The night rain over Edonia tapered off.
Ada stowed her grappling gun, slipped through a hole in the theater's domed roof, and landed with a sound swallowed by the lingering rainwater. Droplets still clung to the edges of the rubble, falling one by one onto the marble stage floor, each impact sharp in the empty theater.
Several corpses lay across the stage. C-Virus victims, half-Chrysalid, deliberately arranged in curtain-call poses with arms outstretched toward the empty seats. Like an absurd play performed for an audience of one. Ada glanced at them without expression, walked down the corridor, and pushed open the dressing room door.
Four mirrors lined the dressing room walls.
Endless reflections.
A woman stood with her back to Ada, adjusting that red scarf in the mirror.
Ada leaned against the doorframe, her tone lazy: "That scarf doesn't suit you. The color's off."
Carla's hands stopped.
She turned around. The same brows, the same bone structure, even the curve of her smile identical down to the millimeter.
But look closely and the eyes gave it away. Ada's eyes held an effortless detachment. Carla's held something that had been through fire, tempered in it. Madness.
"A little later than I expected."
"Ran into a few of your art projects on the way." Ada walked into the dressing room, unhurried, like she was browsing a department store. "Tidied up. Honestly, tacky. Posing bodies like opera scenes? Trying too hard."
Carla stared at her. Said nothing.
In the four mirrors, two Ada Wongs watched each other.
Ada stopped. A vanity chair sat between them. Her gaze swept over Carla, settling on her right hand. Ring finger. A ring. Identical to one Ada had lost.
Ada's tone cooled: "Even copied the ring. Simmons really went all out on you."
"All out?" Carla's lips curled, her voice going cold. "He carved your memories into my brain frame by frame, then made me look in the mirror every day. Every day. At a face that isn't mine. You call that going all out?"
She took a step forward.
"Every single day. Every morning I wake up and spend three seconds remembering who I'm not. I'm not Ada Wong. I'm stitched together from her scraps. The fake."
Ada said nothing.
"Simmons worshipped you like a god, so he built a copy of you to feed his sick fantasy. But he forgot..."
She raised her head.
In all four mirrors, countless versions of her wore the same expression at once.
"A copy never stays content being a copy."
Before the words finished leaving her mouth, she moved.
Right hand like a blade, slashing straight for Ada's throat. Almost no warning. Ada sidestepped, her left hand blocking Carla's follow-up elbow strike.
Their movements were identical. Same mechanics, same angles, same breathing rhythm. In the four mirrors, two identical women grappled through infinite reflections, like a single person fighting her own mirror image.
But the gap showed fast.
Every move Ada made was a half-beat ahead of Carla's. Every read landed just before Carla could change up. That half-beat wasn't technique. It was experience. The one thing those implanted memories couldn't give her.
Ada caught a tiny shift in Carla's center of gravity. Left hand locked the wrist and twisted, right elbow pinned the shoulder. She slammed Carla down onto the vanity.
The mirror rattled.
Two identical faces, inches apart.
"I'm not here to kill you." Ada's voice was steady, her breathing undisturbed. "Simmons made you into a weapon. But a weapon gets to choose where it aims. I can help you."
Carla lay pinned against the table, her cheek pressed to the cold glass.
Two seconds of silence.
Then she laughed.
The laugh crawled up from deep in her throat, sharp and fractured, bouncing between the four mirrors.
Not a happy laugh. The laugh of someone labeled a fake, hearing the original say "I can help you," and squeezing out the only sound left after being ground to nothing.
The laughter cut off.
"Help me?" Carla's voice went cold and hard. "You standing in front of me is the biggest insult there is. As long as you're alive, I'm the fake. You want to help me?"
Her left hand had already slipped inside her jacket at some point.
"Then die."
Ada's pupils contracted. She let go and pulled back.
The explosion ripped through the floor beneath the stage. The shockwave tore the dressing room walls apart and all four mirrors shattered at once. Countless Adas and countless Carlas broke into fragments in the flying glass.
The second blast came right behind it. Carla had wired every load-bearing structure in the theater with explosives. The dome began to crack. The chandelier crashed down whole. The pillars in the audience section toppled one after another.
Ada tumbled through the rubble, dodging. By the time she got her footing, Carla had already retreated to a hidden passage at the back of the dressing room.
A half-collapsed wall stood between them. Flames curled out through the gaps.
Carla stood in the shadow of the passage entrance, watching her through the fire.
"I don't need your help." Her voice carried through the flames with a calm finality. "I've got a funeral planned for Simmons. You're the original, so you'll get an invitation. But remember this."
She stepped back into the passage.
"I'm not your shadow. I'm your headstone."
The charges at the passage entrance detonated simultaneously. Stone collapsed with a roar, flames shooting through the cracks, sealing the entrance shut.
By the time Ada walked out of the theater ruins, the sky had begun to lighten.
Her red blouse was covered in ash. But her steps were the same unhurried pace as always.
She stopped on the front steps of the theater and fished a ring from her pocket. Picked it up during the fight. Identical to the one she'd lost. Simmons had replicated even that detail.
What he was obsessed with wasn't Ada Wong the person. It was his own fixation on Ada Wong. Carla was the thing that obsession had produced. A soul poured into a mold, then left in a corner, waiting to be remembered on occasion.
Ada opened an encrypted channel.
"Met her."
Ryan's voice came through from the other end: "How'd it go?"
"She doesn't want my help." Ada said. "She's planning a funeral for Simmons. Plans to bury herself in it too."
A pause on the other end.
"Can you pull her back?"
Ada didn't answer right away. She thought of Carla's last look through the fire. It wasn't pure hate. There was something else in there. Something deeper. The final declaration of war from someone whose right to exist had been taken away.
"I don't know. But if she's going to burn, she should at least burn the right place down."
She hung up, looked down at the ring in her palm. Looked at it for a while. Then her fingers closed and she slipped it back into her pocket.
Behind her, the theater caved in piece by piece in the fire. Charred beams fell one after another, burying every trace Carla had left beneath the rubble.
Ada didn't look back. She walked along the empty street toward the edge of the city. The last sliver of darkness before dawn trailed behind her, a long, silent shadow.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]