The room was silent except for the soft hum of Zeyan's encrypted laptop. The flash drive blinked once, twice—and then opened a folder simply labeled: "Firebird."
Ruoxi leaned in. Her chest tightened with each file that blinked to life: rows of numbered case files, surveillance photos, and redacted emails. But one document drew her gaze immediately—"Terminated Subjects: Prototype 07-18".
Zeyan clicked.
A screen filled with rows of names and dates. Some had status logs: "deceased," "missing," and disturbingly, "repurposed."
Then came the photo.
A girl. Pale, small, eyes wide open in fear. She looked just like Ruoxi… or Linyue.
"Is that...?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
"I don't know," Zeyan said, jaw clenched. "But look at the location tag."
Ruoxi squinted. Geneva, Switzerland. Underneath, coordinates. A now-defunct lab belonging to a subsidiary of QH Biogenics—a name they'd seen once before in Professor Yan's files.
"Europe?" Ruoxi breathed. "That's where they took the prototypes?"
Zeyan nodded slowly. "And where they… shut them down."
A shiver ran down her spine. "What's Firebird Protocol?"
Zeyan pulled up the metadata on the folder. "Looks like it was a kill-switch program. If the prototypes started showing 'unintended behaviors'—like emotional independence or memory bleed—they were to be… eliminated."
Ruoxi turned away, bile rising in her throat.
That night, Ruoxi couldn't sleep.
The city lights bled through the curtains like broken glass. She stared at the ceiling, Linyue's face echoing in her thoughts—if I disappear, it wasn't an accident.
But what chilled her more was the possibility that she herself might have been listed on that file. Not Ruoxi, the girl with a childhood and heartbreak and journals. But Prototype 07-18… a name on a screen.
She didn't notice when Zeyan came in, holding two mugs of steaming tea.
"You shouldn't be alone with that look," he said softly, handing her a cup.
"Do you think I'm one of them?" she asked, not touching the mug.
He didn't answer right away. "I think… you're you."
"That's not enough."
"It is to me."
She looked at him then. Really looked.
In this quiet moment, with his hair slightly messy and eyes no longer cold, she saw the Zeyan beneath the armor. The man who once cried beside his sister's grave. The man who hunted ghosts with her, not for her.
And for the first time, she felt the tension between them soften—not disappear, but reshape. Like something fragile learning to breathe.
"I used to dream about fire," Ruoxi whispered.
Zeyan raised an eyebrow.
"I was standing in a field of flames, but I wasn't burning. I was watching another girl scream. Her face was mine, but… not."
"You've never told anyone that?"
She shook her head.
Zeyan was quiet, then leaned back and said, "Maybe you're both. Ruoxi… and something else. But that doesn't make you fake. It makes you survivor class."
She smiled, just faintly. "You're such a dork sometimes."
"Only around you."
That caught her off-guard. She stared at him, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
Across town, the Prototype woke.
She didn't know her name, only fragments: silver needles, metal halls, a voice that said, "You are not her."
She'd been sleeping in the hospital's closed ward, under false records and a sedative drip. But tonight, her pulse raced. Her fingers curled against the sheets. A storm of images flooded her mind—a woman with her face crying in a burning corridor, a shadowy figure pulling wires from a server, a needle plunging into a neck.
Future? Past?
She wasn't sure.
But the last vision made her scream.
It was of Ruoxi—tied down, a machine humming behind her, and a face watching from the glass:
The step-sister.
Back in Zeyan's apartment, Ruoxi jolted upright.
"Did you feel that?" she gasped, heart hammering.
"Feel what?"
"I think… someone just remembered me."