The bombardment ended. No dramatic finale, no crescendo—just absence. The final barrel crumpled inward and settled with a tired groan. On the platforms below, the six masked figures froze mid-gesture, their tear-streaked masks angling inward as though witnessing something sacred complete itself.
What followed wasn't silence. It was the void where sound should be. Vivian's sobbing came thin and distant. Marcus's breathing rasped wet and labored, each intake scraping against broken rhythm.
Then the bridge locked.
Not a tremor. Not a settling. The vibration that had thrummed through the cables since they'd stepped onto this span simply ceased. The suspended slabs lost their predatory quality and became inert—decoration in a finished room. The quiet pressed down like physical weight.
Two shapes began forming in the pale fog ahead.
They didn't emerge. They coalesced. The mist thickened and darkened in two distinct columns, pulling substance from vapor. As the fog thinned around them, definition bled into their forms—shoulders, heads, limbs taking on solidity.
Cold spread through Elijah's chest.
The left figure matched his height exactly. His build. It wore shapeless grey clothing, but the way it distributed its weight—knees slightly bent, shoulders angled forward, balance resting on the front of the feet—that was his stance. The face was a blank oval of colorless material, smooth as uncarved stone. Then the surface rippled. Features swam up from underneath. His own face stared back at him: the angular jaw, the grey eyes holding that same calculating emptiness, the mouth set in that same expression of detached assessment.
The right figure carried Marcus's proportions. Broader through the shoulders. It stood with the same protective hunch, favoring its left side, right arm held slightly away from the body to maintain balance. When its blank face shimmered and reformed, it wore Marcus's features twisted in agony and fury—the exact mask Marcus himself wore now.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the entire width of the bridge.
No voice announced the terms. The understanding arrived complete, bypassing language entirely, settling into the base of Elijah's skull with absolute certainty: Defeat your reflection or be destroyed by it. Fight alone and you'll fall.
The copies attacked.
They moved as one organism. Mirror-Elijah flowed left, not charging but drifting wide, its motion carrying that same measured precision Elijah recognized from his own body but stripped of all restraint, reduced to pure hunting efficiency. Mirror-Marcus drove straight forward, a freight train of compressed violence, its functional fist already cocked back.
Elijah's mind went clear and cold. This was kinetics translated to mathematics. Pure motion rendered as formula. He couldn't maintain his careful performance of limitation here. To survive his own reflection, he'd have to match it first, then exceed it.
He didn't waste breath calling to Marcus. He simply moved.
As Mirror-Elijah closed the distance, Elijah stepped inward rather than back, but at an oblique angle. His body language became a stuttering series of contradictions—his shoulder jerking one direction while his weight shifted another, his right foot planting as though to pivot before his left knee dropped slightly. He was feeding the copy false information, flooding its predictive system with conflicting data.
Mirror-Elijah mirrored each feint. Its smooth approach developed a hitch, a momentary confusion in the perfection.
Ten feet away, Marcus met his double head-on with a sound like a wounded animal. He charged directly into it, leading with his good shoulder, abandoning defense entirely. The collision was brutal. Fists hammered into torsos. The wet thud of impacts mixed with gasps of pain from both bodies—flesh and reflection locked together in mutual destruction.
Marcus was losing. His injuries slowed him. Each movement dragged against damaged tissue. Mirror-Marcus fought fresh and whole, every blow landing with full force. A heavy strike glanced off Marcus's temple. He spun, stumbled, his legs carrying him backward toward the railing.
Elijah registered it peripherally. His mental calculation expanded to include new variables: Marcus goes down, his mirror turns on me and Chloe, we don't survive that. Unacceptable outcome.
He broke his pattern with Mirror-Elijah. Didn't engage it. Didn't strike. He ran past it toward the central fight.
This was the equation's solution. Personal animosity meant nothing. Suspicion was irrelevant. Only the mathematics of continued existence mattered.
Mirror-Elijah pivoted smoothly to follow, its pursuit trajectory perfect.
Elijah didn't look back. He angled his sprint not toward Mirror-Marcus but toward a point just behind it, reading the geometry of the two bodies locked in combat. As he reached the brutal tangle of Marcus and his double, he didn't throw a punch or grab. He threw himself.
He dropped into a slide, muscles locking rigid as his legs swept outward in a low arc aimed behind the reflection's ankles. The controlled fall committed all his momentum into a single sweeping motion.
He didn't make contact. Didn't need to.
Mirror-Marcus sensed the attack from its blind side. It shifted weight instinctively, pulling balance backward to avoid the sweep. The punch it had been driving toward Marcus's exposed ribs went wide, missing by inches.
In the same fractional second, Mirror-Elijah closed in on Elijah's sliding form and had to adjust its trajectory to avoid colliding with its counterpart.
For one heartbeat's fraction, the two reflections occupied overlapping space, interfering with each other's geometry.
Elijah was already rolling out of his slide, coming up on his feet. He saw the opening—that brief moment of disrupted coordination. He didn't target Marcus's reflection. He went for his own.
As Mirror-Elijah sidestepped its partner, Elijah was there. He didn't use a closed fist. He drove the edge of his hand into the back of the copy's knee—the structural pivot point where force becomes leverage.
The sound was wrong. Organic but artificial. Wet but hollow.
Mirror-Elijah's leg folded. It made no sound. It simply began falling, the flawless symmetry breaking apart.
"Now!" Elijah's voice cut through the chaos, the first word he'd spoken since the fight began.
Marcus, running on adrenaline and rage, saw his reflection momentarily off-balance. Saw its attention divided. He didn't hesitate. He lunged, his good arm snaking around Mirror-Marcus's neck, locking it in a chokehold. He threw all his weight into it, his damaged side screaming in protest.
Mirror-Marcus thrashed. Its fists pounded into Marcus's ribs. Marcus's face went purple, veins standing out on his forehead, teeth grinding together. He twisted.
Something snapped—the sound of thick ice breaking under pressure.
Mirror-Marcus went limp. Marcus shoved it away. It hit the metal grating and lay still. Then it began to disintegrate. Not into blood or bone but into fragments of black glass that clattered briefly before dissolving into dark smoke.
Elijah stood over his fallen reflection. It looked up at him wearing his face. For a moment, the focused blankness shifted. The mouth curved upward into a small, knowing smile—as though recognizing something in him it approved of. Then Elijah brought his heel down on the center of its chest.
It shattered into the same black glass.
Silence returned.
They stood breathing hard. The air carried the sharp scent of ozone mixed with something metallic that wasn't quite blood. Black crystalline dust covered the grating around their feet.
Marcus slumped against the railing, his left arm cradled against his body. His right hand pressed into his ribs where the reflection had landed its heaviest blows. His breathing came in short, wet gasps. His eyes were glazed with pain but locked on Elijah.
No gratitude showed in that stare. No brotherhood forged in combat. Just assessment. Cold understanding. Elijah had saved him. But Elijah had also been the reason he'd needed saving in the first place. The sequence was clear now: the poisoned rhythm, the vectored barrel, the forced cooperation. Each link in a deliberate chain. A trap built inside a rescue.
Elijah met his gaze without flinching. His own breathing had already steadied, the measured inhale-exhale of someone bringing systems back online. He offered no words. No "are you alright?" No "that was close." He simply looked, those grey eyes flat and analytical, cataloging Marcus's diminished condition as another piece of data.
Chloe and Vivian hurried over. Vivian went straight to Marcus, her hands hovering over his injuries, fresh sobs breaking from her throat. Chloe stopped beside Elijah. She looked down at the dissolving black glass at his feet, then up at his expressionless face.
"You planned that entire sequence," she said quietly. Not a question.
Elijah didn't deny it. Didn't confirm it. He turned his head to look down the bridge. "It's not finished," he said.
As if responding to his words, the bridge shuddered back into motion. The frozen slabs withdrew into walls and ceiling with heavy mechanical sounds. The path ahead opened.
But Marcus couldn't walk properly. He was a wreck of damaged tissue and exhausted reserves, leaning heavily on Vivian, each step a visible ordeal. His endurance—his primary asset—was spent. He was no longer a functional player. He was burden.
Elijah's gaze swept over him once, then moved ahead to where the bridge narrowed and terminated at a sheer wall of dark metal. A single narrow door was set into its surface.
The final equation waited.
He looked at Chloe. Something passed between them without words. Her eyes were hard but held no pleading. She understood the mathematics as well as he did.
Without speaking, Elijah turned and began walking toward the distant door. His steps were even and measured. He didn't offer to help.
He was already solving the last problem.