The images kept changing like a broken projector.
First, a living room with a half-empty whisky bottle, my fingers fumbling the cork.
"Your next sin: you gave up yoga and karate," the clone said, like he was reading from a ledger.
Then the scene blurred, and the voice finished the line with quieter disgust: "Your indulgence in sex and alcohol."
It should have been absurd—counting sins like groceries—but the projection had a weight to it.
Each accusation landed against my ribs and stayed there.
I watched myself, thirty-three, blackout-drunk on the couch.
I popped the cork and downed the bottle like it was water.
A cough shredded my throat; blood painted the upholstery. I died alone, lungs finished, no one at the funeral to argue about who I'd been.
The clone moved the reel again.
I was a child, small and scrappy, eating a sliver of fish in a narrow alley.
A boy in a patched blue tunic—greasy black hair, a mouth full of teeth sharp as gossip—wanted it.
He wanted everything I had that day: food, space, and pride.
"Hey, you red-haired bastard, give me that fish."
I looked up. The kid had the sort of hunger that made other kids cruel.
"You dare ignore me?" He grabbed my collar and shoved me into the wall.
Spit flew.
I could have shrugged it off and walked away with the fish and a bruise, but the bruise wasn't mine alone.
It belonged to every night I had curled up empty and cold.
So I struck back. First a punch to the eye, then a rock to the forehead.
Blood ran, hot and immediate.
He went down and didn't get up.
My hands trembled even in the memory.
I remember sitting on his chest, the slickness of blood under my fingers.
"I'll have to wash my clothes," I said later, practical as a butcher weighing his meat.
The clone's voice came like a judge's hammer: "One hundred eighty sins include taking the life of another human."
One hundred eighty. A number that tasted like rust.
I didn't know if that was accurate. The projection didn't offer receipts or explanations — only the tally and the accusation.
Back in the cave, the torchlight skirted the walls.
My clone sat across from me like a bad conscience in human form. He didn't look surprised. He never did.
"You lead a pitiful life," he said. "You hurt people. You cause deaths. Why keep breathing?"
I met his eyes. They were my eyes—the same hazel rimmed with gold—but colder, like someone who'd had time to count every sin without ever looking away from the count.
"Who the hell are you to ask?" I said. My voice held more calm than I felt.
"Call it what you want. An echo. A tally. A mirror." He smiled without warmth. "You accept the sins, do you not?"
I could have lied. I could have shattered into guilt and begged for absolution.
Why should I? The world hadn't offered me one scrap of mercy when I needed it.
"Yes," I said. "I accept them."
He studied me. Maybe he expected me to rattle and confess and crumble.
Instead I felt a thin, strange relief—like rinsing a wound that had festered for years.
"So be it." He evaporated, leaving nothing but the faint smell of old laundry and the echo of the last torch.
I blinked and told myself it was a hallucination.
Philosophical conversations with your reflection are a new low even for me.
I raked my hands through my hair. Then something moved in the dark—stones shifting, the hiss of a torch being struck.
Light crashed as an answer. I dug my palms into my eyes and cursed.
When my sight returned, the cave had torches in sconces, two of them burning slowly and orange.
Between them stood a heavy door. Beyond the door, sound: whispers, shuffling, the low hum of many tired breaths.
Maybe freedom waited past that threshold.
Maybe it was another trap. Logic said we hadn't been left here for mercy. Instinct—the easier of the two—said to see.
I eased toward the door and froze. Voices. Children whispering in a ragged chorus. I pushed it open.
What met me was worse than silence.
A hall stretched away, candles stuttering against the damp.
Hundreds of small faces turned toward me—hollow cheeks, dull eyes, and clothes fused to skin with grime. They looked like they had been dragged from every corner of some poor map and stitched together into a sad army.
And the smell.
Sick-sour, laced with rot. My chest tightened.
Something in the corridor lay wrapped in tarpaulins; small shoes poked from beneath like the figureheads of dead ships.
"Dead children," a voice gulped. A boy knelt, rocking, snot drying in the cracks around his mouth.
"There are dead children… Someone save me."
Cold seeped into my bones as if the cave had swallowed the sun.
The projection's tally spun again in the back of my head: sins, numbers, the weight of things I'd done, and things I'd failed to stop.
I should have turned away.
I should have run. But I didn't. Not yet.
Because even sinners have to keep moving when the darkness comes—and if there was one thing I'd learned, it was that standing still was the quickest way to die inside.
So I stepped among them.
The children watched, eyes like flint. My palms smelled of moss and blood and whiskey. I kept my head down and my mouth shut.
The cave was loud in its silence.
The clone's numbers replayed like a meter measuring how much of a man I still was.
I had my sins. I had this mess. I had, stupidly, the stubborn habit of surviving.
That was going to have to be enough for now.