Rain always sounds different after midnight.
It stops being weather and starts being confession.
The old train yard stretched for miles—rusted tracks, dead engines, and broken streetlamps humming like insects. I used to come here for evidence drops back in Homicide. Now I was here for something else.
Someone else.
Aria.
She stood under one of the few working lights, the glow painting her hair silver, her coat heavy with rain. Her expression was unreadable—too calm, too rehearsed.
"Nice of you to show, up" I said, keeping my hand near my coat.
"You kept the gun," she said softly. "Good. You'll need it."
"I thought this was a talk."
"It is. But not with me."
She turned toward the shadows between the rail cars.
That's when I saw it.
A shimmer—no, a distortion—like heat rising from asphalt, but wrong. The air bent inward, rippling, humming with faint whispers. A shape emerged: human at first glance, but too fluid, too symmetrical. A mirror of light and smoke.
It was me.
Or something that wore my face.
The Echo.
"You brought it here?" I hissed.
Aria didn't look at me. "I didn't bring it. It followed you."
The thing smiled—my smile, sharper. "He's learning fast, isn't he, Aria?"
"Don't talk to it," she warned. "It feeds on attention."
But I couldn't stop. "What the hell are you?"
The Echo tilted its head. "Memory. Guilt. Reflection. I'm the version of you that remembers."
"Remembers what?"
"The therapy. The war. The murders."
Something inside me cracked. "Those people—you're saying I—"
"You both did," it whispered. "You and her. The perfect team. The healer and the subject. The detective and the demon. You killed them together to silence what you couldn't fix."
Aria flinched like it struck her.
"Lies," she said through her teeth. "It's manipulating you, Ren."
"Am I?" The Echo stepped closer. Rain passed through it like mist. "You don't remember because she made you forget. She called it treatment. I call it lobotomy."
"Enough!" Aria shouted. "You're not him."
It smiled. "Aren't I?"
For a moment, all three of us stood there—the real, the demon, and the reflection—caught in that eerie quiet between lightning and thunder.
Then the Echo moved.
It didn't walk; it shifted, reality warping around its outline. The pressure hit me like vertigo, a sudden storm of noise and memory. Images flooded in—blood on Aria's hands, my own reflection laughing in a one-way mirror, the Hollow Smile victims screaming without sound.
I fired.
The bullet passed through the air and curved, twisting like the world itself refused to obey. The Echo flickered, and suddenly it was behind me, whispering against my ear.
"You can't kill a thought, Ren."
Aria's hand caught my arm, dragging me backward. Her eyes glowed, the air around her thick with resonance. The rain froze midair, every droplet suspended like glass.
"Get out of my head," she hissed.
The Echo smiled wider. "You never left mine."
The sigils flared across the ground—those same spirals, burning faint blue now. They pulsed like a heartbeat. Aria dropped to one knee, blood seeping from her nose.
"Aria!"
"It's binding itself," she gasped. "Trying to merge us again."
"Can you stop it?"
"Not alone."
I didn't think. I just reached for her hand.
Her skin was cold—electric. The moment our palms touched, the world inverted.
The rain vanished. The train yard dissolved into light.
Suddenly we were standing in a white void—like a dream stripped of color. Echoes of our voices rippled through the air, overlapping, repeating.
This wasn't the physical world.
This was inside.
Her resonance and mine had collided.
Memories drifted like ghosts around us—floating images of moments we'd both forgotten.
Aria, sitting across from me in a therapy chair, her voice calm and warm.
Me, confessing things I didn't remember doing.
The Hollow Smile victims, smiling in slow motion as ink bled from their eyes.
"They weren't patients," I whispered. "They were test subjects."
Aria closed her eyes. "It was part of the program. Depsy wasn't just solving crimes—they were creating them. Simulated trauma therapy, emotional weaponization. They needed human-demon pairs that could sync completely."
"And we volunteered."
She nodded weakly. "Or thought we did."
The Echo's voice echoed through the white void, distorted and intimate.
"You were their masterpiece, Ren. You and Aria—the perfect bridge between logic and emotion. They built the Depsy division around your bond. But bonds have limits. Someone had to break."
Aria clutched her head. "Stop it!"
"Why? You know it's true. You erased his pain, Aria. You rewrote his mind until he couldn't tell where you ended and he began. You didn't fall in love with him—you became him."
The void trembled. I could feel her resonance spiraling out of control.
"Aria," I said, gripping her shoulders, "don't listen. That's not us anymore."
She looked at me, eyes full of light and exhaustion. "Then who are we, Ren? If the memories aren't real, if the guilt isn't real—what's left?"
I didn't have an answer.
The Echo appeared between us, smiling gently now. Almost sad.
"You keep searching for truth, detective. But truth is just the prettiest lie that holds together. Let me show you what happens when it doesn't."
Its hand touched my forehead—cold, infinite.
And suddenly I was back there.
The therapy room. The white walls. The machine humming beside us. Aria's voice calm. My hands trembling.
"It's all right, Ren. Just breathe. I'll take the pain."
"What if you take too much?"
"Then I'll carry it for you."
Then the lights exploded, and the world went black again.
When I came to, I was lying on the train tracks. The rain had started again, and Aria was gone. Only the faint burn marks of the sigils remained on the ground, still warm to the touch.
The Echo was nowhere. But its whisper lingered in my head, faint and familiar:
"You can't save her without remembering yourself."
I sat up slowly, drenched and shaking. My hand brushed against something beside me—a small object half-buried in mud. Aria's pendant. The one she always wore beneath her coat.
Inside was a photograph—blurry, old, half-burned.
Two people standing side by side in a therapy room.
Aria Vale.
And me.
Except in the picture… our eyes were the same color.
The city lights burned faintly on the horizon as I stood. Somewhere out there, Depsy would already be covering this up, rewriting the story for the morning news. "Rogue demon consultant missing. Officer under investigation."
But I knew better.
She wasn't missing. She was trapped—in the one place no one could reach.
Her own mind.
And maybe mine.
I holstered my gun and looked down the empty tracks, rain streaming over my face.
"Aria," I whispered, "if you can still hear me… I'm coming to get you back."
The streetlight flickered once.
Just enough to make the shadows smile.