The road to Brecon was a narrow ribbon of asphalt winding through mist-shrouded hills. Beyond the reach of satellites and cell towers, the air grew colder with every mile. The signal faded to static on Rowan's radio around the time the last village disappeared in his rearview mirror.
By the time he reached the gates, night had fully fallen.
The facility wasn't marked on any map.
No signage, no lights, no signs of life. Just two rusted fences flanked by skeletal pines and a road that dipped into shadow. The gate creaked open with a nudge, held together by little more than frost and forgotten warnings. On the other side: a cracked path leading into black.
The place hadn't been used in over two decades. At least, not officially.
Rowan's boots crunched over gravel as he approached the main structure—a low, brutalist bunker half-buried into the hillside. Moss crept over the concrete like bruises. Cameras hung limp and blind. The heavy steel door was half open, as though someone had fled and never bothered to close it behind them.
He stepped inside.
The air shifted instantly—cold, thick, wrong. Like walking into a pressure chamber where the laws of space had warped ever so slightly.
His flashlight beam sliced through dust and decay. The corridor was narrow, lined with peeling paint and cables that looked surgically ripped from their sockets. On the walls, faded signs marked abandoned departments:
SUBLEVEL A – ACOUSTIC THEORY LAB
SUBLEVEL B – SIGNAL CONTAINMENT
SUBLEVEL C – COGNITIVE INTERFERENCE MONITORING
He started with Sublevel B.
The stairwell descended deeper than expected—four flights down, deeper than any of the blueprints Felix had provided. The walls were damp. Echoes didn't behave normally. His own footsteps seemed to stutter behind him—just a millisecond late, as if his shadow was walking half a step behind.
When he reached the bottom, the lights flickered once, then stabilized.
Rowan found himself in a long hallway lined with viewing windows. Behind the glass: soundproof chambers—clean rooms designed for containment. Or observation.
Inside one, the walls were lined with mirrors. Not one—dozens. Each fractured. Each angled just slightly differently, forming a web of reflections that distorted even his flashlight's beam.
On the far side, a message was scrawled across the glass in thick black marker.
DO NOT ENTER WITH SOUND
DO NOT THINK ABOUT IT TOO LOUDLY
DO NOT SPEAK THE NAME
The last part was underlined twice. Beneath it, smeared fingerprints trailed off into darkness.
Rowan turned to the console beside the door. Dusty, corroded—but not untouched. Recent fingerprints tracked across the controls. Someone had been here. Recently.
He pressed PLAY on the console.
The speakers hummed.
Not sound.
Silence.
But beneath the silence—barely detectable—was a pulse. A rhythm. A heartbeat encoded in absence.
And then, a voice.
"If you're hearing this…
you're already infected."
Rowan froze.
"It's not a virus. Not exactly. It's a harmonic seed. It plants itself in perception—uses reflection as medium. Mirrors, yes, but also memory. Language. Once it enters, it rewrites the concept of echo. The self that responds. It makes you think you're alone… but you're not."
The voice trembled—like the man was unraveling as he spoke.
"We called it the Black Signal. But it has other names. The original ones are unpronounceable. It came from deep structure—before thought. Before light. It doesn't speak. It echoes. It learns your voice, your fears. And then it responds."
Click.
The message ended.
Rowan stood there, heart thudding, hand trembling near his coat pocket where the cassette tape still rested. He hadn't played it since London. But it pulsed now—he could feel it. Like it recognized this place. Like it was humming in harmony.
He pushed onward.
---
The next chamber had no mirrors.
Just walls scorched with spirals.
Some matched the patterns from Altmann's skin. Others were more chaotic—like they'd been carved in a frenzy. In the center of the room was a chair, bolted to the floor. A helmet lay beside it, its cables trailing into an ancient control system.
Rowan approached cautiously.
This was the source. The origin point.
On the table beside the chair lay a single photograph—black and white, grainy. It showed Elias Vane standing in this very room, holding a notebook. His eyes were sunken. Behind him, in the reflection of the far window, a second figure stood.
But Elias was alone in the room.
Rowan turned over the photo.
Written on the back:
"It's through the reflection that it listens. But it answers in you."
His breath fogged.
He turned toward the mirror behind the chair.
There was no one else in the room.
And yet… there were two of him in the reflection.
He spun.
Empty.
Turned back.
Still two.
Rowan backed away, heart hammering.
He stumbled into the corridor—and saw something else. A door he hadn't noticed before. Partially ajar. No label.
Inside was a server room, half-powered. Screens glitched with static. The walls hummed with low frequency. But in the far corner—an old terminal blinked green. One word on screen:
VANE
Rowan approached.
The cursor blinked.
He typed: ACCESS VANE FILES
The system hesitated.
Then: Access Granted
Dozens of files flooded the screen—audio logs, encoded diagrams, linguistic fragments, recorded sessions. He clicked the top log.
Vane's voice.
Clearer this time. Conflicted. Eroded.
"The entity… the signal… it doesn't arrive. It awakens. It's part of us. Buried in the parts of the brain we don't map. Dormant until heard. Until seen. It is a code, yes—but more like a… frequency-mimicking virus that thinks."
"I thought I could trap it here. In mirrors. In symbols. In loops of itself. But it changes. It evolves every time it's perceived."
"I saw myself. But not myself. A version of me that remembered things I haven't done yet."
"The spiral is not a symbol. It's a cage."
Click.
Rowan leaned against the console. The room spun. The floor shifted.
He remembered what Helena said—the forensic tech who had a seizure after photographing Altmann's walls. "He started hearing light… seeing sound."
Synesthesia. Or something worse.
Something rewiring perception itself.
Rowan knew then—this wasn't just a case.
It was a threshold.
A line between the known and something older, hungrier, echoing backward from a time before reason.
He downloaded everything. Inserted the cassette into a drive. Synced the pulse with the logs.
The waveform on screen changed.
It synchronized.
And then, for just a moment, the speakers spoke.
But not in English.
Not in any known language.
They whispered in his voice.
Repeating something he hadn't said.
Not yet.
"She's already gone.
You left her in the mirror.
You never came back."
Rowan staggered out of the room.
Back into the corridor. Up the stairs. Through the dark.
And when he finally burst into the open air, gasping in the Welsh night, his reflection followed a half-second behind.