Chapter Eight: The Other Mara
Abandoned Orchard Facility – Site Theta-3 – 5:40 a.m.
The old facility stood like a ribcage buried in frost.
Shattered windows. Concrete eaten by moss. A collapsed roof that opened to the gray sky like a peeled lid.
Site Theta-3 had been decommissioned five years ago.
At least, that was the lie in the records.
The truth?
It had been locked, not abandoned.
Because something inside still moved.
And it wore Mara's face.
---
She descended through the breach in the roof, boots echoing against rusted catwalks and split tiles.
The air smelled like metal and old screams — not sound, but memory, lingering like oil on the tongue.
Vines had pushed up through the foundation, black and brittle, long dead.
But the power was still on.
Only one section.
Down below, in Containment Bay Alpha.
---
The doors opened on their own.
Inside: a white room, cracked and ruined. Mirrors along every wall — shattered, distorted.
And in the middle of the room, slumped against a broken gurney…
Was her.
---
Mara.3.
Shorter. Bald. Her skin had the color of burned wax. Her arms were folded over her chest, but fused at the elbows. She hadn't moved in years.
Until now.
The eye opened first.
Not human. Not even close.
It was a golden ring of circuitry inside an obsidian sclera.
Then the mouth.
> "Did I win?" it whispered. "Or are we still rotting?"
---
Mara stepped closer.
"You survived," she said.
Mara.3 twitched.
"No. I evolved. You're the survivor. I'm just what they made before they got scared of success."
The mirrors trembled as her voice rose.
It wasn't a scream.
It was feedback — like the building itself was reacting to her breath.
> "Why are you here, Nine?"
> "You should be dead. They don't let us live."
Mara hesitated. "The Orchard is free."
A pause.
Then laughter — glitching and wet.
> "Of course it is. You left the door open."
---
Mara.3 stood.
Her legs creaked like unfolding insect limbs. Her back split once as she rose — something inside her readjusting.
But her face… that still looked like Mara.
Only wrong.
Distorted like a memory you wish you hadn't trusted.
---
"I need your help," Mara said.
Mara.3 stared.
"Is this a trick?" she asked.
"No."
"Then it's a mistake."
---
She walked to a console and pressed her hand against the scanner. The screen lit up with neural schematics. Multiple clones. Partial minds. Versions with missing empathy. Versions with no language.
One — just labeled ".X" — had wings made of spine segments.
All dead.
Except for them.
---
"Tell me what I need to know," Mara demanded.
"How do we kill it?"
Mara.3 smiled.
"You don't kill a god," she said. "You starve it."
"You burn every seed. Rip every signal. Cut every cord — even the one in your skull."
Mara touched her temple.
There was something there.
A pulse.
Small. Warm. Hidden until now.
It grew when she touched it.
---
"That's it," Mara.3 whispered. "It speaks in dreams, but roots in doubt. You let it in because you needed to be more."
"Now you have to decide if you're still you without it."
---
A siren shrieked.
Not from the building.
From the sky.
---
Mara ran to the window.
Above the mountains, a military dropship screamed across the clouds, rotors glowing with heat.
And behind it — rising from the forest like an ancient titan — was a shape made of flesh and bark, crawling out from beneath the old Orchard.
It had arms.
Legs.
And a face.
Hers.
---
Mara turned to Mara.3.
"I'm going to stop it."
"You won't," she said, voice calm.
"Because if you kill it, you kill what made you real."
---
Outside, the sky was catching fire.
And beneath the burning stars, the god of the Orchard was waking up.