I’ve been able to see ghosts since I was a child, but I can’t speak to them, only watch. On our fifth wedding anniversary, I prepared a whole table of food and waited for my husband, Ethan, to come home, pretending the quiet house didn’t feel wrong. I stayed calm, hurt by the silence but not weak, telling myself he was just late. Then I looked up and saw his ghost curled up in the corner of the living room, his face deathly pale. My heart dropped, because if Ethan’s ghost was here, something terrible had already happened.

The basement wasn't a lab. It was a sterile, white-tiled tomb.

The walls were lined with banks of humming servers, their blue lights blinking in the darkness like a thousand rhythmic eyes. But it wasn't the servers that stopped my heart. It was the bed in the center of the room.

A man lay on the bed.

He was hooked up to a complex web of IVs and monitors. His breathing was shallow, assisted by a machine that hissed rhythmically. His skin was gray, his cheeks hollow, his lips tinted with that same bluish hue I had seen on the ghost upstairs.

It was Noah.

But it wasn't the Noah who had walked through the door.

I looked back. The Noah who had come home for dinner was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at me. The light from the living room cast his shadow over the basement floor, making him look like a giant.

"You see?" the Noah at the top of the stairs said, his voice devoid of all warmth. "I told you it was a feedback loop."

I stumbled toward the bed, my knees giving out as I reached the side of the man who was lying there. His eyes were closed, his body barely moving. He was alive, but he was barely tethered to this world.

"What did you do to him?" I screamed, looking up at the man on the stairs. "Who are you?"

The man on the stairs walked down, his movements fluid and precise. He didn't look like a killer. He looked like an experiment that had gone perfectly right.

"I am the contingency," he said, stepping into the dim light of the basement. "Noah was brilliant, but he was fragile. He was dying of a rare neurodegenerative disease. We had months—maybe weeks—before his brain would have shut down completely. He wanted to finish the project. He wanted to achieve cognitive mapping."

"You're a clone," I whispered, the realization hitting me with the force of a physical blow. "You're not Noah."

"I am Noah," he said, his face twisting into a mocking smile. "I have his memories. I have his personality. I have his love for you. I just have a better, more efficient vessel."

The ghost of the man on the bed appeared behind me. He was sitting on the edge of the cot, his translucent hands trying to smooth the hair back from his own unconscious brow. He looked at me, his eyes streaming with tears. He was in agony, not just from the disease, but from the realization that his life, his wife, and his very existence had been stolen by the thing he had created.

"He's been begging to die for three months," the 'New' Noah said, gesturing to the man on the cot. "But I couldn't let him. I needed his credentials to finalize the transfer. I needed his life to continue until the patent was approved."

"You monster," I hissed.

"I'm a success," he corrected. "And now, I have a problem. You see, Claire, you were never supposed to know. You were supposed to continue living with the man you loved, and never realize that the man you were kissing was a masterpiece of biological engineering."

He reached out and stroked my cheek. His touch was cold. It felt like synthetic, dead skin.

"The anniversary was a nice touch," he said. "But now, I have to decide what to do with you. You've become a variable I can't account for."

I looked at the ghost of the man I had married—the real Noah. He was pointing at the emergency shut-off switch for the life-support system. It was a simple, red toggle on the wall behind the server bank.