It wasn't a resemblance I could attribute to an ancestor. Those were my eyes. My mouth. The same face I had seen in the mirror that morning.
But unlike me, the figure wasn't terrified.
Before I could sort out my thoughts, he said to me:
"What's wrong?"
I felt pressure in my chest and tried to draw breath, over and over; I wondered what was happening to me. I wanted to return to the room. See Eleonor. Hear Sophie's voice. Anything rather than stay there, staring at my own face on a figure that remained motionless while I lost control.
"Eleonor!"
There was no answer.
I touched my face again, as if I still needed to make sure I had one.
"Why do you look just like me?" I managed to ask. "What's happening?"
The answer began to form inside my head before the figure's lips moved.
"I'm a part of you."
The trembling grew worse.
That voice sounded just like the voice of my own thoughts. I couldn't get away.
"I'm a fragment. A part of your consciousness."
I immediately remembered the words I had heard in China. Back then, the figure had no face, and I had been able to speak to him without facing this.
Now that I could see his face, it was terrifying.
"The First Bearer… Really?" I murmured.
He didn't need to answer.
I had said it myself: I had been a bearer before. I had spoken about that essence in the infirmary, beside Eleonor's bed. Sophie had asked me who I would be when I remembered: Noah or the First Bearer.
And I had answered, "Both."
How had I been able to say that so calmly?
I looked down at my hands. They were still mine, but for a moment I was afraid to raise them and discover that they no longer obeyed me, just as had happened in the room.
"Is this what's going to happen to me?" I asked. "Am I going to stop being me?"
The figure remained in front of me. I felt the answer within me; an almost tangible fear ran through my whole body after I asked the question.
"You're not talking to someone who has come to take your place. I'm a part of your consciousness that we divided."
We divided it…?
Yet hearing those words reminded me of the sensation in the Chamber of Memory: something trying to break through, memories I recognized but couldn't place within my life. I had left that place knowing that my story didn't begin where I had always thought it did.
But that hadn't prepared me for this.
"I don't remember doing it," I said.
"You don't remember."
The certainty in those words pierced me. There were memories I could already reach and others that fell apart as soon as I tried to hold on to them. This wasn't a story someone was telling me from the outside. I was feeling the gaps in my own memory.
I covered my mouth with one hand.
Then I thought of Eleonor.
I had said I would need her to remind me who I was when I fully awakened. Now I understood the fear behind my own words. I searched my memory for her face, her voice that morning, the pressure of her hands on my arms. I needed to hold on to something I could recognize without doubt.
"She's waiting."
Thinking of Eleonor didn't make the anguish disappear, but I managed to calm down a little.
The figure was still there. He wasn't fading as he had in China. His presence was clearer.
"What part of me are you?"
For a few seconds, there were no words.
Suddenly, I felt an immense pressure in my head, similar to what I had felt in the Chamber of Memory. I closed my eyes, and an image suddenly took shape in my memory.
A group of people were having a conversation, and they seemed a little upset.
It was terrifying, because I had never seen any of them, but for some reason they all seemed familiar.
I tried to understand what they were saying, and what I heard almost made my blood run cold: one of the voices I could hear arguing was my own.
"No…"
My eyes snapped open.
The figure was still looking at me with my own face.
An idea formed in my mind, and I tried not to think about it any further.
"You are one of the Supreme Beings."
I felt my legs give way and fell to my knees.
I stayed like that, with one hand braced against the ground and the other pressed to my chest. I wanted to deny what I had just heard, but the words were already inside me. The figure kept looking at me.
"It can't be," I said. "Not me…"
I thought of the records in China. The cylinders, the bodies, and the descriptions of the experiments. I remembered how we had said that those who had done all of that were monsters.
Until that moment, that was what I had thought.
I looked at that face again.
I didn't know what to do.
The images I remembered from China mixed with the scene of that argument. I tried to separate them. I didn't want to assume I was responsible for something I couldn't verify, but I couldn't keep thinking about the Supreme Beings as though none of it had anything to do with me.
I pressed my fingers against the ground.
"Did I take part?"
The question made me nauseous.
I wanted to find an immediate answer, something that would let me look at that face again without feeling terror. But nothing came to mind.
I slowly raised my head. Sweat was streaming down my face.
This time, I didn't try to move away from the fragment or look for a way out of the darkness. I kept trembling as I looked at my own face and asked the question that frightened me most.
"Is he really me?!"