The transition was not violent. It was a theft.
The moment the double's hand covered Mara's mouth, the world didn't go dark; it went hollow. The warmth of the dorm room, the smell of her lavender laundry detergent, the hum of the laptop fan, and the solid weight of the floor beneath her boots didn't vanish. It simply stopped belonging to her.
Mara felt herself being pushed. Not backwards, but inward.
She watched through her own eyes as her room began to ripple. The edges of her desk blurred like ink in water. The light from the
desk lamp stretched, distorting into the long, sterile tubes of the Annex.
She tried to say something, but her lungs were no longer her own. They belonged to the girl holding the phone. The girl who was currently adjusting her coat with Mara's exact, clinical precision.
The double looked at her.
From the outside.
Mara was no longer standing in the centre of her room. She was looking out from the glass of the window, her fingers pressed against a cold, invisible barrier that felt like frozen air.
"Don't fight the displacement," the Double said. Her voice—Mara's voice was crisp, lacking the tremor of the terror currently
paralysing Mara's mind. "It only makes the excision jagged."
Mara hammered her fists against the glass. No sound came out. On the other side, in the "real" room, the Double didn't even flinch. She simply turned back to the laptop and began typing.
Step 5: Integration.
The Double's fingers danced over the keys. Mara watched, horrified, as her own history began to rewrite itself on the screen. Files were being moved. Browser history was being scrubbed.
"Who are you?" Mara mouthed against the glass.
The Double paused. She didn't look at the window, but at the black bezel of the laptop, catching Mara's reflection within the reflection.
"I am the version of you that doesn't skip Step Three," the Double whispered. "I am the solution to the variable."
Outside in the hallway, the sound of heavy, frantic boots thudded against the carpet.
Cole.
Mara redoubled her efforts, throwing her entire weight against the window. The glass didn't break; it hummed, a low-frequency vibration that made her teeth ache. She could see Cole through the door or rather, she could see the shadow of his silhouette through the frosted glass of the dorm door.
"Mara! Open the door!"
The Double stood up. She checked her reflection in the window, checking Mara as if checking a smudge on a mirror. She smoothed her hair, composed her face into a mask of perfect, traumatised shock, and walked toward the door.
She reached for the handle.
The lock, which had been a solid piece of metal for Mara, clicked open effortlessly for the Double.
Cole burst in, his service weapon drawn, his chest heaving. He skidded to a halt, his eyes darting from the open laptop to the girl
standing by the door.
"Mara?" he gasped, his voice raw. "Are you… Are you okay?"
The Double let out a shaky, practised breath. Her eyes welled with tears, a physiological feat Mara had never been able to master on
command.
"He was here, Adrian," the Double sobbed. Her voice was thin, terrified. "In the room. He… he went out the window."
Cole lunged past her toward the window.
Toward Mara.
Mara screamed, her face pressed against the glass, her hands clawing at the barrier. I'm here! Adrian, look at me!
Cole reached the window. He looked directly through Mara.
To him, the glass was empty. The night outside was dark and still. He didn't see the girl trapped in the silver nitrate, her eyes wide with a plea he couldn't hear. He only saw the fourth-floor drop and the empty quad
below.
"There's no one out there," Cole muttered, his brow furrowed. He pressed his hand against the glass, right where Mara's heart
should have been.
She felt nothing. No warmth. No pressure. Just the absolute, freezing void of the Negative Space.
"He disappeared," the Double whispered, stepping up behind Cole. She placed a hand on his shoulder. "Like he wasn't even there."
Cole turned, his suspicion warring with the visible trauma on the girl's face. He looked at the window one last time, his eyes lingering
on a smudge, a faint, hand-shaped fog on the glass that was rapidly evaporating.
"We need to get you out of here," Cole said. "The Annex, the Lab… it's spreading."
"I know," the Double said. She looked at the window, her eyes locking onto Mara's for one final, chilling second.
A cold, thin smile touched her lips, unseen by Cole.
"I have everything I need."
They walked out.
The lights in the room flickered and died.
The laptop screen remained the only source of light, glowing with a single, final line of text that hadn't been there a second ago.
SUBJECT 01: CONTAINMENT SUCCESSFUL.
SUBJECT 02: ACTIVE.
Mara slumped against the glass, sliding down into the darkness of the frame. She wasn't alone in the glass.
As her eyes adjusted to the silver dark, she saw them.
Other reflections. Other girls. Dozens of them, standing in their own distorted versions of the campus, their faces pressed against the windows of buildings that no longer existed.
And in the centre of the white-tiled Lab that now stretched out behind her, a man in a white coat was waiting.
He held a pair of surgical shears.
"Welcome back, Mara," Dr Elias Voss said, his voice echoing from every corner of the void. "We've been waiting for a mind as precise as yours."
He stepped forward, the blades of the shears snicking together with a rhythmic, metallic bite.
"Now," he whispered. "Let's talk about Step Six."