Chapter 16
Nate
The moment Etan stepped through the glass, the air shifted again; colder and heavier, like the whole place had exhaled. The ripples of his exit clung to me, thin silver threads I couldn’t shake. I didn’t sleep here.
I wasn’t sure if anyone did.
The Mirror Realm didn’t have night or day. The light was always dim, like the moment before a thunderstorm, and the shadows never stayed where you left them. Sometimes they curled upward along the walls like smoke. Sometimes they stretched toward me.
I’d been walking for what felt like hours. My legs ached, but there was no real sense of time there. The streets were copies of Hallowell Bay, but hollow, every window black, every storefront empty. The sound of my footsteps didn’t echo. It just stopped.
I saw them in reflections before I saw them in the street, shapes that bent the light wrong. They weren’t all like Etan. Some slunk low to the ground, with arms that bent too many ways. Others stood tall and still until I blinked, and then they were closer.
One followed me for blocks, its face a blank sheet of glass that kept catching pieces of my reflection. A hand here, my mouth there, stitched together in the wrong order.
I’d noticed something about the streets here, certain corners felt thinner, like the air was stretching. Whenever I walked past one, my vision blurred for a second, and the sound what little there was dropped away completely.
I slowed my pace, pretending to be tired, and let the thing gain on me. Its long, glassy arms didn’t swing so much as tilt, like they were on invisible hinges.
At the next seam, I pivoted just before stepping through. The creature lunged — right into the wavering air. For half a heartbeat, its body stretched, then folded in on itself like a reflection being wiped from a mirror.
When the air stilled, the street was empty.
I didn’t know where it went. I didn’t want to know. But I’d just bought myself a little breathing room and maybe, if I found Jess, I could tell her how to use these seams against him.
I thought about diving through after it — but I’d seen what happened to reflections without an anchor. The seams didn’t take you home. They just… spit you out somewhere else in the dark.
The second thing I learned was that they knew Etan.
Two figures with rippling glass skin and no faces stepped out of a warped doorway, blocking the street.
Their bodies didn’t move right. They were too fluid, like they were made of reflections poured into a shape.
One leaned close enough that its surface caught my reflection, stretching my eyes until they filled half its head.
“You’re not fading as fast as you should,” the glass-skinned figure said. “The thief is feeding you just enough to keep his own anchor strong.”
“Where is he?” it asked, though its mouth didn’t move. The voice was layered, like three people speaking at once underwater.
I swallowed hard. “Who?”
The two shapes tilted in unison, like they didn’t believe me.
“The one who wears your face,” the layered voice said. “The one who left.”
“He’s gone to my world, to my life.”
They stepped back slowly, almost reverently.
“He’ll come back,” the other added. “They always come back.”
Then, they melted into the nearest window, rippling out of sight.
The third thing I learned was that the Mirror Realm didn’t want me to leave.
I tried to follow the streets back to the school or where the school should’ve been, but they kept looping. I’d walk past the same cracked shop sign three times, even though I’d been turning in different directions.
Once, I saw a crowd up ahead. People, or copies of them, standing perfectly still in the middle of the road. When I got closer, they all turned their heads at the same time, their faces shifting through a dozen expressions that weren’t theirs.
I ran.
By the time I stopped, I was in the middle of what looked like the boardwalk. The ocean was there, but different. It was as flat as glass, no smell of salt, no sound of waves. Under its surface, however, I saw movement.
Not fish. This was nothing natural.
Dozens of pale, human-shaped figures pressed just beneath the water, their silver eyes opening in unison to look at me.
I backed away slowly.
That’s when I heard it, a laugh I knew too well. Warm, confident, nothing like my own.
Etan.
If he was here, maybe Jess wasn’t far.
I just had to survive long enough for her to find me.
* * *
The streets kept shifting. Buildings leaned toward me, their windows bending and stretching until I wasn’t sure if they were glass or just pretending to be.
That’s when I saw her.
Bianca, or what was left of her, stared out at me from a cracked shop window.
She was older, hair hanging in uneven clumps, skin pale as frost. Her eyes were pools of mirror-silver, and they didn’t blink.
She pressed one hand to the inside of the glass.
Her lips moved, but the sound was just static, rising and falling like a badly tuned radio.
I stepped closer before I could stop myself. The crack in the glass traced down her cheek like a scar. A ripple passed through the reflection, and in a blink, Bianca was gone. Jess stood there instead.
Not my Jess.
Her hair was soaking wet, dripping black water that pooled around her shoes and seeped into the floor. Her gaze locked on mine, and a drop rolled off her chin in slow motion, hitting the glass with a sound like a nail on metal.
The longer I stared, the harder it was to remember they weren’t real. My hand was halfway to the window when movement in the street broke the spell.
A group of faceless figures glided around the corner. Skin like rippled jelly, limbs too long, their heads tilting toward me in unnatural unison.
I ducked into the nearest alley.
It was narrower than it looked, the walls closing in until I could barely squeeze through. The air was warmer here, heavy, and the brickwork flexed under my hand, slow, steady, like the alley was breathing.
Something whispered behind me.
“Nate…”
My own voice.
I didn’t turn.
The whisper came again, closer this time. “Nate. Stay.”
The walls seemed to pulse, heartbeat-fast. I shoved myself forward, scraping my shoulder against the brick, and burst back onto the main street.
When I looked back, the alley was gone. Just a solid wall where it had been.
I didn’t know what was hunting me, but I knew one thing—I couldn’t stop moving. Not here. Not for anything.
The streets blurred past, the same corners looping again, the same silent buildings, until I turned down an unfamiliar block. It was wider, emptier, the cobblestones slick like they’d just been washed, though no rain had fallen here in… maybe ever.
That’s when I saw it.
A mirror, standing alone in the middle of the intersection.
Not mounted to a wall, not part of a shop window, just a tall, free-standing rectangle of glass with a thin brass frame, catching light from nowhere. The air around it bent faintly, as if heat was rising off invisible pavement, but the air here was cold enough to sting my lungs.
I stepped closer.
On the other side was Jess’s bedroom. The desk by the window, the worn paperbacks stacked on her nightstand, the tangle of fairy lights drooping over her headboard.
My pulse jumped. If I could see her room, maybe she could see me.
But it was wrong. Too still, like a photograph waiting to be developed. The colors were muted, washed in a faint grey, and the air leaking through the glass carried no scent at all, no trace of her orange-scented perfume, no warmth from the sun that should’ve been streaming through the curtains.
I pressed my palm to the glass. It was warm under my skin, and for one dizzy second, I felt the barrier loosen, like leaning against a door that suddenly gives.
Then Jess looked up.
She saw me.
Her expression didn’t light with relief. Her eyes were silver, liquid and unreadable. Her mouth curved into a smile that stretched just a fraction past where it should.
She leaned forward until her lips almost touched the glass.
“Stay with me,” she whispered.
The words sank into my bones like a command.
The glass went ice-cold. Frost spiderwebbed out from under my hand, locking me in place for a heartbeat before I jerked back.
When I blinked, the bedroom was gone. The mirror reflected only empty darkness and my own pale, shaken face. The street around me felt tighter now, the shadows leaning in, and I knew, the Realm wanted me to stay.
The darkness swallowed the bedroom, and the street closed in.