Chapter 3: She Tasted Like Trouble And Felt Too Familiar III
Aria reached for a book on the counter. Her reflection didn't move. She froze, a cold knot coiling in her stomach.
Finally, the reflection caught up. She tried to laugh, a short, harsh sound. Too much caffeine, maybe. Not enough sleep, perhaps.
But deep inside, something ancient twisted, a compass spinning wild. Her instincts whispered a warning she couldn't ignore.
When she turned, the girl was back. Standing between the shelves, bathed in the slant of sunlight from the front window.
Her bare feet hovered slightly above the floor. The tips of her hair shifted like static, strands phasing in and out of reality.
"Stop looking," the girl whispered — but her lips did not move.
Aria blinked hard. "You're not real," she said aloud, her voice tight.
"I am," the girl said again — but the voice wasn't hers. It came from behind Aria, somewhere in the Unclassified History section.
Aria spun around. Empty. She whipped back toward the front — gone again.
The store felt impossibly quiet. Every shadow stretched too long. Every flicker of light seemed deliberate, charged. Aria's pulse raced. Whatever she had just seen wasn't child's play — it was something older, something watching.
This time, the store felt colder. Not the kind that made your fingers sting, but a deeper, more insidious chill. It crawled under her skin, settling around her bones, pressing on her chest.
It was as if something sacred had walked across her grave and left wet footprints on her soul. Aria pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart hammered. Not fear — something sharper, more precise.
Warned. That was the word. Warned.
She moved behind the counter, fingertips brushing at the register screen.
It flickered violently for a second, bursting into thin white symbols that twisted and stretched across the glass like wireframe letters from a language humans weren't meant to read. Then, just as suddenly, it snapped back to normal.
Aria leaned back, shallow breaths catching in her throat.
Outside, a couple strolled past the bookstore, laughing. One of them paused, glanced at the window — and for half a second, their face pixelated. Smooth, liquid blur, like a video buffering in real time. Then it was gone. They walked on as though nothing had happened.
Aria rubbed her temple, teeth clenched. "What the hell is happening?" she muttered, voice low, almost swallowed by the space around her.
A soft thump from the back corner made her flinch. One of the old journals she'd unpacked earlier had fallen from the shelf. There was no breeze, no tremor in the floor — just the quiet, deliberate sound of it hitting the ground, as if it had decided to move on its own.
She approached cautiously, each step measured, ears straining. The spine was cracked open to a page that made her stomach twist: a sketch, crude and violent.
A woman — or something resembling one — surrounded by hundreds of red flowers. Her eyes were hollow, black voids, her mouth gaping in a silent scream. The petals curled toward her like clawed fingers, grasping, suffocating.
Aria's hands shook as she snapped the book closed and shoved it back onto the shelf, forcing order onto chaos. Her movements were hurried, almost frantic. She turned off the music, leaving only the hollow echo of her own heartbeat in the shop.
The silence was thick, almost tangible, pressing in from every corner, stretching shadows longer, darker, as though the store itself had taken a breath and was holding it.
Her pulse thundered in her ears. Every instinct screamed that the world had shifted, even if the street outside looked ordinary. And yet… she knew, with a cold certainty, that nothing here was ordinary anymore.
The problem wasn't that the world was glitching. The problem was that Aria was starting to see it.
She could feel it — down in her gut, in the marrow of her bones, in the quiet pulse at the base of her skull. These weren't ghosts.
They were warnings.
Something in her was stirring, rising like a tide she hadn't noticed until it touched her throat. The universe was trying to contain it, or disguise it, behind masks of static and flickers that pretended to be hauntings.
The glitch wasn't a malfunction. It was a message. A prelude. A law bending, breaking — or maybe just failing to restrain what she was meant to become.
She wasn't being haunted. She was being reminded. And whatever lived beneath the skin of the world was watching her.
Aria pressed her palms flat on the counter, staring at the empty shop. She thought about calling Niko at the front, telling him what she'd been seeing, but the words jammed in her throat.
How could she even explain? "Hey, reality's lagging like a bad livestream and I think the sky is trying to tell me something"? No. He'd laugh. Or worse, he'd believe her.
When closing time came, she locked up the shop herself. The old brass key clicked in the door like a period at the end of a sentence. Outside, the streetlights flickered. Once. Twice. Then stayed dark.
The city dimmed — not a blackout, exactly. More like hesitation. Like the power grid was second ‑ guessing itself. The hum of traffic dipped a register, the way a song slows down when the battery dies.
Aria adjusted her scarf and started walking. She took the long way home, boots crunching on salt - streaked pavement. She didn't trust the main street tonight.
When she turned down the narrow alley by the flower shop, she saw it again: a shimmer in the air where there shouldn't be heat. Not steam, not light. More like the air itself was holding its breath, quivering faintly.
Aria stopped. The hairs on her arms rose. She turned sharply, scanning the brick walls and the puddled asphalt. Nothing. Just shadows. A dead pigeon near the drain, its wings spread wide like a warning she couldn't read.
Her heart pounded, but she kept walking, one careful step at a time. The city felt like it was watching her leave.
That night, Aria sat on the bathroom floor, her damp hair clinging to her hoodie she hadn't bothered to take off. Her eyes locked on the mirror, but her reflection didn't feel like hers.
It looked right — same tired gray eyes, same soft mouth — but wrong, somehow. As if someone had plucked her face from her body and was wearing it like a costume in a dream.
Then the mirror fogged, though she hadn't breathed on it. The image tilted its head slowly.
Aria froze.
Her reflection smiled.
A chill ran down her spine. She bolted upright, stumbling toward the door, heart hammering against her ribs. Piper hissed from the windowsill, fur bristling, tail lashing.
She didn't sleep that night.
The next morning, a flower waited for her.
A single crimson bloom curled from the cracked spine of an old book — Myths of the Hollow Earth. She hadn't touched the book in months. There was no soil, no vase, no root. Just the flower, perfectly alive, pushing itself from the pages.
Aria crouched, breath trembling, and reached toward it.
It was warm. Alive.
The petals twitched under her fingers, almost as if they were breathing.
She didn't call anyone.
Instead, she opened her laptop and typed:
Unnatural flower growth indoors + hallucinations + mirror smiling.
Click. Click. Scroll.
Forums and R••••• threads blinked at her. One mentioned "thin places," spots where reality itself thinned. Another linked it to collective dreaming. None of it made sense. None of it felt real.
She shut her laptop. Piper stayed tucked under the bed all day.
That night, the dreams returned — stronger. Fire crawling beneath her skin. Oceans pressing from above. Names whispered in tongues that weren't meant for human mouths. She woke gasping, lungs tasting like smoke, heart pounding as though it wanted to tear itself free.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Jules: You okay? You've gone full ghost mode.
Aria stared at the screen, fingers hovering. She typed slowly.
Aria: Just tired. Something's been… weird lately.
Jules: Weirder than usual?
Aria: Yeah…
A pause, then:
Jules: Want company?
Aria hesitated. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to hide. She typed:
Aria: Maybe tomorrow.
But tomorrow never came.
That evening, as she flicked off the bookstore lights, the city fell into silence. No engines. No buzzing phones. No footsteps.
Everything paused.
The air itself seemed to tremble. Aria felt it in her teeth, a low vibration that rose, insistent and threatening. She turned to the window.
The sky split.
A vertical tear opened slowly, deliberate, stretching upward like lightning drawn by a careful hand. Light poured from it — not golden, not white, but a deep, ocean - night blue.
Shapes moved behind it. Watching.
Then it vanished. Darkness rushed back in.
Power surged. Lights flickered. Traffic returned. A horn honked.
Aria stood frozen, keys clutched in her hand, unsure if she had screamed.
No one else seemed to notice. The news called it a "power grid anomaly."
She didn't believe it. Not anymore.
Back in her apartment, the flower had multiplied. Three now. Each petal a different color, all leaning toward the mirror.
Aria sank onto the couch, hugging her knees to her chest.
The kettle hissed on the stove, untouched. Across the room, her reflection in the mirror didn't mirror her movements. It just watched, patient, expectant.
Waiting for her to remember.
Waiting for something to end.
Or begin.
********************
Reality blinked first —
mirrors hesitated, shadows learned patience,
and warnings arrived disguised as errors,
as if the world itself forgot how to pretend.
What watches does not haunt, it remembers.
What breaks is not the law but the veil.
When the sky pauses and reflections smile,
it is not the end asking —
it is the beginning waking up.