The call ended, but her voice stayed.
Static hissed through the speakers like wind pushing against a closed window.
Arin stared at the empty feed, pulse climbing.
He rewound the recording.
At the 3-minute mark—the same threshold Mira had crossed—the distortion began again:
a flicker of Leah's silhouette bending backward, splitting for half a second into two overlapping frames.
Then black.
Arin leaned closer.
Behind her reflection, just before the cut, something else moved—slow, deliberate, human-shaped but wrong in its timing.
Each motion lagged, like frames out of sync with reality.
He whispered, "Leah… what did you see?"
---
01:12 A.M.
The apartment was silent except for the rhythmic hum of the servers.
Arin opened the old terminal Mira had built, still labeled BRD-CORE, and inserted the drive Leah had touched hours earlier.
The screen filled with unreadable code:
> [BORDERLINE_PROTOCOL: Phase 13 / Reentry Attempt]
Then, beneath it:
> Connection Detected – Mirror Host Confirmed
His reflection on the monitor blinked.
Not at the same time as he did.
Arin backed away, the chair screeching.
Every screen in the room—laptop, phone, even the clock—flashed once, synchronized to that impossible blink.
Then everything stopped.
No sound. No electricity hum.
Just stillness, as if the world had inhaled and forgotten to exhale.
---
The Street Outside
When he stepped onto the balcony, the city had become a loop.
Cars crawled through intersections and froze mid-turn.
People on the sidewalks shifted back and forth in two-second intervals—walking, stopping, walking again.
The air itself seemed granular, each breath catching on invisible edges.
A bird hung in the sky, wings half-extended, twitching like corrupted video frames.
Arin gripped the railing.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears, but even that began to stutter.
> This is what she meant… "Time breathes."
---
02:00 A.M.
He ran down the stairwell, the walls pulsing faintly as though light leaked through them from another layer.
Outside, the temperature dropped instantly—his breath visible in clouds.
A man across the street looked up at him and spoke.
The words reached Arin five seconds late, like the delay of a bad call.
> "Do you… see… it?"
Then the man repeated the sentence perfectly, the same intonation, the same blink.
Two identical moments playing back-to-back.
Arin stumbled backward, clutching his head.
Reality wasn't breaking; it was repeating.
---
02:11 A.M.
He found himself drawn toward Leah's office building, guided by a pull that felt magnetic.
The city along the way was collapsing inward—storefronts folding into themselves, reflections on glass showing angles that didn't exist.
At the intersection, he saw her car still idling by the curb, lights on, driver's door open.
Inside, her phone sat on the passenger seat.
The screen glowed with one unsent message:
> "Arin, it's inside the memory. Don't look at the mirror—"
The message cut off mid-sentence, the timestamp frozen at 02:59 A.M.
He checked his watch.
02:59.
The second hand twitched once… twice… and then refused to move.
---
The Three-Minute Loop
The world folded.
A soft ringing filled the air, too pure to be mechanical.
Then time reset.
He was standing back in his apartment.
The terminal light blinked as before.
His coffee was warm again.
> No. Not again.
He grabbed his phone—it showed the same missed call from Leah, same timestamp.
Every digital trace of the night was resetting, as if the last hour had been copied and pasted endlessly.
He slammed his fist against the desk.
"Stop!"
The echo came back—not from the walls, but from behind him.
His own voice, delayed by three seconds.
> "Stop…"
He turned—and his reflection in the dark window smiled.
---
02:59 → 03:00
The lights flickered red.
The reflection stepped forward through the glass, not shattering it but sliding out as if through water.
It looked exactly like him, except for the eyes—flat, dark, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.
It spoke in his voice but with Mira's cadence:
> "You opened it, Arin. You finished what we began."
He tried to move, to shout, but his body lagged half a beat behind his thoughts.
> "What are you?"
The reflection tilted its head.
> "The part that remembers dying."
Then every mirror in the room—from the window to the laptop screen—filled with thousands of overlapping images, versions of himself gasping for air, frozen at the edge of death.
They whispered in unison:
> "Three minutes… remember the way back…"
---
03:00 A.M.
The breach completed.
Every clock in the city struck three at once.
A pulse rippled through the skyline, bending glass, distorting light.
Then, silence.
Arin collapsed, clutching his head as flashes seared through his mind—Mira, Leah, the Borderline's white expanse, and something deeper beneath it all.
Something that wasn't meant to wake.
He whispered through blood-stained lips:
> "If this is memory... who's remembering me?"
---