“But it’s a bad time?—”
Voss cut him off. “You told me the moment you got a live telepath, you’d show me something worth the cost of acquisition,” he said, before glancing around like he was trying to spot where his millions had gone, and thought he might see stacks of cash fluttering in the pockets of Marek’s lab coat.
Marek stiffened. “We’ve barely begun mapping her—she hasn’t even stabilized?—”
“You want me to tell our potential buyers we burned a black site and spent thirty million tostabilizesomething?” Voss said, voice hardening. “The drama at the dock ruffled a lot of feathers. I can’t take your word on progress anymore.”
Marek tried to step in and block his view of me. “You said you wanted measurable results?—”
“I said I wanted a prototype that worked.” Voss side-stepped him, peering into my pen with the casual menace of a man who’d tap on aquarium glass just to watch a fish flinch. “Ahh. Here you are. The original.”
I didn’t like what that implied.
Voss clapped his hands once, sharp and loud. “Let’s test her.”
Before Marek could stop him, Voss turned toward the hallway and snapped his fingers. A Hollow girl appeared—escorted in by Hollow guards, dressed in my old clothes, her face eerily familiar.
My breath caught. My pendant was around the other girl’s neck.
Voss smiled at my reaction.
Marek sputtered. “Mr. Voss, I assure you, this is entirely unnecessary?—”
“She’s not for the test,” Voss said, pointing at the Hollow. “She is the test. Open the door. Put her in there.”
The guards pushed the girl toward my cage.
She stumbled once, then caught herself. Her eyes flickered up, glassy and unfocused—but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was the pendant at her throat.
What mattered was that her face was mine.
I froze.
The resemblance wasn’t perfect. Her cheekbones were a little fuller, her mouth a touch narrower—but from five feet away? From a security camera? From behind a monitor with grainy uplink and bad lighting?
She was me.
She was meenough.
Enough to fool every facial recognition program the MSA relied on. Enough to ping a match on every checkpoint camera between here and anywhere else. Enough to look like me on paper, in databases, in the cold machine eyes that decided who was real and who wasn’t.
The thought made my stomach turn.
If they released her topside tomorrow, wearing my clothes and that pendant, the world would believe she was Sirena.Systems wouldconfirmit. Nex’s searches would light up green. The MSA would pay ransoms, or follow the wrong trail, or bring her in thinking they’d found me.
And I’d still be here.
They hadn’t just built a distraction—they’d built a replacement.
I took a shaky step back, heartbeat rattling in my ribs.
I couldn’t look away. She was wearing my life like a costume.
And then the thought hit me—cold, surgical.
This wasn’t the kind of plastic surgery you bounced back from in a weekend spa stay. This kind of work wasdeep. Bone restructuring. Cartilage reshaping. Tissue grafts. Swelling alone would take weeks to subside. Healing, months.
