ECHOES OF THE PAST

The room remained quiet after the soldiers vanished. Nathan had managed to intercept them—he told the team to stand down, pulled strings, called in favors, lies, and maybe one last truth. Adelina didn't know how he did it, only that they left.

But the room didn't feel safe anymore.

Not after what she found.

Override: A.EXT.0.

Terminate host.

She stared at the folder still in her hands. The weight of it was heavier than paper should be. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. The betrayal was beyond that now. It had settled in her bones.

Nathan hadn't followed her after the team withdrew. Maybe he knew she needed space. Maybe he was just afraid of what she'd say.

She remained in the hidden room.

There was something off about the space. Not just the preserved toys, the scent of old wood and dust. But a detail on the frame that hadn't struck her at first.

The photo of the twins—two girls smiling in a sunlit field—had a name etched beneath it in faded ink.

Adeline.

Not Adelina.

She blinked. Looked again.

It wasn't a typo.

The walls, too, bore scribbles. Children's drawings. One page pinned to the corkboard read in messy scrawl: Adeline + Arielle, best sisters forever.

Her heart pounded.

This wasn't her room.

She stormed into the sitting room where Nathan sat by the fire, a book untouched in his lap.

"Who was Adeline?" she demanded.

He didn't answer immediately. Didn't even look up. But she could see the tension in his shoulders, the tightness around his mouth.

"I found her name," she said. "And pictures. She looked exactly like me."

Nathan finally looked at her.

"She wasn't just like you," he said. "She was you. Or rather... you were her. Once."

Adelina shook her head. "That doesn't make sense."

He stood slowly.

"It's part of the lineage," he said. "The pattern. Our family... we don't just inherit features. We inherit constructs."

"Constructs?"

He exhaled. "There was an Adeline Blackstone born in 1973. A genius. Reclusive. She died under mysterious circumstances in her twenties. But before she died, she donated her brain to an experimental preservation program."

Adelina's chest went cold.

"They preserved her consciousness?"

"They tried. Years later, a biotech division—under our family's funding—recovered fragments from that project. What they found was a partial mind-map. Incomplete. Damaged. But powerful. It became the foundation of the early neural interface—what would eventually be integrated into... you."

"So I'm... her?"

"Not exactly. You were born. You had your own memories, your own identity. But parts of Adeline's personality—her intellect, her trauma, her emotional reflexes—were encoded into your development."

Adelina backed away.

"So you used a dead woman's brain as a blueprint to build me?"

"It wasn't supposed to take root so deeply," he said quickly. "But over time, the distinctions blurred. Especially after Arielle died. Your mind fractured, and Adeline's residual identity filled the gaps."

She sat down hard.

Her hands trembled.

"I'm not even me."

"You are," Nathan said firmly. "You are Adelina. But you also carry echoes of someone else. It doesn't make you less real. It makes you more."

She looked up, tears stinging her eyes. "So when you look at me... do you see your sister, or your experiment?"

Nathan's face twisted. "I see the woman I failed to protect. Again and again."

Snow began to fall that evening. Soft at first, then heavier. By nightfall, the estate was buried in white.

The radio crackled. The internet died. Signal gone.

They were cut off.

In the isolation, the silence between them took on a different tone. Not rage. Not mistrust.

Just grief.

Nathan cooked dinner—something simple, soup and bread. They ate in silence. No more questions, no more confessions. Just the storm howling outside, and the ghosts between them.

Later, Adelina sat by the fire, wrapped in a thick throw, staring at the flames. Nathan joined her without a word.

After a long pause, she whispered, "Do you think she hated me? Adeline?"

"No," he said. "She loved too deeply. That was always her weakness."

"But I'm not her."

"You're more than her."

The fire popped. Sparks danced upward.

"I have memories that aren't mine," she said. "A garden I've never been to. A boy with gray eyes who called me 'lionheart.' None of it makes sense."

"It will," Nathan said quietly. "Soon."

That night, Adelina dreamed.

Of a white corridor. Cold. Endless. She was running. Footsteps behind her. A voice calling out:

"You promised not to remember."

She turned a corner—and saw a mirror.

But the face staring back wasn't hers.

It was Adeline's.

The woman from the old photos. Older. Sadder.

"Wake up," the woman mouthed.

Adelina jolted awake, drenched in sweat.

The power was out. The fire had gone cold.

She got up, heart racing, and went downstairs.

Nathan was in the kitchen, lighting candles.

He turned when she entered, his face unreadable in the flickering light.

"I had another memory," she said. "I think it was hers."

He nodded.

"There's something I have to tell you," he said.

She waited.

"I've always known," he began, "that you weren't the same Adelina who grew up beside me."

Her breath caught.

"You changed after the first reconstruction. You spoke differently. You stopped remembering our secrets. You stopped looking at me the way you used to."

He stepped closer, the candlelight casting long shadows.

"And yet... I couldn't let you go."

Adelina stepped back.

"Are you saying you knew I wasn't really your sister?"

His voice was barely a whisper.

"I don't think you ever were."