The warehouse in the river district was a known quantity. A Cicada forward post, decommissioned eighteen months ago after a minor security review. The briefing said it should be empty. Clean. A simple physical verification confirm no squatters, no unauthorized signals, document the state of the infrastructure. A janitorial task. A test of her observational skills, nothing more.
It should have been easy.
The cold here was damp, seeping through the layers of the matte suit. It smelled of rust, old motor oil, and the faint, sweet tang of river mud. Nyx moved through the vast, echoing space of the main floor, her headlamp cutting a narrow beam through the darkness. Empty crates, stacked and forgotten. Faded shipping labels peeling from walls. The silence was a thick blanket, broken only by the scuttle of something small in a distant corner.
Nominal, she thought.
She found the stairs to the mezzanine office level. Metal steps, grit underfoot. Her gloved hand on the railing left a clean streak in the dust. Up here, the offices were glass-walled boxes overlooking the factory floor. Most were shattered, opaque with grime.
One at the end was intact.
The door was locked. A keypad, long dead. She used a slim jemmy from her thigh kit, and the latch gave with a tired squeal. Inside, it was a time capsule. A metal desk. A broken chair. A calendar on the wall frozen on a month three years past. And a whole wall of grimy, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the warehouse.
She moved to the window, not to look out, but to look at the reflection. To check her own silhouette against the darkness, to ensure no light was leaking from her gear. Standard procedure.
Her reflection was a dark shape against the black void of the warehouse. The headlamp was off. She was just a silhouette in the glass.
Then she moved her head, just slightly.
And the reflection… didn't.
It was her. But it wasn't now her. The suit was wrong. It had more bulk at the shoulders. A harness she didn't remember putting on. The cut of the collar was higher, tactical, sealing at the neck. And the hair....her hair was tucked under her own hood, but in the reflection, a wisp of it fell differently, longer, against a cheek that looked… sharper. Hollowed out.
She froze.
Her heart gave a single, hard thump against her ribs, a rogue beat in the machinery.
She blinked.
The reflection blinked back. Now it was just her. The familiar suit. The proper hood. Her own face, pale and tense in the dark glass. The extra harness was gone. The hair was correct.
A trick of the light. A smear on the glass. Fatigue.
She'd slept maybe four hours in the last forty-eight. The fundraiser, the stress of the overlap, the constant calculus of school....it was cumulative. Graham's voice: Stress creates echoes.
This was an echo. A glitch in the visual processing software. Nothing more.
She turned away from the window sharply, the movement abrasive. She focused on the room. The desk. She yanked open a drawer. Empty, save for a dead insect and a paperclip. She documented it with a quick scan from her wrist unit. The mechanical action helped. Click. Store. Move on.
But the cold in her bones wasn't from the warehouse anymore.
She completed the sweep. Main floor, loading bays, electrical room with its carcass of a breaker panel. Her reports, whispered into her mic, were clinical. Accurate. Her voice didn't shake.
She saw only herself. The right self.
By the time she hit the extraction point, a rusted door by the river dock....the incident had been compressed, filed under MISSION ANOMALY: VISUAL. PROBABLE CAUSE: FATIGUE. She believed the filing. She had to.
The car was waiting, a non-descript sedan. The driver said nothing. She slid into the back seat, shedding the operative mindset like a heavy coat. Or trying to. The image in the glass stuck. Not as a threat, but as a… wrongness. Like hearing a single, dissonant note in a familiar song.
Back at the safe-house apartment, the silence was different. It wasn't empty. It was watchful.
She stripped the suit, the process automatic. Shower. The water was scalding, but she still felt the damp warehouse cold in her core. She dressed in Lyra's soft clothes. The sweatpants, the worn t-shirt. She made tea. The routine.
She sat on the floor, her back against the sofa, the mug warming her hands. The blank console table across the room seemed to accuse her.
The glasses are still broken.
The thought was a sudden, quiet intrusion. It wasn't about vision. It was about a fracture. A thing not being whole.
She saw Jax's knowing smile in the library. Must make you wonder what else is gonna just… disappear.
She saw the man in the green sedan, watching her.
And she saw the reflection. The not-her. The her that looked harder. Used. A version from a mission she hadn't run yet, or… one she'd already forgotten?
No. That was insanity. Fatigue and stress. A crack in the seam, just like Graham warned.
Her hand went to her ear, to the tiny, almost invisible scar where the receiver's induction port was embedded. A physical anchor. She was real. This was real. The cracked lens, the tape, the too-quiet apartment....this was the real world.
The other world, the warehouses, the encrypted messages, the silent footsteps—it was the construct. It was supposed to be sharp, clear, logical. Not a place where reflections lied.
She didn't move immediately. She finished her tea, watching the light pulse like a slow, patient heartbeat. Finally, she stood, walked over, and pressed her thumb to the wood.
Graham's voice, filtered and calm. "Report."
"Warehouse sweep complete. No signs of occupancy. No active signals. Infrastructure is degraded, as expected. No surprises." She used Nyx's voice. Flat. Sure.
A pause. Longer than usual. "Biometrics showed a minor elevated heart rate at the nineteen-minute mark. Context?"
He was watching the feeds. Always watching.
Her throat tightened. The window. The reflection. A glitch. A meaningless blip.
"A rodent," she said, the lie forming smoothly. "Displacement in the ceiling. It startled me. Momentary."
Another pause. "I see." Did he? Could he see the ghost in the glass from a hundred miles away? "Your stress indicators have been elevated for 72 hours, Lyra. The overlap exercise. The school environment. It's a load. You need to offload. The civilian side… you need to stabilize it."
"I'm stable."
"Fix the glasses," he said, and the command was gentle, final. "Something simple. Concrete. Remind yourself which world has physical objects that break and can be repaired. Do it tomorrow."
The connection severed.
Lyra remained at the console, her thumb on the now-cool wood. She looked towards the bathroom, where the taped glasses sat on the edge of the sink.
A simple, concrete thing.
But as she got ready for bed, avoiding her own gaze in the mirror, the memory of the reflection wouldn't offload.
And the most chilling part wasn't the unfamiliar gear, or the hollow look on that face.
It was the certainty in that other reflection's eyes. The eyes that had looked back at her, not with surprise, but with a kind of weary recognition. As if she were the ghost.