The air in the subterranean lab was dense, saturated with the smell of ozone, cold steel, and something far more grotesque—the scent of preserved mortality. In front of me, rows of glass cylinders glowed with a faint, sickly blue luminescence, each housing a figure in a white dress. Their faces were mine. Their skin was mine. They were echoes of an Elara who never had the chance to wake up.
But the sight that truly shattered my world was the man sitting in the electric wheelchair at the center of the room.
He possessed the exact same features as the man standing beside me—the chiseled jaw, the sharp cheekbones, the aristocratic arrogance. But this man was withered, his skin nearly translucent, his chest rising and falling in shallow, jagged motions aided by a small, hissing ventilator at
