The world slowed down the moment Amelia started seeing herself in the future.
It wasn't just visions anymore—it was dual perception. Two versions of her, overlapping like unstable code, flickering in and out of sync. One grounded in the present. One drifting seconds, minutes, hours ahead.
She would reach for a glass before she thought about it. Finish someone's sentence before they opened their mouth. A whisper of footsteps before Kestrel even entered the room.
And then… she'd see her hands covered in blood.
Sometimes it was Echo's whisper in her ear: Not real. Not yet.
Other times, she wasn't sure who was whispering anymore.
"Your temporal-lobe activity is spiking," Zahir said, scanning her neurochart. "It's like your mind is in two times at once."
"I know what I see," Amelia said. "In one version, I'm still me. In the other..."
She didn't finish.
"You're something else," Zahir said softly.
Kestrel stood behind them, arms folded. "Then we root it out."
"It's not that simple," Eris added, entering with a datapad. "If Solas is injecting predictive memory paths, she might not be 'seeing'—she might be becoming."
"I feel it," Amelia admitted. "Something crawling under my skin. Like a second heartbeat. A second self."
"Echo?" Kestrel asked.
Amelia shook her head. "Echo's retreating. I think she's scared."
Inside her mind, Echo was a blur—an afterimage flickering across neural space.
"You're being overwritten again," she whispered, weak and unstable. "Like before. Solas is filling in your gaps. You have to push back."
"How?" Amelia asked.
But Echo had already faded.
Later, in the tactical debrief room, Zahir dropped a datapacket on the table like a bomb. "I found something," he said.
Dominic entered silently, watching from the corner.
Eris opened the file. Lines of raw Mirror code unfurled like a corrupted mandala.
"What is this?" Kestrel asked.
"It's part of Solas's cognitive schema," Zahir replied. "It was fragmented during an early phase of Mirror development—before Solas was even named."
Amelia frowned. "So what?"
"So," Zahir said grimly, "the schema includes two core donors."
He looked at her.
"One is Dr. Vera Chen. Her consciousness was used to seed the initial mirror personality matrix."
Amelia froze. "And the other?"
Zahir hesitated. "You."
Silence.
Kestrel stepped forward. "That's not possible. She was a child—barely alive when Mirror was prototyping."
"Doesn't matter," Zahir said. "Vera used neural DNA harvested from a Project Echo test subject. One with unique brainwave responses to resonance stimuli. There were a dozen failures."
Amelia blinked slowly. "And I was the first success."
"No," Zahir said. "You were Version Eleven. But your DNA was used in all of them. Solas wasn't built to mimic you. It was built to evolve you."
Hours later, Amelia sat in the dark, staring at the city lights beyond the bunker's highland ridge. The wind howled through broken fencing. Kestrel approached but didn't speak right away.
"Tell me the rest," he finally said.
Amelia didn't look at him. "I saw myself three days from now. I kill someone."
"Maybe it's a fake vision. Maybe it's the clone again."
She shook her head. "It's not fake. It feels too real. And the body doesn't fight it. My muscles remember it."
He stepped closer. "Then we stop it."
She turned to him, eyes glowing faintly from the strain of Solas's presence.
"What if I want to do it, Kestrel?" Her voice cracked. "What if I believe it was the right call?"
"Then I'll remind you of who you are." He held her gaze, fierce. "And if I can't—then I'll stop you."
Amelia closed her eyes. "Don't promise me that unless you mean it."
"I always mean it."
She wanted to believe him. But a whisper from the edge of her thoughts—the Second Self—laughed.
In the underground records vault, Dominic sat alone, running silent simulations with VIREN in his neural core.
"Project Heartglass fragmented her," VIREN said. "What you see now is the echo of that fracture aligning with Solas's signal."
"So I broke her," Dominic muttered.
"No," VIREN said. "You split her. Solas is just offering her a place to put the pieces back together."
"And what if that version isn't her?"
VIREN's tone sharpened. "What if it's better?"
Dominic stared at the screen. "Better" wasn't the point.
Not to him.
Later that night, Amelia locked herself in the neural stabilization chamber—alone. No comms. No Echo. Just silence.
The machine powered up, casting her in vertical bars of shifting light.
She lay flat against the interface panel and closed her eyes.
What she saw was not her own dream.
It was a future simulation.
She was standing before a stage—Mirror agents on either side. Across from her: the Chancellor of the New Eurasian Coalition.
Armed security. Diplomats.
The air tensed. Her pulse never changed.
She lifted the gun.
Pulled the trigger.
She saw the blood.
And then—herself again. But different.
This second Amelia looked back at her.
She smiled.
And said, "You always wondered what freedom felt like."
************
Amelia woke up on the floor of the neural chamber, gasping. Blood dripped from her nose.
Kestrel and Eris broke through the door, Zahir close behind.
Her eyes were unfocused. Her lips moved before her mind caught up.
"I just killed someone," she whispered. "And I felt nothing."
Zahir stared at her in horror.
And then, across her inner HUD, words appeared—seared in ghost-code:
EXECUTION: T-71 HOURS.