…I stared at the jagged black ink bleeding into the cheap paper. My eyes darted up to the man. His face was a mirror, aged exactly like mine, but weathered by a completely different, harsher life. His eyes were cold and calculating. And right above his left eyebrow sat the jagged white line—the exact scar I earned when an oak branch snapped under my weight.
“Leo?” I breathed out, the name tasting like ash after twenty-five years of forced silence.
He didn’t smile. He just stood up, threw a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the table, and turned his back. “Walk. Now. Don’t look at your bags. Don’t look at the gates,” he muttered, his voice a gravelly echo of my own.
I followed, my heart hammering against my ribs. As we merged into the river of travelers dragging rolling suitcases, I risked a glance over my shoulder. Three men in slate-grey suits were converging on the coffee shop we had just abandoned. They didn’t look like airport security. They moved with a synchronized, terrifying precision, tossing my abandoned carry-on to the floor.
Leo shoved open a door marked Authorized Personnel Only. An alarm blared for a half-second before he jammed a small metallic device against the keypad, killing the siren and deadbolting the door behind us. We were suddenly submerged in the quiet gloom of a concrete maintenance corridor beneath the terminals.
“What the hell is going on?” I finally snapped, grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around. “Mom and Dad said—”
“Mom and Dad were handlers,” he cut in, his tone deadpan. “They weren’t our parents. We don’t have parents. We have a patent number.”
The concrete floor felt like it was dissolving beneath my feet. “That’s insane.”
“Is it?” Leo tapped the scar above his eye. “You remember falling out of that tree. You remember the blood, the stitches. I remember it too. But I never fell. You fell. They mirrored the physical trauma on me in the lab to keep our baselines identical. When I started asking too many questions at age seven, I became a liability. They recalled me to the facility, ordered your handlers to gaslight you, and left you in the wild as the control subject.”
My mind flashed to the attic when I was fifteen. The dusty box of toy cars. The left-handed baseball glove. The physical proof of my sanity that I had guarded like a secret treasure—it was just our “parents'” sloppy cleanup job.
“Why are you here now?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“Because the trial is over,” Leo said, checking the chamber of a matte-black pistol he pulled from the inside of his jacket. “They’re terminating the control subject. That’s you. I spent twenty-five years breaking out of a cage so you wouldn’t end up in a body bag.”
He shoved a heavy iron door at the end of the hall, revealing the glaring afternoon sunlight of the tarmac. A stolen baggage cart was idling near the perimeter fence line.
“Your life as you know it ended five minutes ago,” my brother said, turning to look at me—truly look at me—for the first time. “Are you ready to meet our maker?”
I took a deep breath, stepping out of the shadows and into the blinding light. “Lead the way.”
