The mirrored hall pulsed around her, narrowing slowly like the maw of a predator.
Each reflection shimmered unnaturally, as if alive, watching her — versions of Elara with wild eyes, tear-streaked faces, blood on their hands or lips locked in silence. Some smiled with cruel knowing. Others trembled, barely holding themselves together.
All of them were true. None of them were whole.
Elara's breath quickened, her chest tightening beneath the crushing weight of anticipation. Her pulse pounded in her ears like war drums.
Jace's echo had already faded, his final words lingering like smoke in her mind. The fragments of him had melted into the glass, joining the Room's vast mosaic of memory and regret.
Now it was her turn.
Coyle stepped beside her, his eyes sharper than they had any right to be. Watching. Calculating. Bleeding knowledge without explanation. He had survived this Room longer than any of them — that much was obvious. But at what cost?
"Truth isn't free here," he said, voice low, rough with exhaustion and warning.
Elara didn't look at him. Her gaze was on the floor — no longer stone, but black mirror, reflecting her face a hundred times from beneath her feet.
"What kind of cost?" she asked.
He stepped closer, until their reflections bled into one another.
"Sometimes your sanity. Sometimes your memories. Sometimes… your very existence."
A shiver crawled up her spine.
"And if I refuse to speak it?"
"Then the Room speaks for you," he said. "And it never tells it gently."
She took in a slow, shallow breath, then another, steadier one.
"I'm ready."
"You think you are," Coyle murmured. "No one ever really is."
The Room stirred in response.
From the void above, a single shaft of white light cut through the darkness — cold and harsh, not like sunlight but like an autopsy lamp.
It pinned her in place. There was no escape from its gaze.
The others remained in the shadows: Harper, arms wrapped tight around herself. Dorian, quiet and ghost-pale. Kemi, standing too straight to be calm. Jace, jaw set with quiet torment. All of them watching. All of them waiting.
But none of them could help her now.
The mirrors surrounding Elara began to ripple.
They multiplied with every breath, refracting inward, forming a kaleidoscope of her soul. In each surface, a different self.
One screamed.
One wept.
One looked away.
One bled from the eyes.
One simply whispered, "It's your fault."
"Speak the truth you hide deepest," the Room commanded — not in sound, but from within her bones. "The lie that haunts your waking hours."
Elara's lips parted, but nothing came.
The silence inside her was no longer protective. It was suffocating.
Her throat burned. Her hands clenched into trembling fists.
Then she saw Mira.
Not the illusion. Not the memory.
The truth of her — blood-slicked hair, glass cuts on her arms, her eyes wide with disbelief as the door closed between them.
Elara had told herself a thousand times that she had no choice. That the lab was compromised. That escape was the only option.
A thousand lies stacked like bricks around her guilt.
And now the weight crushed her chest.
Her voice emerged, cracked and raw.
"I lied."
The Room exhaled.
Silence swept outward in a pulse, flattening even the sound of her heartbeat.
"I lied when I said I did everything I could to save her," Elara whispered. "I didn't. I hesitated. I panicked. I saw what they were doing to her and I ran."
The reflections flickered violently.
Images slashed across the mirrors like knives: the red glow of emergency lights, scientists dragging Mira toward a chair wired with neural spikes, Elara's footsteps echoing in the sterile corridor as she ran.
"I told myself I'd come back for her. That I'd find a way. But I didn't. I buried the data trail. I erased her name from the access logs. I made myself forget because it was easier."
Her voice broke.
"I chose survival over my sister's life."
The mirrors trembled, their surfaces spiderwebbing with fractures.
Elara sank to her knees, breath ragged.
"Why didn't you speak?" the voice asked — no longer a command, but a quiet accusation.
She lifted her head slowly.
Her voice was barely audible.
"I was ashamed. And I was powerless."
The mirrors cracked in a chorus — a million fractures singing her guilt.
Then one broke completely, and from its center, a glowing shard of mirrored glass floated toward her like a blade drawn to its mark.
It hovered for a moment.
Then pierced her chest.
There was no blood — only sensation. A deep, icy pain that sliced through her soul.
She screamed, but not aloud.
The scream stayed in her mind, echoing across memories as they unraveled.
Suddenly, she was back in the lab.
Bright lights. Surgical white.
Machines hummed.
Scientists moved in ghostly silence.
Mira was screaming — not in words, but in pure, raw sound.
Elara reached out.
But the memory bent, warped.
Her arms stretched like wax. Her voice didn't work. Mira drifted further away.
The moment looped. Again and again.
Elara falling. Reaching. Failing.
A punishment. A revelation. A wound.
Then — stillness.
The shard dissolved into mist.
And she collapsed.
Darkness threatened to consume her.
But then came breath.
Air.
The feel of stone beneath her knees.
She opened her eyes.
She was still in the Room.
Still alive.
The spotlight faded.
But the mirrors no longer shimmered.
They were still now.
Calm.
And empty.
The voice returned, softer this time.
"Truth accepted. But at a price."
Coyle approached from the shadows, his boots silent on the glass floor.
His eyes studied her, but for once, there was no cold calculation. Only something approaching respect.
"You've lost part of yourself," he said.
Elara reached up, pressing her fingertips to her forehead.
Her memories were slippery.
Some faces blurred at the edges. Some voices muffled, like heard underwater.
A few moments — once clear — now felt like fiction.
"Am I… breaking?"
"Maybe," Coyle said. "Or maybe you're becoming free."
She looked up at him.
His expression didn't change.
But something in his voice had cracked — ever so slightly.
The others stepped forward slowly, each emerging from the shadows, one by one.
Kemi's eyes were hollow, like she'd spent hours crying and now had no tears left.
Harper's lips were pressed into a thin line, blood on her palm where her fingernails had dug too deep.
Jace was pale but upright, his gaze hard but clearer than before.
Dorian walked with a limp he hadn't had before — real or imagined, she didn't know — but his posture was stronger, less hesitant.
Each of them had confessed.
Each of them had been cut.
Each of them had paid a price.
And yet, they stood.
They endured.
They had survived the truth.
The Room was quiet now. The oppressive presence seemed to have pulled back.
The mirrors shimmered once — not with threat, but recognition.
A corridor opened to their right.
Not a trap. Not an illusion.
An exit.
Elara stood slowly, breath unsteady.
Her limbs trembled, but her spine straightened with purpose.
She looked at the others — these broken, haunted people.
But there was something else now, just beneath the surface.
Conviction.
Resilience.
Hope.
The kind born from agony and truth, not fantasy.
"What now?" Kemi asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Elara stared down the corridor.
Then turned back to the others.
"Now we find Mira," she said.
"And we burn down everything that made this Room possible."
Coyle smiled faintly.
Harper cracked her knuckles.
Jace just nodded.
Dorian looked ahead with clear eyes.
They didn't know what came next.
Only that the price had been paid.
And there was still more truth left to find.