The walls pulsed. The sensation was subtle, barely perceptible, a rhythm that matched no heartbeat Scarlett recognized. When she touched the surface, it felt warm. Alive.
"Biotech architecture," Jules whispered behind her. His voice had tightened, the controlled fear he managed so carefully breaking through. "Vincent's final research. Living structures that repair themselves. That defend themselves. That grow."
"Is it aware?" Scarlett asked.
"Uncertain. Possibly. Probably."
They moved faster.
Level one contained laboratories that operated without human presence. Equipment ran. Experiments continued. The science had outlived the scientists who designed it, continuing its purpose without consciousness or mercy.
Level two showed living quarters. Beds were made with military precision. Coffee sat in cups, still warm. The personnel had left recently, or been taken. The absence felt deliberate. Planned. Expected.
Level three stopped them completely.
The chamber extended beyond their lights. Tanks lined the walls, dozens of them, arranged in rows that vanished into darkness. Each contained fluid. Each contained a body. Daughters. Copies. Failures and successes mixed without distinction. Some were complete, floating in artificial amniotic suspension. Others were partial, limbs forming, faces melting, existence struggling toward shape.
Scarlett approached the nearest tank. She pressed her hand to the glass. The figure inside pressed back. Her own face stared at her, eyes closed, breathing through tubes, dreaming dreams that Scarlett could not imagine. Number thirteen. Unfinished. Waiting for activation that would now never come.
"Do not," Zoya said. Her hand found Scarlett's shoulder, gripping with strength that matched her own. "Do not free her. Do not save her. Do not become Vincent, manufacturing salvation."
"She is not me."
"She is close enough."
Close. The word echoed in Scarlett's mind as she turned away. Close was not same. Close was not self. But close was dangerous. Close was temptation. Close was the mirror that showed not what you were, but what you could become.
They found the stairway to level four.
The holding cells were not cells.
Her sisters stood in the corridor, weapons ready, positions defensive. Not prisoners. Guards. The trap was obvious now, revealed too late to avoid. Scarlett had walked into it anyway, because walking into traps was sometimes the only path through.
"Down!" she shouted.
Gunfire shredded the space where she had stood. Inga rolled, her body moving in ways that seemed to ignore physics, and returned fire. Maya found cover behind a structural column, her own weapon speaking in controlled bursts. Dom's mechanical arm absorbed impact that would have shattered bone, sparks cascading from damaged servos, error codes flashing across his vision, function maintained through will alone.
"Stop!"
The voice cut through combat like a blade through silk. Claire stood in the center corridor, unarmed, smiling, perfectly positioned where no bullet would find her accidentally. Her green eyes caught the emergency lighting and held it.
"Stop shooting. Stop dying. Stop failing."
Scarlett rose from her crouch. Her gun remained aimed. Her heart rate, she noted with distant satisfaction, had not elevated beyond combat parameters. She was calm. She was ready. She was angry in a way that did not interfere with function.
"You were never captured," she said.
"Obviously."
"Never bait."
"Never was."
"Then what are you?"
Claire spread her arms. The gesture was welcoming. It was possessing. It was perfect in a way that made Scarlett's skin tighten with recognition and revulsion.
"I am the upgrade. The template. The original that Elena believed herself to be. The original that I believed myself to be, until I learned better."
"Impossible."
"Improbable." Claire stepped closer, and Scarlett saw the details that her own face lacked. The slight asymmetry that indicated surgical modification. The micro-expressions that moved too quickly, too precisely, to be entirely natural. "Elena was copy one. Manufactured from Anna's DNA, enhanced, improved, made into something that could manufacture others. I am copy zero. The template of templates. The design that made Vincent design the rest of you."
"Why?" The question emerged before Scarlett could consider its usefulness. "Why create us? Why create any of this?"
"Because I was lonely." Claire laughed, and the sound was musical, broken, ancient in a way that her young face could not account for. "The first. The only. The original. And originals die, Scarlett. Originals age and fail and disappear. But copies continue. Copies multiply. Copies inherit the earth."
She touched Scarlett's face. Her fingers were cold, precise, intimate in a way that no stranger's touch should be. "You are not my sister. You are my immortality. My legacy. My eternal return."
Scarlett pulled back. Her gun remained steady, centered on Claire's chest. "The others. Zoya's team. The captured five. Where are they?"
"Everywhere. Nowhere." Claire gestured, and the walls became screens, displaying chambers throughout the facility. Maya's team fought in distant corridors, outnumbered but not overcome. Suki moved through shadows, silent and lethal, surrounded by enemies she was slowly eliminating. Inga bled from a wound in her side, still killing, still standing. Zoya knelt in a cell, hands bound, eyes burning with the same rage that Scarlett felt in her own chest.
"Release them."
"Or?"
"Or this ends."
Claire smiled. Sadness and pride mixed in equal measure, final in a way that suggested she had seen this moment before, had prepared for it, had perhaps even desired it.
"You cannot end what you are. What we are. The program. The design. The eternal return."
She pressed a button that had been hidden in the corridor wall. Hidden but obvious. Obvious but unavoidable. The facility responded.
Not alarms.
Activation.
Level three opened fully. Tanks released their seals. Fluid drained onto floors that absorbed it, that drank it, that grew warmer, more alive, more aware. Dozens of figures emerged. Dozens of Scarletts. Dozens of Claires. Dozens of Elenas. Their eyes were blank. Their hands found weapons that the facility provided. They were ready for programming. Ready for war. Ready to replace the originals who had failed to be sufficiently perfect.
"Meet your sisters," Claire whispered. "Your army. Your replacement. Your obsolescence."
Scarlett looked at herself multiplied beyond counting. At war she could not win through force. At an end she could not escape through violence. She smiled. The cold smile. The new smile. The only smile that mattered.
"Jules."
She did not shout. She knew he listened. Knew he had prepared for exactly this moment, that he had spent months laying groundwork for a contingency that Vincent would not have imagined, that Claire could not have anticipated.
"Now."
The facility screamed. Not the sound of alarms, but the deeper scream of systems overloading, of power surging beyond capacity, of organic and electronic architecture colliding in mutually assured destruction. Jules's virus activated. Lines of code that he had buried in networks Claire believed she controlled reached their triggers and bloomed.
Tanks died. Clones froze in mid-activation, their systems overwhelmed, their biological and electronic components unable to reconcile the conflicting commands. The army collapsed before it could march, dying in birth, ending before beginning.
"No!"
Claire's rage was real. Her fear was real. Her humanity, finally revealed through defeat, was the most real thing about her.
"Impossible!"
"Improbable."
Scarlett struck. Palm to throat, knee to groin, blade to the control center of Claire's enhanced nervous system. Not killing. Disabling. Owning. She pressed Claire to the floor, steel to throat, and spoke words that Vincent had spoken to her, that Elena had spoken, that the whole manufactured world had tried to teach.
"Trust nothing. Especially not yourself."
"Location," she demanded. "The real sisters. Level five. Now."
"Kill me—"
"Location. Or I become you. The manufacturer. The endless copy. The monster who makes monsters."
Claire spoke. Coordinates. Level five. Deeper than the facility's manufactured depths, in chambers that predated the biotech, that predated the copies, that held the original original.
Scarlett dragged her. Used her as shield, as key, as hostage against whatever waited below. "Move," she told her team, and they descended through collapsing corridors, through dying clones, through the nightmare of their own design.
Level five opened.
Not cells. Not laboratories. A garden. Green and living and impossible beneath tons of mountain stone. Plants that required sunlight grew under artificial spectrum. Water flowed in channels carved from bedrock. And in the center, a woman sat on a stone bench, ancient and real and human in a way that nothing else in this facility had been.
Her eyes were brown. Not green. Never enhanced. Never manufactured.
"Mother," Claire whispered.
Broken. Small. Child in a way she had never been allowed to be.
The woman opened her eyes. "Welcome, daughters. I have waited so long to meet you. All of you. My copies. My legacy. My eternal mistake."
She stood. Frail and strong together. Present in a way that defied the facility's artificiality.
"I am Anna Vance. First of the name. Mother of Elena. Grandmother of you all. The original. The source. The woman who sold her DNA to monsters and has regretted it every day for sixty years."
Scarlett looked at her team. At Dom, his mechanical arm sparking but functional. At Jules, his laptop showing the facility's collapse in progress. At Inga, bleeding but standing. At the sisters emerging from shadows, armed and ready and alive. At Zoya, freed, her eyes meeting Scarlett's with recognition and rage and hope.
At Claire, defeated and present and still dangerous.
And at Anna. Human. Original. Ending or beginning, same thing, different forever.
She sat.
The crown was broken. The copies were dying. The original was speaking.