Rania gasped, stumbling backward as the crystal walls vanished like smoke.
She was standing in her childhood bedroom.
The exact same faded posters. The same uneven bookshelf. The same squeaky panda-shaped nightlight that had a creepy habit of blinking when no one touched it.
But what made her knees buckle wasn't the room.
It was the girl on the bed.
She looked… identical.
Same messy ponytail. Same scar on her left eyebrow. Same mole under her jaw that she always covered with concealer.
But her eyes were different.
Too calm. Too ancient.
"Hi," Mirror Girl said with a smile. "It took you long enough."
"W-What the—how—who the solar-flare-are-you?!" Rania shouted, grabbing the nearest object—a plush frog—and holding it like a weapon.
Mirror Girl laughed softly. "You're holding Froggy. You used to cry into him every time Mom yelled at Dad."
Rania froze.
"Only *I* know that," she whispered.
"Exactly," Mirror Girl said, standing. "Because I *am* you. Or... the version of you that remembers."
Kai's voice crackled through her comms. "Rania?! Where are you?! These orbs are getting *weirder*! One just tried to psychoanalyze my playlist!"
Rania whispered, "Kai... I think I'm inside my own mind."
Mirror Girl stepped forward. "You've been here before, Rania. A long time ago. Before you were born on Earth."
"...Excuse me, *what now*?"
"You are not entirely human," Mirror Girl said. "You're a fragment. A safeguard. A hidden protocol encoded in the moon's memory core."
Rania's jaw dropped.
"I'm... what? A space USB?!"
Mirror Girl smiled. "Something like that. You were sent to Earth to forget—until the artifact was reactivated. Now, it's all coming back."
Rania stumbled back. "No. No way. This is a dream. This is a moon-induced soup-hallucination!"
Then the room trembled.
The walls cracked.
And a voice boomed from all around:
> "THE MEMORY CORE HAS BEEN BREACHED."
Kai screamed through her comms, "RANIA! RUN! EVERYTHING'S MELTING! THE ORBS ARE SCREAMING IN LATIN!"
Mirror Girl began to fade.
"You must wake up," she said. "But first—look in the drawer."
The nightstand drawer popped open by itself.
Inside… was a photo.
A woman with violet eyes, holding baby Rania. Beside her stood a man Rania had never seen before—
—wearing the same uniform as the Moonlings.
Before she could blink, everything shattered like glass.
Rania woke up gasping, back inside the ship.
Alarms blaring. Melvin screaming. Kai covered in jelly. The real kind.
"RANIA! You're back!" Kai shouted, slipping on a slime trail.
But Rania didn't answer.
She was holding the photo.
It came back with her.
And that changed everything.And just as Rania bounced for the third time—right after confessing she once cheated on a math test using a potato—
—the walls of the hall began to melt.
No. Not melt.
Transform.
Into something familiar.
Into…
Her childhood bedroom.
But it wasn't empty.
There was someone waiting on the bed.
Someone who looked exactly like—
Her.
Just as the room exploded in a blinding flash, a voice echoed in her mind:
> "If you don't remember who you really are... this time, *we all* vanish."
To be continued…