Chapter 160 Chapter 160
Truth has a sound when it breaks. It’s quiet at first, like a crack in glass then it spreads until every reflection you trusted shatters. That’s how it feels when the DNA results come back. Not from the woman claiming to be Elia.
From a set of remains unearthed six years ago. I found the record buried in a sealed database private forensic archive, encrypted behind Z-Core’s legal firewall. It took all night to breach it.
When the file finally opened, I expected another lie, another placeholder report. Instead, there were photographs. A shallow grave. Coastal soil. A skeleton wrapped in what looked like linen medical sheets, the kind used in old private clinics.
And a name on the tag, Elia. The autopsy was performed under the authority of a private entity, Liana’s family. My chest went tight.
According to the timestamp, the remains were recovered nine years ago, long after the night Elia vanished but the DNA analysis left no room for doubt.
Match: 99.92%.
The body in that grave was Elia. Except it couldn’t be. Because I’d just seen her Or the woman I thought was her.
Every instinct I have, every scar this story left on me screams that the woman I chased across Lisbon was acting. That she’d been trained to mimic, to remember fragments of another life.
Even her slips, her contradictions, her half-formed memories too precise to be accident. Stanley’s work again. Always one step ahead. He’d turned grief into theater.
I stare at the autopsy photo until it stops looking human. Until the idea of Elia becomes an abstraction, bone, fiber, code. But one thing stands out: a fracture pattern on the right clavicle. I know it instantly.
Elia broke her collarbone when she was seventeen. Fell during a protest march, trying to photograph riot police. She wore that scar like a badge. The body in the photo has the same fracture.
I call the pathologist who ran the 2016 test. He retired two years ago, lives somewhere in Marseille. It takes three calls and a favor to reach him.
When he answers, his voice is wary, thin with age.
“Dr. Serano?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Dominic Smith. You examined remains labeled as Elia in 2016. I need to confirm the authenticity of that report.”
A pause. Then, quietly: “Ah. You’re one of them.”
“What do you mean, them?”
“People who think she didn’t die.”
“She didn’t.”
Another silence. “Mr. Hale, I burned the original tissue samples years ago. But I remember that case. The bones were real. The identification was accurate.”
“You’re sure?”
“As sure as a man can be when money buys silence. I signed what I was told to sign.”
“By who?”
“By the estate’s representative, Stanley Smith.” When I hang up, I feel the world tilt again.
Stanley ordered the test that proved Elia’s death and now he’s the same man parading an impostor across Europe. He’s manufacturing reality itself.
But why? If Elia’s truly dead, what purpose does a copy serve? A message? A distraction? Or something worst, a test, to see how far he can push us before we break?
I look down at the two DNA reports side by side. Both claim to be Elia. Both are genetic matches. And yet, they contradict each other. Two Elia Hales, both confirmed by science, both impossible. Someone tampered with the databases, rewrote genetic code itself.
And there’s only one person with access to the systems that could do that. Liana.
I don’t want to believe it. She’s running, hiding, trying to survive. But her company’s infrastructure, Z-Core’s bioinformatics branch holds the keys to these files.
She could have been manipulated. Or worse, her digital signature forged. I call her. No answer. I try again. Voicemail.
“Liana, it’s me. You need to listen carefully. The woman you met, it’s not Elia. She’s an actress, a replica. And the real Elia her remains were found years ago. The DNA’s been altered in both records. That means someone’s rewriting genetic data. Someone close. Call me back.”
I hang up, my pulse hammering. The room feels smaller, airless. There’s movement outside my window a figure standing by a lamppost, coat collar high. Watching. I step back into shadow. Lisbon’s full of watchers lately.
By nightfall, I’ve already packed. The ferry ticket sits in my pocket. Before I leave, I make one last call to an old contact inside the European Forensic Council.
“Dominic Smith,” she says, voice low. “You’re supposed to be under investigation, not making them.”
“Then call this a confession. I need to verify something.” I give her both DNA strings. When she sees the metadata, she whistles softly. “You’re playing with ghosts, Smith.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“They’re identical until sequence forty-nine. Then one deviates, a deliberate splice. Someone grafted a false marker onto the copy.”
“So one’s original?”
“Yes. The bones.”
“And the other?”
“A simulation. Engineered DNA. Custom-printed from living tissue.”
She hesitates. “Whoever did this had access to black-level biofabrication technology. That’s not just corporate. That’s military grade.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, your girl Elia isn’t reborn. She’s built.”
I don’t remember leaving the call. All I can think of is Stanley again, the man who’s been rewriting people’s lives like code. Elia. Liana’s father. Maybe even me.
The footage, the records, the witnesses none of it can be trusted anymore. Reality itself is being edited frame by frame.
By dawn, I reach the edge of the harbor. The same one where Elia supposedly vanished fifteen years ago.
The tide’s low, the air damp. I stand there, watching the water move in slow, gray ripples, thinking about how many versions of her have existed.
I close my eyes and whisper it anyway, like maybe the sound will bring back the real one.
“Elia.”
The water doesn’t answer.
Only the wind does soft, distant, almost like a voice.
Truth doesn’t die. It mutates.
I finally understand what Stanley’s built, Not just lies.
A system that replaces the truth. Bodies, faces, DNA, memories, it’s all code to him and now, I’m standing inside his creation, chasing ghosts through an artificial history.
There’s only one way out. I have to find where it all began. The clinic. The first experiment. The one that made Elia vanish the first time. Because if her bones were real, then what I’ve been chasing isn’t resurrection.
It’s replication and that means Stanley’s not trying to bring Elia back, He’s trying to make another one.