The blade sliced through tissue and muscle and severed my intestines. I felt an electric shock of pain and then a strange flowing warmth. My doppelgänger was right in front of me, his breath on my face. He cut through my abdomen with the practiced hand of a butcher. The damage was done in seconds, and then he put his other hand flat on my chest and pushed me away. I stumbled backward. The knife slid out of my body. I clutched at my stomach and felt blood oozing between my fingers. I staggered out of the tunnel into the light, with a wet red stain growing on my shirt. The river slurped along the bank beside me, sounding loud inside my head.

Shock overwhelmed me. With my fingers numb, my own knife clattered uselessly to the sidewalk. I tried to hold the blood in, but I couldn’t. It pulsed out of my body.

Dylan followed me out of the tunnel, wiping the bloody knife on his leather jacket.

“I thought you were different,” he sneered. “When I saw you take out that knife, I really thought you might have the balls to kill him. But no. You had your chance, and you let it slip away.”

I fought down the dizziness in my head and charged at him. He saw me coming. Smoothly, he eased his weight onto his left foot, turned sideways, and lashed out with a jab of his right leg. His foot kicked like a piston into the wound in my stomach, and my brain turned upside down with agony. I stumbled, moaned, then collapsed to my hands and knees. My mouth spat up vomit. Blood dripped from my belly onto the trail, a constellation of cherry-red spatter.

I tried to forget about my panic. My fear. My pain. I needed to function, at least for a while longer. The blood on the ground became a kind of Rorschach test, centering me. I stared at the blood, and then my gaze shifted to the weeds and cracks in the bridge’s retaining wall, and then to the shadows thrown by the light post overhead, and then finally to the long steel blade of my knife. It still lay on the trail where I’d dropped it. The black handle was inches away. My body blocked it from the view of the Dylan standing over me. I could feel him there, like a boxer crowing over the adversary he’d knocked to the ground.

My fingers inched closer to the knife like the legs of a spider. In one jerky motion, I grabbed it and pushed off my knees. I slashed at him with the blade, and my knife landed in flesh, driving four inches deep into his thigh.