“Excuse me? How could you have chains of any kind, much less blame them on me? You never existed.”

It gave him a pointed look mixed with pity.

“We both know that isn’t true. We are one and the same. Surely you realized that.”

“Only insofar as we used the same body,” he insisted, so embarrassed to be actually arguing with it that he let the inconsistency in its statements slip by without comment. Absently, he turned the gun over in his hands, feeling the familiar hardness and weight as his fingernails idly traced the little groove where the clip joined it.

Harry sighed loudly. For a moment it was silent as it looked down at the holes in its chest sadly, and traced the outline of one with a finger. When it pulled its hand away, he could see it was red with fresh blood. It looked over at the Glock with a pained expression.

“You tried to kill me,” it said softly.

“I thought you were an intruder.”

“No, I mean . . .” It looked away. “Never mind.”

“Good. If it’s ‘never mind’ then go away and let me go back to sleep.” He threw the pistol back under his pillow and laid down.

The light, however, stayed on. With a start, he suddenly realized it was not coming from either his bedside lamp or the ceiling fixture. He tried pulling the blankets over his head, but there was light in there, too.

“Where’s it coming from?” he demanded, shoving the covers away from his face and staring imperiously at his doppelganger. “And don’t say you don’t know what I mean.”

“From you,” it told him. “It’s coming from you.”

A little prickly thought at the back of his mind forced its way forwards.

“What does that mean?” he asked hesitantly. “Am I dead then?”

Immediately he wished he hadn’t asked, but all the thing said was, “No, you aren’t dead. Neither of us is dead. It only feels that way. But it isn’t too late.”

“What do you mean, ‘neither’ of us?” he asked sarcastically. “You’re definitely dead. You died in that warehouse.”

It shook its head, the collar-length hair flopping back and forth.