OPEN WOUNDS

OPEN WOUNDS
POV: Mira

“Why didn’t you finish?” he asked, quiet, not chiding. He sounded like a man trying to read a map with someone else’s handwriting.

I wanted to tell him the truth, that finishing is what the Committee built me to do; that my pause was proof I had reclaimed some agency; that killing someone because they said a particular cruel thing was what they expected and I was determined to be unpredictable. But the truth is never a single sentence. There were layers: fear, mercy, disgust at mirror images, the fragile calculus of what would happen when the city got one more body to mourn.

“I couldn’t,” I said. The answer felt brittle and honest. “Not with you here.”

He did not look surprised. His jaw tightened like someone pressing a thought down until it is a dull instrument. “Your hands are dangerous,” he said. “You know that.”

So do his hands, I wanted to say. They have killed plans and smoothed bruises. They have held people in ways I would never admit they had until the city asked why a man would stay with two women when only one could be enough.

“You need to be careful,” he told me, softer. “If Ava sees this and doesn’t understand, she will not only be hurt, she will be afraid. The Committee will use that fear.”

Ask me to be careful. Ask me to be the woman who is patient and small and easily forgiven. There are many sins a woman can be asked to commit in the name of peace. This was just another.

“Then prove to her you’re not a weapon,” I said, sudden and raw. The words had the brashness of someone desperate to be believed. “Prove it by telling her, by showing her we’re together in this. Don’t let them do to us what they’ve always done to people like me.”

“Don’t do anything that will make Ava choose fear,” he said, simply. There was no poetry in it. There was only a man who had seen what fear did and wanted to keep it from growing teeth at the table.

“I won’t run anymore,” I said, which was equal parts promise and threat. It meant I wouldn’t disappear to avoid pain; it also meant I would not be the instrument the Committee used to make everyone small.

We left the mill without the doppelgänger and without the clean answer I craved, but with a scrap of tech that smelled like the Committee’s workshops. Nia would tear it apart and find fingerprints where she could. She would call out leads and names and bank accounts. It would not be quick, but it would be methodical. I preferred slow justice to fast theatre. Slow meant we might survive our own victories.

Back at the compound, Leon tended my bruised ribs with an ease I’d never asked him for and never expected to receive. He applied ointment and bandages like a man performing a ritual. There is an intimacy in patching another human that is nearly as close as the one in beds: a recognition of fragility and the desire to repair. His fingers were precise. The scent of him; a mixture of his shampoo and the road filled the small room and made my chest ache.

“You should sleep,” he said, but there was something else in the way he said it: not an order, not a whim. It was care that wanted to be obeyed because it was a sanctuary.

“You’re not a contingency,” he murmured, not a command but a keeping.

“I know,” I said, but the truth had edges. Knowing is different from being believed as an act rather than a negotiation.

He tilted his head, and for a terrible, intoxicating second I thought he might kiss me, in the old way, the way that had once been a ceremony of claim. The air around us hummed with possibility. I felt the heat in my limbs that used to turn me into a live wire and the old desire to be the thing that tastes like permission.

Instead he pressed his hand flat across my sternum, an oddly private guard, and that touch spoke of a thousand unsaid choices. He left then, quiet as a man who knows the price of staying too long.

I slept badly that night. Dreams have no courtesy. I dreamt that I was a sculptor and my hands kept making copies of a woman I did not want to be. In the dream the copies always came alive and climbed out of the clay, each one more eager to be chosen than the last. In the morning, the first light felt like an accusation.

The day after the mill we found a lead in the dusted transponder: a serial number that matched a crate logged in the Committee’s old manufacturing ledger. The ledger was grey and bureaucratic and full of sentences that hid violence behind invoices. Kest and a small team followed the paper until it led, as such things do, to a lab with a name like a pet project: Project Palimpsest: a term for something written over something else until the original is nearly gone. Someone with more poetry might have smiled at the irony. I did not. The name felt like a prophecy.

They had my humanity written over. They’d sold it back to me in half-measures and asked me to be grateful.

We made a plan. Nia had the digital feeds, Kest had the boots, and Leon had the look of a man who was tired enough to be dangerous. It felt like a fitting assembly for what we had to do next: go into the place where they made mirrors and find out what they intended. Not to break things for the spectacle, but to learn what the hell they’d made of me so I could answer with the kind of control they’d given me back.

That night, when the compound finally settled and Ava’s breaths in the next room were the only metronome that mattered, I stood at the window and watched the city wrap itself in small lights. A doppelgänger’s laughter echoed in my memory, and something in me hardened.

For the first time since I learned I had been made, I wanted not to be forgiven. I wanted to be known. Not as a replacement. Not as a contingency. Known - blunt, stubborn, insistently myself.

And that knowledge would be paid for, and paid back, in ways that would make even the Committee stop smiling so easily.