The final platform is a mirror maze, but that’s a mercy compared to what’s come before.

  Alice stands at the edge of it, every breath a miracle of willpower, every heartbeat a question. The floor is obsidian, perfectly polished, and the mirrors—if they can be called that—rise up in shifting, organic columns. Each one is a black glass monolith, surface alive with rolling ripples of code, never the same from one glance to the next.

  She steps forward, and the floor eats her reflection, replacing it with a dozen different Alices, each one a study in what might have been. The first panel shows her as an admin, the suit crisp and flawless, hair braided into a crown, eyes hard as the cold star at the heart of every system. The second panel flickers, and now she is a Whiteshell: the ghostly outline, the dead gaze, the subtle, predatory tilt of the head. The third shows her as the Ghost Queen, skin opaline, Threadmancer patterns wrapping her entire body, the eyes bottomless and blue.

  Each mirror is a trap. If she stares too long, she can feel her body trying to settle into that form, to forget the last twenty minutes of pain and rebrand as something easier, something more inevitable. She keeps moving, never letting her gaze rest.

  The maze shifts as she walks. At every turn, the walls slide, the reflections multiply, some showing her as she is, some as she never could be. When she passes a panel without looking, it hums in a low, angry register, the surface vibrating with the threat of reprisal.

  She tries to track her progress, but her HUD is now useless—numbers spinning, warnings layering over warnings. The only constant is the flicker of her own Threadmancer circuits, now bright enough to cast blue-white shadows in every direction. She trails her fingers along the walls, leaving phosphorescent smears that pulse for a second, then vanish.

  The further she goes, the worse her body gets. Her hands go transparent at the fingertips, revealing the code structure beneath the surface. Sometimes her entire arm is nothing but skeleton and logic mesh; sometimes she blinks, and it’s back, good as new. Her legs stutter, her feet phase in and out of contact with the ground.

  It should terrify her, but it doesn’t. She is past terror. Now there is only the focus: left, right, left, left, right. The maze wants to trick her, but it’s running out of ideas.

  The Rabbit appears at the first dead end, reflected in every panel simultaneously. His mask is now a ruin, each fragment showing a different angle, sometimes showing nothing but raw, churning static. His voice is doubled, trebled, quadrupled: “Who—who—who are you becoming-ing-ing? Where do you end, and where does the system begin?”

  She ignores him, pressing on. The maze shudders, and the path forward is now blocked by a cluster of mirrors all angled at her, each one showing a different self. Some are beautiful; some are monstrous. In the worst one, she is just a blank shell, the outline already flaking away, the eyes replaced by endless, hungry zeroes.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  She touches the surface, and it bites her. Not a real bite, but a logic hack: a surge of current up her arm, hot enough to feel, cold enough to remember. The mirror ripples, and the memory is forced into her head:

  —She is five, hiding under a desk as her mother shouts at an invisible interlocutor, the sound of old Windows error chimes in the background.

  —She is twelve, in the clinic again, this time watching herself through the eyes of the admin who signed the order for her patch.

  —She is seventeen, running from a Protocol Enforcer, only to realize the Enforcer’s mask is her own face, welded shut at the mouth.

  Each time, the maze reconfigures, adding new mirrors, deleting old ones. The path back is gone. There is only forward.

  She uses the Threadmancer abilities now, not as a weapon but as a map: sending a pulse of blue light down every corridor, reading the echoes, following the path of least resistance. Every use costs her—she can feel her sanity dropping, her sense of self fragmenting. Her hands shake, her jaw aches, her skin is alive with the electricity of being watched.

  The echo packets start at the maze’s core: first a whimper, then a scream. They are the deleted users, the ones who didn’t make it. Some of the voices are familiar, but most are not. “Let us out,” they beg. “Don’t forget us. We were real, once.”

  She wants to say something, but her mouth is full of an error code.

  The final approach is a corridor lined with mirrors, each one closer than the last, the space shrinking with every step. In every panel, the Rabbit is there, sometimes just the mask, sometimes the whole body, sometimes just a hand, reaching out, the fingers multiplying as she nears.

  “Who are you now-now-now?” says the Rabbit, voice skipping and popping. “Are you ready for the truth?”

  She is, but not the way he means.

  She pushes ahead, the mirrors now so close that her shoulders brush both sides. The Threadmancer circuits on her arms surge, bathing the corridor in cold fire. Every panel reflects the light, casting her shadow forward, then backward, then in every direction at once.

  The echoes of deleted users reach a fever pitch. The voices overlap, some begging, some cursing, all of them desperate to be remembered.

  At the corridor’s end is a single, perfect mirror. It is obsidian, but inside it is not blackness, but a sky full of code, a horizon stretching on forever. The reflection is herself, but also not herself: she is all the Alices, the patchwork, the failed merges, the child and the queen, the victim and the predator. The face smiles, and the smile is real.

  The Rabbit’s hand reaches through the glass and grabs her by the wrist. His fingers are ice, but she doesn’t flinch.

  “Are you going to finish it?” he asks, voice now just a whisper, almost kind.

  She looks him in the eye. “I already did.”

  She lets the Threadmancer circuit take her, all the way this time. The fire leaps from her skin, into the mirror, and the obsidian surface explodes in a lattice of blue and white and gold. Every reflection shatters; every echo goes silent. The glass falls away, revealing a single, narrow bridge to the summit.

  She steps onto it, body flickering, mind burning. At the apex, the Looking Glass waits: no longer a mirror, but a doorway.

  Alice smiles, her face a patchwork, her arms alive with blue fire.

  She steps through.