There was no urge to sleep. Sleep required a surrender she wasn't willing to give.
She lay in the dark, the Lila Hart file resting open beside her. The pages were slightly curled where her thumb had pressed too hard, a physical ghost of her frustration. The name stared back, flat and unimpressed.
Lila Hart.
The room was silent, but Mara's mind was a frantic projector, replaying the crime scene on a loop. The bathroom. The mirror. The impossible physics. In the vision, the glass had exploded outward. In reality, it was a precise, inward collapse.
The shift was small, but in Mara's world, small meant intentional.
"What did I miss?" she murmured to the ceiling.
The Voice remained silent. The absence of its cold commentary irritated her more than the mystery itself. It had been her shadow for years, correcting her, filling the gaps. Now, it had retreated at the exact moment she needed a scalpel.
Mara closed her eyes. "Show me again."
The request felt like a weight. For a heartbeat, there was only the sound of her own blood in her ears. Then, the tilt.
The edges of the room softened, reality fraying at the seams as her awareness slipped through the cracks. Her body remained on the bed, but she was standing in the science building bathroom again.
Only this time, the air was colder. The lights overhead didn't just hum; they screamed with a low-frequency flicker. The mirror was whole.
Lila stood before it. Alive.
Mara watched, a silent witness to a moment that had already been erased. Lila's breathing was shallow, her knuckles white as she gripped the porcelain sink. Her eyes were wide, darting from the door to her own reflection, then over her shoulder.
She wasn't just afraid. She was waiting.
"Who were you expecting?" Mara asked. Her voice didn't carry in this space, yet Lila's shoulders tightened as if she'd felt a draft.
A soft sound echoed—a click of a heel, or perhaps a latch. Lila froze.
Mara's attention snapped to the mirror. For a split second, there was a blur of movement behind Lila. It wasn't a shadow; it was a distortion, like heat rising off asphalt.
"Turn around!" Mara commanded.
Lila didn't. But her reflection did.
The image in the glass moved a fraction of a second before the girl did. It was the same delay Mara had seen in her own reflection earlier. A lag in reality.
Not what, the Voice suddenly hissed. Who. The mirror cracked. Mara didn't see the aftermath this time; she saw the impact. There was no hand. No weapon. Just a concentrated burst of invisible force. Lila's body jerked backwards, her spine snapping against the air before the vision fractured into a thousand shards of light.
Mara snapped her eyes open. She was back in her dorm, her fingers clawing into the sheets.
"That's not possible," she breathed.
It is.
"No." Mara sat up, shoving the file aside. "That wasn't just a different version of the death. That was earlier. The vision I had three nights ago... it wasn't the beginning."
No, the Voice agreed. The rot had already started.
Mara stood too quickly, the room spinning for a second before she forced it to settle. She didn't wait for morning. She dressed in the dark, her mind rearranging the pieces. The first vision was a staged ending. The second was the truth.
By the time she reached her morning lecture, the campus had fully digested the tragedy. Theories had replaced facts. Suicide was the popular vote, but "secret boyfriend" was a close second.
Mara took her seat by the window, the "cold spot" in the room. She opened her notebook, but she didn't record the lecture. She wrote four words in jagged, pressurised script:
MIRROR. DELAY. FORCE. WAITING.
Then, at the bottom: NOT ALONE.
"You're not writing anything from the lecture," a voice whispered from her left.
Mara didn't look. She knew the cadence. Amara. A girl who possessed a dangerous amount of curiosity and not enough fear.
"I don't need to," Mara said.
"You always say that." Amara leaned in, her eyes catching the words in the notebook. "Is that about the girl? Lila?"
Mara remained silent.
"They're saying she knew him," Amara continued, undeterred. "Found deleted messages on her cloud. Something about a meeting."
Mara's pen stilled. "Where?"
Amara shrugged. "The police are keeping it quiet. But the rumour is she was running for days before she ended up in that bathroom."
Running. Mara's focus shifted inward. The classroom blurred. The lecturer's voice became a distant drone.
Suddenly, she was pulled under again. Not a full vision, but a flash—a jagged memory that didn't belong to her.
A narrow, dark hallway. Flickering industrial lights. The sound of frantic, uneven footsteps. Lila was there, her face a mask of terror. She turned a corner and stopped dead.
At the end of the hall stood a figure. Tall. Still. A void in the shape of a man.
"Please," Lila's voice trembled, echoing in Mara's skull. "I didn't tell anyone. I swear."
The figure didn't move.
CRACK.
The sound of snapping plastic jolted Mara back to the present. Her pen lay in two pieces in her hand, ink staining her palms like fresh bruises. The classroom was silent. Every eye was on her.
"Mara?" the lecturer asked, brow furrowed.
Mara didn't apologise. She didn't look embarrassed. She simply stood, gathering her things with clinical precision. "I don't feel well. I'm leaving."
She walked out before he could give her permission.
In the empty hallway, she leaned against the lockers, her heart finally finding a rhythm.
"She knew him," Mara whispered. "And she was running."
Yes.
"Then why go back to the bathroom? It's a dead end."
The Voice hummed, a sound like grinding teeth. Did she?
Mara's eyes widened. The realisation hit her with the force of a physical blow. "She didn't go there. She was taken there. She didn't die where the struggle started."
Which meant there was another location. A primary scene. A place where the blood hadn't been "placed," but spilt.
"I was looking at the wrong map," Mara murmured, a rare spark of irritation flickering in her eyes. "I hate missing things."
You're close, the Voice goaded.
Mara pushed off the wall, her steps purposeful. She wasn't just a witness anymore. She was retracing the steps of a ghost, and for the first time, she wasn't just following the Voice.
She was hunting.