The salt on Jack's clothes had turned cold by the time they climbed to the next landing.
Nobody talked much. The fight on the island had wrung the strength out of all four of them, and the tower seemed to know it. The ninth-floor door waited above, its dark metal polished just enough to catch warped shapes of their faces.
Dex noticed it too. "Great," he muttered. "The building learned reflections."
Lily rubbed at her arms. "I don't like this one already."
Marcus shifted the shotgun to his other hand. "Then let's not stand here admiring it."
Jack put his palm on the handle. It felt colder than the stairwell concrete. He drew a steadying breath, reached for the familiar weight of gravity inside himself, and pulled the door open.
The floor beyond looked like a home showroom abandoned halfway through being built. Bathroom vanities stood in rows under weak fluorescent lights. Mirrors hung on false walls. Full-length standing mirrors leaned at angles beside wardrobes and dressers. Every few steps, another pane of glass caught them from the side and threw back pale copies that seemed a fraction too slow.
The air smelled of dust, old cleaning chemicals, and something sweet underneath, like flowers left too long in stagnant water.
Jack stepped in first. Carpet muffled his shoes. Behind him, Lily's gold glow stayed banked low under her skin, ready. Dex's hands flexed once. Marcus kept close enough that Jack could hear the scrape of his boot on tile whenever the floor shifted from one mock room to another.
"Stay where everybody can see you," Jack said.
"In here?" Dex looked around at a dozen versions of himself in a dozen mirrors. "That feels ambitious."
They moved anyway, weaving through fake bathrooms and staged bedrooms that all ended abruptly in black office walls. Jack kept his eyes forward as much as he could, but reflections kept forcing themselves on him. Four of them. Eight of them. Twelve. Tired faces. Wet clothes. Weapons ready.
Then, in a tall mirror propped beside a fake sink, he saw a fifth figure.
It crouched behind Dex in the glass and nowhere else.
Pale. Almost transparent. Hairless head. No eyes. No nose. No ears. Its face was smooth except for a huge mouth splitting open where a mouth should never have fit, full of wet, sharp teeth.
Jack turned so fast his shoulder clipped a hanging cabinet. "Behind—"
The mirror burst outward.
Glass sprayed across the aisle. The thing came through in a blur of white and claws, shrieking with a sound like metal dragged down a window. It hit Jack in the chest hard enough to knock him back two steps, passed half through him with an ice-cold stab that stole his breath, then raked for Lily.
Marcus swung first. His bat-whip of a shotgun stock cut clean through the spirit's ribs as if through fog. Dex fired a raw explosion that blasted apart a vanity and sent drawers cartwheeling, but the creature had already slid through the tiled display wall behind it.
Jack slashed with his blade-shaped club, adding a hard gravity edge out of reflex. The strike chopped a wardrobe in half and left the spirit untouched.
"It doesn't weigh anything!" he shouted.
The creature rose out of the floor between the mirrors, mouth split wide in silent fury.
Lily answered with a spear of gold.
That, the spirit feared.
It jerked backward so fast its body seemed to fold. The spear burned a line across its shoulder instead of through its center, and the thing recoiled with a hiss Jack felt in his teeth. Then it fled sideways, not around a display but through it, vanishing into a mirrored wall that should have been solid.
For a beat the room went still except for falling glass.
Dex swallowed. "Okay," he said. "So light hurts it. Good. Fantastic. Also I hate it."
Something whispered at Jack's ear.
It was his own voice.
"Dex thinks you froze."
Jack spun, but only Marcus stood there, eyes scanning the rows. The whisper came again, closer. "Lily saw it. She saw you miss."
He clenched his jaw. "It's in our heads."
"No kidding," Dex snapped, then winced as if the words had bitten him on the way out.
His face had changed. Not physically. Just tightened. Marcus's shoulders did the same, and Lily looked from one to the other with a frown that had too much hurt in it to be simple tension.
Jack knew that look. He had worn it himself at breakfast tables, in classrooms, on every day he had wanted badly to believe something normal. The spirit was not just whispering. It was pressing on the cracks already there.
They tried to keep formation as they pushed deeper through the showroom, but the floor was built to break sightlines. Mirrors interrupted the aisles. Display walls split them into narrow lanes. Every few seconds Jack caught the pale thing in reflection only for it to be gone when he turned.
His own voice stayed with him.
"Marcus is watching your hands."
"He knows what the King looked like."
"How long until you look the same?"
Jack shoved the thoughts down and sent a pulse of gravity through the room. Cabinets rattled. Hanging mirrors chimed. He felt Lily, Dex, Marcus—solid anchors in the wash of weight.
The spirit wasn't weight. It was absence. A cold pocket where his power skidded and found nothing.
A shout exploded from the left.
Dex had both hands out, palms blazing orange-white threaded with gold. He was staring past Jack, face hard with certainty. "Move!"
He fired.
The divine blast tore down the aisle in a snarling arc.
Lily was there.
She threw up both hands on instinct. A curved shield of gold flared into place just before the explosion hit. Light smashed against light with a concussion that blew mirrors off the walls and knocked Lily backward into a display tub. Water fittings snapped. Dust rained from the ceiling.
For one awful second Dex stood frozen, horror burning through the anger on his face.
"Lily—"
"I saw it coming from you!" she shouted, scrambling up with her own light crackling around her. "It looked like it was right behind your eyes!"
"I saw it on top of you!"
The spirit laughed.
It wasn't a sound in the room. It was four separate laughs, each one inside a different skull, each one wearing the listener's own voice.
Marcus swore and aimed at a mirror on the far wall. Jack grabbed for the barrel. "Don't!"
Too late. The shotgun thundered. Buckshot shattered glass and peppered a wardrobe beyond. The recoil made Marcus stumble, already furious with himself. "I had it."
"No, you didn't." Jack heard the sharpness in his own voice and hated it immediately.
The spirit fed on that. He felt it.
"There," his inner voice whispered. "Now he's against you too."
Images began slipping in between the real room and Jack's sight. Elena in a hospital hall with blood on her mouth. Lily staring at him with tears and a golden flame in her hands. Dex stepping back, choosing Marcus instead. The Zombie King on the other side of a pane of glass, wearing Jack's own face and smiling because none of this was new.
"Stop listening," Jack muttered to himself.
"You are listening," his own voice replied. "Because you know it's true. They will turn if they have to. They should."
Something white flashed in a dressing mirror to his right. Jack whirled and slashed with black-gold force. The spirit avoided the attack by simply dropping through the floor. His blow carved a smoking line across tile and sank into concrete.
"Jack!" Lily called.
He looked up. For a second she was Lily.
For the next second her face smoothed blank and split into that huge mouth.
He froze.
Marcus did not.
From Marcus's angle, whatever the spirit had shown him must have been worse, because the older man let out a raw sound and brought the shotgun stock around with both hands.
It hit Jack high behind the ear.
The world vanished sideways.
He saw fluorescent lights spin across broken mirrors. Then tile rushed up and struck his cheek. Sound went thick and distant at once. He tasted blood. His fingers loosened on his weapon. Somewhere far away, Lily screamed his name.
Jack tried to push up and found nothing listening below his neck.
The voice in his head leaned close, almost gentle now. "There. Easier, isn't it? Let them do the rest."
Then heat flooded the room.
Not fire. Not explosion. Something cleaner.
Lily stood over him like a struck match turned into a sun.
Gold ripped out of her in every direction.
It came as a ring first, then a sphere, a blinding pulse that filled the aisles, flooded the mirrors, and poured through every false wall and display like daylight forced into buried ground. Glass burst. Every reflection became white. The sweetness in the air turned to the smell of rain and lightning.
The spirit shrieked.
This time everyone heard it in the room.
It tore itself out of a wall near the ceiling, smoking, both clawed hands over its face as the divine wave burned through whatever veil it had wrapped around their minds. The whispers stopped so suddenly Jack nearly choked on the silence. The false images vanished. Marcus was just Marcus again, wide-eyed and horrified. Dex was staring at the spirit with dawning hatred. Lily's light still poured outward in ragged pulses, forcing the creature into the open.
It tried to flee through the ceiling.
Dex beat it there.
He thrust both hands up and detonated not one blast but many—sharp holy explosions hammering the air around the spirit, then the wall behind it, then the ceiling above, then the floor below in a bright cage of concussive gold-white force. Every escape the creature chose met sanctified fire.
It convulsed, half in matter and half out, with nowhere safe to slip.
Dex shouted through clenched teeth and tightened both fists.
The last ring of explosions folded inward.
The spirit opened its terrible mouth and released a piercing scream so high and thin it seemed to cut the light itself.
Then it came apart.
Not like flesh. Not even like smoke. More like dirty frost blown off glass, scattering in pale fragments that burned away before they touched the floor.
Silence dropped after it.
Lily's burst faded. She fell to her knees beside Jack at once, hands already glowing softer now, trembling from the amount she had spent. "Jack. Jack, stay with me."
Warmth sank into the side of his head. The pain arrived before the healing did, a brutal throb behind his eyes. He sucked in air so sharply it hurt his ribs.
"Ow," he managed.
Lily laughed once in relief and almost cried right after. "Good. Keep complaining."
Marcus was there too, kneeling heavily, face gray beneath the grime. He had set the shotgun down like he no longer trusted himself with it. "Jack, I thought—" He swallowed hard and started over. "I saw that thing wearing your face. I didn't know. I didn't know."
Jack blinked until the doubled lights became single. The betrayal had lasted less than a second. The guilt on Marcus's face looked older than the whole tower. Jack forced his numb hand up and caught the man's wrist.
"You hit what it showed you," he said, voice rough. "That's on it. Not you."
Marcus bowed his head anyway.
A few feet away, Dex stood rigid before Lily, ash and powdered glass on his sleeves. "I nearly blew you in half," he said. "I don't have a good version of that. I'm sorry."
Lily looked up at him, pale from the power she had spent. "I threw a spear at you," she said. "We're even enough for one floor."
That earned the smallest, strangest breath of laughter from Dex. Some of the tightness left his shoulders.
Jack sat up slowly as Lily's healing finished knitting the worst of the damage. Around them, the showroom was wrecked. Mirrors lay in glittering heaps. Burn marks flowered across the walls where Dex had trapped the spirit. Without the reflections, the room looked smaller, meaner, just another dead office floor with a trap inside it.
The stairwell door had reappeared at the far end.
Jack stared at it for a long moment. "It didn't try to kill us," he said.
Dex glanced at the ruined glass. "Felt pretty kill-y to me."
"No." Jack pushed himself to his feet. His legs wobbled once, then held. "It tried to make us do it."
Nobody argued.
Lily rose beside him, still breathing a little too hard. Marcus picked up the shotgun with care now, as if it might remember. Dex kept looking into broken shards on the floor and then away again.
Jack took in each of them before they moved. Real. Hurt. Still here.
"From now on," he said, "nobody reacts alone. If you see something, you say it first. If a voice starts talking, you say that too. I don't care how stupid it sounds. We don't let the tower get between us for free."
Marcus nodded first. Dex after him. Lily reached over and squeezed Jack's arm once.
Together, they walked for the stairwell door through the crunch of shattered mirrors.
Behind them, every broken piece reflected only what was truly there now, and that was somehow worse. The tower had finally shown them a floor where the sharpest weapon wasn't claws or fire or teeth.
It was doubt.
Jack climbed toward the tenth floor with a healing bruise under Lily's light and the cold knowledge that the tower had learned exactly where to cut.