“SHE WAS TRAPPED IN A GLASS TANK AT A LUXURY WEDDING—BUT THE MAN WHO CAME TO SAVE HER UNCOVERED A TERRIFYING SECRET!”

The woman stopped moving. Ethan looked at her hands. His mother had a burn scar across the left wrist from an old kitchen accident. This woman's skin was smooth.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Her eyes filled. “They told me I could leave if you believed me.”

He stepped aside. “Then leave.”

She looked at the locked outer door. “I can't.”

Ethan smashed the control panel with a metal stool, and the lock released. She fled without looking back.

Victor's voice followed him through the empty room. “You keep making my employees difficult to manage.”

“Come say that to my face.”

“I believe I will.”

The door to the adjoining lab opened. A man entered carrying no weapon. The real Victor Ashford was shorter than his public double, with graying hair and a crooked nose. He looked tired, ordinary, and somehow worse for it.

“You've cost me millions,” Victor said.

“You stole people.”

“I gave desperate people new lives.”

“You made them prisoners.”

Victor shrugged. “Most people are prisoners already. Mine are simply more useful.”

Ethan took a step forward. Victor pressed a button on his watch. A monitor lit up with footage of Nora, Celeste, and Jasmine in a parking garage, surrounded by armed men.

“Walk away,” Victor said, “and they live.”

“You're out of time. The originals are going public.”

“Truth doesn't matter if people can't agree what it looks like.”

For one awful moment, Ethan believed him. Then his phone buzzed. A message from Jasmine read: FIRST NETWORK CONFIRMED AUTHENTIC RECORDINGS. FEDERAL WARRANTS IN MOTION.

Victor saw the change in his face and lunged for a pistol inside his coat. Ethan slammed him into a workstation. They wrestled over the weapon. The gun fired into the ceiling. Glass rained down.

Ethan struck Victor hard enough to send him stumbling, then kicked the pistol away. He could have kept hitting him. He wanted to. Instead he locked the man's wrist with a cable tie.

“Your whole life,” Ethan said, breathless, “you've made everybody else afraid.”

Victor smiled through bloody teeth. “And you still don't know where your mother is.”