Orvale no longer slept; it synchronized.
Every window flickered twice before finding the same light. Reflections blinked a heartbeat late. And somewhere deep beneath the Sky Spine, a low pulse beat like a clock that had learned to breathe.
Elara Voss woke to that rhythm. Her apartment was exactly as she'd left it—except for the mirror. The sheet she'd used to cover it had slipped halfway down, revealing half a skyline, half a woman. Her half. The other half twitched a fraction behind.
The kettle clicked. Its whistle came a second later. She exhaled.
Residual drift, 0.02 percent, whispered the memory of her mother's voice. Acceptable deviation.
"Acceptable for who?" Elara muttered.
The phone buzzed. Calen.
You seeing this?Downtown's got two mornings again.
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They met at the old observation deck where two suns still argued over whose turn it was to rise. Calen looked the same, though the air around him shimmered faintly, as if another Calen waited half a meter to the left.
"Power surges all over," he said. "Half the grid thinks it's tomorrow. The other half insists it's last night."
"Temporal phase lag," Elara replied automatically. "The dual continuum's stabilizing—but only just."
He studied her. "You sound like you expected this."
"I did," she said. "Just not so soon."
They looked toward the river. The water split into twin currents moving opposite ways, meeting, parting, rejoining—a conversation in fluent contradiction.
By afternoon, reports flooded in. Duplicate people, identical memories, same ID numbers. Some swore they'd woken to find someone asleep in their own bed. Others vanished mid-sentence, leaving behind a faint smell of ozone and a smear of static.
Elara traced the incidents to a pattern: reflective surfaces. Every mirror, window, and puddle acted as a relay point, whispering coordinates between worlds.
Her laptop chimed. A file had appeared on its own.
| SUBJECT 00 TRANSMISSION – GLASS NETWORK ONLINE | OBJECTIVE: Universal Synchronization. | OPERATOR: DR. EVELYN VOSS (PROTOCOL REINSTATED).
Elara's breath caught. "She's back."
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Back at her lab, the lights flickered as she laid the new evidence out on the table.Screens hummed.Metal ticked as it cooled.
Her laptop replayed the corrupted feed again and again — the freeze-frame of her mother's file signature reappearing where no file should exist.
Elara leaned closer.Behind her, the mirror leaned too —a split second late.
She stilled.
The reflection did not.
"The room breathed," she whispered to herself.Once with her.Once after.
A thin line of static crawled across the screen, forming her mother's voice for a single, impossible moment:
| "…remember what we forgot…"
Elara swallowed hard. "Mom?"
The screen went black.
But the reflection didn't.It leaned closer and whispered—
"Wake up."