The air inside the chamber shimmered — not visually, but sonically.
Every sound seemed to stretch, bend, and echo back seconds too late, like the room itself was breathing their voices in and out.

Aria took a hesitant step forward. The walls — silvered panels mottled with age and smoke stains — caught her reflection in fragments. Dozens of her, split apart, all watching back. Behind her, Rylan’s flashlight beam flickered weakly, swallowed by the haze of dust and static that seemed to hang in the air like fog.

“This isn’t just a recording room,” Aria murmured. “It’s… responsive.”

Rylan’s jaw tightened. “Responsive how?”

“Listen.”

She spoke again — “Hello.”
The chamber answered, her word looping back a half-second later, softer, stretched — “...hello...”
Then again, quieter still, until it dissolved into the hum of the walls.

Rylan frowned. “Old acoustic feedback system?”

But then it changed.
A voice — not hers — whispered from somewhere deep within the chamber:
“You let her die.”

Rylan froze.
That sentence. Those exact words. The ones his partner, Leah, had screamed before the explosion swallowed her voice forever.
He stepped back, as if distance could erase sound. “That’s not possible,” he breathed.

Aria turned to him, pale. “It’s the room. It’s not echoing—it’s remembering.”

He looked at her. “Remembering?”

She nodded slowly. “Sound doesn’t just disappear, Rylan. In here, it’s trapped. Layered. Every frequency that’s ever been recorded is… still here.”

A low hum rippled through the floor. Aria’s own reflection flickered — and her voice spoke again, but she hadn’t moved her lips.

“The mirror is not a place,” her double said, eyes hollow and unblinking.
“It’s a signal.”

Aria’s breath hitched. “That’s my—my voice.”

Rylan’s flashlight faltered as the air filled with faint static, like distant whispers caught between frequencies.
He remembered the tapes. The Voice. The overlapping tones.
“Then the Mirror Hour…” he said quietly, piecing it together. “It’s not a time. It’s a wavelength.”

A radio frequency that could preserve consciousness. Replay it.
Over and over again.
A soul — trapped in sound.

They exchanged a look. The realisation felt heavier than air.

“The Voice…” Aria whispered, her voice trembling. “What if it’s not someone imitating people? What if it’s the experiment itself — alive inside the frequencies?”

Static crackled in response, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat. For a second, the rhythm matched hers.

Fear pressed close, but so did he.
Rylan’s hand brushed hers — grounding, steady.
For the first time in days, she didn’t pull away.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said softly. “You’re not alone in this.”

Her gaze lifted to meet his — brief, raw, unguarded. A silence passed between them, heavy with unspoken things.
Then the static shifted, forming something new — a deep thump-thump-thump that grew louder, rhythmic, like a heartbeat made of soundwaves.

The chamber was alive. Listening.
And feeling.

Aria’s reflection moved — but she hadn’t.
The mirrored version of her tilted its head, smiling faintly.
Then all the echoes stuttered into silence.

For a long moment, there was nothing but the faint, electric hum of the world holding its breath.
Then — Rylan’s phone buzzed.

He frowned, pulling it from his pocket. No signal. No service.
But a notification blinked across the cracked screen — 1 New Voicemail.

He pressed play.

Ellis’s voice — clear, cold, impossible — filled the air.
“Rylan.”
A pause.
“Don’t let her speak again.”

The line went dead.

And from the mirrored walls came a faint, delayed whisper of the same message — not Ellis’s, but Aria’s voice repeating it back.

“Don’t let her speak again…”