The screen of her phone went dark as the call ended.

  “Pablo…” Vicky whispered, a storm of nostalgia touching her heart and flooding her eyes. The pain her body suffered since the fight against the android vanished for a moment, at least from her mind.

  Juzo, who had heard Rigel’s message, took the phone from Vicky’s hands, snapping her back to reality—a place filled with the noise of avenues and crowds, where memories of old loves had no place.

  Vicky’s face hardened for an instant, until the emotional echoes carried by Pablo’s voice gave way to the importance of his message. The renegade Cyclops and a group of fugitives had crossed Point Kappa ten minutes ago, which meant they were likely right on their heels.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” she accused Juzo. “You knew there was someone else besides the Cyclops.”

  The memory of those soldiers at Bellatrix—their vacant eyes, blood dripping from their noses—returned to Juzo. It had been a mistake to dismiss the idea that there was more behind the A60’s assault on the fortress.

  “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure,” he replied.

  “Why would a Tau-code Eddanian program an android to follow us?” she wondered aloud.

  Stacking both phones—his and Vicky’s—on the palm of his hand, Juzo flexed his fingers twice, triggering the implant command on his wrist, and with a small burst of energy, destroyed the devices. Once they were disintegrated, he brushed the scorched remains off his hand.

  “They won’t come for us,” he assured her. “They’ll go after White O22.”

  Vicky crossed her arms, sensing that her partner was hiding something.

  “And how are you so sure? Or are you going to make another assumption and keep me in the dark?”

  Gripping the strap of his backpack, Juzo turned and started walking.

  “You were right,” he admitted. “I should have walked away from all this the moment I learned about the project. Forgive me.”

  Vicky froze, fear gnawing at her stomach. Rarely was Juzo so honest about his regrets, and that was reason enough to worry. Her pace slowed along the lonely sidewalk until she came to a full stop under the canopy of a leafy tree and the yellow glow of a streetlamp. They had left behind the bustle of the busy streets; the tranquility of this area was comforting, and she needed that peace to shake off the horrible feeling beginning to take root in her chest.

  “Vicky, you have to promise me something.” Juzo’s voice had softened, which meant whatever he was about to say would be terrible.

  “What is it?”

  Juzo stopped a little farther ahead, his back to her.

  “If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll take care of my brother.”

  Vicky let out a nervous laugh, utterly devoid of humor.

  “Why would anything happen to you?”

  “Vicky, do you promise?”

  “Fine, Juzo. Sure, no problem. But you sound like you’re certain something will happen to you. Why would it?”

  Juzo looked up at the building across the street. The sign at the front read “Carter Building.” White O22 lived on the twelfth floor.

  “Vicky… I doubt that Eddanian is the one commanding the A60. We’ve been wrong about him… very wrong.”

  “Wrong about the android? In what way? Juzo, what are you talking about?”

  Juzo lowered his head.

  “For the project to be completed, the Binary Reactor has to transfer its proteins to its Catalyst twin. It’s possible the Reactor could suffer cardiac arrest as a result… and die.”

  Vicky’s heart skipped a beat. According to the files, Juzo was the Binary-R—the Reactor.

  “They only need my proteins,” he continued. “I’m expendable. But they need White O22 alive.”

  “Well, you’re not expendable to me, and you don’t have to be the one sacrificed,” she said, desperation creeping into her voice. “Besides, you said it yourself: the project has been suspended for years, and no one knows you’re aware of it.”

  “I know, but…” Juzo reached into the pocket of his uniform jacket, letting out a sigh of defeat. “Now the enemy knows, and they have…”

  “They have what, Juzo?” Impatient, knowing how hard it was for him to speak plainly, she grabbed his backpack. “Let me see those files.”

  He moved her aside. “Why do you need them?”

  “I want to reread the last log, the one about the lost doses—something they needed to complete the project. Did they get them?”

  Juzo gave a hesitant nod, as if he’d rather not talk about it.

  “Vicky, it’s just… When I unlocked the Totem and then saw you fighting him… Well, I thought that by escaping Pannotia, we could outrun them for a while, buy time for me to think of something… But now they’re here, and I’m out of options.”

  “Juzo, there are always options! You took those Auriga cuffs, didn’t you? Let’s charge their damn batteries and get the hell out of this city—anywhere on the planet, just far away from here!”

  “No. White O22 is defenseless, and I won’t leave an innocent person at the mercy of a… psychopath.”

  “A psychopath? Are you talking about the Eddanian Rigel mentioned?”

  Juzo shook his head.

  “I’m talking about the A60,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Puzzled, Vicky grabbed his wrist. The death Juzo seemed to have foretold for himself weighed heavily on her heart—and would weigh on her for a long time—but what she had just heard replaced her despair with confusion.

  “Juzo, please… Tell me what’s going on.”

  

  Rigel’s dangerous game as a double agent was over, finished.

  Colonel Pablo Rigel had just been exposed, and it was one of his highest-ranking superiors who had done it. He wasn’t sure what would become of his life from this point forward; in fact, he wasn’t even certain he’d still have a life in the next few hours.

  Everything he had secretly fought for over the past few years—the effort his comrades had put into covering for him during his brief absences when he met with the Troublemakers to pass on information—was gone.

  A world was crumbling around him, and he needed at least five minutes to figure out his next move.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  And yet, in that moment, as he walked away from Benetnasch’s office, destroying the phone the General had given him, what dominated his thoughts was that final call to Vicky Marie. He’d been so focused on telling her to stay safe that it never even crossed his mind to ask her about what Juzo had uncovered on that computer, as per their agreement. Well, none of that mattered now; chances were, for him, there wouldn’t be any more cases to solve.

  “There you are!” A voice called over from the hallway—a low exclamation, clearly meant to go unnoticed.

  Rigel heard it but didn’t bother to lift his head.

  “Rigel!” the voice insisted.

  It was Henderson, one of his trusted men from the systems department.

  Henderson approached, doing his best to appear calm in front of the other officers passing through the corridor, too absorbed in his act to notice how pale Colonel Detective looked.

  Rigel considered telling him that Benetnasch had discovered his secret but decided against it. First, because his thoughts were still muddled with so many conflicting emotions, and second, because it was likely Henderson and the others’ movements remained hidden from the General. He didn’t want to alarm him unnecessarily.

  “I’ve got news,” Henderson whispered. “Patrick sent over the results from the analysis of the five bodies you found in that bunker.”

  Just the memory of those children inside those crystalline containers, floating in that milky liquid as if they were asleep, filled Rigel with intense revulsion.

  “I thought…” Rigel began, clearing his throat. “I thought the tissue decomposition was…”

  “Extremely rapid, yes,” Henderson interrupted. “But we managed to save some samples by freezing them. Turns out, four of the five children were actually two sets of twins.”

  The mention of twins sent Rigel’s thoughts straight to Juzo and his brother—and the experiments on twins described in those dusty old documents.

  Henderson licked his lips, eager.

  “Incredible, right? Considering the state of the bodies, it was impossible to tell just by looking, but DNA doesn’t lie,” he continued. “Well, guess who the missing pair is from the fifth child. Yeah, Patrick compared their DNA with the results from a previous case in that same cave, and it turns out the bones of the one known as the ‘trapped child’ match perfectly. And there’s more. According to the results, they all share the same genetic base. The exact same, Rigel! You know what that means?”

  Rigel turned to his comrade with an expression that said, ‘Are you implying what I think you’re implying?’

  

  “According to the Totem logs, there were actually two attempts to bring the Binary Project to fruition: the Proteinic and the Atavistic. Both were led by a scientist referred to only as the Director; both were failures,” Juzo explained from the shadows, keeping a distance from the streetlights. His gaze was lost somewhere on the Carter Building across the street.

  Vicky nodded, focused.

  “You and White O22… According to the files, you were part of the second project—the Atavistic one, right?”

  “That’s right,” Juzo said. “The first time around, they experimented on a pair of newborns—twins, Broga and Brun. The children carried mutated proteins in their blood, the result of decades of genetic manipulation in their family line. According to the Director’s notes, the goal of the project was to combine the proteins and use Broga, the Binary Catalyst, as a container for the resulting energy, then monitor him to see how much power he could generate.”

  Vicky crossed her arms. “And that was it? Juzo, no one grants power without a cost. No one creates a weapon without planning to fire it.”

  “I know, but the Totem logs didn’t specify anything else.”

  “Fine. So what happened to them… to the twins?”

  “The project was canceled four years after it began. Broga… he… died during a lab incident.”

  “After four years?” she said, outraged. “He was just a child. Bastards! Do you know what happened?”

  “No, the logs didn’t mention it. The Director, however, wasted no time restarting his work, this time under the name Atavistic, using clones of Broga and Brun. The copies were a failure, except for one pair that managed to survive…”

  Juzo lowered his gaze; his expression said it all.

  “You and White O22…” she said. “You two are those copies!”

  Juzo nodded.

  “This second attempt nearly succeeded, but it ultimately failed as well. On the day the project was set to conclude, five years ago, something happened that destroyed the last doses of the substance. They couldn’t complete the fusion of our proteins, and the Director eventually abandoned the project.”

  “What? Another lab incident?”

  Juzo shrugged. “There were no details about that either,” he said with a humorless chuckle. “What I did find out was that the original Binary Catalyst, Broga…”

  “Right, the boy who died in the incident,” she said impatiently. “Yeah, what about him, Juzo?”

  “He never died, Vicky. Somehow, that boy survived without anyone knowing.”

  “I see. So if this Broga is alive and his brother is too, that means there are now two pairs of Binaries walking around: them and you and White O22. But that’s… a good thing, right?”

  “Yes. The problem is that Broga…” Juzo cleared his throat, struggling to get the words out. “Whatever happened during that incident had serious consequences for him, so much so that he had to replace his limbs with cybernetic ones. For the past three decades, Broga… well, he’s stayed hidden from those who believed he was dead, pretending to be a Cyclops.”

  Vicky took a step back, her eyes wide with shock. “Don’t tell me…”

  “The A60,” Juzo said. “The A60 is actually Broga, the original Binary-C.”

  

  Adam White was at B-Crush, where everything was supposed to be about fun and partying—where he should’ve been hanging out with friends, drinking, laughing, and flirting with every woman who walked past him.

  And yet, he was alone and far from the VIP section, submerged in a sea of people dancing in the shadows and multicolored flashes, searching for his doppelg?nger—searching for someone who, just minutes earlier, had caught him off guard in the restroom stall.

  Adam scanned the crowd in every direction. There were too many people around him, way too many, and it was far too dark to make out their faces.

  I must’ve imagined it, he thought, assuming that what he’d seen in the restroom—or what he thought he’d seen, rather—would end up as nothing more than a fleeting anecdote. Whoever that person was, they had to just look a lot like him. That’s all.

  “Oh, Adam, Adam! Dim lights can trick anyone. How could you even think you’ve got a twin?” he muttered to himself, trying to shake off the thought.

  Unbeknownst to him, a striking bald woman in a long black-and-lavender gown approached him from behind, while his doppelg?nger, hidden among the crowd, watched them closely.

  After catching Adam off guard in the restroom and slipping away—leaving the VIP platform and heading down the stairs to the club’s main dance floor—the doppelg?nger Adam was searching for had managed to blend in, hiding behind a column. In a dark, crowded room, it wasn’t exactly hard to do.

  The man looked just like Adam—except for his sinister demeanor. His amber eyes were cold, ringed with dark circles that testified to the exhaustion of someone who had long been consumed by a grueling endeavor. His face was covered with a coppery beard, and his slightly long hair was tied back. He wore a tattered purple trench coat missing its left sleeve and part of the right, over a black jumpsuit torn at the legs, exposing cybernetic limbs beneath.

  He looked down at his robotic hands, flexing them to test if they were functioning properly. Though he had sealed the leaks in the synthetic veins of his arms and stopped the oil from dripping, exposed wires and damaged circuits were still visible around his wrists. The Great Fotia of the Grenadiers in the dome, followed by the fight against that black-booted bitch and then Romita, had left him in bad shape.

  “Broga…” a raspy voice called him through the thumping music and the chatter of the crowd.

  The bald woman—an Eddanian—joined him. Together, they watched as Adam wandered farther away from them.

  “And? What’s it like to come face-to-face with your clone?” she asked. “Amazing what a few years less, an easy life, and a little face cream can do, huh?”

  Broga eyed her warily. “Before I have to endure your attempts at humor, woman, I’d like to know if you got it or not.”

  “Of course,” she confirmed, her eyes—just as violet as her long earrings—glinting in the darkness. “I don’t know what you did to that playboy in the restroom, but whatever it was, it worked. The poor guy was so vulnerable I had no trouble creating the link.”

  “I just let him know he’s got a twin out there,” Broga replied. “Though I still think it’s ridiculous not to bring him with us now.”

  The woman shook her head. “I thought I made myself clear,” she said. “Romita and White both have already received the charm, but I need White to spend some time connecting with his brother—his real brother—so the link can fully form.”

  “Yes, woman, but what’s gonna happen when White asks him what this whole restroom situation was about? Romita will put two and two together and figure out I was the one here.”

  “Don’t worry. By then, it’ll be too late.”

  Not entirely convinced, Broga cast one last glance at Adam White, who was still scanning the crowd for him, then turned around and walked away. He pressed a small, disc-shaped device attached to the back of his neck, hidden beneath his hair. Hundreds of pieces emerged from it, assembling like a silver puzzle around his head, forming a helmet identical to the head of a Cyclops A60-R8. His conflicted and shadowed face vanished behind the blank face of an android.

  “It’s ridiculous that you’re still wearing that disguise,” the woman remarked. “At this point, your cover’s already blown.”

  Broga touched his mask. “My face stays hidden until I’m sure I’m safe around you. Just because we’ve made a deal doesn’t mean I trust your kind.”

  The woman smiled. “Oh, Broga! Like I’ve said before, as long as White keeps breathing, you’re safe. Who needs the original Binary-C when his copy is alive and in better physical shape?”

  The vertical eye on Broga’s mask—huge and oval—pulsed with red light. He wasn’t about to argue with the woman, so he pushed his way through the crowd and left. What they’d come to do was done, and all the noise and flashing lights were driving him mad.

  “Now that Romita has had access to the Totem, he’ll find a way to get his brother alone,” he said. “I’ll handle them—you just make sure that his little bitch of a friend doesn’t get in the way.”