Chapter 7: Unsettling Sightings
POV: Will Gorski
The Chicago precinct's locker room buzzed with the kind of harsh fluorescent efficiency that turned everything institutional grey. Coffee grounds and printer ink hung in the air like a cocktail of duty and bureaucracy—Will's second atmosphere after a double shift that had ended with paperwork instead of closure.
He paused at the mirror, towel slung over his shoulder, steam from the showers mixing with the metallic tang of gun oil. The reflection that stared back should have been familiar—tired cop, worn down by Chicago's mean streets, carrying the weight of cases that never quite resolved cleanly.
Instead, his reflection fractured.
Kael Vance's scarred, weary face stared back from what looked like a different country entirely. The stranger's fists were clenched in PTSD's grip, eyes carrying a soldier's exhaustion that made Will's tactical instincts surge with borrowed trauma.
The mirror's edge felt cold under Will's fingertips as he leaned closer, heart hammering against his ribs. This wasn't hallucination—the reflection moved independently, Kael's mouth forming silent words that Will somehow understood.
"Trust the connection."
"What the hell are you?" Will breathed, the glass fogging with his fear.
Around him, colleagues' chatter faded to phantom gunshots. The locker room's familiar geometry shifted, walls stretching toward a dim apartment where regret hung heavier than Chicago smog. Will could taste cordite that wasn't there, feel the weight of trauma that belonged to someone else's war.
His lone-wolf instincts recoiled from the invasion. Will Gorski worked alone, trusted his own judgment, relied on his own skills. The idea that someone else's pain could bleed into his consciousness violated every principle he'd built his career on.
But Kael's reflection didn't disappear. If anything, it intensified, scarred knuckles pressing against the glass from the inside as if trying to break through. The vulnerability in those eyes challenged Will's carefully constructed isolation, suggesting that maybe—just maybe—some burdens were too heavy to carry alone.
"You look like you've seen combat," Will murmured to the reflection. "Different kind than mine."
Kael's lips moved again: "Trust the connection."
Will's badge felt suddenly heavy against his chest, a shield that protected him from the world but also from connection. In Kael's reflection, he saw a soldier who understood the weight of duty, the cost of violence, the loneliness that came with being society's guardian.
The mirror fogged completely as Will's breath hitched. When it cleared, only his own face stared back—tired, shaken, but no longer quite so alone.
POV: Chloe "Zero-Cool" Zhang
Chloe's loft fans spun faster, ozone sharp in the air as her triple monitors erupted with beauty that made her chaos look like finger painting. The code weaved patterns that predicted BPO's next move three steps ahead, elegant algorithms that challenged every assumption she'd built her career on.
Nomi Marks' face fractured into the lines of code, eyes narrowing in focused concentration as her hack from San Francisco bled through whatever impossible mirror connected them. The collaborative genius was invasive, intrusive, but undeniably brilliant.
"You're seeing me see you," Chloe whispered, the phrase becoming more certain each time she spoke it.
Her fingers danced with Nomi's rhythm, plastic keys yielding to collaborative touch that created programs neither could have written alone. The duet was terrifying in its intimacy—two minds working in perfect synchronization across impossible distances.
But this time, the code did more than collaborate. It predicted. Nomi's elegant logic mapped BPO surveillance networks with surgical precision, revealing patterns in their operations that made Chloe's breath catch. Corporate structures that weren't quite corporate. Research facilities disguised as medical centers. A network of hunters tracking people like herself.
"They're mapping us," Chloe realized, watching as the code painted a picture of systematic pursuit. "We're not paranoid. We're prey."
The revelation should have terrified her more than it did. Instead, she felt a strange sense of vindication. Her paranoia had always been justified—the corporate betrayals, the sense of being watched, the feeling that powerful forces wanted to use her skills for purposes she couldn't understand.
Terror gripped her throat, but it was mixed with something else—the pure joy of collaborative genius, of finding a sister in a song she'd always sung alone. Nomi's elegance challenged Chloe's chaos, but it also enhanced it, turning disorder into a weapon that could pierce BPO's carefully constructed secrecy.
The loft's shadows lengthened as something else stirred in the psychic distance. A predator's attention sharpening on their duet, drawn by the feast of collaborative genius bleeding across the network.
Leo's containment pulled at the connection, his strain making the vision flicker on her screen. The elegant code dissolved into fragments, leaving Chloe alone with the terrible knowledge of what was hunting them.
"Not just seeing," she breathed. "Building a way out."
But first, they had to survive long enough to use it.
POV: Leo Carter/Aris Thorne
The sightings cascaded to Leo like a digital avalanche, his penthouse mirrors multiplying fractures until every reflective surface showed a different face demanding his attention. Will's scarred features pressed against glass from inside. Chloe's wide-eyed wonder as code revealed terrible truths. Marigold's shadowed logic as Wolfgang's brutality bled through her composure.
All staring back at him. All demanding he graph the chaos bleeding through their connections.
"They're seeing me see them," Leo whispered, the revelation a curse that explained nothing and changed everything.
His vision blurred as the strain took hold, migraine building behind his eyes like pressure in a cracking dam. The nosebleed started immediately, warm copper dripping onto his keyboard as he instinctively reached for the fractures.
This time was different. The mirrors weren't just showing glimpses—they were demanding answers. Will's tactical instincts wanted to know who was sharing his trauma. Chloe's genius needed to understand the collaborative possibilities. The sightings weren't passive anymore; they were interactive, challenging worldviews and demanding explanations he couldn't provide.
Emma's hum filtered through the chaos, her tuning fork turning fractures into fragile harmony. But the strain was exponentially worse, each sighting requiring more of himself to stabilize.
"Two shadows visionary," the phrase pulsed through his consciousness like a heartbeat synchronizing with the fractured network.
In the psychic distance, he felt Jax adjusting his glasses as Kala's prayerful intuition sparked during a broadcast. The network was evolving rapidly, passive glimpses becoming active sightings that challenged every assumption about connection and isolation.
Aris's memories flickered—a fractured image of an ECHO signature, contracts signed in boardrooms that felt more like laboratories. The borrowed memories suggested his inherited identity was more complex than wealth and privilege, tied to something that made these connections possible.
Leo swept phantom shards from his desk, blood from an imagined cut mixing with his real nosebleed. The mirrors were becoming unreliable, reality fracturing along the edges of connection.
His smartwatch buzzed with alarming readouts—neural synchronization at dangerous levels, resonance frequency fluctuating wildly, anchor point under maximum stress. But beneath the data, something else stirred. The bloodhound's attention sharpening on their psychic banquet, drawn by the feast of evolving abilities.
Leo's whisper turned into a quip—"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the disturbed-est of all?"—a deadpan shield against the interactive darkness pressing at the edges of his consciousness.
Emma's hum carried through the fractured glass, a harmonious call that promised he wouldn't face the chaos alone. But outside, fog veiled Chicago's streets like smoke from the bloodhound's exhaust.
The predator was circling closer.
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