She moved towards them, blade sliding free with a soft metallic sound. Serena wasn’t carrying a blade. That was new.

Her scent hit him a heartbeat late, and it wasn’t hers. Close. Almost perfect. But wrong, like a familiar melody played half a note off.

Then he noticed her features were slightly off too. Just slightly misaligned. Eyes a fraction too wide. The distance between her pupils was wrong by millimeters. The jawline was sharper than it should have been. The hair was white but the white was flat, missing the gold undertone that sunlight pulled out of the real thing.

She smiled. The smile was too wide.

That wasn’t Serena.

Xeon: What gave it away? The murder in her eyes or the blade?

“Again,” Hyran sighed.

Gold magic supernovaed from his palms, hitting the Serena copy in a brutal strike.

The figure was hurled back and twisted in midair. Stone and flesh rippled. The shape collapsed inward and reformed as Hyran.

Same height. Same face. Same stance. Same expression of intellectual superiority, replicated with unsettling accuracy, the corridor having apparently studied Hyran long enough to capture the specific angle of his chin when he was about to say something condescending.

Another appeared beside it.

Then another.

Three Hyrans stood in the corridor. Three identical expressions of displeasure. Three identical sets of arms crossed. Three identical jaws set at the exact same angle. The corridor had produced a visual that was either a tactical maneuver or a personal insult, and the line between the two was nonexistent.

“THREE,” Aeron snapped. “One of him is enough. Three is a punishment.”

“He should find it flattering,” Maelor said, studying the copies with the clinical detachment of a mage whose professional curiosity was overriding his survival instincts. “The corridor chose him three times. It could have chosen anyone. It chose the easiest, most generic template in the room. That is a compliment for being average.”

“That is a THREAT, Maelor. Those things have BLADES.”

“The blades are a separate issue. Aesthetically, the corridor made a defensible choice.”

“I am standing RIGHT HERE,” Hyran snapped, looking at his own face three times over with the specific revulsion of a man watching cheap copies of himself prepare for violence. “And those look NOTHING like me. The posture is wrong. The jaw angle is wrong. The third one is holding the blade like a kitchen utensil.”

“Hyran is critiquing the combat stance of his own doppelgangers,” Aeron observed. “This is the most Hyran thing that has ever happened.”

“If this corridor is going to impersonate me, it should do so with ACCURACY. I have STANDARDS. Those standards extend to my duplicates. Is that unreasonable?”

“Completely,” Maelor and Aeron said at the same time.

Across the corridor, Fin’s blood ran cold. A figure stepped out of the wall.

Him.

Same build. Same face. Same eyes. Same jaw. Same military posture.

It walked a slow circle, stopping to look at them. At itself. Then it lifted a hand.

And waved.

Casual. Almost friendly. The wave was the worst part.

“What the…”

Fin couldn’t move. His body had locked. Every instinct, every trained reflex, every muscle that had spent a lifetime learning to react was frozen on the sight of his own face smiling at him with an expression he had never worn and whose never-wearing was the proof that this thing was wrong and the wrong was deeper than the surface.

Xeon: Kill it. Kill it now.

Beside it, Aeron’s double emerged, head tilted at an unnatural angle, eyes too bright. The tilt was inhuman.

The screaming from the walls swelled. The frequency climbed. The infants’ chorus was back.

The infants began crawling again. Pouring from the walls in fresh waves, their cracked-stone bodies hitting the floor in staggered impacts, each one screaming, each scream joining the chorus, the chorus becoming a wall of sound that was trying to break concentration and the trying was working.

The infants arrived, looked up at fake-Fin, sniffed once, and simultaneously bit both ankles.

A gold shield snapped around the group. Without a word, they moved as a unit.

✦✦✦

TWO LEVELS LOWER

Across the temple, Gavriel was running in wolf form, and finally spotted her.

A white wolf, small and bright, pressed against a corridor wall. Aurelia’s golden eyes were tracking shadows that weren’t there anymore, her body coiled in the defensive crouch of an animal that had been hunted through dark tunnels and whose hunting had produced a hyper-vigilance that was keeping her alive and slowly dismantling her nerves.

He shifted mid-stride, bones snapping as he tore back into human form.

“SHIFT, Serena,” he commanded.

White light flashed.

Gavriel shifted at the same time, running into the flash. He caught her before she fell on all fours.

She was wheezing. Gavriel knew it had nothing to do with the shift. The wheeze was panic. Pure, compressed, chemical panic that had been building since the first portal dragged her away and had been compounding through every tendril, every scream, every second she spent alone in a corridor that was designed to break her bloodline.

“Serena,” he said firmly, one hand braced between her shoulder blades, the other steady at her waist. “Breathe.”

She tried. It came out broken and shaky. Her hands were gripping his thermal weave suit with a force that was turning her knuckles white, and the white was the same color as her hair and her wolf and the light that had just faded, and all of the white was shaking.

He held her close, voice dropping just enough to cut through the panic. “I would like to lodge a formal complaint with whoever built this. Zero stars.”

A breathy laugh tore out of her, half-wheeze, half-sob.

“There you go,” Gavriel said. “That’s the sound of surviving.”

Her breathing slowed, inch by inch, until the tremor in her chest finally eased.

He held her there, solid and real. In truth, he’d been alone for a while now. He’d fought skeleton wolves, vampires, and stone infants that screamed at frequencies designed to liquefy sanity. He’d seen her body double standing in a corridor with a scent that was close enough to hurt and wrong enough to confirm that this place had studied her and built a replica and the replica had been the single most disturbing thing he’d encountered since waking up from a coma, and the coma had included a past life.

This place had crawled straight out of his worst nightmares. The difference between him and Serena was that his worst nightmares were producing sarcasm and hers were producing hyperventilation, and both responses were valid, and both responses were holding them together by different threads.

She clutched him tighter, forehead pressed against his chest. Gavriel tightened his hold without comment, anchoring her until her breathing slowed.

“Breathe. We’ll make fun of this later.”

Another laugh broke out of her. Her breathing was almost back to normal.

Gavriel: I have her.

The mindlink carried the message through static and stone. Three words. The three best words the channel had produced in the last hour.

Silence. The silence was the mindlink’s reception failing, or six people exhaling at the same time, or both.

“Do you know which way, Serena?” he asked.

She swallowed. “This way.”