The crimson light dissolved into a room of mirrors.
Elara's reflection stared back at her from every surface—walls, ceiling, floor. But something was wrong. The reflections didn't move in sync. One showed her younger, maybe twenty-five, wearing her white coat from the psychiatric hospital. Another showed her covered in blood, eyes hollow with shock. A third showed her old, gray-haired, with a look of profound resignation.
"Which one is real?" she asked the empty air.
"All of them," the Echo answered. "None of them. Does it matter?"
Elara's training kicked in. This was a psychological manipulation, designed to break her sense of self. She'd used similar techniques in therapy—confronting patients with their different selves, their contradictions. But experiencing it from the inside was different. Terrifying.
"Where's my daughter?" Her voice cracked. "You said—"
"We said nothing. You heard what you needed to hear to enter this room. The seventh floor doesn't lie, Dr. Kane. It simply reveals."
One of the mirrors rippled like water. Elara approached it, her hand trembling. In this reflection, she saw herself in the ruins of Chicago, kneeling beside a small body covered by a bloodstained sheet. She was reaching for the sheet, about to lift it, when—
She'd run.
The memory hit her like a physical blow. She'd run before confirming it was her daughter. Before seeing. Because if she didn't see, maybe it wasn't real. Maybe Sarah was still alive somewhere.
Schrodinger's child. Alive and dead until observed.
"You've been carrying that uncertainty for six months," the Echo observed. "Building a sanctuary around it. But here's the truth you've avoided: uncertainty is heavier than grief. At least grief can heal."
Another mirror showed a different memory: Elara in the sanctuary's medical ward, treating a man with radiation poisoning. She was giving him morphine, more than the protocol allowed. Enough to ease pain. Enough to stop breathing.
He'd thanked her with his last breath.
How many had she 'eased' in three months? Eight? Ten? She'd stopped counting after the first week.
"Mercy or murder?" the Echo asked.
"Both," Elara whispered. "Always both."
"At least you're honest here. Out there, in the 'real' sanctuary, you tell yourself pretty lies. You're a healer. A survivor. A good person making hard choices. But in here"—the mirrors pulsed—"you remember what you really are."
"And what's that?"
The mirrors all shifted at once, showing the same image: Elara standing in this exact room, having this exact conversation. But in the reflection, she was smiling.
"Someone who's been here before," the Echo said softly. "Many times. The seventh floor is a loop, Dr. Kane. Every resident reaches it eventually. Every resident faces their truths. And every resident makes a choice."
Elara's blood ran cold. "What choice?"
"To remember or forget. To climb higher or return to the safety of illusion. Those who forget go back down, believing they've solved their trauma. They live out their days in comfortable delusion. But those who remember..."
A door materialized in one of the mirrors—a door leading up.
"They learn that the sanctuary has more floors than anyone admits. That the climb never ends. That each floor strips away another layer until all that's left is the truth you've been running from since before the world ended."
Elara stared at the door, then back at the mirrors. At her fractured selves. At the life she'd fled and the person she'd become.
"What if I don't want either choice?" she asked. "What if I want to leave the sanctuary entirely?"
The Echo's laughter was like breaking glass.
"Oh, Dr. Kane. That's the beautiful horror of it. There is no outside. There never was. The apocalypse, the sanctuary, this floor—it's all one continuous hell, and you've been in it far longer than three months."
The mirrors began to crack, spider-webbing outward from where Elara stood. Through the fractures, she glimpsed something that made her sanity strain at its moorings.
Not Chicago in ruins.
Chicago intact.
Sunlight. Cars. People walking dogs. Coffee shops open. A world that hadn't ended.
A world where she'd never left.
"No," she breathed.
"Yes," the Echo confirmed. "The eighth floor awaits, Dr. Kane. Where you'll learn which apocalypse was real: the world's, or yours."
The mirrors shattered.
And in the darkness, Elara heard the one question that terrified her more than any monster in the wasteland:
What if she'd never left the psychiatric hospital at all?