The road into the Beqaa Valley was a ribbon of dust and regret.
It wound between jagged hills and burnt-out watchtowers, where the horizon flickered with heat and ghosts. Poppies bloomed along the shoulders like bloodstains that refused to fade. The boy sat between Alon and Nora in the back of a rusted Toyota pickup, bundled in an old army coat, humming softly under his breath.
The melody was familiar now.
Too familiar.
The same notes, again and again, each one a pin pricking at Nora’s memories like a needle trying to sew her back together.
Alon drove in silence.
His hands steady on the wheel, eyes scanning the crags for movement, the kind that didn’t belong to goats or shadows.
They were thirty kilometers east of the Beirut perimeter, past the last drone patrol zone. Off every known map.
The boy had spoken only once since dawn.
“The entrance is beneath the black pines.”
He hadn’t explained what lay beyond it.
He didn’t need to.
Alon already knew.
They found it at midday.
A rise of scorched trees against pale rock, twisted and starved, their needles blackened by fire long extinguished. At the base of the largest pine, the boy knelt, brushed away soil with his hands, and uncovered a flat steel hatch. The kind used by engineers. Or by people who never expected to come back.
No markings. No lock. Just a single hand-shaped plate recessed into the metal.
Nora stepped forward.
Paused.
Then pressed her palm flat against the cold.
A soft chime.
Then a click.
The hatch lifted with a hiss of escaping time.
The stairs spiraled down into silence.
No lights. No sound. Just the air growing colder, denser, older with each step. The boy led the way, barefoot, never hesitating. Nora followed, one hand against the damp wall. Alon came last, his weapon drawn, though he doubted anything down here could be killed in any ordinary way.
They emerged into a corridor.
White tile. Cracked. Peeling.
Long rows of numbered doors, each with a biometric scanner and a flickering LED.
And on the walls,
Photographs.
Children. Dozens of them. All different.
But all with the same eyes.
Nora’s eyes.
She stepped closer.
Her breath caught.
“These are versions,” she whispered.
“Echoes,” the boy said. “Carved from the base model.”
Alon stepped beside her, staring at the faces.
“You mean… Regenesis didn’t clone data. It cloned you.”
The boy nodded.
“It needed more than memory. It needed emotion. It needed Nora.”
At the end of the hall, they found a vault.
Unlike the others, its door bore no number.
Just a name.
Burned into steel.
BEN-MEIR
Nora froze.
Alon touched her shoulder.
“You don’t have to, ”
“I do,” she said.
She pressed her thumb to the reader.
The door opened with a sigh that sounded like an old secret remembering how to speak.
Inside: a room the size of a chapel.
Dark. Still. Lined with transparent capsules.
And in each one,
A body.
Sleeping.
Breathing.
Women.
Dozens of them.
All with her face.
Nora didn’t scream.
She stepped forward slowly, like someone walking through the wreckage of their own funeral.
Alon followed her, weapon lowered, eyes wide.
“This is a reserve,” she said. “For continuity. If one subject broke, another would be activated. With adjustments.”
The boy stood near the center.
He raised his hand and pointed to a single capsule, marked in red.
“This one is awake,” he whispered.
They approached.
Inside, the woman was blinking. Murmuring.
Her lips moved slowly. Fractured words.
Then,
She saw Nora.
And smiled.
“You’re the original,” she said.
Nora swallowed hard.
“And you’re…?”
The woman’s voice was thin. Dreamlike.
“I’m the one who remembered too much.”