The transport kicked up dust, a gritty cloud against the bleached sky. I watched it settle, the familiar ache blooming behind my eyes – the same ache I’d carried since The Incident. Since Rheya. We were staged at a temporary firebase, sandbags piled high, the air thick with the smell of diesel and something metallic I couldn’t quite name. The usual buzz of movement was muted today, a low hum of weary men going through the motions. My motions felt even slower.

Then they stepped off.

Just one, at first. A shadow detaching itself from the metal hull, stepping onto the sun-baked earth. And the world, already fragile, tilted violently on its axis.

My chest constricted, a physical vise clamping down on my lungs. It wasn’t just a resemblance. It was… too much. The build, lean but strong. The way they moved—efficient, economical, like someone who knew exactly where their body was in space. The tilt of the chin, scanning the perimeter with an unsettling calm. And the hair. God, the same shade of sun-bleached brown that used to catch the light just so, making her look like some impossible field sprite dropped into a combat zone.

My fingers curled, digging into the calloused skin of my palms. It felt like a blade was being twisted, slow and deliberate, in the hollow space where my hope used to live. Breathe, my mind whispered on a loop, but my chest refused. The silence felt loud, stretching taut between me and this impossible figure.

“This is the new transfer,” a voice cut through the haze. Sergeant Lowe, maybe. Didn’t matter. The words were just noise. “They’ll be filling Halden’s old position.”

Halden. The name ripped through me. My Halden. The only person who had seen past the wreckage I was, who hadn’t flinched at the jagged edges. And they were replacing her? Replacing Rheya with… this?

A sound escaped me. A laugh, I think, though it felt more like a choke. Bitter, broken, utterly humorless. It scratched its way out of my throat and echoed, too loud, in the sudden quiet of the firebase. Every eye felt like it was on me.

The new recruit turned fully then.

And there it was. The face. Not hers, not exactly. But the echo. The devastating, cruel echo of her in flesh and bone and uniform. The eyes… sharp, watchful, impossibly familiar in their shape, though the light in them was different, colder maybe, or just unfamiliar.

My world didn’t just fall out from under me. It shattered. Split into a million sharp pieces that rained down, tearing at everything I thought I had left. I wanted to run until my lungs gave out, until I ran clean out of this cursed place, this cursed life. I wanted to scream until the sky broke open. I wanted to tear my own skin off because being in it hurt too much, felt too wrong.

Instead, I stepped forward.

The few feet between us felt like miles, thick with unspoken grief and a rage I didn’t know I possessed. The air felt suffocating, pressing in on me, making my head swim.

“You don’t belong here.” My voice was jagged, raw, like it had been dragged across broken glass. It wasn’t a statement of fact; it was a plea, a desperate attempt to unmake what I was seeing.

They flinched slightly, brows furrowing, but still, they didn’t speak. Just watched me, waiting.

And seeing that face, those eyes, trying to understand me, felt like salt rubbed into a gaping wound. Like a cosmic joke I wasn’t supposed to endure.

“You’re a damn mockery,” I whispered, though it felt like shouting in my head. “They can’t just… find someone who looks like her and… and put them here. You’re not her. You’re not her, and you shouldn’t be here.” My voice cracked on the last words, the control I thought I had built splintering into a million pieces. This wasn’t a replacement. This was a torment. A reminder I couldn’t escape, dressed up in the face I mourned.