Chapter 71 - The Twin in the Mist
The wind screamed through the iron lattice of the viaduct, carrying needles of ice that bit into the bare skin of my neck. But the chill of the storm was nothing compared to the paralysis spreading through my veins.
The muzzle of the gun pressed against my forehead was warm from recent firing, but the woman holding it was carved from stone. I had held her through the burning corridors of the salt mill. I had watched her wrap her coat around Lily when the hypothermia threatened to claim our daughter’s life. I had trusted her with every breath remaining in my lungs.
"Don't move, Julian," she whispered. Her voice was flat, devoid of the trembling cadence that had filled our desperate nights on the run. "If you reach for that lockbox, I will put a hollow-point through your skull before your fingers touch the steel."
"Clara..." I breathed, my hands hovering in the freezing air. Lily was sleeping against my chest, bundled inside my torn sheepskin coat, completely oblivious to the death hovering inches above her head. "What are you doing? After everything we've survived—"
"She isn't Clara," rasped the second voice from the mouth of the maintenance tunnel behind us.
Through the whirling curtain of snow, a figure stepped into the pale beam of the viaduct's emergency light. Her hair was matted with dried blood, her woolen coat shredded at the shoulders, and her left arm hung limp at her side, bound by a makeshift sling fashioned from the red silk lining of another handbag. But her face—haggard, frostbitten, and streaked with tears—was an absolute mirror of the woman pointing the gun at me.
"Elena," the woman holding the gun to my head said without turning around. Her grip didn't waver by a fraction of a millimeter. "You should have stayed in the sub-level sluice. The drop was three hundred feet into frozen granite. You always were stubborn."
"And you were always the Council's favorite pet," the woman in the tunnel spat, dragging her booted feet across the rusted grating. She held a heavy iron wrench in her right hand, her knuckles white with strain. "Look at him, Julian. Look at her eyes. Look at the scar beneath her jawline."
My gaze dropped involuntarily to the woman kneeling beside me. Beneath the collar of her tactical sweater, half-hidden by theatrical makeup that had begun to run under the sweat and freezing snow, was a thin, surgical line tracing the curve of her mandible. It was the mark of total facial reconstruction.
"The twin in the cradle of glass," I whispered, the memories of the flooded archives in Chapter 31 slamming into my mind. "The sister Cynthia claimed died at birth."
"She didn't die," the real Clara said, her voice cracking with agony as she took another step forward. "When my mother hid the sovereign files in the floral handbag, the High Council took my sister. They raised her in the black site outside Bern. Conditioned her. Carved her face into an exact replica of mine after my twentieth birthday. When you came to the estate to claim me as your bride, Julian... she took my place at the altar. I've been locked in the Zurich medical ward since the night before our wedding."
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The imposter smiled, a cruel, elegant curve of her lips that I had never seen on Clara's face. "And you played your part beautifully, Julian. You carried the floral handbag across three borders. You cracked the obsidian clasps. You brought the Sovereign Ledger directly to the extraction point."
Her finger tightened on the trigger. "Now, give me the child and the box."
