The duplicate stood under the flickering halogen light of the safehouse basement, perfectly still.
It had my face—the same high cheekbones, the same dark hair, the same slight arch in the left eyebrow. But the way it existed in space was entirely wrong. It didn’t breathe in cycles; its chest rose and fell in jerky, mechanical hitches. Beside me, my sister Nimol shifted her grip on her iron pipe, her knuckles turning white, while my older cousin Veicha—just a year ahead of Nimol—stepped forward to shoulder his way between us and the glass. My oldest brother, Neak, instinctively pulled our youngest cousin, Vannak, behind him, shielding the kid born barely a month after me. We were six of the next generation, bound by Grandma Dary’s ironclad rule: No one gets left behind. Ever.
Behind us, the Hollowkin recoiled. The pale, sprawling entity that had hounded us across three ruined sectors refused to step within ten feet of the door. It hissed, its shadowy limbs pressing backward against the concrete wall, trembling. That was our first real clue. The duplicate wasn't an instrument of the Hollowkin. It was something the Hollowkin feared.
In the quiet tension of the room, Grandpa Kiri moved to Grandma Dary’s side.
He was a broad, weathered man whose hands were rough from decades of manual work, but the way he touched the small of Dary’s back was as gentle as silk. Long before this apocalyptic rift broke the world, they had already survived an apocalypse of their own. After escaping the brutal killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, they had arrived in America with nothing—navigating a strange new land, language barriers, and deep trauma to build a life from the ash. When the new world collapsed around us, it was Kiri who knew how to fortify physical shelters from nothing, but it was Dary’s fierce, protective love that kept our family unit whole.
To ensure we would always survive whatever horrors came for us, they had forged our entire generation in Boran—the ancient Cambodian martial art passed down through their lineage. They spent years drilling Neak, Nimol, Veicha, Vannak, and me in every strike, sweep, and defensive stance, turning us into fighters capable of enduring any catastrophe. He looked down at her now, his thumb tracing a comforting circle against her hip, silently offering his strength to fuel hers. Dary reached up without looking, her fingers intertwining tightly with his, their shared glance carrying decades of unbreakable devotion and shared survival.
"Dary," Kiri murmured softly, his voice low and grounding. "I'm right here."
Grandma Dary didn't take her eyes off the glass. Her posture was straight as a rifle barrel, standard for the woman who had dragged two generations through hardship without losing a single child.
Then, the duplicate's eyes shifted down to my hands.
Resting in my palms was the Golden Lotus—an ancient, gleaming relic that pulsed with a faint, warm light. It was an artifact Grandma had guarded for decades, but she had never handed it to me. During our escape from the first rift zone, when the world shattered around us, the Lotus had reacted to my presence and bound itself to me directly. It chose me. Now, it hummed softly, vibrating against my skin and sending tiny ripples of warmth up my arms as if answering the entity on the other side of the door. Why it had chosen me—out of all my siblings and cousins who trained alongside me in Boran—remained a mystery, but its power was the only reason our family unit was still breathing.
The duplicate pressed its face closer to the reinforced glass, staring intently at the relic before looking up into my eyes.
“You changed her name,” the duplicate said, its voice sounding like two identical frequencies playing slightly out of phase. "And the Lotus... it chose her."
Grandma Dary’s grip on Kiri’s hand tightened until her knuckles turned ghostly white. Her face hardened into stone, but her lips remained sealed. She offered no answer, no denial, no explanation.
Suddenly, the ambient light in the basement flickered wildly. A wave of suffocating nausea rolled over me as the Golden Lotus pulsed with an unnatural, violet-black distortion.
Images flooded my mind—not my memories, but a raw, agonizing echo leaked from the creature behind the door. I saw a subway platform years before the rift opened. The air smelled of ozone, burnt rubber, and old iron. A young man—Grandma and Grandpa's firstborn son—stood near the yellow safety line, his face pale and eyes unseeing. Behind him in the shadows, the Hollowkin was coiled like a parasite of thin smoke and whispers, nudging his mind, warping his perception of space and movement. A blinding headlight cut through the dark tunnel. A horn blared in panic. The Hollowkin gave one subtle, violent shove of psionic force, and the boy tumbled off the ledge directly into the path of the oncoming train.
The phantom sound of screeching steel tore through my skull, making me gasp aloud. It hadn't been an accident. The Hollowkin had engineered his death to break the family before the rifts ever opened.
Along with the memory came the visceral echo of the aftermath. I felt the precise moment Grandpa Kiri received the news. For a man who had weathered war, starvation, and exile without ever bending, the loss of his firstborn son shattered something deep within his soul. The son who carried his lineage, his name, and his highest hopes was gone in an instant. I saw Kiri collapsed on the worn living room rug, a giant of a man reduced to silent, chest-heaving sobs, clutching his son's jacket to his face as if he could breathe life back into it. It was the only time in fifty years his iron pillar had truly cracked—a devastating stroke that nearly extinguished his spirit, leaving behind a quiet, haunting sorrow that only Grandma Dary's fierce love could slowly stitch back together.
I staggered back, looking from the relic in my hands to my grandparents. For as long as I could remember, Grandma’s strength, Grandpa's silent resilience, and the Boran discipline they instilled in us had been the pillar holding our family together. But looking at them now, flanked by each other and surrounded by the children they had trained and saved, the horrible truth crystallized.
They weren't just protecting us from the monsters outside. The Golden Lotus choosing me wasn't a coincidence—it was tied to a secret buried deep in Grandma's earliest childhood, long before the Khmer Rouge, before America, before the horrific loss of their eldest son to the Hollowkin's unseen hand, and before any of us were born. And somehow, that ancient lineage had awakened the Lotus to choose me as its wielder.
The duplicate raised its right arm, pressing its palm flat against the glass right over the reflection of the Golden Lotus.
At the exact moment its skin touched the surface, the Lotus flared with a blinding, golden luminescence, clashing violently against the dark phantom memory. A shockwave of ice-cold energy bloomed in the center of my ribcage. I gasped, dropping to one knee as the phantom pressure expanded, feeling the weight of that same cold hand pressing directly against my own chest from the inside out, binding my heartbeat to the relic, the ancient trauma, and the girl behind the door.