Cold.
Not temperature. Absence.
Elias opened his eyes to a sky the color of television tuned to a dead god.
He was lying on his back in a vast, cracked plaza made of black glass. Every fracture reflected a different version of the same sky, each one a few seconds out of sync.
No sun. No stars. Just that sick gray-blue static.
He sat up slowly.
His trench coat was gone. So were the goggles, the chalk, the key ring.
Only two things remained:
1. The broken hand mirror (both halves now taped together with black electrical tape, like someone had tried to fix a broken skull).
2. A new brand burned into his left forearm: the roman numeral **V** inside the old inverted-sword circle.
It still smoked.
Welcome, Specialist Vark.
The words weren't spoken. They were written directly across the inside of his eyelids when he blinked.
He stood.
The plaza stretched in every direction until it folded upward into impossible angles, like the world had been crumpled by a bored child.
Far away, something moved between the reflections: tall silhouettes wearing his face, but wrong. Too long. Too quiet.
They were watching from every cracked pane, waiting to see which way he would walk.
Elias looked down at the mirror in his hand.
The two halves no longer showed his reflection.
Left half: a little girl with her mouth sewn shut with red thread.
Right half: an old man whose eyes were just empty sockets leaking black sand.
Both halves were crying.
He closed the mirror before they could start screaming again.
A path appeared (one straight line of unbroken glass cutting through the chaos).
At the end of it: a door.
A perfectly ordinary wooden apartment door, pale blue paint peeling, brass number **404** crooked on the front.
It was standing alone in the middle of nowhere, no walls attached.
Elias walked.
The silhouettes in the reflections followed, sliding from pane to pane like sharks.
Halfway there, the ground began to whisper in voices he almost recognized.
You weren't supposed to break the mirror, Elias.
Now you're outside the file.
Now you're the anomaly.
He kept walking.
When he reached the door, the handle turned itself.
Inside was his childhood bedroom. Exactly as he left it the day he ran away at sixteen.
Posters of bands that never existed in this reality.
A desk covered in half-finished containment reports written in crayon.
The little desk mirror his mother used to do her makeup.
Except the mirror was already turned toward him.
And something was sitting on the edge of his old bed.
It looked like Elias.
But the eyes were wrong (one was the little girl's, one was the old man's).
It smiled with too many teeth.
"Hi," it said in his mother's voice. "Welcome home. You've been uncontained for six minutes and forty-two seconds. That's a new record."
Elias didn't step inside.
He looked down at the threshold.
A thin line of chalk dust (someone had drawn a circle years ago and never erased it).
He stayed on the outside.
"Rule number three," he said quietly.
The thing on the bed tilted its head.
"What's rule number three?"
Elias lifted the taped-together mirror and showed it the reflection of the room.
The image in the glass was empty. No bed. No childhood. Just an endless black subway tunnel with a single train light approaching fast.
He spoke to the doorway like it was a microphone.
"Never cross a circle you didn't draw yourself."
He slammed the door from the outside.
The moment wood met frame, the entire plaza shuddered.
Cracks raced across the black glass sky.
The silhouettes in the reflections began to scream in perfect unison (his voice, a thousand times over).
Elias turned and started running back the way he came.
Behind him, Apartment 404 collapsed inward like a crushed cardboard box, taking the path with it.
The ground split open.
He leapt.
For one impossible second he was in freefall above an endless stack of identical plazas, each one a floor lower, each one occupied by another version of himself running in the opposite direction.
Then gravity remembered which way was down.
He hit something soft.
Real darkness. Real cold.
Site-19 infirmary. Heart monitor beeping slow and steady.
Dr. Lena Harrow was asleep in the chair beside the bed, one hand still gripping his wrist like she'd been checking for a pulse every thirty seconds.
A nurse dropped a tray somewhere down the hall and cursed loudly.
Elias stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how to breathe with only one set of lungs.
His left forearm burned.
The roman numeral V was gone.
In its place, fresh scar tissue spelled a single word in tiny, perfect letters:
**PROMOTION**
On the bedside table sat the hand mirror (still taped, still cracked).
Both halves were empty now.
For the first time in thirty-six hours, Elias closed his eyes without seeing anything staring back.
He slept.
In the dream, a new file opened by itself on a screen that didn't exist yet.
**Anomaly Designation: Specialist-01 "Elias Vark"**
**Object Class: Keter (Self-containing)**
**Special Containment Procedures: Let him think he's still on our side.**