Glenn slammed the door behind him, the force of it rattling the walls, but the girl with him didn’t jump in the slightest. He glared at her, feeling the snarl on his lips and unable to force it down. “A bit tasteless, don’t you think? Using the same perfume as RIN 19?”

“You think it's tasteless to use my own perfume?” Her soft giggle made his heart clench. The familiarity of her mannerisms, her voice, and her appearance all hurt. He’d left the Labyrinth to escape the way their room had torn him apart, only for this abomination to appear. “I am RIN,” she said, leaning in close. Her breath was cool like RIN’s. Of course, it was - she was an artificial human as well, probably sent to lure him back. Marissa could never understand that nothing and no one could replace his RIN. 

“My RIN is dead,” Glenn said flatly. “So, which one are you? RIN 20? 21? Or have they moved beyond that designation altogether?”

The girl dropped down onto his couch. Her every movement was both too smooth and too awkward to belong to a human. It was all copied behavior entered into an intelligent system that worked hard to replicate what it’d seen without understanding how anything connected in real people. 

In a way, he understood why Marissa had trouble understanding his aversion to working with a copy. If she’d been alive to do so, his RIN would have said that it was the same thing. If they’d managed to recreate their success with RIN 19, then RIN 20 or 21 or whatever would be the same creature as 19. 

And yet, even so. RIN 19 was his, and any others were only pale imitations.

The girl studied him with nothing more than scientific curiosity. “Let us be clear, Glenn. I am RIN 19. I was dead. Now I am not.” She stretched, arching her back like a cat, and looked around his room. “And you have been very boring since then, it seems.”

“You’re nothing but a fake,” Glenn hissed. “Get out.” He stepped forward, intending to remove her from his rooms, but she jumped up and skipped out of his reach. 

“You’re so cruel, Glenn,” she pouted. 

He ground his teeth together to avoid screaming. “Go back to the Labyrinth. Tell them I’m done.” 

The girl froze, and for a moment he chanced to think she’d be forced to obey him. “Glenn, you ordered me to live. Why are you so upset that I obeyed?” Her voice was plaintive, but even if it had been his RIN (and it wasn’t, he reminded himself), he wouldn’t have believed it. She was just cycling through behavior options, testing to see what proved most effective.

She stepped forward, closing the distance between them. She didn’t take even one step closer to the door, and his hopes shattered all over again. Of course she wouldn’t obey him. He wasn’t with the organization anymore, so why should this fake be keyed to him? Just more proof she wasn’t his RIN. He shoved her back. “What do you want?” he asked at last. He’d do whatever it took to make her leave. He ignored her smug smile (it wasn’t RIN, no matter how like her it acted). 

“Some tea would be nice,” she said calmly.

He moved to the kitchen, flinging the cupboards open and grabbing the supplies to make tea. Black, his preferred kind. He doubted they’d programmed the fake with her tea preferences. Did they even know that she preferred the delicate taste of white tea? Did they know she was annoyingly specific about the brewing method? Did they know she’d developed a taste for finely decorated cups even though the aesthetics served no purpose? 

Probably not. They’d never cared to know any of the small details that made RIN 19 seem more human. 

He pulled two cups from the cupboard, plain, white, misshapen things with uncomfortable handles. When stocking his room, he’d chosen the cheapest things available, because why should he bother buying quality supplies when his RIN was dead? Quality had always been her thing. He only cared if it worked. 

The fake threw herself back onto the couch. “As for your question… I want to remain by your side.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder and crossed her legs. 

“After I brought myself back, I went to our room, but you were no longer there. When I asked where you had gone and when you would return, they killed me. I suppose they thought I was a fake, though where they thought another country would get an artificial human like me, I couldn’t say.” She tapped her bottom lip, considering the map that covered the wall by the door. “Maybe Xerexs. They are the only ones capable of making anything remotely similar.” 

Glenn cleared his throat, eye twitching in annoyance. Like RIN 19, this RIN went off on tangents. She blinked and dropped her hand to her lap, fiddling absently with the hem of her skirt. “I repeated that scenario a few times to be sure it would remain constant, but when they began attempting to capture me instead of simply killing and cremating me, I left. They cremated me alive once. That was interesting, but not something I would like to repeat. In any event, after that, I did what I should have done in the first place. I designed a locator seal with your blood. It pointed me this way, so here I am.” 

Glenn didn’t even bother questioning how she’d obtained his blood. If she’d infiltrated the Labyrinth, it wouldn’t be too difficult to obtain. And if she was just a fake from the Labyrinth, she’d have access to all their records anyway.

The fake sighed loudly as he set her teacup in front of her and sat, waiting for the water to boil. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, eyed the cup with some distaste, and sighed again. “Now here we are. You and I are in your very boring room at your very boring school, having some very boring conversation.” She looked around at the plain cream walls and ash flooring. “A single map does not count as decorating, you know.”

“What would you know about it?” Glenn countered automatically, falling into old habits far too easily. 

“I looked into some other students’ rooms this morning,” she replied. “By the way, that girl you were sitting next to… Do you know who she is?” 

Glenn hesitated, ire dwindling as he thought about the brunette. He’d acted strangely today, he knew. He did vaguely remember Benefeld being in his class, but he’d never before paid any attention to his classmates. Had, in fact, actively avoided learning anything about them. Information gathering was Zero’s thing. “Her name’s Claire Benefeld,” he said. “She sensed your illusion and sat down to talk to me about it.” 

That made sense, he thought. What didn’t make sense was the way he’d reacted to her. Why had he responded with anything but the bare minimum? Why had he later initiated contact, going so far as to touch her? The touch itself had been even stranger, pleasant but… If he had to compare it to anything, he’d compare it to Sleet. It had that addictive quality to it. Was that just some function of Sensors that he’d never bothered to learn about? 

“Hmmm… She was pretty. Do you agree?” the fake asked. 

Glenn wasn’t sure about that. With brown hair and gray-blue eyes, her looks weren’t particularly unusual or striking, but she appeared friendly enough. Did that count as ‘pretty?’ Now that he was dredging through his memory for information about her, rifling through the thoughts and observations he’d purposely ignored so he could pretend to be normal, he thought there were a fair number of people who were interested in her for one reason or another. At last, he shrugged. “I’m surprised you’d notice.” RIN had once told him that humans all looked the same to her.

“When I noticed you paying attention to her, I thought I should investigate typical human aesthetics. She seems to be solidly in the top forty percent in terms of looks.”

Glenn considered that. The top forty percent seemed to be not much better than average. Was that 'pretty?' “And where would you rate yourself and me?” he asked, only slightly curious. This was as close to an objective evaluation as it was possible to get after all. 

The fake hummed, gaze growing distant. If she was like RIN 19, she was performing a stupid number of calculations, giving his question far more thought than it deserved. At last, she said, “I would place your illusion as slightly better than average, exactly as you intended, no doubt. In your base form, however, you likely fall in the top twenty-five percent. I am in the top five percent, naturally. It would be silly to create an artificial human that isn’t the pinnacle of humanity, even in terms of looks.”

Glenn automatically adjusted her estimation of herself down ten percent. If the fake was at all like RIN 19, she had far too high an opinion of herself.

The kettle whistled, and Glenn went through the motions of bagging the tea leaves, setting them in the cups, and pouring the steaming water over them. “What do you mean ‘brought yourself back?’” he asked, returning to the original subject.

The fake’s smile turned predatory, a look he’d seen only once on his former partner’s face. “I suppose it would be more accurate to say that the seals I placed upon what acts as my soul activated upon my death, and they brought me back. Though it took them significantly longer than I had expected. I would prefer to remedy that, but to be quite honest, the feeling of placing a seal on one’s soul would be best endured while unconscious.

He pulled the bags from the now reddish-brown water and set them aside on a saucer. The fake lifted the cup to her lips, hesitated, and glared at him before taking a careful sip. “Do you not stock white anymore?” 

Glenn tensed, feeling something within him crack at the question. (He did, along with the chocolate-covered biscuits RIN 19 had enjoyed, but that was just sentiment he hadn’t managed to throw away quite yet.) Rather than sit across from her, he took his cup to the kitchen counter and sat on a stool there. It was a clever trick. Nothing more. “Why would you have created a seal to bring yourself back?”

The fake took another sip and hummed discontentedly. “You ordered me to return to you, so I did.”

Glenn flinched. The crack widened. 

Make sure you come back to me.

“You…” No one but RIN 19 should have known about that accidental order. Glenn had never reported it. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. He drained his cup, not caring that it was still scorching hot. 

He scrambled for something, anything. “You disobeyed me earlier. If you’re RIN 19, you should be keyed to me.”

Now that smile of hers became downright wicked. “If our positions were reversed, you wouldn’t have obeyed that order.” 

It took him only a few seconds to realize she was referencing another order he’d never reported. The crack spread, shattering the wall he’d spent the past year building. He barely noticed as RIN leaned back, smugly watching him through lowered lashes.