The walk back to Lenard’s hidden workshop felt longer than before. Every shift of the Myrden suit, every brush of the wig against Vernon’s neck, was a screaming reminder of the armor he now wore. The crude, predatory gazes from the market seemed to cling to him like a film. He just wanted to be back in the dim, sterile safety of the underground room.

He triggered the concealed door panel, the hatch hissing open to reveal the familiar glow of surgical lamps and humming machinery. He stepped inside, the door sealing behind him with a definitive thud.

And froze.

Across the workshop, standing near the body-molder unit, was a woman.

She was dressed in the same kind of practical, worn Mar-Shada trousers and tunic that Vernon wore. Her hair was a short, practical brown bob. She had her back to him, examining something on a workbench. A cold jolt went through Vernon. Lenard had another client? Now? The secrecy of this place was their only protection.

Then the woman turned.

Vernon’s breath hitched. The face… it was familiar in a way that made his heart stutter. There was a resemblance to his mother, Freiga, in the set of the eyes and the line of the jaw. But as he stared, the recognition twisted, turning inward. It wasn’t his mother.

It was him.

Or rather, it was a feminine version of his own features, aged by perhaps two decades. The high cheekbones, the shape of the lips, the arch of the brows—all were echoes of the face he’d seen in the mirror just hours ago, but softer, lined with a pragmatic weariness. It was like looking at a ghost of Lauren Kerigan, grown into a woman in her forties.

The woman’s gaze settled on him. She smiled, a small, tight expression.

“Back so soon?” she asked.

The voice was pitched higher than normal, but the cadence, the slight gravel underneath the tone—Vernon knew it instantly. His mind recoiled even as his ears confirmed it.

“Marius?” The name fell from Vernon’s lips, a stunned whisper.

“I asked if you completed the refueling and resupplying,” the woman—Marius—said, the voice modulator at her neck glowing faintly with each word.

Vernon’s own modulator translated his shock into a feminine stutter. “I… yes. The supplies. And the fuel. The merchant said a courier will deliver the canisters to the Whisper.”

He took a hesitant step closer, his eyes raking over the figure before him. The broad, powerful shoulders of his mentor were gone. The frame was narrower, the posture different. The hands, resting on the workbench, were the same capable hands, but they seemed… slimmer.

“Why…” Vernon swallowed, forcing the question out. “Why do you look like… me? But older?”

Marius let out a sigh, a sound that was utterly familiar despite the feminine filter. “The bioscan sigil Lenard had available, the one with a deep enough history to pass a port inspection for someone my apparent age, was registered to Sara Kerigan. Laura’s mother.”

He gestured to his own face. “The records have her image. To match it, and to make our cover viable, Lenard performed a permanent facial restructuring. He used your bone structure as the baseline—the feminine version of it. Then he aged the template. It’s… efficient.”

Vernon’s gaze drifted down. The masculine bulk was absent. “Your body…”

“Muscle atrophy inducer,” Marius said flatly. “A week’s worth of metabolic acceleration in three hours. Painful. Necessary. I had to lose the mass. No woman of Sara Kerigan’s listed profession and age has the physique of a Legionnaire.”

He saw the dawning horror on Vernon’s face—a reflection of his own internal crisis now mirrored in this uncanny visage. Marius’s expression softened, an eerie sight on this maternal mask.

“Don’t worry about the rest,” Marius said, his tone becoming almost clinical, a teaching tone that clashed violently with his appearance. “I am wearing a… similar prosthetic underlayer. For the silhouette. The biological plausibility. Everything is accounted for.”

He picked up a second vocal modulator from the bench, identical to Vernon’s, and fixed it to his own neck. When he spoke again, the voice was smoother, warmer, unmistakably a middle-aged woman’s. “A mother traveling with her daughter, seeking work on the fringe after a personal tragedy. It’s a common story. It draws less suspicion than a man and a young woman. It explains proximity. It explains protection.”

The logic was cold, brutal, and impeccable. Vernon understood it, even as the sight of his mentor, his last tether to the man he had been, now standing before him as a stranger, made him feel utterly untethered.

“Our next destination is the agri-colony on Veridia Secundus,” Marius-as-Sara continued, adjusting the fit of her tunic with a disturbingly natural gesture. “We need information on fleet movements, on which Houses are truly behind the coalition. We’ll gather it there.”

She looked directly at Vernon, her eyes—Marius’s eyes—holding his. “During the journey, I will teach you. How to move. How to sit. How to listen. The manners and mannerisms. You learned to wear the body. Now you must learn to inhabit the life.”

Vernon could only nod, a slow, numb movement. The galaxy had shrunk to this hidden room, containing two people who no longer existed, preparing to face a universe that had tried to erase them. The path forward was dressed in a lie, worn by a man who looked like his mother, guiding a son who looked like a daughter. There was no going back. There was only the performance, and the hope that somewhere behind the masks, they could still find a way to fight.