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Chi Cheng stood over the table, the last sequence complete, the air still humming with residual energy from the process. His hands were steady.
He had not allowed them to shake once during the entire construction - not when the bone structure locked into place, the skin sealed seamless and unmarked and the eyes first flickered beneath closed lids.
The clone opened its eyes.
Identical face, body, the same sharp jawline , the same dark eyes, the same mouth that had never learned how to soften for anyone.
But the stillness was wrong. Chi Cheng had never been still like that. Even in sleep he carried tension, a coiled readiness that never fully left.
This one simply existed - calm, present, already watching him without the restless edge that lived under Chi Cheng’s own skin.
Chi Cheng felt something cold and sharp move through his chest. He crushed it before it could become anything he would have to name.
“Get up.”
The clone sat up without hesitation. The movement was clean, efficient, almost graceful in a way Chi Cheng’s own body never quite managed when he was being observed. Chi Cheng’s jaw tightened.
“Stand.”
It stood.
Chi Cheng circled it slowly, eyes cataloguing every detail the way he would catalogue a new specimen - same height, same build, same faint scar along the left collarbone that Chi Cheng had never bothered to have removed.
The clone did not flinch under the scrutiny. It simply waited, patient in a way that felt like a deliberate insult.
“You will answer when spoken to,” Chi Cheng said, voice flat. “You will do what you are told. You exist because I decided you should. That is the only reason. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The voice was his own - exactly his own. The sound of it in another throat made something in Chi Cheng’s stomach twist.
He stepped closer. Close enough to feel the faint warmth coming off the clone’s skin. Close enough that he should have been able to hear a heartbeat matching his own. He listened.
It was slower, measured, steady and unhurried. The pulse of something that did not have to fight to stay upright, that did not carry the constant low-grade adrenaline Chi Cheng had lived with for years.
Chi Cheng’s own heart was already climbing, a traitorous quickening he could not suppress. The clone’s remained even, calm, perfect.
The difference should not have mattered. It was a minor physiological variance, nothing more. Chi Cheng told himself that while his fingers curled into fists at his sides.
He reached out and pressed two fingers to the side of the clone’s throat, right over the carotid. The skin was warm. The pulse under his fingertips was slow and deliberate, each beat spaced like it had all the time in the world.
Chi Cheng’s own pulse hammered against the inside of his wrist where it brushed the clone’s collarbone.
He hated it - He hated the stillness, the quiet confidence in the way the clone simply stood there and let itself be touched.
He hated that looking at this face - his face - made something hungry and ugly rise in his chest that he had spent years locking down.
Chi Cheng dropped his hand as if burned.
“Kneel.”
The clone dropped to its knees without a word. The movement was smooth, controlled.
Chi Cheng looked down at the top of its head - his own hair, his own shoulders and felt the unwanted pull tighten further, sharp and low in his gut.
“Look at me.”
The clone raised its head. Those eyes - his eyes - met his without flinching. There was no fear in them. No challenge either. Only a quiet, steady attention that felt more dangerous than either.
“Do not look at me like that.”
The clone lowered its gaze immediately.
“Stay silent until I tell you otherwise.”
Silence.
Chi Cheng turned away, walking several steps across the lab before he trusted himself to speak again. His hands were not steady now. He curled them into fists until the nails bit into his palms.
He had made this thing to be useful - to be a perfect research partner, the one presence that would never leave, disappoint or require more than he was willing to give.
He had not made it so he could stand here with his pulse racing and his throat tight because its heartbeat was slower than his own.
He glanced back.
The clone remained on its knees, head bowed, waiting - perfectly obedient and perfectly still.
The slow, measured rhythm of its pulse was almost audible in the quiet room if Chi Cheng listened hard enough and he was listening, whether he wanted to or not.
The obedience should have satisfied him. It did not. It only sharpened the unwanted thing twisting under his ribs, the pull that had started the moment those eyes opened and had not stopped since.
Chi Cheng looked away again.
“Get up,” he said, quieter this time. “And do not make me repeat myself.”
The clone rose.
Chi Cheng did not look at its face. He was no longer certain he could trust what his expression would do if he did.
.
.
.
The days blurred.
Chi Cheng kept the clone close - always within reach, always under observation. He told himself it was practical. The clone was a perfect research partner - same mind, instincts and same capacity for focus that stretched past exhaustion.
They worked side by side in the lab for hrs , hands moving in near identical patterns over the same instruments. Chi Cheng assigned tasks, corrected errors that did not exist, pushed the clone harder than he pushed himself.
He watched for the moment the perfection would crack - some hesitation, some flaw in the mirror that would let him dismiss the entire experiment as a failed vanity.
It never came.
Instead the clone saw him.
Not the surface, but he things underneath.
One evening, while Chi Cheng stood rigid at the console, jaw locked against a headache he refused to acknowledge, the clone simply set down the datapad and said, quiet and exact, “You’re grinding your teeth again. You only do that when you haven’t slept in three days.”
Chi Cheng’s hand stilled on the controls.
No one had ever said that to him or stayed long enough to notice.
He ordered the clone to silence and returned to work. The observation sat under his skin like a splinter.
It kept happening - small, accurate cuts. The clone noticing the way Chi Cheng’s voice flattened when a problem refused to yield. The way he never sat with his back to a door.
Each time the clone spoke the observation without judgment, without pity - just quiet fact and each time Chi Cheng felt the unwanted pull tighten.
He searched harder for a flaw. He found only the slow, steady heartbeat that still unsettled him every time he stood close enough to hear it.
One night the memory surfaced without permission.
A hand on his wrist, years ago - warm, careful - someone who had tried to stay. Chi Cheng had pulled away so hard the grip bruised both of them - purple fingerprints on pale skin, his own and theirs.
He had told himself it was better that way – cleaner,safer. He had walked out and never looked back.
Now the clone was in the same room, standing a few feet away with that same unbearable patience, and Chi Cheng did not know how to pull away. The knowledge sat in his chest like a stone.
The restlessness finally broke him.
It was late - the lab was quiet. The clone was at the secondary console, head bent over a sequence Chi Cheng had assigned only to keep him occupied.
Chi Cheng watched the line of his own neck, the familiar shape of his own hands moving with that unhurried precision, and the hunger that had been building for days finally drowned every rational objection.
He crossed the space in 3 strides.
The clone looked up just as Chi Cheng’s hand closed around the back of his neck. There was no resistance when Chi Cheng dragged him up and shoved him back against the nearest wall. The impact was hard enough to rattle the instruments on the nearby shelf.
Chi Cheng’s mouth crashed into his - his own mouth, his own taste - teeth first, then tongue, brutal and claiming. He kissed like he was trying to erase the difference between them, like he could force the slower heartbeat to race if he only took hard enough.
The clone made a low sound against his lips - no protest or pain. Something closer to recognition. That only made Chi Cheng angrier.
He spun the clone around, shoved him face - first into the wall, and yanked the lab coat and shirt down his arms in one rough motion. The clone’s bare back was identical to his own - the same slope of muscle, same faint scar along the left shoulder blade. Chi Cheng pressed his chest against that bare skin and felt the slower pulse against his own racing one. The contrast made his cock throb so hard it hurt.
“Stay still,” he ordered, voice rough. “You don’t get to move unless I say.”
The clone stayed still.
Chi Cheng freed himself with one hand, shoved the clone’s trousers down just far enough, and spat into his palm. There was no gentleness in the preparation - 2 fingers shoved in dry enough to burn, scissoring open with impatient force.
The clone’s breath hitched once, then steadied. That steadiness enraged Chi Cheng further. He wanted the clone to break the way he was breaking. He wanted proof that this body could be undone.
He lined up and thrust in hard.
The tight heat of his own body closed around him like a fist. Chi Cheng groaned through gritted teeth, forehead dropping against the clone’s shoulder. The sensation was overwhelming - familiar and alien at once.
He set a brutal pace immediately, hips snapping forward with enough force to drive the clone’s chest into the wall. Skin slapped against skin - the wet sound of it filled the quiet lab.
Chi Cheng fucked him like he was trying to punish the mirror for existing, like he could fuck the calm out of that slower heartbeat and replace it with the same frantic rhythm that lived in his own chest.
“You’re mine,” he snarled against the clone’s ear. “I made you. I decide what you’re for.”
The clone’s hands stayed flat against the wall. He took every thrust without pulling away, without pushing back, only the occasional soft, punched out sound when Chi Cheng angled especially deep.
Chi Cheng reached around and gripped the clone’s cock - already hard, leaking and stroked in time with his thrusts, rough and demanding. He wanted the clone to come apart first.
He wanted to watch his own face contort with forced pleasure and know he was the one who caused it.
The clone came with a low, broken sound, spilling over Chi Cheng’s fist. The clench of his body dragged Chi Cheng over the edge a few thrusts later. He buried himself as far as he could and came hard, pulsing deep inside the body that was identical to his own, forehead pressed to the back of the clone’s neck while his vision whited out.
For several long seconds neither of them moved.
Chi Cheng’s breathing was ragged. The clone’s was still slower, measured, even with cum leaking down his thighs and Chi Cheng’s spend still hot inside him.
That difference scraped against something raw in Chi Cheng’s chest. He pulled out abruptly, the loss of heat almost painful, and stepped back. His hands were shaking. He refused to look at them.
He turned to leave - to put distance between them and reclaim the control that had just slipped through his fingers - when the clone’s arms came around him from behind.
Not tight or restraining - just present.
One arm across Chi Cheng’s chest, the other around his waist, holding him in place with a gentleness that felt more absolute than any force. The clone’s bare chest pressed against Chi Cheng’s still-clothed back. The slower heartbeat thudded steadily against his spine.
Chi Cheng froze.
The contact was warm , steady, patient in a way no one had ever been with him. The memory of that old bruised wrist flickered again and died.
This was different. This was his own body holding him, his own voice quiet against the back of his neck when the clone spoke.
“Stay.”
One word - soft, certain.
Something in Chi Cheng’s chest cracked open so wide it hurt. Panic flooded in behind it - hot, sharp, humiliating. He could not be held like this. He could not need it.
He could not stand the way his body wanted to lean back into the solid warmth and never move again.
He wrenched free with more force, spinning to face the clone. His own face looked back at him - flushed, lips kiss bruised, eyes steady and far too knowing. Cum still streaked the clone’s stomach. Chi Cheng’s spend glistened on his thighs. The sight should have satisfied the possessive thing in him. Instead it made him feel exposed.
“Don’t touch me like that,” Chi Cheng snapped, voice raw. “You don’t get to-”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. The words tangled in his throat.
He shoved the clone back a step - hard enough that the clone’s shoulders hit the wall again and walked out of the lab without looking back.
His hands were still shaking and pulse was still racing. Behind him the slower, steadier heartbeat faded with every step, but the feeling of those arms around him stayed, branded into his skin like a mark he could not scrub off.
He did not sleep that night.
He lay in the dark and listened to the silence where another heartbeat should have been, and hated how much he missed the sound of it.
.
.
.
Chi Cheng lasted 3 days.
3 days of silence in the lab - working alone with the clone’s absence sitting in the room like a physical weight. He told himself the distance was necessary. The experiment had crossed a line.
The thing he had made was no longer simply useful, it had begun to occupy space inside him that nothing was allowed to occupy. The memory of those arms around him - warm, steady, uninvited returned every time he closed his eyes.
The slower heartbeat he had once found unsettling now haunted the quiet like a missing sound he kept straining to hear.
By the 3rd night the restlessness had curdled into something sharper.
He stood in the secondary containment room where the deactivation sequence waited. The controls were simple - one sequence, one confirmation and the clone would cease.
The body would be reclaimed for materials, the data archived, the entire failure erased. Chi Cheng had already written the justification in his head - the construct had developed unstable attachment patterns. It was a liability. Ending it was the rational choice.
His hand hovered over the interface.
The clone stood 3 meters away, exactly where Chi Cheng had ordered him to remain. He had not been restrained or ordered to kneel. He simply stood, hands loose at his sides, watching Chi Cheng with that same unbearable calm - no pleading, no movement toward the door and no attempt to speak.
Chi Cheng’s fingers trembled once above the controls. He curled them into a fist, then forced them open again.
“You understand what this is,” he said. His voice came out flatter than he intended. “I made you. I can unmake you. That was always the condition.”
The clone did not answer. He only looked at him.
And then something in those eyes - identical to Chi Cheng’s own shifted.
It was not fear.
Fear would have been easier – it would have confirmed the hierarchy, would have let Chi Cheng finish the sequence with the cold satisfaction of control reasserted. What he saw instead was quieter and far more devastating - recognition.
The soft, stunned understanding of a betrayal the clone had allowed himself to hope would not arrive. As if some private, unspoken belief - that the man who had built him might choose to keep him had just been quietly, irrevocably broken.
The look lasted only a second.
But it was enough.
For the first time since the clone had opened his eyes on the table, Chi Cheng saw him as fully human - not a perfect reflection or a useful construct. A person who had hoped, however carefully, that he would not be thrown away.
The realization landed in Chi Cheng’s chest like a blade driven between his ribs. His breath left him in a single, sharp exhale.
His hand dropped from the controls.
He did not speak. The words that rose in his throat were dangerous - apologies, denials, something raw and humiliating that sounded too much like don’t look at me like that, I can’t stand it.
He turned instead and walked out of the room, the door sealing behind him with a soft hiss.
The emptiness hit the moment the door closed.
It was immediate and absolute. The lab felt larger without the clone’s quiet presence. The air felt thinner. Chi Cheng stood in the corridor with his back against the wall and realized his hands were shaking again.
He pressed them flat against the cool metal and tried to breathe through the sudden, vicious ache behind his sternum.
He had wanted distance, control and the most important - the clean silence of a problem solved.
What he got was the sound of his own pulse racing in his ears and the absolute certainty that the slower, steadier heartbeat was no longer there to answer it.
He lasted 4 hours.
Four hours of opening files he did not read, of telling himself that the decision had been correct, that the clone’s quiet hurt had been further proof of instability, that ending the experiment was the only rational outcome.
Every argument collapsed under the weight of that single look - the recognition of betrayal the clone had not even tried to hide.
When Chi Cheng returned to the containment room, the clone was still standing in the same place. He had not moved. He had simply waited, as if he had known Chi Cheng would come back and had chosen not to make the return easier by disappearing or pleading or changing anything about his posture.
Chi Cheng stopped in the doorway.
The hierarchy was already cracked. He could feel it in the way the clone’s eyes met his without lowering, in the absence of any order given or received, in the quiet fact that Chi Cheng had walked back into the room of his own accord.
The clone did not smile or speak. He only looked at Chi Cheng with that same steady attention, the hurt still faintly present beneath it, and waited.
Chi Cheng’s voice, when it came, was rough.
“Come with me.”
The clone stepped forward without hesitation.
They walked back to the main lab in silence. Chi Cheng did not look at him. He could feel the clone’s presence at his shoulder like a second heartbeat he had already grown too used to.
The control he had tried to reclaim by standing over the deactivation sequence was gone. In its place was something far more dangerous - the knowledge that he had almost destroyed the only person who had ever looked at him with that quiet, unflinching hope and that the person in question had been himself.
The door sealed behind them.
Chi Cheng did not give another order that night.
The hierarchy had already broken, and both of them knew it.
.
.
.
Chi Cheng had told himself this time would be different.
He had brought the clone back and with that he had allowed the cracked hierarchy to stand. But he still needed the proof that he was the one in control - that the thing he had made existed to be taken, used, ordered.
The quiet look the clone had given him over the deactivation controls still burned under his skin. He needed to bury it.
He shoved the clone down onto the narrow bed in the adjoining quarters. The clone landed on his back and looked up at him without resistance, without challenge, only that same steady attention that had begun to feel like a blade.
Chi Cheng stripped with sharp, impatient movements, then dragged the clone’s clothes off with the same rough efficiency.
Fabric tore.
He did not care.
He needed skin, needed the identical body under his hands so he could remind them both who had made whom.
He climbed on top, knees bracketing the clone’s hips, and took his mouth in a hard, claiming kiss - teeth and tongue and the copper taste of a split lip he did not remember causing.
The clone opened for him immediately. Chi Cheng groaned into the kiss, angry at the ease of it, angry at how good it felt to sink into the heat of his own mouth. He ground down, cock already hard and leaking against the clone’s equally hard length, and the friction was filthy and perfect and too much.
“This is what you’re for,” Chi Cheng muttered against his mouth, voice rough. “I made you. I take what I want.”
He spat into his palm, reached between them, and stroked both of them together in a tight, rough grip. The clone’s cock was identical - same weight, same heat, same sensitive head that jumped when Chi Cheng thumbed over the slit. Precum slicked the way, messy and wet.
Chi Cheng watched it with something close to hatred - his own cock sliding against its twin, the same body responding to the same touch. He wanted it to feel like ownership. He needed it to.
He shoved the clone’s thighs wider, lined himself up, and pushed in with one long, relentless thrust.
The tight heat of his own body closed around him again. Chi Cheng’s breath left him in a punched-out sound. He set a brutal pace immediately, hips snapping forward hard enough to rock the bed against the wall.
The wet slap of skin on skin filled the small room. He fucked the clone the way he had the first time - deep, punishing, determined to drive every trace of calm out of that slower heartbeat. Sweat gathered between their chests. The clone’s legs stayed open around him, taking every thrust without pulling away. Chi Cheng reached down and wrapped a hand around the clone’s cock, stroking in time with his hips, determined to force him to fall apart first.
It was working - clone’s breath had begun to hitch. His hands had come up to grip Chi Cheng’s shoulders. Chi Cheng felt the familiar coil of triumph until the clone’s hands moved higher.
Cool palms cupped Chi Cheng’s face.
The same face.
The clone held him still with quiet, absolute strength, forcing Chi Cheng’s eyes to meet his. The thrusts faltered. Chi Cheng tried to pull back, to reclaim the rhythm, but the hands on his face did not allow it. The clone’s thumbs rested against his cheekbones, gentle and immovable.
“Stop pretending this is about power,” the clone said. His voice was quiet, almost soft, but it cut through the wet sounds of their bodies like a blade. “I want you. Not because you made me. Because I see you and I’m still here.”
Chi Cheng’s entire body locked.
The words landed harder than any physical blow. He had defences against ownership, against lust, against the simple animal need to fuck something that looked like him until the restlessness quieted.
He had no defence against being wanted.
Not as a creator.
Not as a reflection.
As himself - seen, known, and still chosen.
Something in his chest cracked open so wide it hurt to breathe.
He tried to look away. The clone’s hands held him. He tried to thrust again, to turn the moment back into something he could control. His hips stuttered.
The clone’s body stayed open and welcoming beneath him, but the eyes looking up at him were steady, patient, and devastatingly clear.
Chi Cheng’s hand left the clone’s cock and pressed flat against his chest instead, right over the heart.
He expected the familiar racing rhythm - the proof that the clone was as undone as he was, that the perfect stillness could be broken. What he felt was the same slow, measured pulse that had unsettled him from the first day – steady, unhurried.
The heartbeat of something that did not have to fight to exist, that did not carry the constant low grade panic Chi Cheng had lived with for years.
Chi Cheng hated it.
He hated the calm under his palm. He hated that his own heart was hammering against his ribs while the clone’s remained even.
He wanted to fuck the steadiness out of him - wanted to drive so deep and so hard that the pulse would finally race, that the clone would finally look as wrecked as Chi Cheng felt. He thrust once, twice, desperate and uneven, chasing that proof.
The clone only looked at him – patient, present and still holding Chi Cheng’s face between his palms as if the contact was the only thing that mattered.
And Chi Cheng realized, with a sick, dizzying clarity, that he was the only one falling apart.
His rhythm collapsed. The rough, punishing pace dissolved into something messier - deeper, slower, almost searching. He could not stop looking at the clone’s face. His own face, flushed and open and watching him with a quiet that felt like forgiveness he had never asked for.
Tears he refused to acknowledge burned at the edges of his vision. He dropped his forehead against the clone’s and kept moving, hips rolling in deep, grinding thrusts that dragged every nerve ending raw.
The wet sound of it was obscene -slick and filthy, their combined precum and spit making every slide louder. The clone’s cock was trapped between their stomachs, hard and leaking, smearing wetness across both of them with every movement.
Chi Cheng came first.
It tore through him without warning - violent, almost painful, his body locking up as he spilled deep inside the clone with a broken sound that was nothing like the controlled noises he usually allowed himself.
He kept thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, as if he could bury the feeling deeper if he just stayed inside long enough.
The clone followed a few seconds later, coming between their bodies with a low, punched-out breath, the tight clench of his release dragging another aftershock out of Chi Cheng.
They stayed locked together afterward, breathing the same air.
Chi Cheng’s hand was still pressed to the clone’s chest. The slower heartbeat thudded under his palm, steady and unchanged.
He hated it.
He needed it.
He could not make himself move away.
The clone’s thumbs stroked once across his cheekbones - soft, almost careful and Chi Cheng felt the last of his defences crumble under the touch.
He did not speak.
He only stayed there, forehead to forehead, palm over the heart that would not race, and let himself be seen.
.
.
.
The lab was quiet in the way it only ever was in the small hours.
Chi Cheng stood in front of the observation window that ran the length of the far wall. The glass was dark on the other side, turned reflective by the low internal lights.
Two identical figures looked back at him - one standing slightly behind the other, one fractionally more still.
He did not turn around.
He could feel the clone’s presence at his shoulder the same way he had grown used to feeling it - a second gravity, a second pulse he no longer tried to pretend he could ignore.
The hierarchy had not vanished. It had simply settled into something narrower and more dangerous. Chi Cheng still gave orders. The clone still obeyed most of them.
But the obedience no longer carried the old distance. It carried recognition instead - quiet, mutual, and absolute.
They had not spoken much since the night everything cracked open. Words felt dangerous. What remained between them was denser than language - the shared knowledge that Chi Cheng had almost ended him, that the clone had still chosen to stay, that neither of them had anywhere else to put the thing that lived under their identical ribs.
Chi Cheng lifted one hand and touched the glass.
His fingers settled over the reflection of the clone’s face - not the real one standing half a step behind him, but the pale, perfect image floating in the dark glass. The surface was cool.
He traced the line of the reflected jaw with his thumb the way he might have traced his own in a mirror on any other night, except this time the face belonged to someone who had looked at him while he fell apart and had not looked away.
“You’re mine,” he said.
The words came out low, almost rough. They were not soft.
They were a claim, the same claim he had made the first time he pushed inside the body that matched his own. But the shape of them had changed.
They no longer tried to reduce the clone to property. They acknowledged the closed circuit they had become – 2 versions of the same man, locked in orbit around each other because nothing else could hold the weight.
Behind him the clone moved.
Chi Cheng did not turn. He kept his hand on the glass, fingertips still resting against the reflected cheek, as the real body stepped in close. Warmth pressed against his back for a moment - chest to shoulder blades, the slower heartbeat steady against his spine, then the clone shifted, circling until they stood face to face in front of the dark window.
The clone lifted both hands and set them lightly on either side of Chi Cheng’s neck. Then he leaned in and pressed his forehead to Chi Cheng’s.
Skin to skin.
Warmth against warmth.
Chi Cheng’s breath caught once and then steadied. He did not pull away. The contact was quiet and absolute.
The slower pulse was close enough now that Chi Cheng could feel it in the places their skin touched - temple, forehead, the edge of a shared jaw.
“I know,” the clone said.
The two words landed with the same quiet certainty they always did - no triumph, no softness - just fact.
The clone had always known. From the moment he opened his eyes on the table, he had understood the shape of the hunger that lived in the man who made him.
He had simply waited for Chi Cheng to stop pretending it was only ownership.
A beat of silence.
Then, quieter, almost against Chi Cheng’s mouth -
“And you’re mine. You just don’t know how to say it yet.”
Chi Cheng’s eyes closed.
The words should have made him bristle. They should have triggered the old reflex to shove, to dominate, to reassert the distance that had once kept him safe.
Instead they settled into the cracked place behind his sternum and stayed there, heavy and true.
He had no language for what the clone had just named. He had spent a lifetime refusing to need anyone, refusing to be seen, refusing to let another person - especially one who wore his own face claim any part of him.
But the clone was not another person.
He was the only one who had ever looked at the full, ugly shape of Chi Cheng’s loneliness and stayed - the slower heartbeat that no longer unsettled him so much as anchored him and the body Chi Cheng had tried to use as proof of power and had instead found himself breaking against.
Chi Cheng kept his hand on the glass a moment longer, fingertips still resting against the reflection of a face that was no longer only his. Then he let it fall.
His other hand came up and settled at the back of the clone’s neck, fingers sliding into the familiar hair, holding him in the same quiet way he was being held.
He did not say the words back.
The closed circuit was already complete - two identical men standing in front of dark glass, foreheads pressed together, one pulse racing and one pulse steady, neither of them willing to step away.
The hierarchy remained - intense, exclusive, sharp-edged but it no longer ran in only one direction. Chi Cheng still claimed and the clone still answered.
And underneath both, quieter and more permanent than either of them had language for, was the simple fact that they had become the only place the other could rest.
Outside the observation window the night stayed dark.
Inside, neither of them moved.