Coyle lay still, eyes wide, lips barely moving.
"She's awake," he repeated, barely audible now.
Elara leaned closer, her heart pounding. The words clung to the air like frost. "Who is she, Coyle? Who's behind the mirror?"
But his gaze had turned glassy. His pupils were dilated, unfocused. His chest still rose and fell, but it was mechanical—shallow, steady, disconnected from conscious intent. His mind was somewhere else, far away, unreachable. Trapped in a place none of them could follow.
The mirrors behind him remained fractured — spiderwebs of light and distortion, each shard refracting distorted reflections of the room and its inhabitants. The cracks were no longer just physical; they felt metaphorical, tearing through the group's sense of control and coherence.
Blood trickled from Coyle's nose, crimson beads soaking into the collar of his shirt.
Kemi moved fast, kneeling beside him. She pressed two fingers to his neck, her other hand gently lifting one of his eyelids. "Pulse is steady," she said, though her voice was tight, "but his neural response is off. It's like… like something's interfering with his cognition."
"Can we move him?" Dorian asked, crouching nearby.
"No," she said sharply. "He's not injured. Not physically. This is something deeper. Like his mind is being hijacked. Remotely."
"By who?" Jace asked. "This… 'she' he mentioned?"
Across the room, Harper sat against the wall, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Her eyes were glassy with a kind of distant dread. "The voice said confession ends the trial. He confessed nothing."
"Because he couldn't," Elara whispered. Her breath felt cold in her throat. "Or because he already has… just not to us."
Silence fell, heavy and pulsing.
Then the mirrors shimmered again.
A ripple — like breath across glass.
The voice returned, cold and clear and closer this time.
"One has broken the pact."
"Judgment reserved. Containment initiated."
And just like that, Coyle vanished.
No sound. No flash. No sense of movement. One moment he was there — still, inert, yet present. And the next… nothing. An absence so stark it seemed to unbalance the room.
His clothes remained in a crumpled heap, untouched, as if the body had been removed but the world hadn't bothered to notice.
Kemi gasped and stumbled back. "They're evolving the rules," she whispered. "That wasn't a trial. That was a response."
"What does 'containment initiated' mean?" Harper asked, her voice brittle, high with fear.
"It means they didn't kill him," Elara said. "Yet."
Jace stared at the space where Coyle had been. "They're holding him. Somewhere else. Maybe inside a deeper level."
"A mirror within a mirror," Kemi murmured. Her gaze flicked to the reflective walls. "Nested control layers. We're in the outer ring. He's just been pulled inward."
The air grew colder. A soft hum began to rise, low and dissonant.
Then, another message appeared — this time not just on the mirrors but across every visible surface, as if the words bled out of the walls themselves:
"Trust fractures faster than glass."
"A traitor walks among you."
The temperature dropped several degrees. Breath misted in the air.
Dorian stood straighter, his jaw clenched. "We're being turned against each other."
"They want paranoia," Elara agreed. "Fracture us before the next trial begins."
Jace let out a sharp breath. "Well, mission accomplished."
Harper rose slowly, smoothing down her sleeves as if anchoring herself. "We can't afford to splinter. Not now. Not when they're changing the rules on us."
"Then we redefine the game," Kemi said. Her eyes had lost all traces of panic. What remained was sharp, clinical focus. "We stop reacting. We start probing back."
"How?" Dorian asked.
Kemi held up the cracked tablet — its screen flickering with erratic data streams. "This isn't just a memory replica. It's a live construct — recursive, dynamic. That means it's susceptible to input. Maybe even to error."
"You want to hack the house?" Jace asked.
"Not the house," she replied. "The interface. If I can push data back into the system, I might be able to map how it pulls memory — or even trace signal patterns that lead to Coyle's location."
"Or you might trigger another purge," Elara warned.
"I know," Kemi said. "But I'm doing it anyway."
The mirrors rippled again, vibrating faintly as if something massive stirred just behind them. The lights above dimmed. The system didn't like this direction.
Which meant it was the right one.
Elara turned toward Harper. "Earlier — the girl you pushed. You said she reminded you of someone. That she had your shoe."
Harper hesitated. The words weren't easy now. "Not real in the literal sense. But she… she looked like a memory. Or a fragment of one. Familiar in a way that hurt. Like the mirrors are showing us pieces of our subconscious."
"They're trying to make us unravel ourselves," Elara said.
"To find someone who can't be broken," Dorian added grimly.
The golden glow of false dawn, which had bathed the chamber in light for the last hour, began to fade — replaced by creeping shadows at the room's edges.
A new message materialized:
"The next trial begins at nightfall."
"In the dark, the truth hides."
A low hum filled the air.
Lights flickered.
Then — without warning — they all went out.
Total blackness.
Not just the absence of light, but something deeper. A sensory vacuum. As if they had all been submerged in a void so complete that space and time ceased to exist.
Then — a whisper, close to Elara's ear but without breath or heat.
"…Elara…"
She spun toward it, heart in her throat.
Nothing.
Another whisper — this time behind her, but the voice was hers, twisted and wounded:
"…You let her die…"
The others cried out — startled — each hearing their own voice. Their own guilt.
The dark now echoed with fragments of their failures.
"I… no…" Harper whispered, trembling. "I didn't mean to…"
"I wasn't supposed to be there," Jace muttered. "That wasn't my shift. I swapped. It wasn't supposed to be me—"
Kemi's voice cracked. "Make it stop—"
"No," Elara said, breath shaking. "Don't fight it. Listen. It wants us to fall apart. If we do, we're gone."
A pressure shifted in the dark — not sound, but sensation. Something moved among them. Watching. Listening. Feeding.
Then a single line lit across one wall, glowing red:
"One of you is not what they seem."
"Find the false one, or be consumed."
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then Harper spoke, her voice hollow. "Is this another trial? Or a warning?"
Kemi stood, bracing herself on the wall. "Maybe both. Maybe this is the trial."
"I don't feel real anymore," Jace whispered. "How do I know I'm not the one? What if I've been planted here? What if I'm just… noise?"
"You're not," Elara said firmly. "None of us are imposters. That's what it wants us to believe."
"But what if it's true?" Dorian asked. "What if one of us isn't who we think we are? We've already seen how the mirrors manipulate memory. What if one of us has already been compromised?"
Kemi turned toward the center of the room. "We need a baseline. Something that predates this place. Childhood memory. Something shared. Something real."
"I have one," Elara said, slowly. "When I was seven, I fell into a ravine behind our house. My brother climbed down after me. He broke his arm saving me. The scar on his wrist—it's shaped like a crescent."
Harper nodded. "I remember summers at the coast. The smell of salt. My sister used to braid my hair with seashells she found. She said the ocean spoke through them."
Jace spoke next. "I had a dog — Rolo. He used to sleep under my bed. I trained him to bring me socks."
Kemi turned to Dorian.
He hesitated.
Then: "I don't remember."
The silence that followed was sharp as a blade.
"What do you mean?" Kemi asked.
"I don't remember anything before the program. I… I've tried, but it's blank. Always has been. I thought it was trauma. Or conditioning. But maybe…"
Elara stepped toward him. "Or maybe they wiped it. To plant something else."
Dorian's hands trembled. "Then how do I prove I'm real?"
The red message glowed brighter.
"Time ends at full dark."
"Reveal the false one — or all are lost."
Kemi moved back to the tablet. "If I can force an internal memory recall, maybe I can prove he's unaltered. But I need time."
"We don't have time," Jace said. "The dark's pressing in. I can feel it — like pressure behind my eyes."
"We hold," Elara said. "We hold, and we trust. Until they give us a reason not to."
Another shimmer moved across the mirror.
A face appeared.
Coyle's.
But wrong.
His eyes were too black. His smile too wide.
Then it spoke — with her voice:
"She's still watching."
The image shattered.
And the trial began.