Lyos Lever couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the child’s face-wide-eyed, haunted, whispering his name. Sometimes, in his dreams, it was his own face staring back, the eyes wrong, the smile too wide. He woke before dawn, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, heart pounding as if he’d run for miles.

  He sat at his desk, notebook open. He tried to make sense of the scrawled message from the night before:

  “Soon, you won’t remember which side of the glass you’re on.”

  He wrote down every detail he could recall: the blackouts, the dreams, the messages, the witnesses’ words. As he traced the events, a pattern began to emerge-dates, places, the number twenty-six recurring in ways that made his skin crawl. Twenty-six minutes missing from security footage. Twenty-six steps from the alley to the crime scene. Twenty-six days since the first blackout.

  He circled the number over and over, the ink bleeding through the page.

  A knock startled him. Liora’s voice came through the door. “It’s me.”

  She entered, eyes red-rimmed but determined, and dropped a stack of files on the table. “I found something. Old foundation records, from when the Architect was alive. Staff logs, patient interviews, security reports. There’s a pattern, Lyos. Every few years, someone starts reporting missing time, strange dreams, seeing themselves in mirrors. Then the disappearances start.”

  Lyos flipped through the files, hands shaking. The names blurred together, but the dates matched his own blackouts. “How did no one notice?”

  Liora’s lips pressed thin. “They did. But the records were buried. The Architect was obsessed with consciousness, with splitting the self. He wrote about ‘the mirror mind’-a second self that could be trained, strengthened, set free.”

  Lyos felt cold all over. “You think he did this to me?”

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  “I think he started something he couldn’t control. And now it’s happening again.”

  They spent the morning piecing together the timeline. The pattern was unmistakable: every cycle ended with violence, then silence. The survivors vanished, or were found dead-sometimes by their own hand, sometimes under mysterious circumstances.

  Lyos stared at the final page. “What if I’m next?”

  Liora squeezed his hand. “We’re going to break the cycle. We have to.”

  Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, frowning. “It’s Soren. He wants to meet. He says he’s found something big.”

  They met Soren at a small café near the river. The sky was overcast, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Soren looked worse than ever-unshaven, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling as he nursed a cup of coffee.

  “I dug deeper into the Architect’s past,” he said quietly. “There are rumors he never died. Some say he found a way to live on-not in body, but in mind. There’s talk of a ritual, something to transfer consciousness from one host to another. I think whatever’s inside you, Lyos, is older than you realize.”

  Lyos’s mouth went dry. “You think I’m possessed?”

  Soren shook his head. “Not possessed. Infected. Like a parasite, but made of thoughts. It needs a mind to live in. And it learns, adapts, gets stronger every time.”

  Liora’s face was pale. “Is there a way to fight it?”

  Soren hesitated. “Maybe. The Architect’s journals mention a ‘mirror ritual’-a way to confront the other self. But it’s dangerous. People who tried it…most didn’t survive.”

  Lyos felt a strange calm settle over him. “I don’t care. I can’t keep living like this.”

  Soren slid a photocopied page across the table. It was covered in symbols-intersecting lines, circles, and the number 26 repeated in the margins.

  “You’ll need help,” Soren said. “Don’t do it alone.”

  Lyos nodded, determination hardening inside him. “Tonight. We start tonight.”

  That evening, back in his apartment, Lyos prepared for the ritual. He covered every mirror but one, placed the notebook and the copied page on the desk, and drew the curtains tight. Liora arrived just after sunset, her presence a steady anchor.

  As they began, the air in the room seemed to thicken, the shadows deepening. Lyos stared into the uncovered mirror, repeating the words from the journal. His reflection stared back, eyes dark and endless.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the glass rippled, and his reflection smiled-a wide, predatory grin.

  Lyos’s vision blurred. He felt himself slipping, falling into the glass. The last thing he heard was Liora’s voice, distant and terrified:

  “Lyos! Don’t let go!”

  And then the world went black.