Harper didn't sleep that night.
She sat at her desk with every light in the room switched on, a tangle of red string, papers, and drawings covering her wall like a conspiracy board. It was a conspiracy board now.
Room 13A.
Katherine Quinn.
The mirrored Harper.
Jamie's erasure.
The whisper in the walls.
Every thread pulled tighter the longer she stared.
She rewound the cassette again.
"She's awake. Move faster."
It didn't sound like any voice she knew. Genderless. Whispered in static. Mechanical but ancient.
She tried slowing it down, reversing it—no luck. But one thing was clear:
They knew she could see.
And they were responding.
... the Next Morning...
At Bellridge, everything looked… fine. Normal. Sunny even.
That's what terrified her the most.
Morgan met her at the edge of the courtyard, handing her a fresh black notebook.
"No digital," she said. "We work analog now. We write everything they don't want us to."
Harper opened it. Inside, Morgan had drawn the symbol from the wall—the one carved near the broken fire extinguisher glass.
Beneath it, she'd written:
"If they watch through reflections, we blind them."
By third period, Harper had already:
Stuck black tape over every reflective surface in her locker.
Covered her phone's front-facing camera.
Smashed a compact mirror in the girls' bathroom.
Avoided the sinks.
By lunch, she and Morgan had discovered that Room 13A was missing again. Replaced by Room 13B, which had never existed before. No windows. No record.
"Why would they give it a new number?" Harper asked.
Morgan replied, "To reset the pattern. Keep us off-balance. If we can't track it, we can't expose it."
Harper stared at the new brass plate.
13B.
Then scribbled in her notebook:
"They rename the crime scene and pretend it was never real."
After school, Harper visited the library. She hadn't been back since Katherine's photo showed up in the Archives.
The head librarian, Ms. Clove, was shelving books. Old. Sharp-eyed. Quiet.
Harper approached carefully.
"Ms. Clove… Do you remember Katherine Quinn?"
The woman didn't blink.
"I remember every student," she said, monotone.
Harper opened her mouth—but Ms. Clove held up a finger.
Then she whispered, too quietly to be casual:
"They're listening. Use paper."
She slid Harper a checkout slip.
Harper wrote:
"What happened to her?"
Clove read it. Then took a pen and scribbled back:
"She remembered too much."
Harper swallowed hard.
Then, one more question:
"Did they erase her?"
Clove looked Harper dead in the eye.
Then she crossed out the word erase and replaced it with:
"Rewrite. But cracks still show. You have cracks."
And beneath that:
"Fight quiet. Fight fast. Never fight alone."
Then she walked away.
That night, Harper returned to Bellridge again.
Alone this time.
Morgan was grounded—some fight with her dad about suspicious cuts on her jacket. Harper didn't want to wait.
She followed her notebook. All the signs.
Room 13A was back.
This time the door wasn't wood.
It was red. A deep, dark, arterial red. Faintly pulsing like something beneath it still lived.
She pressed her fingers against it.
Warm.
Not paint.
Blood.
Her heart pounded.
Something scratched from the inside. Not claws. Not metal.
Writing.
Words scrawled across the door in black, slowly revealing themselves as if ink seeped from the wood:
"Once you're inside, you cannot unsee."
"Choose."
Harper hesitated.
This wasn't a warning. It was an invitation.
She pulled out her pen and scrawled underneath the message:
"I already did."
And turned the handle.
Inside was… nothing.
No desk. No chairs. No Katherine. No books. Just a room filled with mirrors. Every wall, the ceiling, the floor.
Hundreds of Harpers stared back at her.
But not all of them moved when she did.
She stepped forward. One version blinked before she did. Another turned her head slightly after her.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Her own voice echoed back, fractured, repeating:
"Cracks… cracks… cracks…"
And then, from every mirror at once, a single sentence:
"You are the glitch. You are the problem."
Harper stepped back, trembling—but didn't run.
She took a deep breath.
And whispered,
"Then I'll be the glitch that ruins you."
The lights blew out.
All the mirrors shattered.
And Harper Quinn didn't scream.
Too shocked to speak...
Shocked or fear?