The hum of the lab had become as constant as a heartbeat, so familiar to Elara Veyne that silence seemed alien. Tonight, though, the air was different—humming too high, the equipment straining as if it, too, were on the cusp of breaking.

Elara leaned forward, fingers tight on the edge of the console. For years she had watched embryos dissolve, cells misfire, DNA collapse under its own weight. Always a flaw. Always a gap too wide for science to bridge. And yet—here, tonight—Subject E–2 was holding.

A pulse appeared on the screen, faint but steady. An impossible rhythm.

Her throat constricted. She hadn’t eaten in hours; her mouth was dry, metallic. “It’s not real,” she whispered, but her hands trembled as though she feared to touch the proof. The incubator glowed, a sterile womb of glass and steel, casting pale light over the dark circles beneath her eyes.

Days bled together after that. Fevered monitoring, sleepless anticipation, her very breath hitching with every new development. The clone grew not in the quick, monstrous way of failed attempts, but with unsettling precision. A mirror image carved cell by cell, as though the universe had finally relented, if only to mock her persistence.

And then—birth.

She had no poetic word for it, no triumphant cry. One moment, there was only the hiss of cooling systems and the scent of sterile air. The next, Subject E–2 was there, lying motionless on the table like a drowned reflection pulled from glass.

Elara removed her gloves with shaking fingers, her stomach roiling. She had imagined this moment a thousand times and yet, standing over the body, she felt more dread than triumph.

The clone’s eyes opened.

Grey-green, sharp as her own. But where hers were dulled by fatigue and reason, these were alive, gleaming with something she could not name. They fixed on her instantly, unblinking, as though no other object in the world existed.

Elara stumbled back, hitting the edge of the console. She forced herself to breathe. “You’re awake,” she said, voice uneven. “You’re… alive.”

The clone’s lips parted. A rasp, faint as static, pressed into the air: “Doctor Veyne.”

It wasn’t a question. It was recognition.

And though the voice was her own, it carried a strange weight—as if it had been waiting for her.