Chapter 14: Accidental bandage
Lina did not sleep. The tea went cold on the silver tray. The bed remained untouched, a landscape of silk and shadow. She stood at the window for hours, watching the moon trace a cold path across the wine-dark sea. The variables were not just changing; they were multiplying. The empty vial in her pocket felt like a condemnation.
At first light, a different unease prickled at her nerves. A silence from the master suite. No movement. No sound of Pace’s voice, low and commanding, echoing through the stone halls.
She changed from the borrowed dress into her own clothes, the simple, severe lines of black trousers and a fitted sweater a kind of armor. She unlocked her door—the guard outside, a young man with watchful eyes, tensed—but she only requested to see the Don. Medical concern, she stated. His sutures.
The guard spoke into his radio. Listened. Nodded. “Vito says it’s clear. He’s with him now.”
The walk to Pace’s suite was a journey through a sleeping fortress. The morning sun cut sharp angles through the high windows, lighting motes of dust that swirled like unsettled ghosts. She found Vito outside the heavy oak door, his face carved from granite.
“He’s not waking up,” Vito said, his voice stripped of its usual pragmatic calm. “The doctor gave him painkillers, but not this. He’s unresponsive. His vitals are steady but… he won’t rouse.”
Lina’s own pulse quickened. “The bullet was clean. The blood loss was managed. There was no sign of neurological damage.”
“I know what the report said,” Vito snapped, then mastered himself. He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair. “The family doctor is useless beyond stitching holes. We need someone else. Someone discrete. You know people.”
She did. The world of groundbreaking, ethically-flexible genetics was small. She thought of the name immediately. Sebastian Guillory. A surgical prodigy with a reputation for fixing problems society’s legal surgeons wouldn’t touch. He owed her a favor. A big one.
“There’s a man,” she said. “In the city. He can come. He’ll ask no questions.”
Vito studied her face, looking for the trap. He saw only cold, clear logic. “Call him.”
Sebastian arrived within two hours, a testament to the Augustus family’s power to bend time and traffic. He was a slight man in his forties, with clever, quick eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and an aura of intense focus. He carried a sleek, unmarked case. He took one look at Pace, prone and pale on the massive bed, and got to work.
The medical room was reassembled, this time with Sebastian’s portable equipment humming softly. Monitors beeped a steady, reassuring rhythm. Pace’s chest rose and fell evenly. But his consciousness was absent, a castle with the drawbridge pulled up.
“It’s not the injury,” Sebastian murmured, his fingers dancing over a tablet displaying brainwave activity. “It’s… cellular. His body is repairing at an accelerated rate, but the energy expenditure is phenomenal. It’s like his system has redirected all resources to physical regeneration, leaving higher functions dormant.”
Lina stood gloved and gowned beside him, an assistant by necessity. “We observed accelerated healing. But not to this degree.”
“It may be escalating,” Sebastian said. “A runaway metabolic process. We need to stabilize it, slow it down so his mind can catch up. I have a compound. An inhibitor. It’s experimental.”
Vito, a looming presence by the door, spoke. “Will it work?”
“It should,” Sebastian said, not looking up. “In theory. Administered intravenously, it should temper the regenerative cascade.”
Lina watched as Sebastian prepared the vial. A clear, viscous fluid. He worked with an efficient, sterile grace, attaching the line to Pace’s IV. The intubation tube was still in place, a stark reminder of his vulnerability.
“Beginning infusion,” Sebastian said.
It happened in a blur of terrible, clumsy chance. As he reached to adjust the flow rate, his elbow caught the edge of the monitoring station. The jolt was slight. The vial, perched on a stand, wobbled. Sebastian grabbed for it, his fingers slick with sanitizer.
He fumbled.
The vial spun through the air, a tiny crystal comet. It struck the headrail of the bed, shattered. A droplet, a single, perfect bead of the clear inhibitor, arced through the sterile light.
And landed directly on Pace’s parted lips, seeping into the tube securing his airway.
“No,” Sebastian breathed, the word a choked whisper of pure horror.
For a second, nothing. Then Pace’s body jerked. A violent, full-body convulsion that rattled the bed frame. The monitors shrieked in discordant alarm. His back arched, muscles seizing.
“What’s happening?” Vito roared, stepping forward.
“Reaction!” Sebastian shouted, his hands flying to adjust doses, to counteract. “It’s going systemic too fast—"
But it wasn’t just a reaction.
The regenerative process, already in chaotic overdrive, encountered the inhibitor. Instead of slowing, the two powerful, conflicting biological signals collided. The result was not a cessation, but a catastrophic division.
Pace’s form seemed to blur at the edges. A second convulsion, worse than the first. Lina watched, her scientific mind unable to process what her eyes were seeing. The space around him… wavered. It was like watching a reflection in a pond split by a thrown stone.
From the epicenter of the seizure, from the very core of Pace Augustus, something else began to coalesce.
It was not a birth. It was an emergence. A form peeling itself away from the original, wet and gleaming under the surgical lights. It slid from the side of the bed with a soft, terrible sound, landing on the polished floor in a tangle of limbs.
Sebastian stumbled back, his glasses askew, a hand clamped over his mouth.
Vito stood frozen, his gun half-drawn, but aimed at nothing he could comprehend.
Lina could only stare.
On the floor, naked and slick with amniotic fluid that wasn’t amniotic fluid, a man pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He was Pace. Every contour, every angle, the raven hair, the powerful build. But unscarred. The bullet wound on his thigh, the old knife mark on his ribs, the faint line on his brow from a long-ago fight—all gone. His skin was pristine, blank canvas.
On the bed, the original Pace fell still, the monitors settling back into a steady, strong rhythm. The seizure had passed. He remained unconscious, intubated, his body bearing the history of its life.
The man on the floor raised his head.
He opened his eyes.
They were Pace’s eyes. Dark, intense, magnetic. But the expression in them was different. Unformed. Empty of memory, of persona, of the weight of thirty years of violence and power and cunning. They were newborn eyes in an ancient face.
He blinked, looking first at his own hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time. Then his gaze traveled up, past his own knees, to the three people staring down at him in abject, silent shock.
His lips parted. He took a breath, his first.
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the steady, mocking beep of the original Pace’s heart monitor.
The clone looked at Lina. He looked at Sebastian, cowering against the wall. He looked at Vito, whose face had gone ashen.
Then he spoke. His voice was Pace’s voice. The same timbre, the same resonance. But the inflection was flat, curious, devoid of the gravitas that commanded rooms.
“What,” he asked, “am I?”
The word hung in the antiseptic air, a simple question that shattered reality. Lina’s mind, usually a cathedral of ordered logic, fractured into a thousand glittering shards of panic. This was no variable. This was an impossibility made flesh.
Sebastian made a small, wet sound of pure terror. Vito remained statue-still, his weapon now fully drawn but aim wavering between the figure on the floor and the man on the bed.
The clone looked at his own hands again, flexing the fingers. He seemed fascinated by the movement. He began to stand, his movements uncoordinated, like a puppet learning its strings. His new muscles trembled with the effort. He was a perfect, hollow reproduction, and the emptiness in his eyes was more frightening than any threat.
Lina started to open her mouth, a denial or a command forming on her lips. But before a sound could escape, her training overrode her shock. Her eyes darted to the instrument tray beside Sebastian. There, among the scalpels and clamps, lay a loaded anesthetic syringe, prepared for a potential procedure.
She moved.
It was not a calculated decision. It was pure instinct, a predator’s lunge. Her hand closed around the cold plastic. In one fluid motion, she pivoted and drove the needle deep into the clone’s bare thigh, depressing the plunger to its hilt.
Sebastian screamed, “Lina, no!”
But it was too late.
The clone’s newly focused eyes snapped to hers, wide with a sudden, profound betrayal. He looked down at the syringe protruding from his leg, then back up at her. His expression wasn’t anger. It was a deep, wounded puzzlement. He managed a single, slurred word.
“Why—?”
Then his knees buckled. He collapsed forward, his head hitting the polished floor with a sickening crack. He slept.
On the bed, the original Pace’s vitals spiked on the monitor, the beeping frantic for a three-second burst before settling back into a strong, steady rhythm. It was as if his body, freed from some parasitic drain, sighed in relief.
In the security office three floors down, Vito watched the scene unfold on a bank of monitors. He saw Lina’s strike. He saw the clone’s fall. A raw, involuntary scream ripped from his throat, a visceral noise of anguish and confusion that echoed in the sterile, concrete room. He slammed a fist onto the console, making the screens shudder.
The sound, amplified by the estate’s ancient stone conduits and quiet halls, traveled.
It slithered under the door of a recovery room where Jace Augustus lay drifting in a morphine haze. The scream was a hook in his subconscious, dark and familiar. His eyes flew open. The ceiling swam into focus. Pain, a distant throb in his bandaged shoulder, anchored him to the present.
That had been Vito’s voice.
Something had gone terribly, irrevocably wrong.
He grinned into the darkness, a slow, painful stretch of lips. Then he began the arduous process of moving his battered body, intention crystallizing with each sharp, biting breath.
Then he began the arduous process of moving his battered body, intention crystallizing with each sharp, biting breath. He used the bedframe, cold and solid, to haul himself upright. The world tilted, a nauseating swirl of muted color and distant, echoing shouts from elsewhere in the fortress. He focused on the pain. It was a compass needle. It pointed toward chaos.
Down the hall, in the medical room, the chaos was a silent, sprawling thing.
Sebastian stared at the two forms. The Don on the bed, breathing steadily. The duplicate on the floor, unconscious, a line of blood trickling from where his temple had struck the tiles. The horror of what his mistake had wrought finally crashed over him. He backed into a steel instrument cart, sending it screeching across the floor. A sob tore loose from his chest, ragged and wet.
He turned wild eyes to Lina, who stood poised and frigid beside the original Pace’s bed, her hand still resting near his pulse point as if to anchor herself to the only reality she could accept.
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian blurted, the words tumbling out in a frantic, gasping rush. “I’m so sorry, Lina, I didn’t—the vial, it was just a stabilizer, I swear, it was just my reminder for the dosage protocol but I—the contamination, the regenerative reaction, it must have interfaced with his unique mitotic—”
Lina turned her head. Slowly. The movement was predator-still. Her violet eyes, usually so cool and assessing, held a glacial fire that made Sebastian’s apology die in his throat.
“What,” she asked, her voice low, perfectly calm, and absolutely terrifying, “have you done, Bash?”
Sebastian flinched as if struck. “I- I- I can explain. The vial’s just my reminder but I—the epigenetic factors in his sample, the ones you logged, they must have created a template instability during the metabolic cascade, and the inhibitor acted as a catalyst for a spontaneous somatic cell—”
“You turned him into a clone?” Lina’s voice didn’t rise. It sharpened, like a scalpel being drawn from a sterilized pack. She looked from the bed to the floor. “Now I have two Pace Augustuses? One has given me enough headache. Now double the trouble?” She let out a short, breathless laugh that held no humor at all. “Fuck me.”
Sebastian wrung his hands, his gloves smearing with saline and panic-sweat. “We can dispose of him.” He gestured limply toward the figure on the floor. “It’s clean. Simple. He’s… an accident. A null set.”
Lina’s gaze snapped back to him. “No. That would be against every medical ethic—”
“Fucking Lina!” Sebastian’s own fear erupted, his voice cracking. “You’ve been working as an underworld researcher for a mafia dynasty! You synthesise tailored pathogens and genetic stabilizers for a man who probably murders people before breakfast! Now you talk a damn thing about ethics?!”
The truth of it hung between them, foul and undeniable. Lina’s jaw tightened. She looked at the clone again. He was breathing. The anesthetic would wear off. He would open those empty, Pace-owned eyes and ask another question she couldn’t answer.
“I can’t kill him,” she said, the words final. “Not now. Not like this.”
“But Lina,” Sebastian pleaded, stepping closer, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper. “You saw his eyes. He’s a blank. A walking, talking liability. When the real one wakes up—”
“I said no.”
The silence that followed was thicker than the sterile air. Sebastian deflated, all his frantic energy bleeding away into a shuddering acceptance of the nightmare. Lina’s mind raced, options and consequences branching and collapsing like a failing neural network. Dispose of the clone, and she was what Sebastian said: a hypocrite who used ethics as a convenient cloak. Keep him, and she introduced a variable of apocalyptic unpredictability into an already fracturing world.
A soft groan cut through the static in her head.
It didn’t come from the bed.
Both of them froze, staring at the clone on the floor. His fingers twitched. The sedative was metabolizing at a speed that mirrored his originator’s unnatural biology. His eyelids fluttered.
“The dose wasn’t enough,” Sebastian whispered, horrified. “His system is burning through it.”
Lina moved. She knelt beside the clone, her movements clinical yet hesitant. She didn’t touch him. She just watched as consciousness returned to a face that held none of the memory that should have filled it. He blinked up at the ceiling lights, wincing at the brightness.
His head turned. Those dark eyes found hers. There was no betrayal in them now. Just a deep, unsettling curiosity. And a dawning recognition.
“You,” he said, his voice a rusty copy of the one she knew. He remembered the needle. The fall.
Before she could speak, before she could formulate a lie or a command, the medical room door hissed open on its smooth hinges.
Jace Augustus stood in the doorway, leaning heavily on the frame, his complexion ashen from pain and effort. His shrewd eyes took in the scene with terrifying speed: his brother, unconscious and tubed on the bed; Vito, vanished, his scream explained; Sebastian, a stranger trembling against a cabinet; Lina, kneeling on the floor.
And the naked, perfect replica of Pace rising shakily to his elbows, staring back at him.
Jace’s breath caught. For a long moment, he simply stared, his mind refusing to assemble the pieces. Then it did. A slow, brilliant, monstrous understanding dawned across his features, cutting through the morphine haze.
A smile touched his bloodless lips. It wasn’t pleasant. It was the smile of a man who has just been dealt the winning hand from a deck he thought was stacked against him.
“Well,” Jace rasped, his gaze locking onto Lina’s stricken face. “This changes absolutely everything, doesn’t it?”