The mirror room was sealed again, but the damage had been done. The team had glimpsed something they weren't meant to see—something that was now awake.
Their reflection was coming after them~
That night, Sarah Adler vanished.
No struggle. No signs of escape. Her cot was empty, her boots still by the door, her coat untouched, and a cup of coffee seemingly cold, signaling that it had been a while already. Her notebook sat on her pillow, open to a final passage hastily scrawled:
/"It's wearing my face. It smiles when I sleep. Don't trust the mirror. Don't trust me."/
They searched the compound. Reznik barked orders, his voice cracking with tension. Karpov wandered into the dormitory wing muttering, "They always take the kind ones first." He wasn't particularly sad, but this still angered him, they didn't know who they were against.
Hours later, Davis found her.
Or what was left of her?
She was curled in a fetal position near the old hydrotherapy chamber, eyes wide, skin pale, mouth frozen mid-scream. But there was something wrong—her reflection in a shattered mirror nearby was smiling.
Elena recoiled. "That's not Sarah."
"No," Davis agreed. "But it wants us to think it is." both frowned, staring at the reflection in the mirror.
*
By morning, Elena began noticing the others changing.
Karpov stared too long into corners, whispering to someone who wasn't there. Reznik lost hours of time—once found wandering the lower corridors with no memory of how he got there. Even Davis, reliable Davis, began sleep-talking in German—a language he didn't know.
Elena locked herself in the command room and replayed the old audio logs they had recovered. Voices of Soviet doctors. Experiments with light deprivation and sensory distortion.
And always—always—Room 313 at the center.
In one recording, a woman sobbed uncontrollably.
/"It took my husband. Replaced him. But it didn't get him right. He forgot how to hold a pen. He smiled too often. He laughed at the wrong jokes. It's not just copying us. It's learning how to be better."/
Elena clutched the journal frowning. The pages were starting to change. Passages she remembered reading were rewritten. Now they referred to her by name.
Then she saw it.
A note, scrawled in her own handwriting:
/"You already looked into the mirror. You just don't remember what it took."/
She dropped the book. It landed open on a blank page.
Ink bled across it like veins:
You are not the original.