Chapter 13 - The Fourth Face
The figure in the darkness stepped into the emergency light.
Vanessa.
She wore a hospital gown beneath a stolen coat. Blood had soaked through the bandage on her shoulder. Her eyes were unfocused from the drug, but Noah wrapped his arms around her waist as if he knew her.
Amelia felt something break inside her.
“Why did he call you Mommy?”
Vanessa looked down at Noah in horror. “I don’t know.”
The other twin moved first. She grabbed Noah and pulled him away from Vanessa just as armed officers entered the corridor.
Everyone shouted at once.
Cross ordered all three women to the floor.
Then the fetal monitor attached to Amelia’s bed screamed.
Lily’s heartbeat fell.
The argument ended. Amelia was rushed into surgery while the hospital locked down the twins, Vanessa, Noah, Adrian, and every member of staff.
Under anesthesia, memories came without order.
Three little girls sat around a kitchen table while Rose Lane braided their hair. Amelia wore blue. Mia wore green. Vanessa wore red. Rose placed a hand over Vanessa’s trembling fingers and told the other two to sing so their sister would not be afraid.
Later, in a laboratory, Amelia and Mia repeated words into microphones while Vanessa slept beneath a scanner.
At sixteen, Mia escaped first.
At twenty-two, Amelia met Adrian at a charity clinic. He fell in love with her laugh. Vanessa watched from across the street. Mia returned to warn them both that Voss had begun copying their adult minds.
On the night of the crash, all three sisters argued inside the red car.
Mia wanted to expose everything.
Amelia wanted to protect Adrian.
Vanessa wanted Rose’s research destroyed.
A truck forced them toward the barrier.
The car spun.
In the final instant, Vanessa grabbed the wheel, not to cause the crash but to avoid a child standing in the road.
The vehicle broke through the rail and entered the river.
Amelia woke underwater. Mia was trapped. Vanessa was bleeding. A man reached through the broken window.
Marcus.
He pulled one sister out.
Which one?
The memory dissolved.
Amelia woke after an emergency cesarean section.
Adrian sat beside her holding a tiny sleeping baby wrapped in white.
“Lily,” he whispered.
Amelia began to cry.
For several minutes, conspiracy disappeared. There was only the warmth of her daughter, the rise and fall of a small chest, and Adrian’s hand supporting the baby’s head.
“Is she healthy?”
“She is early, but strong.”
Amelia touched Lily’s cheek.
Then she noticed the identification band around the baby’s ankle.
BABY MIA LANE.
Adrian saw it too.
He called the nurse, but the nurse who entered denied placing the band. Hospital records showed the baby had been registered under Amelia Hart.
The band contained a second message printed inside.
ONE MOTHER LEAVES WITH HER.
Cross moved Lily to a secure neonatal unit. DNA samples were taken from all three women. Results should have established their relationship, but the laboratory system returned impossible findings: each woman appeared genetically identical in some markers and unrelated in others.
“Engineered samples,” Cross said. “Someone contaminated the chain.”
Vanessa remembered fragments after the drug. She admitted working with Voss for years, but claimed she did so to find Mia and destroy Mirror from inside. Her affair with Adrian had been real, selfish, and separate from the plan.
“I hated you,” she told Amelia from behind glass. “Not because you stole my life. Because you had one.”
The other twin called herself Amelia Lane Hart. She insisted the woman who had lived at the villa was Mia, conditioned to replace her after the crash.
“I was kept sedated because Evelyn discovered Adrian loved the substitute more successfully than the original,” she said.
Adrian refused to meet her alone.
At dawn, Voss seized control of the hospital screens.
“Congratulations,” he told Amelia. “Lily is the first child born after complete prenatal Mirror mapping. She is not the fourth face. She is the first unbroken archive.”
Amelia held Lily tighter.
“You will never touch her.”
Voss smiled. “I already have.”
A nurse screamed from the neonatal corridor.
May you like
The secure crib was empty.
In its place lay the ugly yellow giraffe Adrian had bought the night Noah was born.
