The call ended with a soft digital click, but its echo rang through Dominic's mind like a funeral bell wrapped in silk. The screen went black. No number. No signal. Just a silence that felt absolute.
He didn't move right away.
Instead, he stood in the center of his dimly lit bedroom, his shadow stretching across the mahogany floorboards like a stain. Rain tapped gently against the tall windows behind him, blurring the city lights into smears of gold and blue. Somewhere far below, a car engine rumbled to life, then faded. The world outside was moving. But inside, everything waited.
Dominic turned slowly, his fingers brushing across the corner of his desk—his old sketchbook lay there, untouched for weeks. Next to it, the cracked frame of a childhood photo: him and his mother in the garden, his father standing tall behind them, half in shadow. The glass had broken during the first police sweep. No one had bothered to fix it.
His fingers lingered on the edge of the frame before pulling away.
There was no time for sentimentality. Not now.
He moved like someone rehearsing a role. Each step precise, almost theatrical in its intention. He walked to his closet—not for clothes, but for the false panel at the back. He pressed his thumb against a barely visible depression. The latch released with a soft click. Inside, beneath neatly folded jackets, was a compact canvas bag marked only with a faded red triangle.
He didn't unzip it. Not yet.
Instead, he sat on the edge of his bed and let the silence deepen. The shadows in the room seemed to lean in, waiting to devour the last traces of Dominic Manon.
"He told me not to flinch."
The words drifted through his thoughts, dry and sharp. "Even if it meant becoming something they wouldn't recognize."
He could still hear the voice, aged and metallic, filtered through layers of encryption. Calm, commanding, and impossibly distant. No affection. Just instruction.
There had been no goodbye.
Dominic stood again, sharper this time. He crossed the room to his bookshelf, pulling out a battered copy of The Art of War—a gift from his grandfather—kept close to him because he thought it was the only thing left of him. He flipped through the pages quickly, stopping at a hollowed-out section near the back. Inside were three things: a strip of medical gauze, a folded map with scribbled notes, and a flash drive wrapped in foil.
He took only the map.
Every step tonight had to be clean, contained, and irrevocable.
He moved next to the mirror. Not to look at himself—but to check the placement of the cameras. The main hallway feed was supposed to go dark for twenty minutes each night due a flaw in the system after the last time. He had tested it once, weeks ago, with a toothbrush taped to a broomstick and a strategically placed shoebox.
It had worked then. He was gambling it would work now.
He watched the red light blink once, twice… then fade.
The window had opened.
Dominic pressed two fingers to his own wrist, feeling the pulse. Still steady. Still too slow for someone about to fake his own death.
He allowed himself one last glance around the room. The shelves. The desk. The cracked photo. It all looked so ordinary—like the room of someone still holding on.
But he wasn't.
He turned, reached for the canvas bag, and unzipped it in one slow motion.
Smoke hadn't risen yet. But the ashes had already begun to fall.
The room was silent again.
Dominic locked the door, drew the blackout curtains tighter, and turned off the desk lamp. The only light came from the faint blue glow of the standby router beneath his bed. It pulsed like a heartbeat—steady, mechanical, artificial.
He crouched beside the large, nondescript duffel pushed into the corner near the closet. No one had questioned it. No one ever did when a boy had just "survived" an attempted suicide. The lie gave him cover. It made people avert their eyes.
He rested his palm against the surface of the bag. The material was cold. He could feel the faint indentation of the zipper beneath the fabric.
A breath in.
Then he pulled.
The teeth of the zipper parted with a quiet rasp, too loud in the stillness. A thin whiff of antiseptic stung his nose. Underneath, wrapped in a light mesh layer, was the clone.
It didn't twitch.
It didn't breathe.
It didn't blink.
Dominic stared.
The clone was perfect. Pale skin, slightly translucent under the overhead fan's rotating shadow. No hair. Eyes half-closed like a corpse trying to remember how to wake. Musculature lean, undefined but strong. It was human, biologically. Perhaps even more flawless than he had been before the nightmare began.
It looked like him.
Just enough.
A younger version, maybe—less worry in the brow, no callus on the knuckles, no trace of sleep deprivation in the cheekbones.
But the hollowness was there.
It was the emptiness that made it inhuman. Not the body—but the absence of something deeper. A lack of weight. Of tension. Of soul.
He touched its shoulder. The skin was room-temperature. Synthetic in its perfection.
Dominic's eyes flicked to the inner thigh. Near the groin, barely visible unless you looked closely: a thin surgical tag sewn into the flesh with microthread. Letters in dull gray:
PROJECT AZRAEL — PROTOTYPE 06B
The name echoed in him like a cipher key fitting into a lock.
AZRAEL. The angel of death.
The clone's creators had no intention of pretending this was life.
A flicker of memory returned. A line from his grandfather's letter, underlined in red:
"It's legal nowhere. But effective everywhere. Use it once. Never speak of it again."
Dominic stared at the figure—his twin, his corpse, his tool.
His mind didn't wander to morality or horror. Instead, logistics ticked forward.
He estimated the burn radius. The posture that would suggest collapse. The probability that dental records would survive the fire. A planted molar fragment. Maybe a ring, scorched beyond detail.
It was strange.
This was the closest thing he'd ever seen to his own death.
And still… no dread.
Just the silence of a sealed future.
He whispered to himself as he began to reseal the bag:
> "It was my face… without my sins."
After injecting his blood, the zipper closed like a mouth silencing the truth.
He stood, wiped his hands on a cloth, and walked to the window.
Outside, the world moved on—believing he was healing, maybe recovering. Maybe even grateful to be alive.
But inside this room, beneath the buzz of a dying ceiling fan, Dominic Manon had just looked into the eyes of his own ending—and planned to burn it.
Next week, the lie would become fire.[1]
And no one would know what walked away from the ashes.[2]
On the day it all ends.
The clock on Dominic's wall blinked 19:37 in silent red.
He sat perfectly still.
Not out of fear.
Out of discipline.
His fingers curled around the edge of his desk as he waited—not for courage, but for the exact moment. He had rehearsed this down to the second. Every step, every breath, mapped like a surgeon's incision.
At 19:42, the surveillance system's ghost flaw would activate—a remnant from the last time he'd cracked their internal monitoring. The buffer had reset, yes, but it had left a trace. A flaw that shouldn't exist. A quiet hole where nothing was seen and nothing recorded.
A twenty-minute abyss.
He didn't know why it remained. Maybe someone in the system had wanted him to notice. Maybe it was the system's version of a heartbeat—glitching just enough to resemble humanity.
19:42.
He moved.
First, the chemicals—retrieved from his floorboard stash in labeled vials marked as "cleaning concentrate." They were odorless but reactive when exposed to moisture and heat. His grandfather's note had described the precise mix, the ratios, the ignition delay.
He carried them to the small utility closet near the greenhouse exit, where water wouldn't seem out of place. No cameras. No questions.
Second, the body.
Dominic opened his closet. The clone was slumped inside, wrapped in a school-issued blanket. He pulled it out gently, careful not to leave smears on the walls. The clone's limbs moved like overcooked meat—soft, unresisting.
It looked like him.
Just enough.
He positioned it carefully on the stone tiles just beside the swimming pool's sliding emergency access door—a space rarely checked at night. The floor had a drain, and the overhead glass panels gave just enough moonlight to keep details ambiguous. This was where he'd almost died the first time. It made the story stronger.
He ruffled the clone's hair. Tore the shirt. Faked abrasions with iodine and dust. Pressed dried blood—his own, extracted a week ago after the injection—into the neckline, the wrists, the collarbone. Injected a knock out drug that could knock out cows for days—as for he got it. He synthesized.
Then came the lighter, the burner phone—scrubbed, reset, wiped clean with magnetics. He placed it six feet away, screen down, just out of splash range.
And the note. Folded once, no name.
"I was too late. They already broke me."
Vague. Cryptic. Enough to make them doubt what had happened. Enough to invite speculation.
19:48.
He clicked open the final vial and poured it in a circle around the clone's upper chest. A thin film shimmered as the liquid spread, invisible to most eyes. When ignited, it would flash-burn the skin, contort the bones, and simulate damage consistent with an internal suicide combustion—something the watchers wouldn't question publicly, only classify quietly.
He stepped back.
Just outside the greenhouse door.
A single bead of sweat slid down his temple.
He let it fall.
19:51.
Time to leave the shadow and vanish into the myth.
Dominic slipped silently through the dim hallway of the school's upper floor, heart pounding with a rhythm that matched the countdown ticking in his mind.
He found a narrow window cracked open just enough to slip through and ducked out onto the fire escape landing. From here, he could see the greenhouse below—a pale rectangle of glass shadowed by trees.
The burner phone vibrated softly in his palm. A single encrypted message.
He pressed the trigger.
A faint click echoed across the receiver.
Inside the greenhouse, the chemicals ignited.
First, a low hiss—like breath escaping a wound.
Then, a sudden bloom of orange flame, violent but contained.
The clone's face twisted, melting grotesquely, the skin bubbling and blackening like burnt parchment.
The fire caught onto scattered papers and a loose branch nearby, flames licking upward, smoke billowing thick and dark.
Dominic allowed himself a moment—just a breath—before he whispered,
"Let them mourn a lie."
Sirens pierced the night, distant but growing closer.
Two watchers burst from the school's main entrance, shouting orders into their radios, faces taut with alarm.
But Dominic was already gone.
He slipped back inside, disappearing into a narrow, shadowed corridor few knew existed.
His change of clothes was pressed tight against his body—dark jacket pulled low, hood up, and hair streaked with brown dye, the edges of his face masked by a loose scarf.
He moved swiftly toward the service entrance, where a rusted manhole cover sat hidden beneath a cluster of ivy.
With practiced hands, he lifted it and dropped into the damp tunnel below.
The muffled roar of flames and sirens faded above him as he navigated the slick passage.
He paused, inhaling the cool, stale air.
No relief yet.
Only transition.
Dominic pressed forward.
The world beyond the city's reach was a different one—forgotten by time, swallowed by shadows.
Dominic's boots crunched against cracked asphalt mottled with patches of moss and broken leaves, the air sharp with the scent of damp earth and rust. Sparse trees leaned like skeletal sentinels, their brittle branches scratching at the slate-gray sky, a whisper of cold wind threading through their boughs. No hum of distant traffic, no muffled voices—only silence, thick and unyielding.
Each step he took felt heavier, as if the weight of his past clung tighter here, pressing him down like the dense fog rolling in from the nearby marshlands. He moved with purpose, but with a quiet unease—this place was a far cry from the polished corridors and hidden cameras he'd left behind.
Up ahead loomed the water treatment plant, a relic from another era. Its concrete walls were stained and cracked, ivy crawling like veins over the faded signage that barely hung on rusted hinges. The chain-link fence sagged, its barbed wire rusted and dulled, useless now.
Dominic reached the gate and pushed it open slowly. The screech of metal was sharp but muted, swallowed immediately by the oppressive stillness inside.
Beyond the threshold, the air grew colder, tinged with the scent of mildew and forgotten machines. Broken pipes jutted out like broken bones; the faint drip of water echoed somewhere in the depths, steady and hollow. Dust motes floated in narrow beams of light filtering through cracked windows, catching on threads of cobwebs that swayed faintly in the draft.
His footsteps echoed softly on cracked tile and concrete as he followed the narrow corridors, walls lined with rusted control panels whose blinking lights flickered weakly—ghosts of a time when this place had purpose.
Then, from the deeper shadows, a figure emerged—a silhouette carved from darkness.
The voice was low, gravelly, a harsh whisper cutting through the cold air.
"Was the death clean?"
Dominic's gaze met the shadow's, steady and unflinching.
"It was never alive."
The figure stepped forward, features still hidden beneath the hooded darkness.
A pause stretched like a held breath.
"Would you have still been there after the feint suicide and before receiving my instructions?"
Dominic's lips tightened. "Probably. I didn't want to escape yet. I just wanted the eyes to stop watching."
The voice nodded slowly, as if weighing the words.
"Understood."
Another pause, heavy with unspoken meaning.
"Then the real war begins. But your training comes first."
Dominic lowered his hood, revealing a face sharpened by years of pain and deception. The boy who once danced on the edge was gone—replaced by something colder, harder, ready for what lay ahead.
Outside, the wind howled faintly through broken windows, carrying the distant echo of the city's chaos. Inside, the darkness swallowed them both as the weight of what was to come settled like a shroud.
[1] (Time skip)
[2] (Time skip)