Stranger at the Wedding

Chapter 5 Anna Underground

The side door of Wentworth Manor is unlocked.

It wasn't that she forgot to lock the door; she deliberately left it unlocked. Even though Ai Mili knew it was a trap, she still pushed open the door.

The corridor was very dark, with only the green indicator light of the emergency exit emitting a faint glow. Her footsteps on the wooden floor made a slight creaking sound, and each sound was amplified by the empty house, as if someone was imitating her footsteps in the distance.

The basement door was behind the kitchen, an unassuming wooden door that looked like a storage room. But Ai Mili knew it wasn't. She inserted the silver key into the keyhole - not the one for the safe, but the one Veronica had given her.

The door opened.

The stairs descend, narrow and steep, with a strange warm yellow light—not incandescent, but an old-fashioned tungsten filament lamp, its filament trembling slightly inside the glass bulb, like an old man shivering.

She walked up seventeen steps.

Each level feels like stepping on one's own heartbeat.

The air in the basement was cold, with a smell that only hospitals have - disinfectant, metal, and something indescribable, like the warmth emanating from the flesh itself. At the end of the corridor was a door, which was white, had no handle, and only a combination lock.

Ai Mili entered a password. It wasn't that she knew the password, but rather her hand typed it on its own—a sequence of numbers she had never seen before but somehow felt familiar with.

0425。

Ai Linna's birthday. Her mother.

The door opened.

The room is bigger than Ai Mili imagined. There's a bed, a desk, a sofa, a bookshelf, and a TV. This isn't a dungeon; it's a cage—a cage that tries to disguise imprisonment with comfort.

A woman is sitting on the sofa.

She was wearing a white nightgown, barefoot, with long black hair that fell to her waist. Her face - Ai Mili felt as if she were looking into a mirror at that moment, but not an ordinary mirror, but a magic mirror that could show "what would have happened if different choices had been made back then". The same face, the same cheekbones, the same curve of the chin, but Anna's eyes were gray, while Ai Mili's were blue. Anna's skin was fairer, as white as if she had never seen sunlight. Her lips were bloodless, her fingers were slender, and the nails of each finger were neatly trimmed.

She looked up and stared at Ai Mili.

didn't say anything.

didn't say a word, but there was a whole world in her eyes. In that world, there was the gloom of twenty-six years of underground life, the despair of countless failed attempts to escape, the fear of blurred consciousness when being injected with tranquilizers, and a name that had never been spoken but always existed - Sister.

"You're here." Anna said.

Her voice was very soft, as soft as a feather falling on the snow. Not because of weakness, but because she was not very used to using her voice. The only things she spoke to underground were the walls, books, and the voices on TV.

"You knew I was coming?"

"I've waited for twenty-six years." Anna stood up, stepping barefoot on the floor and walking towards Ai Mili. "Every year on my birthday, I made a wish. Not for freedom, not for health, not for revenge. It was just to see you once. Just once."

The distance between them is only three steps.

The three-step process took 26 years.

Anna reached out her hand, and her fingertips touched Ai Mili's face.

Her fingers were cold, like the water in late autumn. But she was smiling - Ai Mili had never seen such a smile before. It was neither happiness nor sadness, but something deeper than both. It was confirmation. It was the confirmation when a person's soul finally meets the missing half.

"You look exactly as I imagined you," Anna said. "I've imagined your face every night in the darkness. Twenty-six years of imagining. And not once was I wrong."

Ai Mili cried.

She was not a person who cried easily. She didn't cry on her wedding day, didn't cry when Samantha burst in, didn't cry when Henry died in front of her, and didn't cry when she saw the death certificate of her twin sister. But now she was crying, her tears falling one by one like broken beads, silently.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't know you were here. I didn't know you existed. I thought I was alone."

"You're not alone." Anna took her hand. "You've never been alone."

They hugged.

Anna's body was very thin, as thin as a paper lantern blown by the wind, but her heartbeat was very strong. Through the thin nightgown, Ai Mili could feel that rhythm—thump, thump, thump—exactly the same as her own heartbeat, the same frequency, the same strength, as if two hearts were sharing a metronome.

"Your illness." Ai Mili let go of her and looked at her pale face. "They said you don't have much time left."

"It's not that there's not much left," Anna lowered her head, looking at her slender fingers, "it's that it's not enough. My mitochondria are failing, and my cells can't regenerate properly. I wasn't 'made' this way, I was 'designed' this way. The backup body of Project M-17 only has a lifespan of twenty-five years. They thought twenty-five years would be enough, thought you'd never know of my existence before you needed an organ transplant."

"They are wrong."

"They got many things wrong." Anna walked back to the sofa and sat down slowly, as if every movement was draining her limited energy. "But one thing they got right is that you're my sister, and I'm your shadow. You were planned, I was unplanned. You were raised as a daughter, I was raised as a medicine. You were fostered in the Wen Tewosi family, I was raised in the basement."

"Do they treat you as a person or as a medicine?"

Anna laughed, and that laugh made Ai Mili's heart skip a beat: "What do you think? Would you celebrate a birthday for a medicine? Would you buy books for her? Would you install a TV for her? They would. Because they need me alive. A dead medicine is useless."

Ai Mili remembered the death certificate in the safe. On March 20, 1999, M-17-2 died of organ failure. That was a lie. But the truth beneath the lie was even more cruel—they didn't kill Anna, but they didn't let her live either. She just didn't die.

"James." When Ai Mili said this name, she found her voice surprisingly calm, so calm that it didn't seem like that of a woman who had just discovered her fiancé's betrayal. "Is he yours or theirs?"

A flicker of complex light flashed in Anna's grey eyes - not guilt, not avoidance, but something even harder to name.

"He's my man," Anna said. "He's also theirs. He was sent to get close to you, but then he changed. He met you, and he fell in love with you. He fell in love with you, so he also fell in love with me. We're one, and he can't tell the difference."

"The ring is engraved with your name."

"That was the day he came to see me, and I gave it to him. He said he was going to marry a woman named Anna, but he couldn't. Because the one he was going to marry was you."

"So do you hate me?"

Anna shook her head very gently and slowly, like a reed swaying in the wind.

"I hated," she admitted. "I hated for twenty-five years. I hated that you had everything in the world above: sunlight, air, freedom, love. I had nothing in the darkness underground. But when I saw your photo, your smile, and the way you were with James - I stopped hating you. Because when you smile, it's as if I'm smiling too. When you're happy, I can feel that happiness too."

"Telepathy?"

"It's not telepathy. It's the same soul split into two bodies. We're not sisters. We're one person."

Footsteps were heard coming from the stairs.

More than one person, at least three or four. Heavy, rhythmic, well-trained footsteps.

Anna's face changed.

"They're here," she said. "William's men. They won't let you leave here."

Ai Mili fished out the pistol from her trench coat pocket - the one she had stolen from Richard's safe and had been carrying with her all along. She checked the magazine; it had seven rounds.

"Can you use a g*n?" she asked Anna.

Anna pulled out another g*n from under the sofa cushion. A small, silver, feminine pistol.

"I spent twenty-six years in the basement," Anna said. "I had plenty of time to read books. There were also many people who came to bring me things, and some brought things they shouldn't have."

The sound of footsteps is getting closer.

Ai Mili stands side by side with Anna, back against the wall, and the muzzle pointed in the direction of the door.

The door was pushed open.

The person who came in was neither a black-clad man nor an agent from the Ministry of Defense.

is Veronica.

She was wearing pajamas, barefoot, with her hair in disarray, and holding an envelope in her hand. There was no expression on her face, but her eyes were crying—silently, continuously, like a river that would never dry up.

"Children," she said, her voice hoarse. "William has given you a choice." She placed the envelope on the ground and pushed it over. "Here are the address in Switzerland, two passports, and two plane tickets. You can go. Leave this country, leave this name, leave it all behind."

"What's the price?" Ai Mili asked.

"The price is that you must never return. Don't come back for him, don't come back for revenge, and don't come back to expose M-17. You leave alive, but from now on, you cease to exist in this world."

Anna looked at Ai Mili.

Ai Mili looked at Anna.

They reached a consensus in silence. Not through words, not through gestures, not even through eye contact. But through a connection deeper than all of these - the same DNA, the same womb, the same soul that had been torn apart and then sewn back together.

"We're not leaving." Ai Mili said.

Veronica's tears finally fell.

"I know," she said, "so I brought a third thing."

She took out a small USB flash drive from the pocket of her pajamas.

"The complete file of Project M-17. All subject lists, all experimental data, and the names of all involved personnel. Including Wen Tewosi, including the Ministry of Defense, including three people in Parliament, and including someone you shouldn't know yet."

"Who?"

Veronica shook her head. "Read it yourself after you get the file."

She placed the USB drive on the ground, along with the envelope.

Then she turned around and walked towards the stairs.

Took three steps, stopped, and didn't look back.

"Ai Mili."

"Yes."

"I've made many mistakes in my life. But I love you, and that's true."

She's gone.

The sound of footsteps gradually faded away, and the basement fell back into silence.

Ai Mili squatted down, picked up the envelope and the USB drive.

Anna looked at her and suddenly said something that made Ai Mili's blood freeze.

"Does she know William's next plan?"

"What plan?"

Anna raised her arm and rolled up the sleeve of her nightgown.

On the inside of her forearm, there is a thin scar, not a surgical scar but a sutured incision. Beneath the incision, something slides under the skin—not muscle, not blood vessels, but something slender, hard, and not part of the human body.

"They implanted a tracker in my body," Anna said. "It's not a chip. It's a living tracker. A genetically modified organism that feeds on my blood. They can find me wherever I go."

Ai Mili grabbed Anna's hand, feeling something sliding beneath the skin with her fingertips.

"Why not take it out?"

"Because it's next to my aorta. If accidentally touched, I'll bleed to death within thirty seconds."

"So you were never a hostage either." Ai Mili's voice was very low, very low. "You were bait. They used you to lure me."

"Yes."

"Then why did you still tell me?"

Anna smiled, and this time her smile was different from before. This time, there was a glint in her smile that Ai Mili had never seen before - not hope, not courage, but something more extreme. Something that could only be honed after twenty-six years of imprisonment in the basement.

"Because I don't care anymore," Anna said. "If they wanted to kill me, they would have done so long ago. They haven't killed me because I'm still useful. But my usefulness ends today. Either we leave together, or we die together."

She tightened her grip on Ai Mili's hand.

"Sister, are you afraid of death?"

Ai Mili thought about this question, seriously thought about it.

"I'm not afraid," she said. "What I'm afraid of is that I've never truly lived. Living in his lies, his plans, his games. That's not living."

She raised her g*n.

"Today, we live once."

Footsteps sounded again on the stairs.

This time, it wasn't Veronica's gentle footsteps.

is the sound of many people's footsteps, heavy, hurried, and accompanied by the clanging of metal.

Emily released the safety of the pistol.

Anna also opened it.

They stand side by side.

Two identical faces, two pairs of eyes of different colors, and two guns pointing in the same direction.

The door was knocked open.

The corridor lights shine in, illuminating their faces.

They are in the light.

They have never been so bright.