Mira backed into the corner, her spine pressing against a wall that hadn't been there moments ago. The room was shrinking. Not visibly—but she could feel it, as though the walls were breathing in and refusing to exhale.
The other-Mira stood across the table, untouched by fear. She tilted her head, studying Mira like a reflection in warped glass.
"You left me down here," she said softly. "Do you even remember when?"
Mira shook her head, too stunned to speak. Her throat felt closed. Her mind a blur of fractured timelines.
"I remember everything," the doppelgänger said, stepping closer. "The day you shut the door. The sound of your footsteps running away. You promised you'd come back. You never did."
"That's not true," Mira managed. "I've never been here before."
The girl smiled. "Haven't you?"
The walls shifted again. The table evaporated into smoke. The chairs folded in on themselves like broken marionettes. Mira blinked—and suddenly they were standing in a long, narrow corridor of mirrors. Each one taller than a door, framed in tarnished silver and dust.
The other-Mira stood in the reflection. In all the reflections.
But Mira was nowhere to be seen.
She turned to flee, but the corridor offered no exit.
"You've been forgetting," the other-Mira said, now behind her, voice right beside her ear. "For years. Pieces of you chipped off every time you turned away. Every time you refused to remember."
A mirror rippled as if water. Mira stared into it—and for the first time, she saw herself. But not as she was.
As she had been.
A child. Kneeling at the edge of her mother's bed. Whispering to a locked door in the floor. Her mother stood behind her, eyes hollow and distant.
"Never open it," the reflection said.
"But there's crying," the child said. "Someone's down there."
"There's nothing down there," her mother snapped.
Mira stepped back from the mirror. The image followed her—now showing her as a teenager, standing in the woods, clutching the key around her neck. Crying. Bleeding. Whispering someone's name.
She couldn't hear it.
Couldn't remember it.
The other-Mira watched her, smile gone.
"She made you forget," she said. "The house helped."
"Why?" Mira's voice cracked.
"Because you knew something you weren't supposed to. You saw something." The reflection's eyes gleamed. "You locked it away. You buried me here to protect yourself. But protection comes with a cost."
The corridor began to twist, mirrors warping inward, distorting faces. Screams echoed—dozens of them, hundreds—her own voice in different ages, different versions. All trapped. All begging to be remembered.
The floor groaned. Not wood—bone.
Cracks appeared beneath her feet, glowing with pale, cold light.
"You can't outrun memory," the other-Mira said. "Not here."
Then she lunged.
Mira fell backward, through one of the mirrors.
Glass didn't shatter.
It swallowed her.
Darkness again.
But this time, not quiet.
Whispers flooded her ears. Voices she knew. A lullaby. A scream. A name.
Her name.
But not how she remembered it.
Not how she'd ever said it aloud.