When she woke up, she could not remember which name was hers, and she was pointing a gun at the mirror.

Lieutenant Soma Peries rarely remembered her dreams. It was necessary for her to dream in the first place only for the proper upkeep of the brain; needless recollection of those images would only risk muddling her memories. She'd been conditioned to forget them.

Lately, she'd remembered some: sequences where she'd been growing up as Sergei Smirnov's daughter. They reminded her of the reason she didn't think much of dreams in the first place, of course; they made no sense at all. She spent them convinced she was a child, his child, even though she was never much younger than she was now. Still, when she explained them to Colonel Smirnov, she found herself smiling.

This was not one of those dreams. She wouldn't have minded so much if it were.

When she first became aware of her new surroundings, Soma was chasing after Subject E-0057 again. (A dream born of her failure, then: it was in part her fault he'd escaped earlier that day.) He ran through blank corridors--the supersoldier institute, of course. Was this a memory? No, it was too surreal for that. Both of them had started out as adults, but as he fled and she gave chase, the years dropped away from their bodies. When Soma finally cornered him, she could not remember ever having been this young.

It didn't matter; she still had a gun. She was still a soldier, and he was still the same man who had destroyed their own kind over four years ago and who now called her by the wrong name.

Marie, Marie.

She stopped, suddenly unsure if he had called those words out to her or if she had heard them in her mind. No: this time she wouldn't let herself be swayed, as she had so badly before. She leveled her gun at him with small and childish hands. "Subject E-0057! You won't be taken alive this time!" Even speaking those words, her child's voice sounded too gentle now. She hated it.

"Marie!" Now he was definitely speaking. "I heard you calling me. I brought you back here. Don't you remember?"

She stopped, her finger trembling clumsily on the trigger. "That isn't what happened. I chased you here. You ran instead of fighting: again."

He shook his head. "I led you here. Marie, there's something you need to see."

"There's nothing here for me."

"This is where it started," he said. "Don't you remember, Marie?"

It hurt her again: not like his quantum brainwaves once had, but like the vision that had crippled her before. (And yet they were similar.) Marie. She couldn't stand to hear it any longer. Soma hurled herself forward, feeling her body rise and grow and change as she did, feeling the cold comfort of her competent adult form return to her as she screamed. "That's not my name!"

Dream logic dictated her actions. She could have shot him so easily, but instead she found herself beating him with the barrel of the gun. He flinched back, but made no move to defend himself against her with force. That only enraged her more. Soma hit him again and again, but she could never seem to do more than bloody him. Red splattered through the air, but he was still standing, and only superficially hurt.

"Marie," he said again. He was his real age now too.

She was tired, and somehow as he spoke none of this seemed right. She didn't want to hit him again; she wanted to do something else--

--she wanted to hold him.

"No!" Before the urge could overwhelm her, Soma pointed the gun at his face again and pulled the trigger. The shot went off, terribly loud in the small room.

Glass shattered. Subject E-0057 was nowhere to be seen, but now Soma stood in front of a raised glass case. It was broken in the wake of the shot, releasing whatever had been confined inside it. No, not whatever: whoever. Soma tensed and lifted her gun again.

And then, within the glass, she sat up.

Soma stared. That was her she faced now: Soma Peries. Except it wasn't. Those eyes were too gentle. There was no fight in her form. She might as well have been an alien. "Get out of my body," Soma said.

"No," said her doppelganger.

Soma curled her finger around the trigger.

"You can't shoot me," said the other her. "You don't want to die. You want to live, for the Colonel. And I want to live, for Allelujah."

"You're talking about Subject E-0057," Soma said, and she suddenly wished she hadn't. Because it meant that she knew who Allelujah was. She didn't want to know. She only wanted him subjugated and preferably dead, to pay for his own sins and erase hers. "You're the one he's mistaken me for. Marie Perfacy."

"It isn't a mistake," Marie said. "No, it isn't his mistake." She pushed shards of glass aside and climbed down from the remains of the case.

"Don't get any closer!" Soma kept the gun pointed at her. "You interfere with my duties. I'll destroy you too."

"I said that you wouldn't," Marie said. She started walking towards Soma. "I won't let you destroy him, either."

"Why do you care so much about him?" Soma felt the gun digging into her palm, but she refused to let go. "He's nothing but an incomplete specimen, and a traitor and a murderer of our own kind as well."

"It doesn't matter," Marie said. "I still have to be with him."

"It won't happen," Soma said, "because I won't forgive him."

"But I will," Marie said, "because he hasn't forgiven himself." She was close enough now to reach out and take hold of the gun by its barrel. Soma thought about pulling the trigger first, but she found she couldn't, and then Marie had pulled the gun away and dropped it on the floor. She folded her arms around Soma and pulled her close. Soma couldn't move. She tried to hold onto the smooth cool stability of her fury, but it slipped away.

"We are Marie Perfacy as well as Soma Peries," she said. "And before we were Soma Peries, he spoke to me when no one else would or could. Since then, nothing will keep me from him in the end."

Soma struggled to break free, but Marie hardly even had to try to hold her. "Let me go!"

Marie kissed her on the cheek.

Soma didn't know how she'd risen from her bed, picked up her gun, and came to stand in front of the mirror, aiming at her reflection, without being aware of it. Had she betrayed herself now, as Subject E-0057 had betrayed all of them?

Not Subject E-0057. Allelujah.

She'd meant to restrain herself, but that was too much. Soma fired furiously into the mirror, feeling only shameful relief as the bullet ricocheted off into the darkness and left obscuring cracks behind. Right now, her face was easier to view in shards and fragments. But the cracks were dark like his hair, the different facets of her reflection unmatching like his eyes. She could not put him out of her mind.

It didn't matter. She would focus on him for as long as it took; that would only help her defeat him.

"I am Soma Peries," she told her broken reflection, "and I will kill Subject E-0057."

Something inside her answered: I am Marie Perfacy, and I will protect Allelujah Haptism.

She was still as divided as the fractured shards of the mirror, and no matter what she intended to do to him, he was what bound the pieces of herself together. She would find him again, and she would

( kill / protect )

him. Then she would be whole.