Jeremiah moved slowly toward him, blade first, and stared him down, unblinking. A slow smile spread across his face when he saw the fear tighten its grip over the clone, pinning him to the floor. That fear seemed to feed something in Jeremiah. The more the clone cowered, the more intense Jeremiah’s own fury burned.

“Who are you?” the clone whimpered. “What do you want?”

Jeremiah stopped a mere two feet from him and almost laughed.

“Who am I? Don’t you know?” He took a heady delight in taunting him. “Here, take a closer look.”

He spanned the space between them in a few steps and knelt down at eye level, the knife so close to the clone’s face the steel began to fog with his breath.

“Now do I look familiar?” Jeremiah sneered. “Recognize me?”

“How can...” The clone arched his back and craned his neck away from the blade, his eyes wild with confusion. “Please,” he moaned, “please, I have a son!”

The words hit Jeremiah like a slap in the face. He pushed the flat of the knife under the clone’s chin, so tight against his neck that he could feel the pulsing of his veins right through the handle, as though the weapon had become some sort of conduit connecting them.

“No!” Jeremiah spat the word out like venom. “No, I have a son! You have nothing!”

He watched in fascination as the clone’s face twisted in terror, the blood visibly draining from his cheeks, the eyes darting frantically, looking for escape.

“Please,” the clone barely managed, “please.”

It would have been so easy to kill him then. It should have been so easy. One little push into that pulsing vein on the neck. One little slice.

But the sight of that face and the terrified eyes rattled Jeremiah, just for an instant. Just long enough to make him hesitate. Long enough to register the sudden, startling sensation of looking into a mirror. Jeremiah pulled the blade just slightly away from the clone’s neck as the realization spilled over him like defeat. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t kill this thing. His hand began to tremble, his breath heavy and hard in the clone’s sniveling face. He hated him. He wanted to do it. He wanted him gone. But something in him held back. This must be, he thought, what people go through in the seconds leading up to suicide. He’d always considered it a cowardly act. In that instant, though, he understood the steely resolve it must take.

Just a few months ago, he thought, this might have been him. This was him. This cowering, frightened mess of a man was him. And Jeremiah knew that. A few months ago, he would have reacted in exactly the same way, pleading for the sake of Parker, terrified at the thought of leaving him—everything relating to the fate of his son. And it was this, Jeremiah supposed, that finally snapped his will. Simple recognition. That, and empathy. A thing he never figured on, but there it was. He had been willing to kill to get Parker back. The clone was begging to stay with him. For all his faults and weakness, for all his mistakes, this clone loved the boy every bit as fiercely as Jeremiah did. It connected them, he thought; like it or not, more than any other of a million similarities, this was what made them the same.