Stranger at the Wedding

Chapter 4 Sisters

The next afternoon, in front of the National Archives, Ai Mili was seven minutes late.

It wasn't because she was dawdling, but because she noticed that her car had been tampered with - there was a tiny cut in the brake oil pipe, slowly leaking oil, and it would completely fail after driving about ten miles. She didn't tell anyone, hailed a taxi, pulled up the collar of her windbreaker in the back seat, and watched in the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following.

When the taxi pulled up in front of the archive, Jack had already been waiting for ten minutes. He was dressed in a dark gray suit, his hair neatly combed, looking nothing like the man who had been in the police station detention cell just yesterday. His face was expressionless, but his eyes lit up for a moment when he saw Ai Mili - not with joy, but with confirmation. Confirmation that she was still alive.

"Get in the car." He said, opening the door of a black sedan.

"Where are you going?"

"Didn't you want to ask a question? Ask it in the car."

The car pulled into the streets of London. Jack drove with the same style as his personality - calm, precise, and without any unnecessary movements. Ai Mili sat in the passenger seat, holding the silver key in her hand, its edge pressing against her palm.

"Do you have a twin sister?" she asked, getting straight to the point.

Jack's mouth twitched; it wasn't a smile, but an expression of holding something back.

"No," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Because if I had a twin sister, Samantha would tell me."

"Samantha is not your mother."

Jack slammed on the brakes, and the sedan abruptly stopped by the roadside amidst the honking of the cars behind. He turned his face to look at Ai Mili, his pupils slightly contracting.

"What did you say?"

"Samantha Black is not your birth mother. She was your surrogate. Your biological mother is Elena Voronova, the same person as me." Ai Mili pulled out the photo - a photo of two babies in incubators - from her bag and handed it to Jack. "We're not siblings. I'm your sister."

Jack's hand was steady as he took the photo, but his eyes were not. His gaze shifted back and forth between the two babies' faces, as if searching for some kind of confirmation or trying to deny it.

"This is not true." He said.

"What Henry Morris said on his deathbed. What Margaret Sterling wrote in her letter. What Veronica admitted in person. The official files found in the Wen Tewosi family's safe. How much evidence do you need?"

"What I want is not evidence." Jack clenched the photo in his hand, the paper making a rustling sound. "What I want is the reason. Why did they separate us? Why was I treated as an experimental subject? Why you - you, a person who knows nothing - inherited everything from Wen Tewosi, while I was locked up in the laboratory and even had a thumb cut off by them?"

He raised his left hand in front of Ai Mili.

She looked at that hand seriously for the first time. Where the thumb should have been was not a thumb, but a small, dark lump of flesh—a mark left after surgery, a mark of careful stitching, like a piece of cut fabric.

"The 'donor' for Project M-17." Jack said, "They needed my thumb to repair an injured agent. An agent's hand is worth more than a baby's life."

Ai Mili reached out and grasped the mutilated hand.

Jack didn't pull back.

His fingers were ice-cold, like those of someone who hadn't been touched in a long time. They sat in the car like this for a long time, with the bustling traffic of London outside the window, and no one noticed that in a black sedan, two young people in their twenties were silently digesting a truth that could crush anyone.

"You haven't answered my question yet," Ai Mili said. "Do you have a twin sister?"

Jack took a deep breath: "No. But I have the person you're looking for."

"Who?"

"Your twin sister. She's not M-17-2. M-17-2 died, but it was fake. The death certificate was forged. She's alive, and she's been locked up in --" Jack paused, as if hesitating to say the next word, "Wentworth Manor."

Ai Mili felt her heart skip a beat, not speed up, but slow down. So slow that it seemed as if it had decided to stop beating.

"In the basement," Jack said. "She wasn't locked up in the basement; she was kept there. Veronica and Richard regularly injected her with sedatives, not to control her, but to delay her organ failure. Her body - the 'backup body' created by Project M-17 - was designed to last only 25 years. She's 26 this year. Her time is running out."

"What's her name?"

"Anna. Anna Sterling."

Anna.

She had never heard this name before, but she felt it was not an unfamiliar name. Not the kind of unfamiliarity that comes with "hearing it for the first time today," but the kind of familiarity that comes with "having called this name for several lifetimes."

"Take me to see her." Ai Mili said.

"Not now. Wentworth Manor is already under surveillance by the Ministry of Defense. Your adoptive father, Richard, has reported to William Sterling about your investigation into the number. They're waiting for you to return."

"They won't wait for me to go back." Ai Mili fastened her seatbelt again. "I'll go back on my own initiative. But not alone. I'll be inside, and you'll be outside. I need you to do something for me."

"What?"

Ai Mili took out a folded piece of paper from her pocket, which was the last sentence from Margaret's letter: "Don't trust anyone. Not even your fiancé."

"Help me look into James Ashworth," she said. "His past, his family, his life before he met me. He's not just a lawyer. Or rather, he's more than just a lawyer."

"How do you know?"

"Because of his ring."

Ai Mili has taken off her engagement ring, which now lies in her palm. She turns the ring over, and inscribed on the inside is a line of text—not her name, not James's vow, but an abbreviation: A.S.

Anna Sterling.

"This is not my ring," Ai Mili said. "It's hers. This ring was custom-made for Anna from the very beginning. James was never my fiancé. He's hers."

Jack stared at the line of text for a long time.

Then he started the car.

The car drove towards Wentworth Estate.

Drive towards that underground, dark place where the other half of her soul is locked away.

It's raining in London.

The windshield wipers swayed left and right on the windshield, like a pendulum, like a countdown.

Anna is waiting for her.

Waited for twenty-six years.