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In fact, he'd never even told Vanderberk the truth about Vanderberk.

Perhaps that was a mistake in retrospect, but Jercash had never really wanted to find out how he would react to the revelation that he and his reaper were experiments.

Clones, actually. Though, for some reason that Jercash still did not understand, Lozaro hated it when he used that word. Based on some technical gobbledygook, no doubt.

The real Vanderberk and Elinox had died twenty years ago. Truly died. And the new versions of them had needed to be replaced multiple times since then, too.

The latest iterations had been much more stable and reliable, which was why Jercash hadn't minded granting them a bit more freedom to make their own decisions--that was the whole point of the experiment, after all--but he hadn't anticipated Graves getting to them in such a problematic way.

From the way Gohvis had described their deaths this time, Graves intended to use them as psychic puppets--either by reconstituting their corpses or by making full illusory copies.

Either way, it presented him with a major issue. If he had Lozaro make yet another new clone, then Graves could essentially do the same, and then there would be two Vanderberks running around.

But one of them would be a traitor.

That was simply too dangerous to allow, no matter how much more might still be accomplished by continuing the experiment.

He had to be patient, unfortunately. He needed to wait for this traitor copy to appear so that he could deal with it properly and then decide what to do next from there.

But even that plan was rather dubious, honestly. If Graves really could make a traitor clone, then what was to stop him from doing so again and again? If Jercash killed one, then it wasn't like he could suddenly start making his own clones again. It would be a constant threat to the experiment.

Until the Pale Hawk himself was dealt with.

Which was why Jercash started to think that, perhaps, Graves actually wouldn't be sending a Vanderberk clone to infiltrate their ranks.

Because the bastard knew. About the experiment. About the cloning. Somehow.

No one should know about that. Not Gohvis. Not Morgunov. Hell, not even Lozaro and Jercash knew, at times, due to their memory locking strategy.

And yet... when it came to the Pale Hawk, he might still have found some way to learn about it.

That surreptitious motherfucker.