Rowan didn't drive home after Brecon.
He didn't trust the dark anymore.
Instead, he found himself parked in a gas station on the outskirts of town, engine off, eyes locked on his reflection in the rearview mirror. The reflection stared back with a slight delay—barely perceptible. A fraction of a second. But enough.
He blinked.
His reflection didn't.
That was when he tore the mirror off and threw it in the glovebox.
The sun was rising by the time he arrived at the old flat. His real flat. Not the safehouse. The one he hadn't visited in nearly four years.
The one she used to live in.
---
The walls still smelled like winter.
Dust clung to every surface like memory. Books sat untouched, their pages warped with moisture. On the nightstand, a coffee cup with lipstick marks—faded, rimmed in dust. A ghost of a life he'd buried.
Her name was Kaia.
They met during his last assignment before the collapse of Unit 7. She was a linguist—one of the few who specialized in archaic code dialects and dead syntaxes. Her fascination with language was infectious. She believed words held power. Not metaphorically—literally.
"The first programming language," she'd once told him over wine, "was spoken. You could command gods, or summon demons, if you just knew the syntax."
He didn't believe her then.
But he remembered her hands shaking when she first saw the spiral symbol.
---
The hallway mirror was covered by a sheet.
Rowan walked past it like it was a sleeping dog. He didn't touch it. Didn't dare.
Instead, he went to the desk.
A locked drawer. The key still on his chain.
Inside: Kaia's old journals. Dozens of them. One bound in red leather.
He opened it.
Pages filled with spirals, phonetic breakdowns, runes he'd never seen before. Some scribbled in a frenzy. Some calm, deliberate. One page near the end was entirely blacked out—scratched over with ink so violently the paper had nearly torn.
But one word peeked out in the margin.
"Reflected."
On the last page, she'd written a single sentence:
"If I disappear—don't look for me. I'm not me anymore."
---
Rowan sat there for a long time, the book trembling in his hands.
Something wasn't adding up.
Kaia had left a month before Elias vanished. Claimed she was going off-grid for research. But what if it was more than that? What if she knew what Elias had found—and tried to stop it?
What if she didn't leave?
What if she was taken?
His phone buzzed.
Private number. He almost didn't answer.
Then a voice crackled through—fragmented, distant.
"Creed. You need to get out. You were seen at Brecon."
"Who is this?"
But he already knew. The voice was Felix's.
"They know what you've taken. The waveform, the logs—Vane encoded a key into the data. It's not just a signal. It's a map. You're holding the coordinates to the source."
"The source of what?"
A pause.
"…of the first echo."
Click.
---
It rained that evening.
Heavy, slanted rain, the kind that blurred windows and swallowed headlights. Rowan sat in the dark, watching it, heart thudding like a drum. He hadn't slept. He couldn't.
He kept seeing things in the corners of mirrors. Faces. Flickers of movement that didn't match his own. And worst of all—he kept hearing Kaia's voice in places she couldn't be.
In the faucet drip. In the fridge hum. In the silence between breaths.
That night, he finally pulled the sheet off the hallway mirror.
What he saw nearly stopped his heart.
Not because of what was there.
But because of what wasn't.
His reflection wasn't looking at him.
It was looking past him.
He turned.
Nothing.
He turned back.
The reflection was now smiling.
And then it opened its mouth.
No sound came out.
Only a signal.
A pitch just low enough to not be heard—only felt.
His nose bled. His vision blurred. He dropped to his knees, gripping his skull.
And just before the mirror shattered under its own tension—
—he saw her.
Kaia.
Standing behind the reflection.
But her eyes were black mirrors.
---
When he came to, the flat was silent. The mirror lay in shards. His nose still dripped blood.
He stumbled to his feet, dizzy, every nerve on fire. The cassette in his coat pocket buzzed like a heartbeat.
There was only one person left who might know what to do.
Helena Vos.
The forensic analyst who first saw the spiral on Altmann's walls—and who hadn't been the same since.
He hadn't wanted to drag her in again. But if Kaia was still alive—trapped in whatever plane that mirror led to—he needed help decoding what the Echo Code really was.
And if the reflection could speak… it meant it could lie.
Or worse—it could call.
---