The emergency lights in the fire passageway turned the blood drops into the color of sapphires. Lila stepped back, treading on the fragments of the broken communion cups. The mechanical eyes of the seven Ethan clones glowed with red light in the darkness. She tore off the burning hem of her dress and wrapped it around her palm. When the flames licked at her skin, she smelled the fermented aroma of the 1997 red wine in her own blood.
"You've destroyed twenty-seven carriers," the voices of the clones resonated in the dome of the church. "Repay with this body." Their platinum wedding rings simultaneously shot out laser beams, weaving a DNA chain-shaped prison on the surface of the baptismal pool. Lila threw the miniature film hidden under her tongue towards the laser beams. The developed surveillance footage made the clones suddenly freeze rigid—the real Ethan in the footage was injecting the iris toxin into the infant Scarlett.
The stained glass shattered with a crash, and the fire hose that rushed in during the downpour turned the holographic projection into garbled code. Lila pushed open the hidden door of the confessional and snapped three data cables as she fell into the underground corridor. The eerie green "Safe Exit" sign illuminated the scratch marks on the wall. The blood-stained "0927" engraving appeared every nine meters, resonating with the prison number tattoo on her palm.
The low temperature in the cold storage made frost form on her eyelashes. Lila entered her imprisonment date on the fluorescent screen of the mortuary cabinet. What popped out from drawer B-27 was not a corpse, but a vacuum bag filled with wedding veils. The edges of each veil were embroidered with the alternating letters "SW❤LW" in golden thread. When the seventh veil was placed over her face, she heard her own voice saying, "I do."
"Are you satisfied with the wedding rehearsal?" Scarlett's mechanical skeleton pierced through the cold mist. Her artificial skin was peeling off, revealing a titanium alloy chest cavity inlaid with rough diamonds. "Isn't it poetic that father hid the clone factory under the funeral parlor?" She whipped the long whip transformed from her spine, coiling around Lila's waist and smashing her into the gene map display screen.
The moment the glass fragments embedded into the small of her back, a stream of memory data forcefully flooded into her optic nerve. Lila saw herself dancing in a wedding dress in the fire. Ethan and Scarlett were holding her hands respectively. When the "Air on the G String" reached its climax, they simultaneously stabbed their daggers into each other's hearts, and the blood splattered on the burning "Bloody Iris", forming a double helix.
The cold storage suddenly lost power. At the moment the backup power supply was activated, twenty-seven clone pods emerged under the scarlet light. Lila kicked open the cover of pod No. 3, and the sleeping body inside was wearing her prison number tag. When she touched the iris interface at the back of the clone's neck, the alarm sound of a baby crying rang out throughout the factory.
"Guess where these cries are coming from?" Scarlett ripped open the embryo chamber in her abdominal cavity. The fetuses soaked in the nutrient solution all had Ethan's eyes. "Every tip from the audience during the wedding live stream can fund a new clone."
What the fire sprinklers sprayed down was not water but turpentine. Lila ignited the power supply cables of the clone pods. The flames shot towards the main control console along the DNA chain-shaped wires, burning up the memory data packets that were being transmitted. Scarlett whipped out her spine whip in the explosion, and the diamond barbs at the tip of the whip hooked out three of Lila's ribs.
The floor of the cold storage began to tilt, and Lila slid along the pool of blood towards the entrance of the incinerator. When she grabbed the handle of the incinerator, she found that it was cast with the wax seal of the Harlowe family—the same as the seal on her bail documents. The accumulated ashes in the furnace suddenly formed a small tornado, and the image of her mother signing in the delivery room emerged from the ashes, and the attending physician was wearing Ethan's father's wedding ring.
The distorted face of Ethan himself suddenly appeared in the observation window of the incinerator. His left hand, wearing a gas mask, was holding an embryo culture dish. Lila's rib pierced through the clone's protective suit. When the blood dripped into the pile of ashes, twenty-seven monitoring screens lit up simultaneously—each screen showed a scene of herself at different ages being injected with a drug.
"Look at the real art." Ethan pressed the button on the control console, and the incinerator turned into a holographic projection theater. In the image of the jewelry heist in 1997, the leader of the robbers tore off his mask—it was Mr. Harlowe who was thirty years younger. He was stuffing a sapphire into the womb of a dying pregnant woman. "The perfect culture dish, isn't it?"
Lila's retina suddenly burned, and the memories of her infancy were forcefully awakened. She saw herself curled up in a diamond safe, with the umbilical cord connected to the infusion tube of a 1997 vintage wine barrel. When the holographic image switched to the genetic laboratory, three embryos merged into the shape of an iris flower under the ultraviolet light, and the label on the culture solution read "LW-SW-EW fusion."
Scarlett's robotic arm suddenly pierced through the wall of the furnace, and her diamond fingernails choked Lila's throat: "It's time for the curtain call, my backup battery." Her chest cracked open, revealing Lila's clone brain that was dissolving. "Father made your neural synapses into an immortality chip."
The fire alarm and the wedding march reached their climax simultaneously. Lila bit open the β-carotene capsule hidden in her molar. The ejected orange mist made the holographic projection distort into a nightmarish scene: Ethan was having a wedding with three "Scarlett"s at the same time, and each bride was wearing a prison identification plate made of different materials.
When the temperature of the incinerator broke through the critical point, Lila tore off the infusion tube of the clone and inserted it into her own carotid artery. The blood mixed with red wine and turpentine splashed on the control console, activating the long-dormant delivery room monitoring. In the image, the nurse suddenly switched the baby bracelets, putting the platinum bracelet engraved with "Harlowe" on the wrist of the stillborn, while the real heir was stuffed into a medical waste truck.
"You're the fake one!" Lila smashed the burning embryo chamber onto the main control screen. Scarlett's robotic eye suddenly burst into sparks, and the artificial vocal cords let out Ethan's scream: "Impossible! The memory transplantation clearly..."
The whole factory began to tilt, and the clone chambers slid towards the lava pool like coffins. Lila grabbed the skirt of the wedding dress hanging down from the ventilation pipe and swung towards the emergency exit before Scarlett's mechanical skeleton exploded. Behind the hidden door blown open by the blast wave, there was a red Honda parked, and the dashboard showed that the fuel tank was filled with 1997 vintage red wine.
The moment she crashed through the garage roller shutter door, in the rearview mirror, the entire clone factory lifted into the air amidst iris-shaped flames. The car radio automatically played an emergency news report: "There was a sudden explosion at the Harlowe Gallery, suspected to be related to the arson case five years ago..." In the background sound, there was a distorted version of "Air on the G String" faintly.
The basement of the abandoned church in the slum was piled with wedding invitations, and each one had a sealing wax stamp with a different date. Lila used the broken rib to open the latest one. The holographic invitation projected Ethan's wedding vows: "I will always love you all—Scarlett, Lila, and our sacred fusion."
When she tore the wedding dress fabric to bandage the wound, a miniature tracker fell out from the interlayer. She inserted the chip into an old-fashioned cathode-ray tube television, and the monitoring image from 1997 shook violently—Mrs. Harlowe was in the delivery room using a diamond to cut off the right hand of the stillborn baby, and the thorn birthmark on that severed finger was now faintly burning under her bleeding bandage.
The sound of the rain beating against the stained glass suddenly became as regular as Morse code. Lila used red wine to draw a genetic map on the altar. When the β-carotene solution dripped, a double helix structure appeared, revealing a map of the sewers of Manhattan. Next to a certain drainage outlet marked "0927", there was a spray-painted image of a burning wedding dress and three intertwined wedding rings.
Fragments of wedding invitations floated in the stench of the sewer, and Lila's infected wound caused double vision. When wading through waist-deep sewage, she suddenly touched a safe embedded in the wall—the combination lock was stained with the unique gravy oil stain from the prison cafeteria. When she entered 0927, what popped out was Ethan's childhood diary.
"...Father brought home a new mother again today. This body can last for three months..." Between the yellowed pages was Lila's ankle bracelet from her infancy. "The experimental subject LW shows astonishing artistic talent. The genetic fusion progress of SW should be accelerated..."
The sound of an organ came from the end of the tunnel. Lila pushed open the rusty iron door, and in front of her was a scaled-down version of the Harlowe Gallery. In the center of the exhibition hall was a glass coffin, in which lay a bride wearing an iris mask, and the person keeping vigil turned around—it was a homeless version of Ethan. He was inserting a robotic prosthetic limb into the cervical spine interface of the corpse in the coffin.
"The last bride is awake." He tore off the head cover of the corpse, revealing the face of Lila's mother. "Your mother-in-law has been waiting for you for a long time." Twenty-seven syringes suddenly protruded from the coffin, and the tips of the needles were stained with iris toxin. "Father said that your womb is more valuable than your brain."
When Lila threw the fire axe at the organ, the infrasound waves generated by the burst pipes shattered all the glass display cases. Her mother's corpse sat up in the sound waves, and the iris tattoo on her lower back cracked open, revealing the monitoring hard drive from the delivery room in 1997. The homeless man's robotic eye suddenly popped out, and the bloodshot optic nerve wrapped around her ankle like a cable.
"The game is over." Seven Ethan clones rose from the sewage, and their wedding rings formed a DNA chain shackle. "It's time to go back to the culture dish, dear Miss Culture Medium."