The counterfeit spoke Jiang's name with the lips he had once shaved in a bathroom mirror.
It remembered his lower voice. It remembered the slight drag on the second syllable that his mother used to tease him about. Hearing it from a face made out of other people's shadows drove Jiang's claws through the towel.
"Do not answer with words," Devika said.
Jiang had no human words left to give it; making him miss them was the cruelty.
The silhouette pushed through the white screen. Its right arm wore Jiang's former reach, long enough to pass over his low penguin body and close around empty air beyond his tail.
That mistake belonged to a shape copied from memory.
Jiang dropped onto his belly.
Devika released the towel instead of clutching him. He slid down its padded slope as Lucia tilted the reflector away from the court door. The counterfeit's hand swept over his back, close enough to stir the warm down beneath his outer feathers.
His bad shoulder struck the floor.
White pain climbed his neck, but both feet landed beneath him. He had chosen the drop. Devika's palm followed without pinning him and stopped the injured flipper from opening.
"Floor is his," she said. "Keep the high routes busy."
Matthews pulled the second screen toward himself. His shadow stretched across the cloth, broad through the shoulders and unmistakably human.
The counterfeit abandoned Jiang's lost face and turned toward the easier body.
"One step," Matthews told Lucia. "Then you pull me clear, whether I argue or pray."
"You will not have time for either," she said, gripping the back of his belt.
He stepped into the narrow sunlight.
The black arm struck his shadow before it reached his skin. Elias's brow rolled across the counterfeit's face, followed by Matthews's mouth. Grief softened the borrowed features into something almost kind.
"Thomas, please," it said.
Matthews leaned toward the voice.
Lucia hauled him backward so hard that one shoe stayed in the light. Devika snapped open the reflective thermal sheet between him and the screen. Crinkled silver broke his outline into a hundred bright folds.
The reaching arm split at every reflection.
"That was my step," Matthews said, breathless.
"And this is mine," Lucia answered. She kicked his abandoned shoe out of the beam and shut the court door against the sun.
Darkness swallowed the clean route. Nerea, waiting in the workroom as promised, switched on two hooded conservation lamps aimed at opposite walls.
The false body tore sideways.
Half of it reached for Matthews's divided reflection. The other half clung to the stole's ragged shadow beneath the empty covers. Between them, the black thread in Jiang's borrowed sight pulled tight through the floor.
"I can close both lamps," Nerea called.
"Leave the left one," Aylin said. "Give it a body we choose."
Cool green light spread from her fingers along the base of the screen. She shaped Natural Essence around the stole's narrow shade, holding its edges in one place without feeding it flame.
The counterfeit fought the boundary by changing faces.
Lucia appeared first, then Nerea, Devika, and Matthews. Each mouth opened on a stolen fragment: a prayer, a warning, Jiang's contact call. Stored sound crowded the room until every voice seemed to come from the wrong chest.
Jiang felt the false call in his breast before he understood it. Both voices were present because Gredudande had recorded them. Their timing landed perfectly, yet his breast recognized a call without hunger, cold, or a caller waiting behind it.
A recording had captured his identity. Life gave Jiang the answer it lacked.
Raising his beak, he answered.
His first voice cut low through the room. The second climbed across it from the same throat, and the two met in a rough beat shaped by cold, pain, anger, and the body making it now.
No recording owned this call.
The counterfeit shuddered. Jiang's old face slid sideways across Matthews's jaw, then broke at the mouth. Every borrowed feature tried to answer at once.
Only one flat cry emerged.
"Hold it there," Nerea said.
She drove her padded fork beneath the sight rod's cradle and turned the aperture toward the stole. Dark silver crossed the floor. The black thread remained buried, but a knot appeared where the false vessel joined the physical fringe.
Jiang saw his opening.
Distance separated him from the knot: a table leg, Aylin's planted boot, and the counterfeit's reaching arms. His injured shoulder made a normal charge impossible.
A normal charge belonged to an animal built higher from the floor.
He shoved with both feet and slid on his belly beneath Aylin's green boundary. One black hand clawed above his tail. Another folded down in front of his beak, wearing his old fingers.
Tactical Strike marked the thumb's delayed turn.
Jiang twisted around it. The move cost skin at his shoulder and left a wet streak across the tile, yet his beak reached the stole's exposed fringe.
Old cloth filled his mouth with dust and bitter oil.
He bit down on the knot.
The counterfeit drove its human knee toward him. Aylin caught the blow on her forearm, holding her essence steady with the other hand.
"Tear through it, Jiang!"
He planted one foot against the stand and pulled. The first threads parted. Voices spilled from them: a child's blessing in Elias's cadence, a name read by Lucia, Matthews's request for forgiveness. Each memory ended before it could pretend to be a person.
Matthews heard Elias and took one step away from the cloth. "Finish it," he said as Jiang tore through the last woven edge.
The human silhouette collapsed from the feet upward. Devika threw the thermal sheet over its divided arms. Lucia pinned the cloth with the reflector, and Nerea killed the remaining lamp.
Aylin's green boundary tightened around the final patch of shadow.
Jiang's former face remained above it, detached from any neck. His old mouth shaped a plea without sound.
For one raw breath, he wanted to know what it would promise.
Then he drove his beak through the last piece of stole.
The face folded inward. Blackness ran across the tile like spilled ink, struck the dead lamps, and found no body-shaped route. It thinned, curled, and soaked into the ruined cloth.
Silence returned one borrowed voice at a time.
Devika reached Jiang first. "Stay down."
He was happy to obey. Air scraped through his open beak, his left side burned, and the floor had begun to feel colder than the court stones.
Aylin knelt outside his striking reach. Her forearm already showed the shape of the counterfeit's blow.
"Permission to move the cloth, not you," she said.
One tap against the tile granted permission.
With green light, Aylin lifted the torn stole. Monsignor Elias's embroidered name had split through the center. Every sound trapped in the weave was gone, including whatever might have proved how his second shadow had been made.
Matthews crouched beside the empty shoe Lucia returned to him.
"I heard him," he said.
"You heard what the cloth kept," Lucia replied.
Pain crossed his face. He nodded anyway. Saving the evidence would have preserved the creature that wore it, and he refused to rename that choice as faith.
Under the lifted ruin, the black core thread still descended through the floor.
It had lost the stolen-name body. It had not lost Gredudande.
A muted pressure gathered behind Jiang's eyes.
`[ADAPTATION COMPLETE: STOLEN SHAPE DENIED | SYNCHRONIZATION 55%]`
Pain held his shoulder open while cold packed his feet. The System recognized what his body had survived and left every cost in place.
Three possible instincts opened behind the message.
Pressure Heart I would deepen his dive response during a brief hold with almost no movement, conserving oxygen under spiritual pressure. Fast movement would break the state, and recovery afterward would be compulsory.
Huddle Pulse would let close companions share warmth through sustained contact, with Jiang paying first from his own heat.
Icewake would strengthen the contact ice behind his feet while raising its drain on the warmth he still struggled to keep.
`[CHOOSE ONE: PRESSURE HEART I / HUDDLE PULSE / ICEWAKE]`
The black thread quivered below the tile. Jiang felt the space beneath it press back, deep and airless, as if the buried route wanted his lungs before it wanted his name.
He chose `PRESSURE HEART I`.
The new instinct settled around his heartbeat without changing it. No borrowed calm arrived. No reserve opened. It waited for deliberate use, carrying the certainty that every false dive would still demand a real recovery.
Devika read his posture. "You chose something."
Jiang gave her one tired tap.
"Then you demonstrate after rest, under observation, and nowhere near the hole beneath this room."
His second tap came slower, but it came.
Nerea lowered the fork into a seam beside the ruined stand. The tile shifted under its padded end. A breath of cold air lifted ash from the stole and exposed a narrow service shaft disappearing below the conservation floor.
"I sealed that shaft myself," she said.
Lucia moved the lamp hoods without lighting them. Their hanging shadows had turned away from every person in the room.
Every hanging shadow pointed down.
From the shaft came Jiang's living two-voice call, repeated in a body that had never drawn breath.