Chapter Text
The countdown does not exist in numbers. It exists in the sharp snap of plastic hangers sliding across metal wardrobe rails, and in the clinical, aggressive hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
Sherry Birkin stands in the centre of an upscale department store in downtown Washington, D.C., and she is entirely out of her depth.
The digital watch on her wrist reads 14:22. In exactly three hours and thirty-eight minutes, a commercial flight from Western Europe will touch down at Dulles International Airport.
On that flight is Jake Muller.
The real Jake Muller.
Not a ghost, not a biometric imitation engineered in a subterranean laboratory, and not a voice filtered through thousands of miles of encrypted satellite static.
Her fingers twitch against the handle of a matte-chrome shopping cart. She has spent the last seven years of her life operating under strict, high-stakes federal protocols. She can track biochemical anomalies through a crowded metropolis. She can draft a twenty-page operational brief for the Defence Security Operations division without a single typo. But standing in the men's grooming aisle of a high-end department store, she feels a cold, creeping paralysis that rivals any tactical ambush she has ever survived.
As it turns out, Sherry couldn't just sit and wait for him to show up. Every minute that passed felt like a minute closer to her inevitable doom. What doom, she had no idea, but it crawled under her skin and coiled around her stomach, gripping tightly enough that it sent her out of her bed. She'd scooped her keys into her hand on the way out the door.
She takes a deep breath, forcing her shoulders down. Operational mode, she tells herself. Treat it like an acquisition mission.
The cart wheels squeak as she pushes it forward. Her eyes scan the shelves, cataloguing products with a frantic, desperate intensity. What does a man like Jake use when he isn't running for his life through the snow-choked mountains of Edonia? What does he look like when the mud and the dried blood are washed away, and he is simply existing in a civilian space?
She doesn't know. For several months, their entire relationship has been built on the sound of his breathing through her phone speaker at twelve o'clock in the morning. She knows the exact cadence of his growl when he's tired. She knows the precise, low frequency of his laugh when he's trying to be quiet so he doesn’t wake up the rest of his mercenary unit. But she does not know what brand of shaving cream he prefers.
The thought causes a sharp, sudden spike of panic in her chest.
Her hand reaches out, grasping a heavy, glass bottle of high-end pomade. The label promises a firm hold with a matte finish. Jake's hair, from what she'd seen on the video call, is short, buzzed tight on the sides but left just long enough on top to catch the wind when he moves. The clone had kept it perfectly styled— a meticulous, engineered perfection that had always felt subtly wrong, though she hadn't possessed the vocabulary to understand why at the time. The real Jake's hair is usually a chaotic, sweat-dampened mess.
She drops the pomade into the cart. It hits the wire bottom with a heavy, echoing thud.
Next, she moves to the shaving kits. There are dozens of them. Sleek, triple-blade safety razors; traditional straight-edge blades housed in polished sandalwood; heavy, industrial-looking steel trimmers. She stares at them until the silver packaging begins to blur together. Jake has a scar that cuts clean through his left cheek, and another, fainter one that tracks along the line of his jaw— a souvenir from a bar fight in Tortice, he had told her once during a late-night call, his voice dripping with defensive pride.
If he uses a cheap razor, will he aggravate the scar tissue? If he uses something too delicate, will his coarse stubble just ruin the blade?
"Can I help you find something specific, ma'am?"
Sherry flinches, her spine instantly going rigid. She turns to find a young sales associate standing a few feet away, a polite, well-trained smile plastered across his face. He is wearing a crisp suit, his hands folded neatly in front of his waist. He looks soft. He looks like someone who has never had to look at a room and immediately calculate its structural exit points.
"I'm fine," Sherry says, her voice coming out a fraction too sharp, a fraction too authoritative. She catches herself and forces her features to soften into the pleasant, unthreatening mask she uses during Senate oversight hearings. "Thank you. Just... Looking for now."
"Of course," the associate says, his eyes lingering for a fraction of a second on her shopping cart, which already contains three different brands of premium toothpaste, a specialised beard comb, and four boxes of heavy-duty bandages. "Let me know if you need assistance with sizes or scents."
He steps back, fading into the background of the aisle. Sherry lets out a slow, controlled exhale through her nose.
She moves to the clothing section. This is where the true guesswork begins.
When she had last seen Jake in the flesh, he had been wearing a tattered, blood-stained merc rig that looked like it had been salvaged from a scrap heap. Since then, he has sent her exactly two photographs via an encrypted messaging app. In both, he had been wearing a heavy, oversized tactical jacket that obscured the true contour of his frame.
She stands before a wall of folded flannel shirts and knit sweaters, her mind racing. She knows he is tall— well over six feet. She knows his shoulders are broad, built from a lifetime of hand-to-hand combat and carrying heavy munitions across broken terrain. But what does that translate to in civilian retail? Large? Extra-large?
She reaches out and grabs a dark grey, thermal knit shirt in a size Large. She holds it up, squinting at the fabric. The material is thick and durable. But as she pictures Jake's chest— the heavy slope of his pectoral muscles, the thick expanse of his back— she realises the fabric will likely stretch to the point of tearing across his shoulders.
She drops the Large back onto the table and grabs an Extra-Large. Then, because the uncertainty is an itch she cannot scratch, she grabs a second one in a different colour. And a third.
"Sizes," she mutters to herself, her hands moving with a frantic, systematic speed. "Just buy multiple sizes. We can return what doesn't fit."
Within ten minutes, the cart is overflowing. She has picked up five different pairs of heavy-duty denim jeans, a selection of plain black and white t-shirts, three thick hooded sweatshirts, and a pack of woollen socks thick enough to survive an arctic expedition. She is overcompensating, and she knows it. She is trying to build a fortress out of cotton and denim— a physical manifestation of a domestic life to shield them from the vacuum of what lies ahead.
She exits the apparel section and wanders toward the home goods department, her steps slowing as the adrenaline begins to ebb, leaving behind a cold, hollow ache.
The warehouse is mostly empty.
And it is perfectly safe.
Even now, surrounded by the bright, consumerist warmth of a suburban department store, a sudden, violent shudder ripples through her limbs. If she closes her eyes, she can still feel the weight of the clone's hands on her skin. She can still hear the way he had spoken her name —a perfect, flawless imitation of Jake's voice, but lacking the rough, jagged edge of the man who had actually bled for her in China. The clone had been an intruder in her mind, a violation of her history, and he had claimed her on that couch.
Her gaze drifts to a display of kitchenware. Amidst the polished silver espresso machines and the delicate porcelain teacups, a single object catches her eye.
It is a heavy, ceramic coffee mug. It has no branding, no delicate patterns, no gold trim. It is wrapped in a thick, matte-black glaze that looks almost like oxidised iron. The handle is wide, thick enough to accommodate a hand twice the size of her own. It is heavy, brutalist, and entirely uncompromising.
It looks like him. It looks like a piece of the earth that someone dug up and forced into a functional shape.
Sherry reaches out, her small, pale fingers wrapping around the cool ceramic. It feels grounded. It feels real.
She places the mug gently at the very top of her mountain of purchases, right next to the shaving cream.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The drive back to her apartment is a blur of windshield wipers and brake lights. A low, grey fog has rolled in over the city, swallowing the tops of the monuments and turning the city into a muted, monochrome landscape.
Sherry parks her government-issued sedan in the subterranean garage beneath the warehouse conversion. It takes her three trips to carry all the bags up the freight elevator. Each time the heavy iron doors clatter shut, she checks her watch.
15:40. 16:05. 16:22.
The time is evaporating.
When the final bag is safely inside, she shuts the heavy, reinforced front door. The click echoes loudly off the polished concrete floors.
She stands in the centre of the vast, open space. The afternoon light is dying, casting long, skeletal shadows across the brick walls. The silence here is thick, almost heavy enough to touch. It is a silence she used to crave during her years in government facilities, but today, it feels like a countdown that has finally reached zero.
She drops the shopping bags onto the floor near the kitchen island and begins the layout.
This is her routine. When Sherry is overwhelmed, she categorises. She organises. She creates a perimeter.
She marches into the bathroom— a clean, minimalist space with dark slate tile and a massive, glass-walled shower. She unboxes the toothbrushes. She aligns them in a ceramic tumbler, side by side. Her own small, white toothbrush looks almost comical next to the heavy, charcoal-bristled one she bought for him. She takes the shaving cream and sets it exactly two inches from the faucet. She stacks the new towels— thick, dark grey bath sheets that she picked solely because they looked large enough to wrap around his frame.
Then, she moves to the bedroom area.
The bed sits in the far corner, tucked away from the direct sightline of the windows. She has dressed it in clean, high-thread-count white sheets. She takes the flannel shirts and the denim jeans she bought, removes the tags with a pair of scissors, and folds them into precise, neat squares. She aligns them along the edge of the mattress.
She steps back, her hands resting on her hips, her eyes sweeping over the arrangement.
It looks like a museum display. It looks like an exhibition titled The Life of a Normal Person.
She lets out a small, self-deprecating laugh that sounds thin in the vast room. Who is she kidding? Jake Muller is not a normal person. He is a man who was born in the mud of Eastern Europe, whose biological father tried to rewrite the genetic code of the planet, and who spent his teenage years trading bullets for local currency. He doesn't know how to live in a room with twelve-foot ceilings and artisanal hand soap.
And she doesn't know how to be the person who gives it to him.
During their phone calls over the last several months, it had been easy to pretend. The distance had given them a buffer. When the static was thick and the line was lagging, she could tell him about her day, about the mundane horrors of bureaucratic paperwork, and he would grunt in agreement, offering a sharp, cynical piece of advice that would make her smile. They had built a bridge out of words. They had talked about the future because the present was too far away to touch.
But now, the future is currently in a taxi cab travelling inbound on Route 267.
Sherry walks over to the giant, steel-framed windows and presses her forehead against the cool glass. The river below is dark, almost black, under the darkening sky.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket. The sharp, sudden buzz against her thigh makes her jump.
She pulls it out, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The screen displays a single, encrypted text message from a blocked number.
Jake♡: Cleared customs. Heading your way.
The text had been sent twenty minutes ago.
Sherry's breath catches. She stares at the seven words until the white light of the screen hurts her eyes. He is in the city.
He's... God, he should be right around the corner.
She locks the phone and slides it back into her pocket, her movements suddenly frantic. She looks around the warehouse. Is it too cold? She walks to the thermostat and turns the heat up two degrees. Is it too dark? She flips the switch for the overhead tracks, but the bright, industrial glare feels too clinical, too much like an interrogation room. She turns them off and instead switches on the single, low-wattage lamp sitting on the kitchen counter.
The amber glow softens the harsh angles of the concrete and brick, throwing the edges of the room into a deep, warm shadow.
She walks back to the kitchen island and picks up the matte-black mug. She holds it in both hands, her fingers seeking the comfort of its weight.
You're fine, she tells herself, her voice a whispered mantra in the dark. This is Jake. You know him. You saved his life. He saved yours.
But she hadn't known the clone wasn't him.
The thought arrives abruptly, knocking the air from her lungs. It is the secret, rotting core of her anxiety, the thing she has refused to voice during every late-night call, the thing she has buried beneath layers of DSO operational efficiency.
She had looked into a face that belonged to Jake Muller. She had listened to a voice that sounded like Jake Muller. And she had let that face and that voice into her bed. She had given away pieces of herself to a monster wearing the skin of the only man she had ever wanted like that, and she hadn't realised the deception until it was too late.
When he sees the empty space for himself, when he looks into her eyes and sees the lingering, pathetic terror that she can't quite scrub away— what will he look like? Will he look at her with pity? Will he look at her with disgust?
Or worse, will he look at her and see a stranger?
A sharp, metallic clank cuts through the silence of the warehouse.
Sherry freezes. Her ears tune to the sound, her training overriding the emotional spiral in an instant.
The sound came from the ground floor. The heavy iron door of the freight elevator. Someone has entered the building.
The elevator mechanism begins its slow, grinding ascent. The low hum vibrates through the concrete floorboards beneath her feet, travelling up her spine.
Four floors, she thinks, her mind instantly calculating the seconds. Thirty seconds to reach the top.
She sets the matte-black mug down on the counter with a small, sharp click. Her hands are shaking. She forces them into the pockets of her cardigan, burying them deep so no one can see the tremor.
The elevator stops. The heavy, hydraulic sigh of the doors opening echoes down the short hallway outside her unit.
Then come the footsteps.
They are heavy. Unhurried, but solid. The distinct, dragging scuff of heavy leather combat boots against concrete. It is a stride she would recognise in the middle of a war zone. It is a stride that doesn't care about stealth because it has never needed to hide.
The footsteps stop directly outside her door.
Sherry stands completely paralysed in the centre of her kitchen. Her breath is stuck in her throat, a hard, painful knot.
There is a long, agonising pause. For a second, she wonders if he is going to knock. She wonders if they are going to play the game of polite guests and formal hosts.
Then, the brass doorknob turns.
The locks are already disengaged— she had kept them unlocked when she got home.
The heavy, steel-reinforced door swings inward.
The hallway light behind him is bright, silhouetted against his massive shape. He is wearing a dark, faded leather jacket that looks like it has survived three different motorcycle crashes. A single, battered canvas duffel bag hangs from his left shoulder, the strap cutting deep into the thick leather of his coat.
He steps across the threshold, and the entire atmosphere of the room shifts. The warehouse, which had felt vast and echoey only seconds before, suddenly feels incredibly small. It feels crowded.
Jake Muller closes the door behind him with his heel. The heavy thud of the latch clicking into place sounds like a gunshot.
He doesn't move. He stands by the door, his large frame blocking the exit, his eyes sweeping over the expanse of the room. He looks at the high ceilings, the exposed brick, the dark windows, and finally, his gaze tracks across the floor until it lands on her.
Sherry is standing twenty feet away, her hands still buried in her pockets, her shoulders tight.
In the dim light of the kitchen lamp, his face looks sharper than she remembers. The scar on his cheek is a pale, stark line against his tanned skin. His jaw is covered in a dark, three-day growth of stubble that looks rough enough to scratch. He looks exhausted— there are deep, violet shadows bruised beneath his sharp, icy-blue eyes, and his mouth is set in a hard, thin line.
He looks entirely real. He looks like violence and smoke and cold mountain air, and he does not belong in this clean, quiet city.
"Sherry," he says.
His voice is lower than it is over the phone. It has a physical resonance to it, a low, gravelly vibration that travels across the twenty feet of concrete between them and hits her directly in the chest.
"Jake," she stammers. Her voice sounds small. It sounds like the voice of a child. She pulls her hands out of her pockets, then immediately drops them to her sides, unsure of what to do with them.
The silence returns, but it is no longer empty. It is heavy, charged with a frantic, stuttering grid of unspoken words and half a year's worth of long-distance longing that has suddenly been forced into a physical space.
Jake doesn't advance. He drops his duffel bag to the floor. It hits the floor with a heavy, metallic rattle— the sound of tools or survival gear shifting inside. He shifts his weight, his hands sliding into the pockets of his leather jacket. His eyes linger on her face, tracking the line of her nose, the curve of her jaw, as if he is verifying a biometric scan of his own.
"Nice place," he grunts, his eyes darting briefly to the empty expanse where a living room should be. "A bit echoey."
"I... I haven't finished furnishing it yet," Sherry says, her tongue feeling thick and clumsy in her mouth. She takes a half-step forward, then freezes, her heels clicking sharply against the floor. "You know that."
She wants to run to him. She wants to throw her arms around his neck and bury her face in the worn leather of his jacket until the scent of him burns away the returning memory of the clone. But her limbs feel like lead. The awkwardness is a physical barrier, a sheet of bulletproof glass that has dropped between them the moment he stepped through the door.
He is too big. He is too real. The Jake on the phone was safe; the Jake on the phone couldn't see the way her fingers trembled or notice the faint, nervous hitch in her breathing.
Jake takes his hands out of his pockets and rubs the back of his neck, his leather jacket creaking loudly in the quiet room. "Yeah. Well. Looks secure, anyway. That's the main thing."
"Yes," Sherry says, nodding quickly, desperately grasping at the mundane topic. "The glass is ballistic. And the door frame is reinforced. I set up the grid myself."
"Good. That's... Good."
Jake looks down at his boots, then looks back up at her. His blue eyes are intense, searching, but there is a strange, rigid caution in them that she has never seen before. He isn't moving toward her. He is keeping his distance, standing exactly by the perimeter of the door, as if he is afraid that a single step forward will cause the whole room to collapse.
Sherry forces a polite, empty smile onto her face— the mask of a good host. "Make yourself at home," she says, her voice cracking slightly on the last word. "You can... You can put your things in the bathroom. Through that door on the left."
Jake stares at her for a long second, his jaw tightening. He misinterprets the stiffness in her posture, the formal distance in her voice. He looks at her pale face, her defensive stance, and his mind immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion.
She's terrified, he thinks, a hard, cold knot forming in his stomach. She's looking at me, and she's seeing him.
The thought makes him feel monstrous. It makes his own skin feel heavy and dirty. He resolves, right there in the dim light of her entryway, that he will not push. He will not touch her. He will not give her a single reason to look at him and feel the ghost of that imitation.
"Right," Jake says, his voice dropping into a flat, disciplined register. "The bathroom. I'll go clear out the travel grime."
He picks up his duffel bag, his large knuckles white against the canvas strap, and walks past her. He doesn't brush against her shoulder. He steers clear, leaving a wide, three-foot buffer of empty air between his body and hers as he crosses the kitchen floor.
Sherry watches him go, her heart sinking into her shoes.
The bathroom door closes behind him with a soft, deliberate click.
Sherry stands alone in the amber light of the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the closed wooden panel. The silence of the warehouse returns, bigger and more deafening than before, but beneath it, she can hear the faint, steady sound of the shower turning on— the rush of hot water striking slate tile.
She turns slowly and looks at the kitchen island.
The matte-black mug sits exactly where she left it, its heavy, dark surface catching the light. She reaches out and touches the rim, her skin cold against the ceramic.
They are within the same four walls, but as she listens to the sound of the water running in the dark, she realises the hardest part of the mission has only just begun.