There's a silence after she speaks—
not the good kind.
Not the theatrical, Oscar-winning kind.
The other kind.
The kind that sits too long.
The kind that comes before someone says something clinical,
and someone else never recovers.
The kind you get in doctor's offices
before the diagnosis.
Before the lie.
Ryan stands like he was carved to be obeyed—
hands on hips, a statue of masculine denial.
And then he laughs.
That sterile kind of laugh that only sounds like mirth
if you've never heard real joy.
"You've been under pressure," he says,
with the precision of a scalpel,
like pressure is a scapegoat
that lives in women's throats.
"Stress hallucinations are normal. You're exhausted. You're seeing things."
You're seeing things.
He says it like her eyes are the problem.
Not what she saw.
Not the girl in the mirror
who smiled like a secret remembered.
Not the whisper that said Rasmika's name
before her own mind could.
He wants her to doubt herself.
Wants her to file it away under
hormones or hysteria
or whatever they're calling intuition these days.
She opens her mouth.
Closes it.
The silence catches in her throat,
a fishhook too deep to dislodge.
Raahi is gentler.
But not necessarily better.
She lights incense as if the smoke
can smudge away the shape of truth.
Her fingers flutter like moths around a dying candle.
"Sometimes, energy lingers," she murmurs.
"Trauma echoes.
You might be sensitive to past frequencies...
Psychic trauma. It's a thing."
Her eyes are half-lidded like she's peering into the veil—
but she never asks the real question.
Not directly.
What did you see?
Because she already suspects the answer will make too much sense.
And sense is dangerous.
Sense unravels order.
Then there's Rasmika.
Rasmika, who speaks like every word
has to claw its way out of her mouth.
She stares too long at the photograph on the canvas wall:
sepia-toned, sun-faded,
a woman with eyes like sharpened obsidian and a half-smile that dares history to misname her.
The resemblance is criminal.
No—ancestral.
"I know her," Rasmika whispers.
"That face. I've seen it before."
And there it is—
truth,
not shouted but splintered,
wedged beneath the skin of certainty.
After that, everything warps.
The clocks don't tick in rhythm.
The mirrors catch her at wrong angles.
Her own reflection sometimes lags behind her,
like a delay in an old broadcast.
People glance at her like they've heard something she hasn't.
Like she's the punchline of a joke written centuries ago.
She tells herself she's fine.
That nothing happened.
That faces don't crawl out of mirrors,
that dead women don't wear her smile.
But it's like trying to hold water in cupped hands—
always slipping.
Always humming.
At night, she dreams of windows that don't open.
Of fire.
Of a name she doesn't remember choosing.
Of someone telling her to run.
Always too late.
She wakes with her throat shut tight,
like a locked room with the key swallowed.
The gaslighting doesn't scream.
It hums.
It shows up in:
Emails she never sent
Phone calls with static and someone breathing on the other end
A name—Alira—scrawled in the margins of her notebook, in her own handwriting,
though she doesn't remember writing it
They tell her it's stress.
They tell her to hydrate.
To sleep.
To stop over-identifying with local legends.
But the girl in the mirror is still smiling.
And Rasmika's starting to smile back.
Because it's not madness
if the ghosts remember you first.
Back at basecamp, the air is tense like a stretched wire.
Rasmika sits swaddled in a blanket too thin for the chill that's sunk into her bones.
Her pupils are wide, dilated—like she's seen something older than memory
and it's still looking back.
Ryan stands two feet away, arms crossed.
Concern disguised as command.
His voice clipped.
"This is classic overstimulation," he tells the medic,
"Lack of REM sleep. Heatstroke. Hallucinations.
She's been spiraling since day one."
"Hallucination?"
Rasmika's voice is dry as old paper.
Her gaze locks on him—
hollow, yes, but steel beneath the hollow.
"That woman in the mirror… I knew her.
I didn't dream her.
I remembered her."
"Memory can glitch under trauma," Ryan replies.
"Especially in the field.
We've all seen what stress can do—"
"I said I remembered her."
Rasmika's voice cracks the tent open like a faultline.
"Not imagined. Remembered."
Raahi stands half-shadowed in the corner,
hands clasped behind her back like a mourner at the wrong funeral.
Listening.
Her eyes flash faintly—
a flicker of static blue, almost like interference.
Like electricity misbehaving.
"Psychic trauma," she murmurs at last,
"Residual data from historical emotional frequencies.
Temporal echo, maybe…"
Ryan turns, cold eyebrow raised.
"And you are?"
Raahi smiles, too calm to be harmless.
"Field researcher.
Background in—metaphysics."
A lie.
But a convincing one.
Within 12 hours, Rasmika is "relocated for observation."
They call it a recovery facility.
Built from stone, restored for wellness.
But the stones remember.
Before it was painted and pacified,
this was Kal-Kothri—
the dungeon where Princess Alira had been held.
Tried for sorcery.
Burned in name, vanished in flame.
The plaque on the wall calls her a "mysterious historical figure."
But at night, the ceilings whisper her real story.
And under her bed—deep in the floor—
something pulses.
Not like a heartbeat.
Like something waiting.
The staff say it's peaceful.
The kind of place where "nothing happens anymore."
But Rasmika doesn't sleep.
She keeps mumbling in her dreams,
sheets tangled around her ankles like chains.
"The mirror was never just a reflection…"
"She's not gone. She's under."
And in the morning, the nurses find her staring into the silver-backed glass above the sink,
lips parted like she's about to say something
in a language she doesn't know.
She begins to draw—on napkins, in notebooks, on the walls when they let her.
Circles within circles. A snake biting its tail.
An old palace sigil no one taught her.
The mirror's geometry.
When she closes her eyes, she sees flames
and jasmine.
and a woman with her face saying,
"You came back too late.
But not too lost."
The glitch follows her now.
She walks past security cameras and they blink.
A second shadow trails her.
Lightbulbs hum a little louder when she enters a room.
Raahi visits once.
She brings flowers.
But they wilt by the time she sets them down.
"You're remembering too much," she says gently.
"She's not just a ghost.
She's a file that was never deleted."
And that's when Rasmika understands.
This isn't just a haunting.
It's a download.
A life,
a lineage,
a long-forgotten truth syncing itself back into her.
She stares at the mirror one last time.
And this time—
doesn't blink
when her reflection blinks first.
The mirror doesn't show what's behind you.
It shows what's underneath.
And if you look long enough—
it remembers your name.