The wild roses on the rooftop of the Art Academy grew wildly over the wire mesh, and when Elvira used a utility knife to sharpen charcoal pencils, she found that the blade was stained with silver fragments. After the full moon night three days ago, all metal products that came into contact with the skin would leave this glittering residue.
"Look at my new tattoo!" Lila suddenly lifted up her clothes on the back, and saw a line of Gothic letters - EN - tattooed between her ribs.
Elvira's charcoal pencil drew a sharp zigzag line on the sketch paper: "Eric's initials?"
"Eternal Night!" Lila pulled off the ring of a Coke can, put it on her ring finger and spun it in circles. "That tattoo shop has a view of the harbor at night. When Eric took me there last week..."
The rest of the words were drowned out by the roar of the helicopter. Elvira stared at Lila's red ears, remembering the mechanical tentacles that ooze blood from Lucas' back three days ago. As she drew a diagram of the micro-gear structure on the edge of her sketchbook, Lila suddenly grabbed her wrist.
"You've been drawing these weird lines lately." Her bestie dug her fingernails into her palms, "Ever since you got involved with that Neumann guy..."
"Like you always draw Eric?" Elvira pulled her hand back, leaving charcoal fingerprints on Lila's white T-shirt.
Lila's sketchbook slammed down on the easel. Lucas's profile in the woods flashed between the pages, his pupils painted with fluorescent silver paint. But Elvira caught a glimpse of a sketch in the corner of a page - Eric's back in the lab, with a half-cut metal syringe sticking out of his white coat pocket.
"At least Eric doesn't look at me like he's hunting prey." Lila scraped off the silver paint with a scraper. "I saw him dealing with the man in black at the back door of the biology building late last Wednesday night."
The door to the rooftop was suddenly knocked open. Eric rushed up with a medical box, his sleeves stained with dark red stains: "Lila, you forgot the anti-allergic medicine..." When he saw the picture in the sketchbook clearly, the medical scissors slipped out of the box.
On the yellowed paper, the veins in Eric's neck were drawn like circuit board patterns, and his right hand was wearing the same fingerless gloves as Lucas. Lila picked up the page with the tip of the scraper: "You said this was a therapeutic pressure bracelet?"
The air was filled with a strange aroma of turpentine and blood. Eric picked up the scissors in slow motion, and Elvira saw a microchip stuck to the back of his neck, the same model as the one behind Lucas' ear.
"Art creation requires imagination." Eric put the scissors back into the box, and the metal clattered with a particularly crisp sound, "Just like Elvira always drew the shadow of the stairs into the shape of a wolf."
The helicopter cast a huge shadow as it flew over again. Elvira took advantage of the confrontation between the two to take a photo of the key page of the sketchbook with her mobile phone. When she zoomed in on the incubator number in the background of Eric's laboratory, her blood suddenly froze - LN2000-2023, which was five years different from Lucas' clone number.
Lila suddenly coughed violently, and fluorescent blue liquid oozed out from her fingers. Eric pulled out a purple injection from the bottom of the medicine box, and the needle glowed like an oil film in the sunlight: "The last treatment, I promise."
Elvira pretended to bend down to pick up the eraser, and the silver leaf bookmark in her sleeve swept across Lila's blood. The wolf eye on the bookmark absorbed the liquid and turned amber, and the longitude and latitude coordinates appeared on the inside, pointing to the abandoned dock in the port.
"I'll go get some drinks." She grabbed her sketchbook and ran to the stairs. Lila's scream was torn apart by the strong wind on the rooftop. Eric's face was reflected in the glass of the fire cabinet at the corner, and his irises were fading into a cloudy silver.
The iron door of the dock was tied with three chains. When Elvira cut the lock with a silver leaf bookmark, blue-purple sparks flew from the metal contact surface. The rusty hinges groaned and opened, and the fishy and salty sea breeze wrapped in the smell of formalin blew in her face.
Rows of incubators were soaked in light green liquid, and each pod was covered with yellowed archival photos. When Elvira found the pod marked "LN2000", the flashlight on her phone swept across a familiar face - fifteen-year-old Lila was floating in it with her eyes closed, with an unfinished EN tattooed on her neck.
Fluorescent blue liquid suddenly seeped out of the cabin, and the ground began to shake violently. As Elvira stepped back, she bumped into the operating table and knocked over a glass jar filled with silver powder. The dust condensed into the outline of Eric in the moonlight, and a mechanically synthesized voice came from all directions:
"You shouldn't touch your brother's toys."
The sketchbook slipped out of the backpack, and bloody words appeared on the blank space of the latest page. The moment Elvira saw the words clearly, all the searchlights on the dock roof lit up -
"The Daughter of the Eclipse is the final sacrifice."