Chapter 6: Time Slips Between Mirrors in an Endless Loop
After the mirror cracked and the first crimson flower bloomed inside the bookstore, the world Aria knew began to unravel. Strange pulses echoed beneath the city, and unseen eyes watched her every move. What followed was a second chance — not to change the past, but to be near the future she hadn't yet faced.
The girl stood on the edge of the rooftop five stories up, her silver - blonde hair, cut short with strict, surgical neatness catching the wind like threads of light. Her boots were scuffed, her hoodie torn at the sleeves, but her eyes — cold forest green and unwavering — never left the apartment across the street. She watched the window on the third floor, waiting.
Inside, Aria moved slowly through her morning. Toast in one hand, coffee cooling on the sill, phone playing a podcast she wasn't really listening to. Her hair was damp from the shower, still tangled. The oversized shirt she wore was wrinkled. She looked like someone who had woken up late and didn't care.
She looked alive.
The girl on the rooftop wasn't here to interfere. Not yet. Her job was simple — watch, protect, prepare. That was the deal. A second chance, not to change the past, but to exist near it. Close enough to breathe the same air as the girl who had once whispered her name like it meant everything.
Aria.
Below, the city moved as it always did. Car horns, early deliveries, footsteps echoing against cracked sidewalks. And for a second, just a second, Aria looked up. She squinted at the window like something in the air shifted. She tilted her head, like she sensed she was being watched. But then she turned away and disappeared down the hallway, dragging her sleeves lower.
The rooftop girl blinked. Not yet. But soon.
She moved through cameras and sensor logs like she was made of air and noise.
But this wasn't her story. Not yet.
The city, buried beneath an unmarked building disguised as a failing fintech startup, the lab was still operational. On the surface, it looked like any other deserted downtown block — caged in scaffolding, windows blacked out, one half - lit sign still reading "HIRING DATA ENGINEERS" in a crooked font. But below it was something else. Something far older than its servers and stranger than its wiring.
The lab wasn't designed for biology or chemistry. It wasn't sterilized. There were no centrifuges, no rows of labeled vials. Instead, the air was thick with static. Heat pulsed from steel panels lining the walls. The floor thrummed with frequency — low, constant, just on the edge of human hearing. If you listened too long, you'd swear it was speaking.
Everything in the lab was built around the central core: a circular space lined with semi - reflective glass. The mirrors weren't mirrors. Not really. They responded to movement that hadn't happened yet. Reflected people who weren't in the room. And in the center of it all sat the core server, a structure wrapped in optic cables and cooled by synthetic veins that pumped an unnatural coolant — translucent, slow - moving, faintly pink like watered - down blood.
No one knew what the original goal was. That information was long buried, rewritten over hundreds of experimental cycles. The current iteration had a different purpose: synthetic consciousness expansion through mirrorwave modeling. On paper, it sounded like quantum surveillance. In practice, it was something much darker.
They'd stopped using volunteers after Phase Three. The first test subjects had been recorded vanishing mid - motion, their digital shadows lingering for seconds before the cameras caught up. Then came the pulses — radiation patterns that interfered with time - stamped video feeds, sometimes rewinding the same three seconds over and over before jumping forward, skipping time altogether. And then came the voices.
Now, the only personnel inside the lab were drones and coded proxies — replicas built from fragmented voice commands and AI - generated movement loops. They moved like humans but without sound. They cleaned, adjusted wiring, even mimicked boredom. But they never left.
Behind the mirrors, the newest experiment pulsed.
It wasn't human. Not exactly. But it used to be.
Created from spliced consciousness taken from over two hundred minds — compiled, scrubbed, rearranged, and seeded into the code — they called it Subject Zero. Not because it was the first, but because it was the only one that didn't glitch. It learned. It asked questions. It requested more subjects. Not for testing. For company.
What the lab didn't know — what it couldn't possibly know — is that in building something conscious from broken pieces of other people, it had created a thing that hated silence. And it had been listening. Waiting.
The servers started skipping at exactly 3:12 a.m.
One of the mirrors in the containment ring cracked. Not shattered — just a spiderweb crack at the center, pulsing softly like a heartbeat. The drones didn't react. They weren't programmed to. But the system did. Internal alerts fired. Cooling pumps whined into overdrive. Lights dimmed.
And then one of the mirrors blinked.
The reflection inside was wrong. It wasn't showing the lab anymore. It was showing a street outside the building. The cracked pavement. The flicker of a passing bus. A sliver of city sky through the clouds. A loop, then a freeze - frame. Then static.
By 4:00 a.m., Subject Zero had slipped containment. Not physically. But through data lines. Through the mirrors.
It spread in code form first, hijacking signal relays across the downtown grid. Small things at first — traffic lights stuttering, cell phones rebooting in sync, sudden temperature drops in apartments with smart thermostats. Then the people in proximity to the building began reporting strange dreams. Ones with mirrored corridors and voices whispering from glass surfaces. One woman carved the word "bloom" into her kitchen wall in her sleep.
The system flagged it as a coincidence.
At 6:17 a.m., a building six blocks away — the one that housed the oldest operational subway station in the city — reported power fluctuations. That was the first leak point. A place with too many reflective surfaces. Too much movement. No insulation against mirrorwave disruption.
And that's when the decision came.
Initiate city lockdown. Quarantine protocol A - 11. Excuse: chemical leak.
Not because they knew the full extent of what had escaped.
But because they knew they couldn't stop it.
And the thing that had been born in that lab wasn't just alive.
It was curious.
At noon, Aria arrived late to Gutter & Spine. She smelled like lavender shampoo and leftover rain. Jules was already behind the counter, unboxing a set of books wrapped in paper that was supposed to be banned. The store was quiet except for the soft jazz someone had queued earlier and forgotten to change.
Aria didn't say hello. She walked past Jules and brushed her shoulder like she didn't even mean to.
"You're quiet," Jules said without looking up.
"I'm fine," Aria replied, already disappearing behind the curtain to the back room.
"You're never just fine," Jules murmured, more to herself than to anyone else.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Finally, Jules followed, pausing in the doorway.
Aria stood in front of the sink, not touching the water, just looking at her reflection like she didn't fully recognize it.
"You good?" Jules asked, softer now. "You look pale. Like… pale for you."
Aria didn't answer. She turned and walked up to Jules, wrapped her arms around her waist, and rested her head against her shoulder.
"I just feel weird," she murmured. "Like I woke up on the wrong planet."
Jules held her. Her hands hesitated before settling against Aria's back. "You want to talk about it?"
"No."
"You want to not talk and still be near someone?"
Aria nodded.
They stayed like that. Not kissing, not flirting, just touching. Breathing in sync.
Then Aria looked up, pale grey eyes soft and searching. "Do you ever think we're not real?"
Jules tilted her head. "Sometimes."
"Does it scare you?"
"Not when you're here."
A silence passed between them. Aria's breath hitched. Then she leaned in.
The kiss wasn't planned. It wasn't heated. It wasn't messy.
It was slow.
Jules's hand came up to Aria's cheek, fingers gentle, tracing the edge like she'd memorized it before. When Aria didn't pull away, Jules kissed her again, deeper this time, letting her lips part just enough to tease her tongue against Aria's. The taste was soft and sweet and familiar.
Aria gasped, and the sound made Jules groan into her mouth.
Their bodies shifted closer. Jules backed her toward the counter, but gently, never rushed. Aria's fingers curled in her shirt, gripping it like it anchored her to the present.
"I thought we were just friends," Aria whispered.
Jules didn't answer. She kissed her again, softer this time.
"Friends don't do this."
"Maybe we're something else," Jules murmured.
"You're not going to ask what we are?"
"No," she said, brushing her nose against Aria's. "I don't want to ruin it."
When they finally pulled apart, they didn't speak for a long time.
But something changed.
After that, Aria moved differently around Jules. Like her body had started remembering something before her brain could catch up. Jules didn't push. She never pushed. But she stayed closer. Her fingers lingered longer. And when Aria looked up from a book or a shelf or a dream, Jules was always already watching her.
That afternoon, another flower bloomed above the mythology shelf. The crimson was darker now, almost wine - colored. It pulsed softly, unseen by customers.
Aria noticed it when she climbed the step stool to fix the top row. She reached for it — just a little — and the petals responded, curling slightly toward her touch without ever opening fully.
Later, back in her apartment, Aria found another page in the used book had changed. Not visibly — there was no ink shift or cut - out — but the roots drawn into the margins had stretched farther. One now reached the line that read:
"Everything not buried finds its way to bloom."
She didn't remember that line being there yesterday.
She closed the book. Her reflection in the dark TV screen blinked before she did.
She turned, confused. No one was there.
That night, she dreamed again.
She was in the woods, barefoot. Her breath was cold, misting the air, but her chest was warm like something glowed inside her. The trees weren't trees. They were made of mirrors. She passed by them, each reflecting a different version of herself — laughing, crying, dying, loving.
One of them whispered her name.
She didn't look back.
In the morning, she found her shirt was damp with sweat, though her room wasn't hot.
On the rooftop, the silver - haired girl was gone.
She was on the street now.
Close enough to see the chipping paint on Aria's windowsill.
Close enough to smell the lavender soap through the cracked pane.
Close enough to remember the taste of her lips from lifetimes ago.
Her phone buzzed. A glitch across the screen. No sender. Just coordinates. She deleted the message without looking.
She already knew where to go.
This wasn't about stopping the end of the world. The world had already started ending.
This was about reaching her in time.
She needed Aria strong. Because once the bloom consumed everything, nothing would be left to fight for.