Nora and Puck reach floor twenty-three and enter the garden. Amidst the speckled flowers and swaying trees, Cain is nowhere to be found.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Nora asks.

Puck gives an eager bark and flies off the path. Nora follows, tip-toeing past flowers, then walking over the fake hill and under the shady tree. The dog’s propellers stop and he leaps into a large hedge behind the elm. Trudging through it, the girl finds a deceptive dead end, a wall disguised to give the illusion that the garden goes on. The Saint Bernard stops, looks up at her. There is a modest breeze coming from a small crack at the bottom of the wall. Nora presses her hands to the wall, and finding a slight indentation, she pushes. It goes in. A section of the wall slides back to reveal a set of stairs descending into darkness. They enter.

Light quickly dissolves, the deeper down they go. Nora feels at the walls for guidance, inching forward. At some point, the walls fall away, and the girl is left with nothing, but the soft luminescence of Puck’s mechanical eyes to lead her. The path is slanted, and it grows narrow. Is there a drop? The abyss seems empty. She can hardly see, hear, or smell anything. She can only feel her way through the darkness.

A flickering blue light emerges. As they approach it, they see the profile of a room, filled with that same cobalt radiance. Soon, they are inside the blue-lit space, and Nora stares, trying desperately to grasp the sight before her.

The place is split into two different sectors. The first is occupied by large glass tubes, siphoning glowing blue liquid into glass jars. In the tubes, there are bulging green plants, deep purple strains of foliage, sharp flowers, and withering little weeds.

It looks like a garden, but less natural.

Those are not plants, informs the voice within.

She examines the other sector. Under the low-hanging roof, rows of shelves stretch on into the blackness, carrying the same jars, the same blue liquid. Some containers are empty, some are marked with numbers. Others are imprinted with names. Proceeding down a row, she notices an alphabetical order. She passes the K section, the L section, then on M, something catches her eye. She picks up a jar to see the contents behind it. One container with one simple word.

Miller.

The container is empty. Nora’s mind races. She searches her thoughts and the thoughts of the voice in her mind, then she knows. These are not objects, experiments, or extracts from plants. The canisters carry the names of people because people are inside. They are alive.

He was Cain’s friend, and to Nora, he was much, much more than this. What had Cain done?

Nora feels sick. Her stomach twists in disgust and the jar she carries slides from her grip, dropping to the floor. As it shatters, Puck flies back and some of the shining cobalt sprays onto Nora’s legs.

Stone cold, she peers down at the blue for a moment. Her eyes are welling, but per usual, she tries to blink away the tears, erase the pain her father’s actions have brought about. She cannot erase it, she will not deal with it, and so she ignores it. It hurts more.

She and her dog walk further down the row. Her walk quickly becomes a run and Puck starts to fly by her side. There is something at the end of the row, some projection, some massive screen. When she reaches it, she sees it is, in fact, multiple screens, each rendering a room of the building. Surveillance.

Beneath the screens, there is an operation panel and a leather chair. A line of wires coils from the darkness to the chair, while a broken watch and some odd sort of gun occupy the panel.

Suddenly, the chair turns, and in it, Cain sits. However, he is not like before. His eyes emit a vague green light. On either side of his eyes and in the place of veins, a cable begins to surface through the skin. The wires suspending from the ceiling limply perforate his fingertips, his ears, and fill the empty space where his scalp should be. Pulsing green electricity rises up the hanging wires and into the gloom.

“I have been expecting you,” he announces.

“You’re…” Nora fumbles. “you’re a…”

“A robot? Indeed, I am.”

The girl is speechless. Her father raises a gaunt hand and continues.

“But let us not waste precious time. You have come for answers, after all. This place is much of the DNA I harvested, my greatest life’s work. Well, most of it.” He glances at the shattered watch. “This place is the summation of the people I trapped, changed, experimented on so that they are no longer human. It is where all my greatest ideas were imagined, where the life serum was made, where those taken became immortal, became tools. It is my garden of souls.”

“And Miller–what did you do to him?” Nora inquires.

“I dumped him in an alley somewhere. That is, I dumped the life serum, in which he was stored. I trust you have grown acquainted with that familiar blue.”

Cain seems to be hinting at something. The girl inspects herself to find there is no longer any blood, or scabbing, or scratch marks on her knees. They are healed. In that serum is a person, she thinks, and that cheap replacement for my father killed that person, along with all the rest. She looks up at the disillusioned husk.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“To live on as a fraud without feeling or humanity–it is a nauseating crime against the intended order, a cheat, a perverted lie. Worse than this, Miller was a friend, a colleague, a fellow human being. What is wrong with your twisted conscience? Have wires, circuits, and steel removed any sense of right and wrong? You killed so many, you killed my mother, then you killed Miller. Why? For what reason would you hurt so many innocent people?”

“For you.”

Nora closes her eyes tighter and tighter. She imagines that the murderous replica of her father is only a dream, and that, when she wakes up, her mother will be at her side. She will not have to pretend to be happy, to pretend everything is alright. No more fights between father and mother, no more killing of friends, no more test subjects of that homicidal pig. All will be bliss.

But this world is only imagination. She will never see her mother again, and the world is only an empty place echoing past tragedies. It is all because of him, that killer, that forgery, that monster. And he would dare blame her?

Nora laughs, sobs, scowls. Something in her breaks.

“I don’t know who you are anymore…” she states. Fists clenching and spine shivering, she says one final word. “Attack.”

Puck jets forward. The wires piercing Cain spark and fly in all directions, while the dog tears through them with fangs and claws of steel. Cain leaps toward the panel and Nora races after him. The man presses a red button and red lights flash across the room as a siren rings out. The wires are ruined. Puck and Nora stare at him, and he leans back in his chair. His hands and feet twitch, eerie green electricity fizzes about him, and in a broken voice, he gives a psychotic laugh. His voice turns higher, lower, faster, slower, louder, quieter. Nora grabs the amalgamation gun on the panel and points it at him.

“Even if you knew how to use that, you couldn’t stop me,” the man cackles. “You will never reach the prison of mind. You will never truly kill me.”

Nora turns a knob and she presses the trigger. Some unseen force blasts from the contraption, mauling the unliving man. He just keeps laughing.

“Stop it!” the girl screams, eyes watering.

The gun slips from her hands. The disfigured form gives one final, warped laugh, then the light in its eyes fades.

Nora scowls at the robot’s maimed scraps and, next, looks at the panel’s chief adornments: the red button, the broken watch. She wrestles the voice in her mind as it resists something. She takes over and is filled with an unexplainable sensation. You need that watch, she tells herself. It’s the only way to stop him. It’s the key.

Suddenly, the feeling is gone. She grabs the watch, stuffs it in a pocket, and runs. The strobing red light is her guide as she and Puck bolt past the jars filled with distorted life, the encased fake plants, and the narrow path. They exit the passageway into the false outdoors of the unoccupied garden.

The sirens still ring, the red still flashes. They will be here soon.

She grabs a brick and throws it at a wall of windows. One shatters, and chilled by an updraft of wind, she leers down. She can see the tops of buildings, and the street is merely a sliver across the faraway ground. Of course, Cain’s projections paint a false picture of the outside world, but Nora knows she is too high up to jump.

She examines the room. There is a switch on the nearby wall, an activator for the Allagi. She hands Puck the watch and he clamps it between his jaws.

“I said you could not kill me.”

Nora turns around and gasps. Cain stands before her, his mechanical body still perfectly intact, feigning humanity. The girl jumps to her feet, wide-eyed.

The man reads the question on her face and answers, “I am a machine. There are many of us.”

The door to the garden opens, and a dozen figures enter. They all have exactly the same face, exactly the same form. They are all Cain. The girl’s breathing quickens.

“Puck, outside,” she orders. The Saint Bernard stands his ground. “Now!” Nora demands. He obeys, flying outside the broken window and levitating above the skyline.

“I know what you are planning,” Cain states. “Don’t.”

“Do you know?” Nora asks. “You’re not my father and you’re not even human. How could you know what I’m thinking? How could you know anything about me?”

“This room and other Allagis are the reason you and your pet were separated for all those years. A magnetic field gives Allagis operation. It freezes machines in place and slowly destroys them. You are correct in believing that will stop us. The only detail you missed is that you are just like us.” He pronounces the last words slowly: “You are one of us. You are a machine.”

“You’re lying,” says Nora.

“Would a human survive an attack from a Remnant? Would a human heal so quickly? Would a human need a piece of metal in their neck to fix their legs? You’re no human.”

Her head is dizzy and her legs are weak at the thought of it.

Remember that feeling when you first awoke to this new world? the voice within adds. That feeling that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that you didn’t belong. You aren’t really Nora, you aren’t really alive.

“It can’t be true! You’re lying! You’re all lying!” she cries out. She glares at the switch on the nearest wall.

A clicking, trotting sound races nearer and nearer from the other side of the door.

“It seems the Hunters are coming. If you give up now, your punishment will be less, but if you run, if you flip that switch, we can do nothing to stop them.”

Nora turns to the switch, falters. She suppresses her fear.

“No more hiding, no more sacrificing truth for thoughtless obedience. I guess we’ll just have to see who’s right,” she says.

She dashes to the switch, a horde of Cains sprinting, climbing, bounding after her. One grabs her by the leg. She reaches, extends a hand. She flips the switch and all stops.

Now for the moment of truth. She pulls. At first, her attempts yield no validation, no movement. She pulls as hard as she can, then pulls harder. She tries with everything in her. Then, she is free.

She hears the door rip from its hinges. Sprinting in the slowness toward the window, she both hears and feels the clicking, the trotting. The stench grows. The Allagi stretches moments of dread. Reaching the smashed window, she looks down, looks at Puck.

If you take that step, there will be no turning back.

She swallows hard. I know.

She jumps. Slow ascent shifts to a swift plummet. While wind whips against Nora, Puck dives after her. She grabs the dog, they barely fly forward, then they drop to the roof of a building.

There is no turning back.