I woke up in a room that wasn't mine. 

The bed was too big, the sheets too crisp, and the air smelled faintly of metal and rain. My eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through a window that stretched from floor to ceiling.

Beyond it was a city that shouldn't exist. Skyscrapers stood like jagged teeth, their tops spiraling into a bruised yellow sky. Flickering holograms floated in the air, forming words I couldn't read. 

I sat up, heart hammering.

My room was small, cluttered, safe. This was none of those things. My reflection in a mirrored panel on the wall caught my eye, and I froze. 

That wasn't me. 

Or ... it was. The features were mine, but sharper, like someone had carved away the softness. My hair was longer, its strands shimmering with faint iridescence. My eyes---one green, one black---blinked back at me. 

A knock at the door made me jump. 

"It's time," said a voice. Smooth, clipped, almost melodic. 

The door creaked open, and a woman stepped in. Her face was covered by a mask of fractured glass, catching the room's pale light. She wore a coat stitched from patchworks of what looked like old warning signs and tattered maps. 

"Time for what?" I croaked, my voice hoarse and unfamiliar in the still air. 

She tilted her head. "For the walk. You always forget." She didn't wait for me to respond, just turned and started down a long hallway. 

Something about her pulled me to follow, even though every instinct screamed against it. 

***

The hallway stretched too far, impossibly far, the way a dream warps reality. Doors lined the walls, each one marked with strange symbols---loops and spirals and jagged edges. My steps echoed unnaturally, doubling back in strange rhythms. 

"Where am I?" I asked, my voice trembling. 

The woman didn't stop. "You call it home," she said, not looking back. 

"That's not an answer."

She finally paused at a door, her gloved hand resting on its handle. "No," she said softly, "it isn't."

The door opened, and the world shifted. 

We stood in a field of broken mirrors. Each shard reflected a fragment of the sky, splintered and wrong.

Some mirrors showed the city I had glimpsed earlier, others showed nothing but static.

My reflection flickered in the glass closest to me, a hollow-eyed figure standing against a swirling void. 

"This isn't real," I whispered. 

"None of it is," the woman said, her voice distant. "Not here, not there."

She gestured vaguely toward the horizon, where the ground fell away into endless black. "It's all just versions of you, scattered and incomplete."

"Versions of me?"

She nodded, crouching to pick up a shard of mirror. When she held it up, I saw myself---not as I was, but as I could have been. I was wearing a tattered uniform, my face scarred but resolute, my green eye glowing faintly like an ember. 

"You're slipping," she said, almost gently. 

"Slipping where?"

"Into the spaces between."

The shard in her hand cracked, the image fracturing into hundreds of tiny versions of itself. 

***

I didn't wake up. 

Or maybe I did, but not in the way I wanted. 

I found myself back in the room where I started, but the walls were different now---covered in strange, pulsing veins of light. The window showed not a city but a sea of churning colors, and my reflection in the mirror no longer moved when I did. 

I stared at it, and it stared back, smiling faintly. 

When I blinked, the reflection didn't. It simply tilted its head, like it was studying me. 

"Which one are you?" it asked. Its voice was mine, but wrong, layered and distorted. 

I didn't answer.

I couldn't. 

The reflection pressed its hands to the glass, and the surface rippled like water.

"You'll figure it out," it said before pulling itself out of the mirror. 

As it stepped toward me, I tried to scream, but the sound died in my throat. It placed its hand on my chest, and I felt myself unraveling, my edges dissolving like smoke. 

And then I was the reflection. 

Watching.

Waiting. 

It's your turn now.

***

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