Seventeen-year-old Lena starts seeing impossible things in glass: another boy, another corridor, another life. When she follows the reflection into the school’s abandoned wing, the mirror answers back.
The final bell slammed through the corridor like a warning, and the school began to empty in a rush of coats, bags, and sharp voices. Lena stayed where she was for a moment longer, her hand on the locker door, staring past the crowd toward the abandoned wing at the far end of the building.
No one went there unless they had to. The hallway was a strip of dim light and peeling paint, with warped benches lined up against the wall and windows that rattled whenever the rain hit them. It felt sealed off from the rest of the school, as if the years had been forgotten there and left to rot.
Lena should have gone home. Instead, every instinct she had was pulling her in the other direction.
For three days, something had been wrong with the world.
It had started with the mirror in her bedroom. Her reflection had blinked a heartbeat late, as if it needed a moment to decide whether to copy her. Then, in the library washroom, she had looked up and seen not herself but a boy she didn’t know: dark hair, a thin scar cutting across one cheek, eyes fixed on her with the same stunned focus she felt herself. The strangest part was the certainty that she knew him, even though she was sure she had never met him.
Now she stood in a deserted classroom at the end of the old wing, in front of a fogged mirror above a cracked marble sink. Her pulse thudded in her throat. The room smelled of dust, damp plaster, and rainwater seeping through old stone.
She wiped the glass with her sleeve.
Her own face stared back for half a second, pale and tense, before the reflection rippled.
The classroom vanished.
In its place, Lena saw a narrow corridor she had never been in, lit by a flickering strip of emergency lights. The scarred boy was running, breath tearing from him in ragged bursts. Behind him came a figure in a white coat, moving too fast, too close, reaching as if it knew exactly where he would turn next.
Lena stumbled back, but the image held her.
The boy’s fear hit her first, raw and desperate. Then the other presence slammed into her mind like a cold hand closing around her skull. Not words. Not quite. A certainty. It knows you’re watching.
The figure in the white coat stopped.
Slowly, it turned its head and looked straight at her.
Straight through the mirror.
A crack snapped across the glass, then another, spidering from the center out to the edges. The room trembled. Lena’s breath caught as the reflection brightened, and letters began to surface beneath the fractured glare, one after another, as if someone were writing them from the far side.
You have opened the door. Now you must enter...
Outside the classroom, something started moving down the corridor. Footsteps, slow at first, then faster. Coming closer.
Lena couldn’t look away from the mirror, and the boy in the glass was already reaching toward her.