When Evelyn's menstrual blood dripped onto the altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral, the seventh clone was making her last confession in the cellar. She lifted the scarlet chasuble embroidered with the Rothschild family crest, revealing the image of the Virgin Mary beneath, which was composed of thirty thousand microchips. The papal tiara showed the pattern of blood-colored irises under the ultraviolet light—this was a masterpiece of nano-etching that she had stolen from the Vatican's treasury the previous week.
"The secret door in the third confessional booth requires the blood of a virgin." Lucas whispered to her through the brass pipe of the confessional booth, his voice mixed with the electrical noise of the transatlantic submarine cable. He was wearing a cardinal's robe today. Instead of a rosary, what showed from his sleeve cuffs was a steel wire rope entwined with Evelyn's hair.
Evelyn stuffed the blood-stained communion wafer into the gap of the confessional window. When the gears of the secret door began to turn, she heard the screams from her twelve-year-old self welling up from the ground—it was the surveillance recording from the psychiatric hospital replayed by an infrasonic generator. The scratch marks on the stone steps matched perfectly with the whip marks on her back, and each depression stored the brainwave data from the electroconvulsive therapy at that time.
The temperature in the catacombs dropped sharply. Three hundred gilded coffins were arranged in a radial pattern, and each contained the specimen of a girl in a ballet skirt. Evelyn's bare feet stepped over the nameplate in front of the seventh coffin. The cold bronze plate was engraved with "The Seventh Rebirth Anniversary of Test Subject E-09". When she lifted the coffin lid, the corpse soaked in formalin suddenly opened its eyes, and the nanobots floating in the irises formed Daniel's real-time heart rate.
"You are more proficient in tampering with my faith than in modifying the DNA chain." Lucas lit the Bible soaked in phosphorus powder. In the firelight, Evelyn's baptism record from her infancy emerged—the signature in the godfather's column was surprisingly the handwriting of Daniel's father. He tore open his cassock to reveal the quantum computer on his chest. The screen was broadcasting the explosion scene of the Swiss Bank's vault: "What you've stored here isn't gold. It's the wombs of three hundred spare clones, right?"
Evelyn inserted the papal staff into the groove of the control console, and the entire catacomb began to turn. When all the coffins were inverted into the formation of a cross, the projector hidden under the tongue of the corpse pieced together the complete surveillance video in the air: 47 seconds before the explosion in 1997, Lucas's father, wearing a protective suit, was locking the crying Evelyn into the blast-proof cabinet, and the small hand pressing the self-destruct button in front of the console was wearing a mechanical finger cot—it belonged to the eight-year-old Daniel.
"There's a flaw in your revenge code." Lucas suddenly sprayed the coolant onto the tracking chip implanted in her coccyx, "The one sent to the psychiatric hospital back then was the clone. The real you..." He opened the 99th coffin, "...has always been kept as a living sample in the underground laboratory of the Rothschild family."
The moment Evelyn snapped the papal staff, the nerve poison hidden in the head of the staff exploded in the catacomb, creating a purple cloud of smoke. Taking advantage of the chaos, she leaped onto the inverted coffin. The steel hoop of her ballet skirt scratched Lucas's cheek, and the blood droplets formed Morse code in the air: She is the original body. When the smoke cleared, the "living sample" in the 99th coffin was actually wearing her mother's charred ballet shoes. The ankle shackles were engraved with Daniel's childhood graffiti—a swan's neck pierced by an arrow.
"Your pain nerves are my father's most outstanding work." Lucas crushed the communion wafer on the ground, and miniature drones flew out from the crumbs. The wings reflected surveillance images of Evelyn at different ages. "The arc of each convulsion when you were electroshocked was a carefully designed prayer pose."
Evelyn ripped off the golden candlestick from the altar and threw it at the air outlet of the central air conditioner. The cold mist laced with an aphrodisiac filled the catacomb in an instant. The skin of all the clones began to exude a pearl-colored mucus—it was the biological developer she had concocted, which could imprint a fluorescent outline of all the people who had touched them in the past thirty years. When the mist condensed on the wall, a suffocating truth emerged: On each clone's body, the palm prints of Daniel and Lucas overlapped, and there were also the fingerprints of a third person—belonging to herself.
"How does it feel to have your perception subverted?" Lucas suddenly tore open the scalp of the living sample. The brain cortex chip displayed the same memory code as Evelyn's. "You are the 100th clone. This so-called revenge is just a pre-programmed plot." He licked off the condensed poison mist on his eyelashes. "And the real Evelyn Archer..."
The stained glass window of the church shattered with a loud bang. Daniel crashed in driving a crane, and the robotic arm was gripping the self-destruction device console of the chemical plant from back then. Evelyn's diamond earring was inserted into his left eye socket, and the nerve wires were connected to the crane's control system. "Honey, it's time to restart the game." The screen of the console suddenly lit up, showing the obstetric video of Evelyn's birth—the doctor delivering the baby was wearing a ring with the Rothschild family's emblem.
Evelyn performed the death variation of "Swan Lake" among the falling crystal fragments. Each rotation triggered the explosives buried under the floor tiles, and the shockwaves shattered the clone coffins into powder. When her tiptoe touched the 33rd blasting point, the entire catacomb collapsed into the shape of a sacrificial chalice. The moonlight poured through the blasted dome onto the three of them, nailing their shadows into the shape of Dante's Inferno.
"You forgot the most important variable." She inserted Lucas's quantum computer chip into the interface at the base of her neck, and the church organ suddenly started playing a strange requiem automatically. Each musical note corresponded to an explosion somewhere in Manhattan, and the flames outside the window formed her true declaration of revenge—all the genetic databases of the Rothschild Group were being simultaneously destroyed.
Daniel's mechanical heart burst out its last spark at this moment. He knelt in front of the coffin of the living sample, and his mechanical fingers trembled as he inserted them into his temple. "My father was right... The most perfect revenge is to make your enemy fall in love with their own reflection..." As his brain matter splashed out mixed with the coolant, Evelyn suddenly saw memory images she had never seen before on her retina: At the age of six, she was playing in the chemical plant laboratory with Daniel, and the person holding the camera outside the glass window had Lucas's gray-green eyes.
When the stun grenades of the SWAT team were thrown into the ruins, Evelyn was grinding a cross out of Lucas's rib. She stuffed the bloody clone uterus into the chalice in the hand of the Virgin Mary statue and turned around to jump into the entrance of the blasted sewer. The turbid sewage was floating with yellowed experimental records, and the words soaked in blood on a certain page were glowing:
The 100th personality reset of test subject E-09 was successful. The revenge program version 3.0 is being loaded—