Evie didn't remember leaving the lab.
One moment she was watching Elowen draw a perfect scalpel incision through synthetic muscle, the next she was standing in the Vanderbilt Institute's west stairwell—four flights above the anatomy wing, barefoot again.
She stared down at her shoes, held neatly in her left hand, laces tied together like a child preparing for gym class.
I didn't tie these.
Someone had. Someone inside her dream.
The hallway was lit by flickering sodium lights, each buzz scraping against her skull. The air smelled of antiseptic and faint lavender—the scent her mother used to wear before her accident. Before she'd "forgotten" how to say Evie's name.
Her pulse ticked like a metronome as she turned the corner.
And there it was again.
The door.
The one with no number, no handle, no official presence in the floor plans. The door from her dreams.
She touched it. Cold metal. Solid.
This isn't real, she told herself. It can't be real if I know it's not.
But her hand didn't listen.
The door slid open with a hiss like breath escaping a corpse, revealing a surgical theater bathed in white.
And at the center, under sterile light, Liam sat on a gurney with a gauze-wrapped arm and a needle-thin electrode threading into his temple. His eyes were closed. Breathing even.
"Evie," a voice said behind her.
She turned.
Elowen. In scrubs. Holding a clipboard in one hand, a scalpel in the other. Barcode visible. Smile clinical.
"Funny," Elowen said. "You're not scheduled for implantation until next month."
Evie's throat constricted. "What... what is this?"
Elowen's eyes glittered like broken glass. "A future you weren't supposed to wake up in."
The clipboard flipped open with a snap. On the patient file: Subject 04: E.V. — SCAR Protocol Rejected
A photo of her. Dated today. Labeled: Unstable. High liability.
She ran.
Back through the door, down the stairs—but the stairs spiraled impossibly now, folding and looping like a Möbius strip. Every landing led to a mirror. In every mirror, Elowen's face replaced her own.
She collapsed on the cold marble of the entry hall, gasping.
Then—
Hands.
Warm hands on her shoulders.
Liam.
But his eyes were wrong. Soft. Gentle. Pitying.
"It's time you stopped running from who you were built to be."
And on his wrist, faint under the cuff of his blazer, she saw it:
The same barcode.
Evie jolted awake in her own bed, her palm slick with sweat, fingernail crescents stamped into her skin like a code only her nerves could read.
She double-checked everything.
The sheets were clean.
The floor was normal.
No blood.
No mirrors.
No Elowen.
This time, it's real.
She moved slowly into the bathroom. The moment she flipped on the light, her breath caught.
On the mirror, written in fog but perfectly legible:
"Did you dream I died?"
Lipstick. Midnight Red.
Her lipstick.
Evie stared at the message until her phone buzzed.
A text. Unmarked number.
[You're late. Admin doesn't make exceptions for schizophrenic royalty.]
Evie gritted her teeth, tossed the lipstick into the sink, and scrubbed the words off the glass. Steam clung to her reflection like static. Her own face blurred at the edges, like the mirror couldn't decide if it was still hers.
She stormed into class.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, everyone went silent. Heads turned—slow, synchronized—like a flock sensing a predator in disguise.
She dropped into her seat, jaw tight.
Elowen spoke without looking up:
"You're alive, then."
Evie froze.
Elowen sat two rows ahead, draped in a grey uniform blazer with her barcode tattoo visible beneath a rolled sleeve. She was casually spinning something between her fingers.
Evie's breath stopped.
Her missing scalpel.
The one from two weeks ago—the one engraved with the Vanderbilt crest.
"What did you do?" Evie whispered.
Elowen smirked. "You sure you didn't do it first?"
She pulled a folded document from her pocket and slid it back along the table toward Evie, smooth and silent.
Evie unfolded it.
A clinical report.
Subject: E. Vanderbilt – Incident Log: Hallucinatory Episode, 05:38 AM
Transcripted phrases: "You're not me." "This isn't the real door."
Diagnosis: Delusional recall behavior. Memory loop consistent with pre-implant trauma.
Signed:
Dr. Liam Cross
Evie didn't hear a single word that followed in class.
Liam's seat was empty. The absence buzzed louder than any voice.
Her eyes kept returning to the bottom of the report.
Dr. Liam Cross.
The man who once promised he'd never sign anything without her consent.
The man she was starting to suspect had signed everything behind her back.
She didn't wait for class to end. She ran—to the archive level beneath the library. The place where banned protocols were buried under layers of red tape and retinal scans.
And yet—
He was already there.
Liam. Standing by a file drawer labeled Nuerosynthetic Trauma Cases 2A. His sleeves neatly buttoned. No barcode in sight.
"Evie," he said, voice calm, like a storm about to apologize for blowing down your house. "There's one question you really need to ask yourself."
She didn't move. Her pulse thundered in her ears.
"What question?"
Liam stepped forward. His eyes were exhausted, but his words were surgical.
"How do you know... you're not Elowe
Evie didn't answer.
She couldn't.
Her brain was already running search queries she hadn't authorized—comparing memory fragments, testing timestamps, rewriting the hierarchy of her own identity. Her name echoed inside her skull like a siren and a lie.
"How do you know you're not Elowen?"
She opened her mouth. No words came out.
Liam closed the drawer and moved closer, his tone gentle—almost pitying.
"You've been getting the dreams out of order. That's not your fault."
She blinked. "What?"
"They weren't supposed to activate until phase four. But your neural lattice isn't syncing. You're remembering things Elowen was supposed to remember."
He reached into his blazer and pulled out a flash drive, matte black with a sapphire embedded at the center. Her heart jolted at the sight.
"I can fix it. But you have to let me."
Evie stepped back. "Why would I let you near my mind again?"
Liam tilted his head, expression soft. "Because you already did. Hundreds of times."
The lab reeked of alcohol and sterile betrayal.
Evie's fingers were trembling as she slid the drive into the port at her personal diagnostics console. The screen blinked, then bloomed into a neural interface tree. At the root: EV_v3.6.2.
Below it: Cross Project: Parallel Persona Reconstruction – Elowen Alpha Feed.
She scrolled down.
Her heartbeat went cold.
Each dream. Each "premonition." Each breakdown. Labeled. Archived. Timestamped. Deliberate.
Dream_001: Elowen finds scalpel.
Dream_006: Evie witnesses Liam's barcode.
Dream_010: Evie screams when finding earring in throat.
Evie stared at that last one. She didn't remember dreaming it yet.
She clicked.
The video opened in grayscale, the resolution distorted—but unmistakable.
It was her.
Standing in the rain beside a corpse in a marble tub. A girl with short hair, throat slashed, eyes wide open. A sapphire earring glinting from her open mouth.
Evie's hand reached into the corpse's mouth. Pulled it out.
The scream echoed through the speakers.
Her scream.
That night, Evie locked herself inside the Vanderbilt estate's east library—where no one went except the dead.
She curled into the armchair by the grandfather clock, heart thrashing like a wild bird in a glass cage. Every thought was infected.
What if she was never meant to be "Evie"?
What if her memories were just dev files stitched into a legacy heir?
What if Elowen wasn't invading her life—
—but reclaiming it?
At 2:06 AM, she received a message.
No number. No sender.
Just one sentence:
"You forgot you had a sister."