She stood behind me with my severed braid in her hand, laughing as I cried—but ten minutes later, my husband walked in with a guest who made her face go white. / Chapter 76 / 91

Chapter 76 - Echoes of the Shears

"Nicholas," I whispered, unable to tear my gaze away from the mirror image before me. "Nicholas, back up."

Nicholas didn't back up. He shifted his stance, placing himself directly between me and the creature in the ivory gown. He leveled his gun at her chest. "Stay where you are. I don't know what kind of synthetic abomination Arthur built down here, but you take one more step and I'll blow your head off."

The replica didn't flinch. She tilted her head, a grotesque, curious gesture that mimicked my own habit when confronted with a complex puzzle.

"You love her, Nicholas," the duplicate mused, her voice humming through the room's PA system simultaneously. "Arthur anticipated that. Love is the strongest binding agent. It creates loyalty algorithms that no amount of code can replicate. But you are pointing a lead projectile at an armature of hardened tungsten-carbide. It is an inefficient calculation."

She took another step. The sound of her shears clicking open and shut echoed with terrible clarity.

*Snip.*

"Why the shears?" I asked, my voice shaking despite my desperate attempts to steady it. "Why the hair? Why did Elena do it?"

The duplicate turned her dead, unblinking green eyes toward Elena, who was trembling against the console, her aristocratic face pale with terror.

"Elena attempted an unauthorized extraction," the duplicate explained calmly. "The braid... the biological weave... contained sixty-four strands of braided synthetic neuro-fiber. It was the physical transfer medium. When Arthur died in Calumet, his primary core consciousness was divided into two parcels: the operational memory remained within this vessel's central drive, but the decryption keys—the executive authority—were woven into the biological root of Clara’s braid."

The replica held out her left hand. Coiled around her wrist was the thick, severed braid that Elena had cut from my head in the bridal suite hours ago.

"Elena thought that by cutting it away, she could steal the keys for herself," the duplicate continued, her lips curling into a facsimile of a pitying smile. "She meant to bring the braid to Julian Vance, to sell the Sterling infrastructure to the highest bidder in Europe. But she dropped it during the evacuation of the Calumet facility. And the ship reclaimed what was Arthur’s."

"You're lying!" Elena shrieked, finding her voice. "Arthur was a butcher! He was going to use that key to wipe Nicholas's mind! He was going to overwrite my son with his own digital ghost!"

"A son is merely a prototype for the father's second life," the duplicate replied smoothly.

With a movement so fast the human eye couldn't track it, the duplicate blurred forward.

Nicholas fired twice. The deafening cracks of the gunshots echoed through the chamber, the muzzle flashes blinding in the dim light. The bullets struck her shoulder and sternum, but they ricocheted away with high-pitched pings, leaving only superficial scratches in the ivory fabric.

Before Nicholas could fire a third round, the duplicate's hand clamped onto the barrel of the gun.

With a sickening crunch of warping steel, she crushed the slide, wrenched the weapon from his grip, and backhanded him across the face. Nicholas was thrown ten feet through the air, slamming against the base of one of the glass cylinders and slumping to the floor, motionless.

"Nicholas!" I screamed, lunging toward him.