They sat on a large couch in a small and moldy room on the eighth floor of an apartment block. The room is just high enough that the lights from the city can make their way through the small windows, giving everything not lit up by the dim yellow bulb a pale grey color.

“How did you know that we were going to come here?” One-six asked the old lady.

“I’ll get to that in a moment,” she said in a gentle, motherly manner as she poured some hot water into a dusty teapot. “Would you like some tea?”

“…Yeah…sure…” One-six stuttered. He had only ever tried tea once in his life, and that was during a meeting with his superiors which he attended a long time ago. During the meeting tea was served, and One-six didn’t really enjoy the bitterness of it.

The woman poured some of the reddish liquid into a porcelain cup, then brought it onto the table in front of One-six, setting it down with a slight clink. Her movements seemed to have no haste in them whatsoever, as if she was an immortal being who had too much time on their hands. She then poured a cup for herself, and sat down in a chair opposite One-six and his team.

She took a small sip from her cup, swallowed the hot liquid, and set down the cup slowly.

“Well then,” she said. “Where would you like me to start.”

One-six didn’t know how to answer so he looked over at his teammates. But evidently they had no clue either as all had the same dumbfounded expression on their faces.

The woman chuckled, took another sip, and began talking. “My name is Alpha, well, not actually, but that’s what everyone calls me and that’s what you can call me. I am the current, first, and most probably, last leader of The Phoenix Bond.”

“The…what?”

“The Phoenix Bond, a secret organization who are actively trying to make the world a better place.”

“Why is it secret?”

“Because while we are righteous, we are still very much breaking the law.”

“How so?”

“It is hard to explain without you knowing everything, and for you to know everything you must go out there and see for yourselves…” Alpha took another sip from her cup of tea. “In short, this city contains more dark secrets than you can ever imagine.” She got up from her seat and walked over to the window, beckoning One-six and his team to follow her. “You see those big warehouses there?” She said, pointing to a wide, flat structure below them.

“Yeah…”

“That warehouse is where all your answers lie,” she stated.

This was the first time that the answers he is seeking seemed so tangible and so near. He wanted to walk over to that place right now, open the doors and find out all he wants to. But he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to know, just that he wanted to know.

“Why are you telling us all this?” One-six asked. “If you know what you are saying is highly illegal?”

“If you are working for the government, then I will be taken away and executed. Then in a few days, Europa will launch an attack with The Weapon, and The Phoenix Bond will fail in its primary objective. If you are not working for the government, then the same is still going to happen. You will try your best to stop the attack, but ultimately it will be in vain. Europa will attack, New Asia will be destroyed, and we will fail. But the latter scenarios has just that much more probability for us to succeed, and it is for that reason that I am telling you all this.”

“So much for so little, huh?” One-five asked.

“Compared to what I’ve been doing my entire life, tonight’s little talk is nothing.” Alpha answered. “I got the message from Takeshi. I know what you four already know. But I also know much much more. If you thought that your little discovery that night was worth something, what you are going to see next is worth twice that.”

“You know Takeshi?”

“The branches of The Phoenix Bond stretch far and wide. I know more people than you might think.”

“Do those three men down there work for you too?”

“Yes.”

“Why can’t you just tell us the answers we want?” One-five asked. “It feels like you are trying to trick us into a trap.”

One-six wanted to object, but he too felt the same way.

“You need to see for yourselves,” Alpha said. “That factory alone speaks more than I ever can. If going in there convinces you to fight against Europa, like it did to me, then you can come back here and I can answer all of your questions for you.”

“I don’t believe you.” One-five said sternly.

“You don’t have to.”

“We’re leaving,” One-five said, turning towards the door.

One-six was going to shout at him to stop, but One-five turned his head slightly and met his eyes. That brief moment transffered enough information for him to know exactly what One-five was trying to do.

“Come on, let’s go,” One-six said to Two-six and Two-five.

“But…” Two-six opened her mouth to protest.

“I said, we are leaving.”

They walked out of the door, leaving Alpha alone in the room. She said nothing as they left, but simply watched them go and the door close. Then she turned to the window again, and sighed.

“For thirty years I’ve been fighting,” she muttered to herself. “Is it finally going to end?”

*****

“What’s your plan?” One-six asked One-five as they walked down the alleyway.

“She was acting way too suspicious for me to trust her fully. But I also want to see whether she was telling the truth or not. If I just complied and followed along with her words, it would make us way too vulnerable,” One-five explained. “Like you said, One-six. If we could be spies, what’s to say that Alpha isn’t a spy too?”

Maybe he was just being too cautious, but something inside of One-five was preventing him from believing Alpha.

He knows that it's very unlikely for Alpha to be a spy. If Captain Steiner was onto them he would have them arrested long before they even left their dorm room. And also, Takeshi was the person who gave them the location. Why would a merchant want to rat out a few soldiers of Europa?

But even so, the thought of turning against his own city just sounded too outlandish to him. Maybe it's because he didn’t see what One-six and Two-six saw that night. Maybe it's because he’s just too loyal.

So along the way, he just kept denying every piece of information which was handed to him. When One-six told him about the whole incineration thing, he decided that One-six and Two-six must be crazy. When the Asian pilots told them about cloning, he decided that they were misinformed and stupid. He had never heard the word “cloning” before, and he wasn’t going to let some enemy soldiers teach him.

But little by little, unnoticed by him, he was beginning to lose faith in his city. Right now, he just wanted to know the truth. Partly because he hoped his city wouldn’t fail him, and that everyone around him were just turning insane. And partly because he really just wanted to know.

“There’s a fence,” One-six, who was scouting ahead, called out to them.

“Can we climb it?”

“Don’t know… it seems like it’s electric,” One-six said, pointing to the cables leading up from the ground.

There are security cameras, infrared most likely. But no one seemed to take much notice of them. They walked up to the main gate; a towering metal structure with a facial recognition system mounted on the middle.

One-five wondered how they were going to get past it without triggering any alarms. They could climb it, but with the amount of cameras that would be next to suicide. They could try to jump some cables but there was no guarantee that would work.

“Why did she send us here if she knew we wouldn’t be able to get in?” One-five asked.

One-six didn’t answer.

He was going to ask again, but the scanner on the gate turned green, and with eerily little sound the doors swung open.

“What happened?”

“Apparently we have permission to enter,” One-six said, pointing to the green text on the screen of the facial recognition system. “Maybe it’s only restricted to people outside the military.”

One-five was a little weirded out, but decided to not question anything and followed One-six. They switched on their flashlights to navigate the pitch-black courtyard, and entered through a small door on the side of the massive factory building.

The hallways were brightly lit but vacant. Not many still worked this late at night. There were signs on the walls, pointing to various offices and production areas.

“What sort of factory is this?” Two-six whispered.

“Judging by the signs…” One-six mumbled, looking at the text on the walls. “I don’t know… these signs don’t really tell us much.”

They wandered around the hallways for a while, sticking close to the walls and moving as silently as possible. A few of the offices still had their lights on, and the sound of rapid typing emanated from some.

Soon their path was blocked by a sliding glass door and a card scanner, which they bypassed with an access card stolen from an empty office.

Now they were in the main production complex of the factory. The high ceiling spanning out above them seemingly indefinitely. A few guards patrolled the large sections of suspended walkways which hung down from above. Instinctively they ducked behind a section of machinery, but soon relaxed once they realized the guards didn't mind them being there.

Wearily they stalked past the rows upon rows of humming and bubbling machinery. Some looked like generators, others looked like huge pressure tanks of some sort, and some looked like glass tubes filled with bubbling liquid.

Two-five pulled on One-five's sleeve. “What’s in those tubes?” She asked, pointing to the bubbling glass tubes sitting in rows besides them.

He walked up to one and put his eye up to it. There were small cables inside, connected to what seems like a little pink ball, suspended in the bubbling liquid.

“I don’t know…”

Didn’t Alpha say we’d find answers here? One-five thought to himself.

As they walked further and further along, One-five noticed that the things inside the glass tubes began to change. It went from nothing, to a little ball, then to a vaguely humanoid object.

“One-six,” he called out, speeding up his steps a little to catch up. “Look at these tubes. Don’t they look like…little people?”

“Yeah…they do…”

“Didn’t the New Asian pilots mention something about cloning?” One-five asked. “These tubes have the words ‘cloning intubation tube’ printed on their control panels.”

“I searched through the military database already, there was not a single use of the word anywhere,” One-six said.

“Are you sure?” One-five asked “If they are used here, it must be a real word, and the database has the definition of every word in existence.”

“Very sure,” Two-five interjected. “I wrote the script. Every single word in the database. Took a good while to scour everything. There were exactly zero matches to the word.”

“I thought the New Asian pilots were misinformed,” One-six continued. “But even Takeshi mentioned it, and now that it’s printed on the signs and the machines I’m not so sure anymore.”

They continued walking past the glass tubes until they arrived at another divide within the factory. Once again the stolen card was used to get past the locked door.

This time, instead of glass tubes, there were bodies hung up on conveyor belts by their necks like bullets on a production line.

“What is…” One-five mumbled to himself, standing in shock just past the doorway.

His teammates were standing still too, looking up at the rows upon rows of not quite dead, yet not quite alive bodies.

All of them had differing hair colors, and all seemed to be younger than One-five and his team. They were hung above a raised platform, from which talking could be heard.

“These…definitely look like people…” Two-six whispered.

One-five grabbed onto the edge of the raised platform and lifted his head over. He could see one man in a white lab coat talking to two men dressed in military uniform. Judging by their uniforms, they don’t seem to be that high ranking, merely delegates for a general.

“This batch is ready for shipment tomorrow morning,” the scientist said, tapping a pen against his clipboard. “The next batch should be ready in a week or so’s time.”

“Can you turn all resources to this current batch?” One of the men in uniform asked. “Ship them at a slightly older age so they can take part in the attack.”

“Sir, we are already pushing biology to the extreme here. Any more and we would risk deformities and anomalies.” The scientist argued. “Years ago we’ve already had to raise the retirement age and sacrifice some neural-solidifying time to speed up production. And now you want us to deliver fully grown pilots straight to your squadrons?”

“We need the extra manpower.”

The scientist sighed. “If you say so…” He scribbled some stuff down on his clipboard. “That would take another two days.”

“Make that one.”

The scientist sighed again. “If you say so…”

Then they turned and walked away, accompanied by a guard.

“What were they talking about?” Two-six asked.

“They said…they’re…” One-six stuttered. “These are pilots…before they’ve gone through training…they are us…”

“What do you-”

“I refuse to believe that,” One-five said, cutting off Two-six. He dropped down from the ledge and started jogging after the men.

“One-five! Where are you-”

“I’m going to ask these people myself,” One-five replied.

A terrible pressure in his chest was growing, making his limbs move on their own. He felt like he was seeing fire before his eyes, and the only thing he could think about was how he would make those men suffer.

One-six and the others ran after him without question, as if they agreed with what he wanted to do.

They caught up to the men as they entered an office, and hid behind a utility trolley to observe the situation. From here they were hidden from the scaffolding by a large drywall, and only one guard stood outside the office.

“We can take down the guard,” One-five whispered.

“He’s got a gun.”

“We can pretend to be inspectors or something,” One-five explained. “Remember how the guards up there didn’t mind us sneaking around inside here?”

One-six nodded, and together they stepped out from behind the trolley.

The guard looked at them, then looked away and began whistling to himself.

“Hey sir, we would like to have a word with you,” One-six called out.

The guard turned to look at them again. “I didn’t hear that there would be inspectors from the air force this late.” He complained.

“Yeah…well…” One-six said as he walked up to the man. “We’re not inspectors.”

“You’re not-” the guard began to ask, but was silenced by a swift punch to the gut from One-six. Then he stepped in, grabbed the barrel of the guard’s rifle, and put the guard to sleep with a single elbow to the chin.

One-five stepped forwards and grabbed the guard’s service pistol. Without thinking he pointed it at the guard’s head and fired.

Blood splattered the ground as a sharp bang rang out above the noise of the machines.

“What are you doing!?” One-six shouted.

But One-five took no notice. He kicked open the door to the office with the gun still in his hands. The two military delegates were already getting up from their seats after hearing the gunshot, and saw One-five just as the door flew open. They both reached down for their pistols, but One-five fired a bullet into each of them.

Two more bangs, followed by the dull thump of limp bodies collapsing to the floor.

Then he turned the gun to the terrified scientist sitting in his chair behind the desk.

“One-five! Put down the gun! What do you think-” One-six was shouting in his ear, but he took no notice.

“What is this place?” He asked the scientist. “And what are those bodies?”

“Are…are you spies?” The scientist whimpered, covered in the blood of the two men he was just talking to.

“No. We’re just pilots,” One-five replied, walking up to the desk with the gun still pointed at the scientist’s head. “Now answer my question.”

He heard the rapid steps come up the hallway as Two-six and Two-five ran up to them. One-six had already taken the guard’s rifle and was standing besides One-five. Two-six and Two-five searched the bodies of the two dead men, finding their handguns and taking it for themselves.

“Oh…well…I knew a day like this would come,” The scientist laughed. A cold, mocking, almost psychotic laugh. One-five could tell the man was in shock. “This place is where you, you, you and you are from,” he said, pointing to One-five and his teammates one by one. “And those bodies? Well, to put it bluntly, they are you.”