Chapter 10 The Mirror That Breathes

Jack stood at the edge of his reflection.

Not in a mirror. In something else. A black, rippling surface deep underground, where reality no longer held shape. It shimmered like oil and shimmered back.

He remembered the moment he stepped through it - or was pushed.

It had been weeks since the core breach at Breach Point. He and Clay had been trying to destroy the signal transmitter - the one pumping out psychotropic waves into the bunker like a heartbeat. Clay died in the blast. Jack didn't.

Or at least, not all of him.

Now, he wasn't sure who was watching whom anymore.

"Who are you today?" the reflection whispered.

"Are you the memory, or the meat?"

Jack didn't answer.

The voice always sounded like him. But it came from the wrong angles, like it was bouncing through mirrors before hitting his ears.

His hand twitched. Something inside it pulsed - not blood. A signal.

He scratched at his face. Skin came loose. Beneath it was... more skin. Smoother. Younger. Like layers of masks, each closer to something hollowed-out and smiling.

"You gave me the entry point," the voice cooed again. "The way in."

"Through your guilt."

And it was true.

Jack remembered everything. How he'd authorized the Orpheus Protocol. How he'd told Marcus Clay to bring his daughter to the site. "Just to run a baseline," he'd said. "Nothing dangerous." A lie he'd told himself as much as anyone.

She'd been tagged.

A child marked by the Hollow. Not infected, not quite. But watched.

Always watched.

Now it used her as bait.

Jack turned away from the pool and stumbled deeper into the cave system beneath the canyon. He didn't eat. Didn't sleep. But something like will still burned inside him - not his own, but enough to keep walking.

He reached what the Hollow called the Chamber of Return.

A room made of jagged screens. Dozens of them.

Each one showed a different version of him. Smiling. Bleeding. Screaming. In one, he kissed a woman whose face he couldn't recall. In another, he held Riley in a bunker as gunfire raged above.

"These are all the versions we could be," said the Hollow.

"All the Jacks we learned."

Jack fell to his knees.

One screen flickered - different from the rest. Dim. Dusty. Forgotten.

It showed Riley. In the Canyon Ridge bunker. Watching his final message.

He reached toward the screen, hand trembling.

"You don't get to be her protector anymore," said the voice.

"Only her warning."

Then the lights went out.

And Jack Rourke - or the last whisper of him - began crawling toward her.