The next morning, I woke up in bed.
No library. No Rhea. No dust or books or stitched mouths.
Just the sound of the morning bell clanging through the cold air and the faint sting of sweat at the back of my neck.
A dream. That was the easy answer.
But the mark beneath my collarbone burned.
And there was dust on the soles of my feet.
I didn't see Rhea all day.
Not in the hallways. Not in the courtyard where she usually disappeared into that shadowed edge of the hedge maze. Not even in Calculus, where she sat two rows behind me and never raised her hand but always turned in perfect work.
It was like she'd never been there.
Like the night never happened.
But I knew better now. Knew what it felt like when reality bent and something older than truth bled through the cracks.
I spent most of the afternoon staring at my notebook. The page in front of me was covered in that symbol again—over and over, tighter each time, like my hand had been trying to draw something out of itself. Circle. Slash. Curve. Deeper. Again.
The Lock.
Rhea's voice came back to me in pieces.
> "Children like you."
> "They didn't find you… they made you."
I flipped through every page of the notebook like I was hoping for answers to bloom in the margins.
What I found instead was a page near the back—one I didn't remember writing on.
It wasn't in my handwriting.
But it was mine.
> "Do not trust the mirrors."
I stared at it.
Then I looked up.
The classroom had emptied.
Somewhere between page three and page twenty-one, I'd lost time again.
I didn't go to my dorm. I didn't want to be alone in a room with mirrors.
So I went to the gym building, slipped past the doors with the broken lock, and climbed the stairwell to the top floor—the one they'd closed off after the accident no one ever talked about.
The windows up there were all boarded. The lights were long dead. It smelled like dust and mildew and time.
And she was there.
Rhea stood in front of the old wall-length mirror in the ballet studio, her reflection not quite matching her movements. Her hand lifted slowly, trailing her fingertips along the cracked glass—but in the mirror, her hand stopped.
Didn't move at all.
I felt the chill before I even spoke.
"You lied."
She didn't turn around.
"I said a lot of things," she murmured. "Which one do you mean?"
"You said they erased who I was. Hid it beneath the floorboards."
Her gaze met mine in the reflection now—sharp, calm, endless. "They did."
"But you didn't tell me why."
She turned then, fully facing me. The mirror behind her shivered. "Would it have mattered?"
"Yes."
Rhea exhaled. Walked toward me again. This time, slower. Like she didn't want to scare whatever part of me still believed this could all be undone.
"They broke you," she said quietly. "You were never supposed to wake up. Not like this. Not so soon."
"What was I?" My voice was hoarse. "Before."
She tilted her head. "You were a weapon."
The word landed like a fist.
"No," I whispered.
"You were trained," she said. "Conditioned. Built. Not from birth—no, that would've made you predictable. They used pain. Silence. Chemicals. Triggers."
I backed up.
"You killed someone, Adrian. When you were ten."
I stopped breathing.
"You weren't supposed to remember it. But it's coming back, isn't it?"
I saw blood again.
A room with no ceiling.
A scream that didn't stop.
"I was a kid," I whispered.
"You were a test."
My hands were shaking.
I wanted to run.
But I couldn't stop listening.
"Why do you know all this?" I asked, voice shaking. "What are you, Rhea?"
She walked up to me, placed something cold in my hand. A photo. Folded. Old.
I opened it.
Two children. A girl with her mouth stitched shut.
And me.
Smiling.
"She was my sister," Rhea said, her voice flat now. "You were the last one who saw her alive."
Silence.
I looked up slowly.
"You came here to get revenge."
She didn't deny it.
Instead, she reached for me, pressed her fingers to the place where the mark burned beneath my collarbone.
"I came here," she said, "to wake you up."
And as she touched me, everything broke open.
Not memory.
Not yet.
But the wall inside me cracked—and the thing behind it smiled.