"Mirrors are eyes. And someone is using them against you."
The bathroom mirror still bore the faint traces of the charcoal symbol: four vertical lines crossed by a slanted spiral. But that morning, Lucas noticed something strange — the reflection was... delayed.
It wasn't exactly a reflection. It was as if the image lagged a few milliseconds behind his real movements. A slight misalignment. Almost imperceptible — except to someone obsessively watching himself, like Lucas was now.
He splashed his face three times.
Looked again.
Nothing.
But as he turned to leave...
The reflection didn't move.
Frozen. Staring at him.
Lucas froze.
He turned back toward the mirror.
The image followed, as it should.
But inside, a sensation clung like rust:
"Something watches you from within the surface. And it has already learned how to pretend."
Later, upon arriving at the precinct, Lucas noticed Erick looking at him differently. No longer suspicious — but no longer skeptical either. It was the kind of look someone gives when they've chosen to cross a threshold from which they can never return.
"I have something to show you," Erick said.
They brought the forensics computer into the meeting room.
Erick typed a sequence. A short video appeared. Captured by a high-definition municipal surveillance camera.
It showed the same alleyway where Lucas had exited during the night, after the activation of the Fourth Degree.
But now, something new.
In the reflection of a nearby window...
A hooded figure was watching everything.
Most unsettling: the figure's face wasn't caught directly. Only indirectly, through the window's reflection.
And the face seen there...
...was Lucas's.
"Any theories?" Erick asked cautiously.
Lucas took a moment.
Then replied simply:
"That... isn't me."
That night, Lucas decided to test something.
He set up three mirrors in his apartment. One in the bathroom, another in the bedroom, and a third improvised in the living room, using an old frame he had bought years ago at a thrift store in Pinheiros.
He spent the entire day observing the reflections.
Nothing.
But when the clock struck 3:03 AM, all the mirrors in the apartment fogged up simultaneously — as if moisture had been blown inside the glass.
Lucas got up silently.
Went to the mirror in the living room.
And there it was again.
The hooded figure.
But this time... with its back turned.
It was staring into another mirror — one Lucas didn't have.
And in that invisible mirror...
Was Lucas's own reflection, bleeding from the eyes.
The living room floor trembled slightly.
Lucas blinked.
Everything was normal again.
Except for one thing:
In the lower corner of the mirror, a freshly scratched phrase:
"Mirrors are eyes. And someone is using them against you."
Lucas began to understand he wasn't just being watched.
He was being duplicated.
And possibly... fragmented.
The next morning, Lucas went to the precinct's archive. He wasn't searching for a case — he was searching for a name: Josué Toledo, a former investigator retired due to disability, who disappeared in 2003 and was declared dead two years later.
But Lucas knew he was alive.
An old informant named Gariba had mentioned Josué weeks before, saying he lived in isolation on a small farm in the countryside — far from windows... and mirrors.
Apparently, Josué was one of the few living people who had survived an encounter with a Living Reflection — as he called it.
Lucas got in the car and left.
he farm was located in Guararema — small, hidden behind tall eucalyptus trees and a broken wooden fence.
The gate was open.
Inside, a raw masonry house, with walls scratched on the inside as if someone had tried to record memories... or erase time.
Josué opened the door holding a shotgun.
"I don't take visitors," he growled.
Lucas raised his hands.
"I just need answers."
Josué stared at him for several long seconds.
"You've already been touched, haven't you?"
Lucas hesitated.
"I don't know what that means."
Josué scoffed. Stepped aside.
"You do. You're just still in denial."
The house was filled with covered objects. All mirrors had been removed. The windows were draped in black cloth. The floor creaked as Lucas stepped in.
Josué offered coffee — no ceremony. It was strong, bitter, almost medicinal.
"They're not reflections. They're copies.
Attempts to become you, only... without limits.
The mirror is just the channel. What lives there... is a fragment of something greater."
Lucas felt his stomach churn.
"You've seen yours?"
Josué chuckled.
"It saw me first."
He pulled out a worn leather folder.
Inside: dozens of old photos, with red circles drawn on them. Each showed images captured by outdated surveillance cameras — all with one thing in common:
People standing in front of mirrors that reflected something wrong.
Duplicated faces. Frozen screams. Smiles that didn't move.
One of them was of Lucas. From seven years ago.
He stood in front of the morgue mirror, a suicide victim's body behind him.
In the reflection... both were smiling.
"Living Mirrors are part of the Veiled Heritage," said Josué. "One of the Orders that deals with the 'invisible imitator.'
They're not allies of the Vigil.
Nor enemies.
They're... something else. Older."
Lucas frowned.
"And what do they want?"
"Experiences. Fractures. The breaking of the original image.
When a reflection successfully copies you...
It can walk without leaving traces.
It can kill in your place.
It can enter dreams that aren't yours."
Lucas left the farm with more questions than answers. But he knew one thing now:
Someone — or something — was trying to become him.
And soon, there might be no way to prove he was the original.
The call came at 7:12 in the morning.
"Chief Rodrigo speaking.
Mr. Lucas Yamazaki, you are being officially notified."
Lucas, still without coffee, raised an eyebrow.
"Notified for what?"
"Attempted intimidation, home invasion, and direct threat to the integrity of a citizen under judicial protection.
The curious part is... she gave your full name. And identified you by photo."
Lucas's stomach dropped.
"Who?"
"A woman named Lúcia Noronha. A victim in a domestic violence case from last year.
She claims you were at her house last night."
Lucas fell silent.
He didn't know any Lúcia Noronha.
At the police station, the details worsened.
Lúcia had filed a formal report. She said "Lucas Yamazaki" appeared at her door, wore gloves, but the voice was identical. He stared at her for two minutes and said:
"The reflection never dies. It just changes angles."
Then vanished.
A neighbor's security camera captured the suspect calmly leaving the condo, wearing a black overcoat.
The face… unmistakable.
It was him.
Lucas watched the footage, Erick beside him.
"This is… impossible," Lucas whispered.
Erick didn't reply immediately.
The tension between them grew.
Later that afternoon, another call.
Homicide. Central region. An abandoned antique shop.
When they arrived, Lucas saw the blood mark on the wall.
A crude symbol:
A cracked mirror with an eye at the center.
On the floor, the body of a man. Dead from hemorrhage — precise, deep, surgical cuts.
But the worst was yet to come.
Forensics found fingerprints.
And blood.
Lucas's.
Erick gripped the case folder tightly. His hands trembled.
"Lucas... help me help you.
Tell me you weren't here last night."
"I wasn't," Lucas said, staring at the symbol on the wall.
"But something was. And it used my face.
And, apparently... my blood."
Erick didn't know what to say.
That night, Lucas opened an old notebook and wrote:
"The duplication is accelerating.
The copy no longer needs mirrors.
Maybe it never did.
Maybe... it came from me."
A soft tap on the window made him look.
In the glass…
His reflection was smiling.
But he wasn't.
Erick always believed in evidence. In data. In testimonies backed by logic.
But in recent days, the reports clashed with reality like fists against a locked door.
And that particular morning was the breaking point.
On his desk lay a copy of Dário Menezes's statement, doorman of a residential building in Consolação:
"I saw two men arguing in the alley. They were identical. Same suit, same voice. But one of them… was bleeding from the eyes."
Erick read it for the fourth time.
No doubt: Dário had described two Lucas Yamazakis.
And the most unsettling detail: the "bleeding Lucas" pointed at the other and shouted:
"You're just a broken reflection! You're not real!"
But the other... simply smiled.
And then, they both vanished.
Erick didn't tell Lucas.
Not yet.
Instead, he began building his own secret dossier.
He included:
Copies of the videos from the alley and the threatened womanReports with time inconsistencies in Lucas's shiftsAnd a new item, captured by Light's substation cameras in the Lapa neighborhood:
A man with Lucas's face… passing through a locked gate from the inside without opening it.
Erick began to doubt everything.
Even himself.
Meanwhile, Lucas spent the afternoon trying to understand a discomfort in his chest.
It wasn't pain. Nor weight.
It was a pulsing heat.
The Fourth Grade Stone, which used to glow softly, now burned — red, intense.
And that night, as he slept, he dreamed of nine floating stones in the sky.
The fifth fragment — black like burnt coal — hovered closer.
"You're about to burn from the inside," whispered the same voice from the previous Stone.
"And he will use that against you.
The reflection... has learned to grow."
Lucas woke up sweating, breathless.
His left hand was bleeding from the old scar — as if it were opening again.
And in the bathroom mirror, his image… blinked.
But he hadn't blinked.
The next morning, Lucas found an envelope under the door. No sender.
Inside, a single printed photo.
It showed him, from behind, staring into the reflection of a mirror.
But in the reflection…
his face was turned toward the camera.
Smiling.
And on the wall behind the reflection, written in charcoal:
"The Stone does not belong to the original."
The sound began as a low buzz.
Irregular. Almost an electronic whisper crawling along his spine. Lucas only heard it when pressing his forehead against glass surfaces — windows, mirrors, even cups.
But there was more: a subterranean music.
Not exactly melody — but a pattern.
Rhythm. Frequency. Pulse.
As if the very Stone resting in his chest was trying to send a warning signal.
"The Fifth is awakening… without permission," said the voice from the Fourth Stone in a dream-like memory.
"This shouldn't be happening.
Someone is calling it… from inside the reflection."
Lucas jotted the phrase in the black notebook.
Below it, he wrote:
"If I forget… remember that not all forgetting is mine."
Elsewhere in the city, Erick entered an abandoned warehouse in Mooca.
He'd received an anonymous call:
"He's here. Come alone. Bring your weapon. But not your memory."
Erick ignored the last part.
Inside, a man sat among boxes, back turned.
Same build. Same suit. Same haircut.
When he turned around…
"Lucas?" Erick called, hesitantly.
The man looked at him with the calmness of polished glass.
"Erick... finally."
The conversation lasted ten minutes.
Erick asked about old cases, about Lucas's father, about a robbery in 2019.
The man answered everything correctly.
Without hesitation.
But… something was off.
He smiled too much.
And used the word "fragment" as if it meant "person."
Erick didn't notice at the time.
Only when he returned to the station and found the real Lucas asleep in the archives room, exhausted.
"You were just with me... weren't you?" Erick asked, confused.
Lucas looked up.
"No. I've been here the whole time."
The silence between them cracked like splitting glass.
That night, Lucas dreamed of a corridor full of mirrors.
But in the reflections… he saw other versions of himself.
One was crying.
Another held a knife.
A third lay dead.
And in the distance… the sound of the Fifth Fragment.
Not a buzz.
A chant.
A human voice — his own — singing in a tongueless song, in a language only the Stone could understand.
When he woke, there was a new mark on his left arm.
Five parallel lines burned into the skin — as if branded by a heated mirror.
And in the bathroom mirror, next to the previous phrase, now read:
"You are becoming the reflection. And it is becoming you."
Lucas sat before the living room mirror for the last time.
It was midnight. The city slept. But not him. He was watching.
For days, he had avoided reflections. Covered mirrors. Turned off screens.
But now, he understood: running wasn't enough.
He had to cut the link.
He opened his grandmother's old notebook.
In it, a passage he had never understood until now:
"The reflection is the other side of breathing.
To break it, breathe backward.
But break it with something that is yours and only yours."
Lucas thought of the scar.
His father's name.
The necklace he'd kept since childhood.
He took all three.
Made a circle of salt.
Smashed the central mirror with the base of the obsidian statue.
And, with the tip of a knife, wrote on the floor:
"I AM NOT YOU."
Then held his breath for several seconds and whispered the phrase repeatedly.
Upon exhaling, he felt as if part of his body had disconnected.
The shattered glass began to smoke.
Elsewhere in the city, Erick was reviewing the footage with the "fake Lucas."
He noticed something.
In the ten-minute conversation, there were four moments where the shadow of the fake Lucas didn't move correctly.
The mouth spoke…
But the shadow didn't follow.
Or the shadow moved… before he did.
And in one of the final frames, the reflection in Erick's eyes captured a third man in the room.
Invisible to the naked eye.
Erick paused the video.
Zoomed in. Applied filters.
It was the real Lucas, silently observing from the doorway.
The video had never been just a recording.
It was a stage.
A distraction.
Erick stumbled back, gasping.
He had been investigating the wrong man.
Lucas no longer trusted mirrors.
Or cameras.
Or voices that mimicked his own thoughts.
That night, he descended into a part of the city rarely mapped — the old tunnels beneath the Sé region, where construction of the subway had once stopped because "the terrain was unstable."
He now understood what unstable truly meant.
At the bottom of one of the blocked shafts, he found what he'd been sensing for weeks.
A mirror, embedded in the wall like an altar.
But not made of glass.
It was obsidian.
Polished.
Alive.
And in its center: a black Stone — pulsing red, surrounded by nine mirrored fragments arranged like petals.
The Fifth Fragment.
It wasn't calling him.
It was answering.
Lucas touched it.
His vision twisted.
His ears bled.
The whispers multiplied, and behind his closed eyelids, he saw a version of himself standing at the center of a crowd of copies.
Each one with a slightly wrong face.
One with no eyes.
Another with a twisted mouth.
A third bleeding from every pore.
"You are the Key and the Lock," said one of them.
"Your body houses the final echo."
Lucas screamed.
But no sound left his lips.
When he awoke, he was alone in the tunnel.
The Stone was gone.
The fragments… scattered like ashes.
Only one remained, glowing in his hand.
The Fifth Stone.
Its marking: a spiral with five vertical cuts.
He climbed back to the surface.
It was still night.
But the sky looked… torn.
Erick received a final message on his encrypted phone.
No sender. Just a file named: "REWRITE_REFLECTION.mp4"
When he opened it, the video showed Lucas — or someone who looked exactly like him — standing in front of a mirror.
His reflection no longer mimicked him.
It watched him.
Tilting its head.
Smiling.
And behind the reflection, someone else appeared.
A woman with silver hair and eyes of obsidian.
The same one from Lucas's dream.
She whispered:
"He carries more than fragments now.
He carries the door."
Lucas, sitting alone on a rooftop, whispered to himself:
"If I lose myself...
May what I've become still fight for what I once was."
In the distance, a siren echoed.
The city no longer slept.
And neither did the reflection.