Chapter 6: Fractured Pulse

The gunshot's echo clung to Jiang Se's eardrums like tar. She crawled through amniotic fluid and glass shards, her burgundy eye reduced to a weeping socket. The thermal vision was gone, leaving only phantom heat signatures dancing at the edges of blindness.

"Lu Chen!" Her voice bounced off stainless steel tanks. "This isn't funny!"

Mingyu's laughter answered—no longer childish, but the smoky timbre of a woman grown. "Poor JieJie. Always losing things."

Jiang Se's fingers closed around a scalpel. "Where is he?"

"Where you left me." The voice came from everywhere. "In the dark. With the needles and the lies."

Emergency lights flickered on, revealing the lab's true scale. Hundreds of clone pods lined the walls like grotesque wine bottles, each containing a Jiang Se at different ages. Some lacked limbs. Others had extra eyes.

The oldest specimen floated at the chamber's heart—Mingyu at twenty-eight, mirroring Jiang Se's current form but for the surgical scars laddering her arms.

"Surprise." The clone's lips moved in sync with the speakers. "Qin Shu-gege perfected his craft."

Jiang Se lunged at the pod. The scalpel skittered off reinforced glass. "You're not real!"

"Says the skin thief." Mingyu's eyes snapped open, pupiless and white. "You stole my face. My life. My pain."

Security screens lit up, showing Lu Chen bound to a dental chair in the greenhouse. His chest rose and fell in ragged bursts, skin prickling with subcutaneous lights that mapped his nervous system.

"Choose." Mingyu's voice hardened. "His memories or yours."

A syringe gleamed in Jiang Se's peripheral vision—one dose of shimmering silver liquid, one of inky black.

"The silver erases." Mingyu's clone pressed a palm to the glass. "The black reveals. Decide who dies tonight."

Jiang Se grabbed both syringes. "Or option three—"

She stabbed them into the clone pod's power conduit. The liquid sizzled, eating through cables that screamed like living things. Mingyu's clone pounded the glass as the fluid level rose.

"You'll kill us both!"

Jiang Se smiled through bloodied teeth. "We've died before."

The explosion blew her through a rotten wall into blinding sunlight.

Three Days Later

The mountain burned with unnatural blue flames. Jiang Se watched from a stolen delivery van, face wrapped in bloody gauze. News reports chattered about "chemical wildfires" and "eco-terrorism."

No mention of missing detectives or mass cloning.

Her remaining eye twitched when the radio played Frère Jacques. The song cut to static, then a familiar giggle.

"JieJie's getting colder."

Jiang Se crushed the radio underheel. The van's rearview mirror showed her reflection—and Lu Chen's bruised face in the backseat.

"You're hallucinating." She popped stolen painkillers.

"Am I?" His reflection adjusted an imaginary tie. "Check the glovebox."

Inside lay a butterfly clip oozing black fluid. The attached note read: He tastes like regret.

Coordinates followed—for the city's abandoned subway line.

Terminus Station, Midnight

Jiang Se descended into the mothballed platform, her flashlight beam catching on graffiti depicting eyeless faces. The air reeked of burnt hair and copper.

Lu Chen waited by a derelict train, his shirt crisp despite days in captivity. "Took you long enough."

She aimed the scalpel. "Prove you're real."

He unbuttoned his collar, revealing subcutaneous lights dancing beneath his skin. "Mingyu's tracking system. She's mapping my neural pathways to improve the clones."

"Why?"

"Because you broke her favorite toy." He nodded at the train. "She's waiting."

The carriage doors creaked open, releasing a fog that smelled of hospital disinfectant and birthday cake. Mingyu lounged on a throne of mannequin parts, now physically present in the flesh.

"No more holograms." She spread arms stitched with Jiang Se's hair. "Do you like what Qin Shu-gege made me?"

Jiang Se's gauze slipped, revealing the empty socket. "Let him go."

"Or what?" Mingyu licked Lu Chen's cheek. "You'll stab me with a Q-tip?"

The train lurched forward on dead tracks. Jiang Se fell against a pole strung with human teeth. Mingyu loomed over her, surgical scars glowing.

"You'll watch as I become you." Her breath reeked of corpse flowers. "Then I'll peel him apart sense by sense."

Lu Chen caught Jiang Se's eye. His fingers flickered in tactical sign language: Distract. 30 seconds.

Jiang Se spat blood at Mingyu's face. "You'll always be second best."

The clone roared, tackling her through a window into the next carriage. Jiang Se's head cracked against metal flooring. Mingyu straddled her, thumbs pressing into the bleeding eye socket.

"I'll take both eyes this time."

Lu Chen's voice boomed through intercoms. "Hey, Frankenbitch! Catch."

He tossed a glass vial overhead. Mingyu caught it instinctively—Qin Shu's original Path to Hades formula.

Jiang Se headbutted her. The vial shattered between them, dousing both in concentrated scent.

Mingyu's scream shook the train. "What did you do?!"

"Gave you what you wanted." Jiang Se gagged on the fumes. "My memories."

The clone convulsed, skin bubbling with recalled traumas—the scalpels, the wires, the endless nights screaming into padded walls.

Lu Chen kicked open an emergency hatch. "Jump!"

They tumbled onto the tracks as the train plowed into a concrete barrier. Mingyu's final shriek harmonized with twisting metal.

Safe House, Dawn

Jiang Se picked glass from her palms. "She'll come back."

"Probably." Lu Chen scrubbed tracking fluid from his chest. "But now we know her weakness."

"Which is?"

"You." He tossed her a fresh gauze roll. "Turns out being a selfish bitch has its perks."

She almost smiled. "What now?"

He unrolled blueprints stolen from the clinic. "We find the original."

The schematics showed six secret labs arranged like a butterfly's wings. Five were destroyed. The last's coordinates formed a familiar shape—the scar under Jiang Se's left breast.

Lu Chen traced it through her shirt. "Looks like you've been the map all along."

Somewhere beneath their feet, a subway tunnel collapsed. Jiang Se's phantom eye throbbed in time with the aftershocks.