The mango core wouldn't stop humming.
Leila held it in both hands, though it felt more like it was holding her. The black sphere inside pulsed with a heartbeat that wasn't hers—too slow, too heavy. Each thud sent a ripple through the air, bending the neon reflections around her.
The street wasn't the street anymore.
Pavement peeled upward like the surface of a pond. Cars hung in the air, wheels twitching like insects flipped on their backs. People blurred, their outlines jagged and lagging a few seconds behind their movements, like reality was buffering.
A voice—hers, but not—whispered from above.
"Don't drop it."
Leila tilted her head up. The mirror sky was closer now, as if Earth and its inverted twin were being pulled together by invisible strings. The other Leilas—seven, maybe eight now—hovered upside down, their hair hanging toward her like black roots. One of them, wearing a leather jacket burned at the edges, mouthed words Leila couldn't hear. Another was bound in metal bands, twitching.
The one who had screamed earlier was gone.
The mango core split further, and a thin stream of black light—liquid light—trickled out and coiled around her wrist. It didn't burn. It sank in.
The words didn't come from anywhere. They simply arrived inside her skull, clean and cold like machine static.
"Nope," Leila hissed. "Nope nope nope."
She stumbled back, but the street followed her. Buildings stretched, light smeared. The world tilted like a lens shifting focus. The mirrored sky cracked at the edges—not like glass, but like a smile splitting too wide.
Then one of the other Leilas fell.
This one wasn't screaming. She moved with purpose, arms tucked in, like a diver cutting through water. The instant her body hit the air between worlds, it didn't shatter—it stitched. A black seam unfurled across the sky, threading the mirror world to this one.
Leila felt the pull. It wasn't gravity. It was recognition.
"Stop this!" she shouted at the sky. At herself. At everything.
The falling Leila landed soundlessly three feet away, knees bent, eyes burning with the same black light as the core. She straightened up. For a second, they just stared at each other. Same heartbeat. Same breath.
Then the other Leila spoke, her voice layered with static and something older.
"You shouldn't have picked the fruit."
Leila looked down at the core, pulsing in her palm like a star dying. "I didn't pick it. I stole it."
"Exactly," the other her whispered. "That's why you were chosen."
The air behind her tore open like a zipper. More silhouettes pressed through—other Leilas, other choices. Some bleeding. Some armored. One with no eyes at all.
The ground beneath Leila's feet dissolved into a lattice of light. Above, the mirrored city began to invert. Not float anymore—descend.
And in the center of it all, where the sky and earth would meet, something vast was crawling through the seam.
Leila tightened her grip on the core.
If this was a gate, someone had to close it.
Or rule it.