Mira was not where Jamie had left her.
She hadn't moved—not physically—but the building had.
It had retracted like breath through broken lungs, sealing her into a place that felt stitched together from old dreams and half-formed lies. The corridor she now wandered was familiar, but wrong, like remembering a home you never lived in.
The lights buzzed with thoughts that weren't hers.
The floor creaked like it was trying to whisper her name in reverse.
And the walls… the walls weren't holding her in. They were holding something else back.
She walked slowly, her boots trailing old ash. The wallpaper here peeled in slow motion, like it was alive and trying not to be noticed. The air smelled of scorched flowers and static, and the only door she passed was made of teeth—neatly aligned, grinning wide.
She didn't touch it.
The hallway narrowed, the ceiling pressing low. Something in the shadows ahead shifted, breathing with a sound like a library on fire.
But it wasn't the building that made Mira stop.
It was the mirror.
Thin, framed in rust, and mounted on a stand made from old piano keys. She hadn't seen it before, but she knew it. It was hers.
The one they'd taken from her old room the day she was committed.
The mirror didn't reflect her body.
It showed her mind.
Broken into pages.
One read: "MIRA AT EIGHT—SHE KNEW THE DARK COULD LISTEN."
Another: "MIRA AT THIRTEEN—SHE LET IT IN."
Then: "MIRA, THE TEST SUBJECT."
"THE WITNESS."
"THE GHOST."
"THE WEAPON."
She reached for the glass.
And felt herself on the other side.
Not the version Jamie had met.
Not the careful, quiet survivor she'd become.
But the thing that had survived the dark with nothing but her voice.
The girl who spoke the building's true name at age fifteen and forgot her own.
The one who burned out her reflection just to make the pain stop looking back.
A hand met hers from the other side.
It was her hand. But wrong.
Fingers too long. Wrist bent like a question mark. Nails made of script.
And eyes—her own eyes—but lidless, leaking black ink.
The reflection smiled.
"Ready to come home?" it whispered.
Mira clenched her jaw. "No. I'm ready to rewrite what you did to me."
The mirror shattered inward.
Behind it was a stairwell.
And at the bottom: the West Wing.
The place she swore she'd never go again.
Where they'd buried the first Archivist.
Where the Rehearsal Room stood empty and full all at once.
And where something that remembered her name waited to remind her of it.
The steps downward felt like memories.
She didn't walk. She fell through flashbacks.
The white room with the chalkboard and the needles.
The voice behind the two-way glass.
The lullaby sung backward.
The day they told her she had no past, only potential.
The West Wing had not been touched in years.
Which is why the doors should not have been open.
But they were.
Wide and weeping.
Inside, nothing made sense.
The lights floated in midair like jellyfish. The floor was stitched from carpets and old dreams. One wall pulsed like a living lung, the other peeled back into corridors that hadn't been built yet.
At the center of it all, a chair.
Her chair.
The one they used when they tested how long the human mind could survive contradiction.
She'd chewed through the straps once.
Now, the straps were waiting.
Something sat beside the chair.
A mannequin.
No face. But dressed in her hospital gown.
A voice played on loop from an old cassette beside it:
"Subject M—pattern instability increasing.
Subject M—begins muttering in unknown syntax.
Subject M—is starting to write without ink."
Mira felt her stomach turn.
They'd tried to make her into a rewrite machine.
And maybe they'd succeeded.
Because even now, the words on the walls were shifting when she looked at them. Bending. Reordering. Responding.
This whole place remembered her.
Worse—obeyed her.
A figure appeared in the far mirror.
Not her this time.
Someone else.
Long coat. Rusted crown. Eyes hollowed out by too many visions.
The Archivist.
Not alive. Not dead.
But recording.
"She's near," the Archivist said softly, though its mouth didn't move. "The girl who writes with silence. The girl who broke the page. You've come back to finish it, haven't you?"
Mira shook her head. "No. I've come to take my name back."
The Archivist tilted its head.
"There is no going back. Only forward. Only deeper."
The lights blinked.
And now, every wall read:
WELCOME BACK, MIRA.
WE MISSED YOUR VOICE.
SPEAK THE END.
WE'LL MAKE IT REAL.
She stepped away from the chair.
But it scraped forward on its own.
The building wanted her to sit.
To command.
To rewrite.
Mira took one last look at the walls, the mirrors, the chair… and the mannequin wearing her past.
Then she whispered, "Not yet."
And walked away.
Not running.
Choosing.
The hallway sealed behind her.