When Evelyn tasted the crystallized nitroglycerin on the tip of her tongue, a pale pink liquid was seeping from the freezer in the gallery basement. The New York Times headline, which she was standing on bare feet, was **Rothschild heir appears to be Having a nervous breakdown ** accompanied by a picture of Daniel tearing apart his prosthetic arm at the police station door.
"Dopamine levels in your blood were three times over the legal limit." Lucas picked up the skin of her newly peeled foot with tweezers and placed it in an evidence bag with his own saliva on the seal, "identical to the hormone levels found in the bodies that were floating in the lake in Central Park last month."
The freezer suddenly tilted and 37 frozen iris specimens poured out. As Evelyn rolled through the ice, her lower back hit a hidden temperature control device. The digital screen showed the surface temperature at the time of the 1997 chemical plant explosion: 417 ° C. She tore open ice crystals stuck to her calf to reveal tiny explosives implanted under her skin - each trigger point corresponding to Daniel's daily dose.
Lucas' tactical boots crush the ice pick at her feet: "Didn't you notice I replaced the chlorate in the detonator when I planted the bomb in the cold storage at Columbia Medical School?" He tugged Evelyn's soaked collar and pressed the tip of his nose against the congealed cream on her eyelashes. "Your father used to mix the coolant with the exact same ingredients I switched."
The alarm in the basement suddenly gave off the high-pitched sound characteristic of chemical plants. Evelyn takes the chance to bite the liquid nitrogen capsule hidden in the molar, and the cold mist envelops both of them. She rolled over and pressed down on Lucas's sidearm, and the rapid cooling of the barrel ripped a layer of flesh off his palm - like a nine-year-old palm stuck to a blast door.
"Did you know that freezing can make you sexually aroused?" She licked away the beads of blood oozed from his wound and groped with her other hand to open the old-fashioned projector in the hidden cell. "This is how your father took off my mother's tutu at the morgue."
The moldy film began to turn. The surveillance footage shows Lucas's father in a white coat injecting mercury into the eyeballs of the dead body, while Daniel's childhood photos are melting on a freezer in the corner. Evelyn's back slammed into the hidden console, the entire wall flipped to reveal the biology lab, and twelve bodies of her likeness floated in the Formalin Pool.
"The Rothschilds are worse at cloning than I thought." She tapped on the glass compartment of subject 3, whose right shoulder had no burn scars and "couldn't even copy the revenge program on the DNA strand."
Evelyn was holding an electromagnet to her temple when Lucas' bullet pierced the liquid nitrogen pipe. The cortical chip she had implanted three years earlier began to overload, and the retina emerged with a live feed of Daniel's safe-the wrong code he was entering at the moment would activate her preset nerve gas injection device.
"When you tampered with my antidepressants, you didn't put powdered sugar in the capsules." She handcuffed Lucas's left hand to the clone conveyor belt, and the metal thudding woke the piranha at the bottom of the pool, "Those little golden pills contain amphetamine made from your sister's ashes."
The alarm suddenly switched to Chopin's Prelude to Raindrops. Evelyn knew it was a sign that Daniel was approaching, and the lighter locator in his suit pocket said it was only 300 meters away. She ripped the artificial skin off the clone's belly, pulled out the miniature reactor and slipped it into the sandwich of Lucas's body armor - the timer showed the exact moment of the chemical plant explosion.
"Guess who will melt first this time?" She pressed the emergency drain valve button and the piranha was wrapped in formalin and rushed down the drain. "I mixed slow-acting hemolysis with the whiskey your father drank in the control room."
The ventilation pipe suddenly fell. When Daniel's robotic prosthetics stuck Evelyn in her throat, she smelled Jasmine perfume she had concocted - a hormonal catalyst designed for him. His bloodshot eyeballs reflected the red glow of the lab alarm, much like the sunset outside the window when his mother fell.
"You have 17 puncture holes in the wall of your uterus." His metal fingers dug into the bottom of her skirt, and the clip-off blade scraped the tracking chip on her inner thigh, "exactly the same way my father's lab rats were sterilized."
Evelyn bent her knees against his mechanical pelvis, the splintering sound echoing the roar of the underground river. When she opened Daniel's metal rib cage, the beating human heart was branded with her initials - a "gift" she had personally signed for eight years earlier at a black-market organ trading center.
Lucas bellows through the flooded passageway: "Look at the barcode on the back of your clone!" Evelyn removes the moss from the wall to reveal a surveillance image of herself being numbered 20 years ago, while the doctor at the operating table snakes the same serpentine scar as Lucas under the rolled up cuff.
There was a sudden vibration from deep inside the freezer. Evelyn swam to the sunken console, and the searing sensation of ice water rushing down her nose reminded her of the first time she was pressed into a bathtub for interrogation. When she activates the backup switch, the entire underground lab begins to flip, and the glass chambers of all the clones combine into a giant kaleidoscope, reflecting 300 images of Daniel shooting himself.
"How does it feel to have a cognitive breakdown?" She pressed Daniel's head into the pool of floating clone parts. "You were in the monitoring room watching my family gassed. Now it's your turn."
Evelyn was applying lipstick to the broken mirror when Lucas' bullet hit the reactor through 12 layers of bulletproof glass. As soon as the timer goes to zero, she shoots a magnetic key under her tongue into the air duct - which opens the last puzzle in the Manhattan bank vault.
As the blast blew off the underground river gate, Evelyn saw her nine-year-old reflection emerge from the vortex. The ballet shoe in the little girl's hand is oozing blood, and each drop of blood has a different ending: Daniel tears at his mechanical limb in a mental hospital, Lucas kisses the clone on the lips in the morgue, and the real her stands on the ruins of a chemical plant and sets fire to the iris fields that cover the entire East Coast.