down my neck!”
Chantal’s clone gave her a cold grin. “Tick tock. You know she hates waiting. Time is not a concept she likes much.”
The recording ended there. The cubes had to be data packets from the time Isabelle’s clone spent among us, searching for that tiny dice she’d lost to Claudia’s doppelganger. Phoenix worked quickly to patch us into another storage unit. One by one, we watched footage as old as two months ago. We’d even witnessed the data transfer moments. The clone’s eyes did the recording, and the images were wirelessly transmitted into the cubes, which had a tiny green light that flickered, indicating transmission. Isabelle’s clone would occasionally bring each cube closer to her head in order for the transfers to go faster, it seemed.
The more we saw, the clearer it became that the clones had done quite a lot of intel gathering from our Shade. Just thinking through the whole truth made me shiver. Isabelle’s clone had been but one of many who had listened to us, who’d stolen from us.
“There’s no sight of our Isabelle,” Serena said after five cubes’ worth of footage. “Where is she, damn it?”
“We need to watch the rest of these things,” Phoenix replied, fumbling with another one. The image flashed across the white glass, the sound coming through with crystal clarity. “Here we go…”
This was an eerie scene. That much was obvious from the very first seconds. “Hold on, is this our Shade?” Derek asked, sounding as confused as I felt.
Isabelle’s clone was walking up a white sand beach. The Port was right behind her, and the woods ahead were huge and dark but… something was off. “The colors aren’t right,” I mumbled. The greens were off. The browns were almost gray. And the dull light didn’t make sense. It looked like The Shade I had known for years, and yet I was willing to bet all the money in the world that it wasn’t our Shade. “It’s not The Shade. It just… it just looks like it,” I concluded, trying to ignore the shivers that ran down my back.
The more I watched, the creepier it got. Isabelle’s clone crossed paths with many of us, only… I could tell they weren’t us. None of them were originals. Their smiles and the instruments they held and operated told me that much. I spotted the reflective disks that we had yet to fully understand. The black mist canisters responsible for creating some of the most horrific mental anguish in the known history of existence itself. No, these were clones. They were all clones, and they were all going in the same direction.
“What if this is their lair?” Rose said, unable to peel her eyes off the screen. “Think about it. Clones of us. Would it be weird to think they might live in a place like ours? I mean, what if we’re not the only things they copied?”
“That makes sense, actually,” Derek replied. “It’s deeply disturbing, of course, but… yeah. I’d see that.”
“Look over there,” Ben said, pointing at the moving images. Isabelle’s clone had made it deep into the woods, where a gorgeous two-story villa with wisteria-covered walls dominated the clearing. “That’s supposed to be the entrance to the witches’ Sanctuary. There’s no Sanctuary there, from what I can tell.”
Rose nodded. “But those are absolutely our redwoods.”
“Not ours, per se,” Esme sighed. “Derek is right. I think we’re looking at a modified copy of our world. It’s the only explanation for this…”
There were people gathering in the clearing. All the clones from every corner of that… “Shade.” I saw myself and Derek, too. Our children and grandchildren. Their uncles and aunts. Their cousins. Friends and colleagues. People we’d lived with for most of our lives, mimicked by these vicious creatures. A woman came out of the villa, and everything fell silent.
“Welcome, children,” she told them, smiling and obviously satisfied by the gigantic turnout. Isabelle’s clone was but a drop in this ocean. “Welcome. I know this has been a long journey for each of us. Some of you might have worried that what I promised might not come true. Some of you might be thinking you’re better off losing yourselves in the world, pretending to be someone you’re not. Do not despair, children…” The crowd grew restless, but the woman didn’t care. She glowed like a sunbeam, her hair long and golden, her dress black and white, her sapphire eyes burning like nothing I’d seen before. Even her voice… it was sweet