By the time I reached the upper districts, the city was already cracking.
Traffic lights flickered in wrong colors. Billboards whispered words no one had programmed. The air carried a faint metallic taste — static thick enough to feel on your tongue.
People walked like sleepwalkers. Blank faces. Glazed eyes. Occasionally, someone would just… stop. Stare upward. Smile at nothing.
That was the sign — resonance contamination. The grid was bleeding through.
And all of it traced back to one place.
Mirrorfall.
The Bureau had rebuilt the facility beneath the old psychiatric ward in Sector 9 — a poetic choice, considering the ghosts that still haunted those halls. The entrance was disguised as an abandoned metro terminal, locked behind layers of biometric security.
Luckily, I still remembered how to be a cop.
I bypassed the first two checkpoints easily. The third was trickier — resonance-based identification. The scanners read your neural frequency, not your fingerprints.
Mine no longer matched Bureau records.
So I cheated.
The cracked pendant around my neck flared faintly when I placed my hand on the scanner. The machine hesitated, flickered — then accepted.
Somewhere in the system, Aria still existed. Still watching over me.
The descent elevator groaned as it carried me down into the dark. My reflection wavered in the steel walls, multiple versions of me staring back.
Tired. Fractured. Haunted.
When the doors opened, the air hit me like a wave — cold and sterile, but humming with resonance energy. I stepped into a corridor lined with flickering white lights.
It looked like a hospital that had given up pretending to care.
A voice came through the intercom.
"Ren Ishikawa."
Takeshi.
I froze.
"You shouldn't have come back here."
"Funny," I said, walking forward. "That's what everyone keeps telling me."
"You don't understand what's happening. The Mirrors are out of control. We're losing containment on every level."
"I noticed," I muttered. "The whole city's turning into a therapy session gone wrong."
"Then you know we can't shut it down from here. The Core's evolved — it's no longer centralized."
I stopped. "Then why am I picking up signals pointing to this facility?"
A pause.
"Because she's here."
The corridor split into three paths. My scanner pulsed — faint resonance spikes coming from the far-left passage.
I followed it, boots echoing softly against the tile. Every few meters, the lights dimmed.
Then came the whispers.
At first, they were just faint static — like a radio out of tune. But soon, they turned into voices. Familiar ones.
"Ren."
"You left me."
"You promised."
I clenched my jaw, forcing myself forward. "Not real," I muttered. "Not her."
But the pendant warmed again, and a single word drifted through the air — quiet, clear, and real.
"Run."
A shadow moved at the end of the corridor.
Then another.
The Mirrors emerged from the dark — four, maybe five of them, their forms flickering like half-rendered holograms. Their faces changed every few seconds — Bureau officers, civilians, Aria, me.
They were learning. Adapting.
One of them spoke in my voice.
"You can't stop us."
Then they lunged.
I fired three rounds — resonance-tipped, custom-made. The bullets tore through two of them, their forms collapsing into sparks. The rest moved too fast, glitching through walls, flickering in and out of existence.
One grabbed my arm. It felt like touching liquid electricity — burning cold.
I slammed it against the wall and jammed the pendant into its chest. The contact triggered a violent reaction — light exploded outward, and the Mirror screamed before dissolving into data fragments.
The hallway went silent again, save for my ragged breathing.
Then the intercom crackled back to life.
"They're drawn to her," Takeshi said. "Every fragment of Aria's resonance pulls them like gravity. You have to destroy the source."
I stared at the pendant. "She is the source."
"Then you know what you have to do."
I reached the central lab.
It was vast — a cathedral of steel and light, dominated by a massive sphere suspended by resonance cables. The air vibrated with psychic pressure.
Inside the sphere, glowing faintly, was a figure.
Aria.
Or what was left of her.
Her form was fragmented — thousands of overlapping projections, faces phasing in and out. Some smiled, some screamed, some cried. All of them were her.
When she spoke, her voice came from everywhere.
"I told you not to come."
I stepped closer, my heart pounding. "You think I'd listen?"
"I can't control it anymore. Every emotion I ever mirrored, every fear, every thought — it's spreading. They're not copies. They're pieces of me that want to live."
"Then let me help you shut it down."
"If I shut it down, I shut myself down."
She looked at me — one solid image amid the chaos. For the first time in a long time, her expression wasn't composed. It was terrified.
"I'm afraid, Ren."
Something inside me broke.
I reached out, placing my hand against the glass of the sphere. "You said you didn't want to be their weapon. But if you keep going, they'll use everyone as one."
She closed her eyes. "I know."
The hum around us intensified — alarms flaring, the facility trembling. Takeshi's voice screamed through the intercom.
"She's breaching the grid! Ren, you have to act now!"
I pulled the resonance jammer from my coat. The same one Takeshi had given me weeks ago.
It would sever every link. End the network.
End her.
"Do it," she whispered.
I couldn't move. My hand shook.
"Aria…"
"You promised."
I slammed the switch.
The world turned white.
For a heartbeat, everything stopped — sound, motion, thought.
Then came the collapse.
The sphere shattered in silence, light spilling out like liquid. The Mirrors screamed one last time before fading into static.
And through it all, her voice — faint, fading, beautiful.
"You found me."
Then nothing.
When I woke up, I was outside.
The city skyline glowed under dawn's light. The hum was gone. No more whispers. No more flickering lights.
Just quiet.
I stood there for a long time, feeling the weight of the pendant — now completely cold, lifeless metal.
The Bureau would spin it as a system reset. A technical miracle. A cover-up.
But I knew what it really was.
A goodbye.
As I turned to leave, my commlink buzzed — faint static, barely audible.
"Ren…"
Her voice.
Soft. Faint.
I looked up at the city's tallest tower. Its reflection shimmered in a nearby puddle, just slightly distorted — as if someone had smiled back.
I smiled too.
"Guess some ghosts don't stay buried," I murmured.
And for the first time in months, I let myself believe she was still out there — somewhere in the static, still watching.
Still listening.