IV
Being collected didn't feel like much of anything. I didn't have senses or a body to feel much. The fall through the mirror wasn't much of a fall.
It was more like being pulled through a sheet of ice — a cold, frictionless slide that stripped away every sensation except the hum of the mirror‑portal vibrating through what was left of me. My great‑aunt's soul drifted beside me, a pale, wavering outline of the woman I remembered. Her eyes were wide, confused, but she couldn't speak. Neither could I.
Then the darkness opened.
We spilled into a room that wasn't a room — a vast chamber of metal and shadow, lit only by stuttering strips of white light embedded in the walls. The air vibrated with a low mechanical thrum, like a machine the size of a planet was breathing somewhere just beyond the walls.
Shapes moved in the dark. Tall, thin silhouettes, their bodies flickering like smoke caught in a strobe light. They weren't solid. They weren't flesh. They were shadows wearing the suggestion of darkness forming elongated limbs, tapered heads, eyes like dim silver coals. They glided rather than walked, their movements too smooth, too synchronized, too deliberate. One of them reached for my great‑aunt.
Its appendage passed through her chest, and she convulsed, her outline shuddering like static. A stream of pale, shimmering vapor poured out of her, pulled into a long crystalline tube that descended from the ceiling. The tube filled with swirling soul‑smoke, glowing faintly as it spiraled upward into some unseen apparatus.
Another shadow‑alien adjusted a panel of floating symbols — not buttons, not screens, but shifting geometric shapes that rearranged themselves as it touched them. The tube pulsed, and my aunt's essence dimmed, thinning like mist in sunlight.
I tried to reach her. Olivia! My soul-self shook wanting to grab onto her but paralyzed. I finally willed myself to pick up my arm and put out a hand towards her degraded form. My hand passed through her like fog.
The alien turned toward me. Its eyes brightened. Hey held not malice, but with interest. Clinical. Curious. As if I were a specimen it hadn't catalogued yet. It raised a device, a thin metallic rod that hummed with a frequency that made my entire being vibrate.
Behind it, more tubes glowed with trapped soul‑smoke — dozens, maybe hundreds — each one swirling with the remnants of someone who had once been alive, once been human, once been loved.
My great‑aunt didn't scream. But the way she shuddered as the shadow‑aliens pulled her apart was worse than any sound. Her outline flickered, thinning like smoke in a draft, while the instruments around her pulsed with hungry light.
One of the aliens, a being taller than the rest, its form more defined, its eyes glowing with a cold, clinical intelligence held a wand‑like instrument that radiated a soft blue glow. Every time it passed the wand through her chest, more of her essence peeled away, drawn into the tubes overhead. The soul‑smoke spiraled upward, glowing faintly as it was siphoned into some unseen chamber.
Great-aunt Olivia was disappearing. Piece by piece. Memory by memory she was drifting away into a myriad of alien tubes and pipes, dissected. Until only a faint silhouette remained, trembling like a candle flame about to flicker out.
The aliens paused. They looked at her depleted form with a strange, analytical stillness. No empathy. No cruelty. Just calculation. The tall one tilted its head, the blue wand dimming as it examined the last flicker of her consciousness.
A ripple of symbols flashed across the floating panels nearby. I didn't understand the language, but the meaning hit me anyway, like a cold whisper inside my skull. They used the souls of the dead they collected as some sort of specimen, research material, some unknown alien reason.
I was different than Olivia. I was some sort of freak accident. This is what I got for trying to be heroic. I tried to save the soul of a dying woman and accidentally had my own ripped out of my body by shadow alien scientists or something.
The being that I had met before stood before me, one limb elongating, piercing painlessly into my forehead. It communicated something like disappointment. Her body still lives. She is still tethered. She cannot be stored. She cannot be kept. They couldn't finish the extraction. Not until her physical body died.
But they were too alien, too detached, too utterly other to send her back. To them, returning a soul to a living body wasn't mercy. It was irrelevant. A variable they didn't account for. A step they didn't bother with.
So, the tall one simply raised a hand. A gesture. A command.
The floor beneath my aunt's fading form opened like a trapdoor of light. There wasn't much of her left. She fell. Not down, but out. Out of the chamber. Out of the ship. Out of the alien dimension. Her silhouette tumbled into a vast, swirling fog below, dissolving as she fell, her last fragments scattering like sparks blown from a dying fire. Then the trapdoor sealed.
The aliens turned back to their instruments. And I realized, with a coldness that hollowed me out: They weren't done. They had only paused. They would deal with me next, and I couldn't do anything about it.