There were no mirrors in this room.
He'd checked.
Twice.
Not because he feared the Echo would appear in the glass, but because he feared it wouldn't. And that meant it was inside him now.
Selene sat across from him, close but not close enough to touch. Her arms rested on her knees, her hair pulled back, face bare and open. Too open.
Alpha didn't like how that made him feel.
"Why are you still here?" he asked, voice low.
Selene didn't look up. "Because if I leave, I'll never know who made it out."
He stared at her.
She met his gaze this time, and it felt like two ghosts trying to recognize each other in a fog.
"You think I'm not me."
"I think you don't know if you're you," she replied gently.
He wanted to argue. To deny. But that was the problem.
He didn't.
Instead, he looked at his hands. Pale knuckles. A thin scratch on his thumb. Something left behind from the chamber?
Or… from before?
His chest tightened.
Selene shifted. "I could try something."
Alpha tensed.
"No magic," she said quickly. "Nothing that burns. Just… something simple."
He nodded slowly.
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a smooth, palm-sized stone.
Faint red shimmer beneath its black surface. Almost warm.
"This was mine," she said. "Before the Rite. I kept it with me. Slept with it under my pillow."
"What is it?"
"An anchor," she said. "It smells like fire when it rains. I don't know why. But it always reminded me I was real."
Alpha took the stone in his hand.
It was smooth. Solid. Real. But that didn't mean he was.
Still… he closed his fingers around it.
Selene watched him, quiet.
Then she said something he didn't expect:
"When mine spoke to me… it said things only I remembered."
He looked up.
She shrugged. "Tiny things. A cracked bowl in my father's house. The sound of boots in winter. It was like it'd stolen the pieces I forgot."
Alpha felt something stir behind his eyes.
Not pain.
Recognition.
"Do you ever miss it?" he asked.
Selene froze.
Then, in a voice so soft it might've been someone else's:
"Sometimes I wonder if it was more me than I ever let myself be."
They sat there, not speaking. The warmth of the stone between his fingers. Her breath steady across from him.
No threats.
No spells.
Just two people slowly confessing that maybe neither of them made it out whole.
Maybe no one ever does.
He woke before the others.
The fire had long since gone out, but he felt warm.
Not in the way the body feels heat.
In the way a whisper might curl around the back of the neck.
The blanket slipped from his shoulders as he sat up. The world moved like syrup—slow, too slow, then all at once. He pressed a hand to his temple.
He was alone.
That thought came with strange relief. And then unease.
He stretched, stood. Walked past the half-open door and into the still hallway.
There was a puddle outside the chamber. Just rain, maybe.
He looked down into it, and blinked.
His reflection lagged behind.
Just a blink, nothing more. But the image didn't vanish with the ripple.
It watched him.
Like it had been waiting.
He stepped back. It didn't move. Not until he turned his head. Then, perfect sync.
He swallowed hard. Didn't speak. Didn't test it.
Just moved on.
Breakfast was quiet.
The boy chatted, fidgeting with his food. Selene mostly watched Alpha.
Alpha pretended not to notice.
He chewed. Swallowed. Chewed again.
All of it tasted like paper.
When the boy laughed, Alpha laughed too.
Too quickly.
Too… perfectly timed.
It made Selene glance up.
"You okay?" the boy asked.
Alpha nodded. "Yeah. Just tired."
But even the lie felt borrowed. A line from a play. Words in someone else's mouth.
Later, Selene sat beside him while the boy dozed nearby.
They spoke about nothing. The weather. The stone walls. Dust.
And then Selene, quietly: "My brother once carved little patterns into the doorframes. Said they kept Echoes from listening."
Alpha answered without thinking.
"The triangular ones, right? Interlocked. With a burn mark in the center."
She stiffened. He felt it like a crack through glass.
"I never told you that," she whispered.
Alpha blinked.
"I… must've read it," he said. "One of the scrolls."
But her face told him: no, you didn't.
That night, when the room went quiet, Alpha stayed awake.
He traced patterns on the blanket with his finger. Circles. Lines. A shape his hand remembered, even if his mind didn't.
When he looked down, There was a faint, red line on his wrist.
Not blood. Not ink. A sigil burned into the skin, faded, but unmistakable.
Selene saw it in the morning. Said nothing.
But her silence had weight.
Like she was measuring the difference between him and someone she used to know.
He heard a voice while washing his face.
Soft.
His own voice.
"You're not fooling her."
Alpha froze.
Looked around.
No one.
Just his reflection in the basin.
And maybe, for half a second,
It smiled.
Selene's POV
He was eating.
That should've comforted her.
It didn't.
Selene sat across the room, arms around her knees, back to cold stone. The boy had gone quiet again, watching Alpha with the same careful reverence one might give a wounded god. Or a ticking bomb.
Alpha dipped bread into the broth with movements too measured. Too... rehearsed. Like he was acting out the part of a person.
Not quite wrong. But not quite right either.
And Selene knew what it looked like.
She had worn that same mask once.
When she came back from her own Rite.
When she hadn't come back alone.
Flashback, blurred around the edges.
She remembered standing in front of a mirror.Bleeding. Barefoot. Drenched in smoke and memory.
And her Echo behind the glass, smiling with her mouth, holding her thoughts like glass marbles.
"You survived," it whispered.But it hadn't felt like survival.
It had felt like a trade.
Alpha looked up. Met her eyes.
And for a heartbeat, it was him.
Then he blinked. Just once.
And she wasn't sure anymore.
She rose to her feet slowly, moving to sit beside him as he finished the last of the broth. He didn't speak. Neither did she.
The boy had gone to fetch more firewood, or maybe just to give them space.
Or escape.
Selene studied Alpha's profile. The slope of his cheek. The scar just beneath his jawline. All familiar.
Still, something crawled beneath her skin.
"Do you remember," she said softly, "the first time we found the bone lanterns?"
Alpha's brow furrowed. "Yeah. That pit full of salt and shadows. You tried to light one with your blood."
Selene's breath caught.
Close. Almost word for word.
But she had never cut her hand. She'd used the boy's. He'd insisted.
She nodded anyway, lips tight. "Right."
He smiled faintly.
Like he'd passed a test he didn't know he was taking.
Later, when he slept, Selene sat awake. Staring.
She wanted to believe it was him.
She ached to.
But memory was a slippery thing. She knew that. The Echo didn't always speak. It didn't need to. Sometimes it just… borrowed. A mannerism. A word. A smile.
And left you wondering who was copying who.
She remembered her own Echo's final words before she severed it.
You'll miss me.You'll never know if you got the right one.
Selene looked at Alpha again, his body curled under a heavy blanket, breath even.
And she almost reached for his hand.
Almost.
Instead, she whispered, "If you're still in there, Alpha... come back on your own."
Then she sat beside him in the dark, listening to the quiet hum of his dreams, wondering who exactly was dreaming.
And whether she'd already lost him.
She left a blade on the table.
Not a real one. Not sharpened steel. Just bone, worn and carved, once used for ritual etching. Dull at the edge. Harmless to anyone who didn't remember.
She placed it there casually, next to the tea.
Alpha barely glanced at it.
Didn't flinch. Didn't reach. Just drank slowly, eyes distant.
Selene watched. Every motion. Every breath.
He hadn't asked her how long he'd been gone.
Hadn't asked what the scroll revealed.
Didn't even seem curious.
The real Alpha would have been.
She knew that.
Didn't she?
Later, she left the boy with a distraction, some errand about ink or dried herbs, and cornered Alpha alone in the old records room. Shelves leaned sideways, filled with rotting parchment and flaking wax seals. The air tasted like dust and memory.
She pulled out a map. Spread it between them.
"Where did we lose the second glyph?" she asked.
Alpha's eyes traced the parchment. Slowly.
She could almost see the calculation.
"There." He pointed.
The correct spot.
But his finger didn't tremble. Not even a little.
The real Alpha had shaken for hours after that night. From blood loss. From fear.
He wasn't shaking now.
"Good," she said softly.
That night, she whispered his name in his sleep.
Not the name he used now. The one he'd discarded. The one he'd only ever told her once, back when they thought they might die in the tunnels below the Ardent Vault.
"Malik," she said into the dark.
No movement.
She tried again, just louder. "Malik."
His breathing didn't change.
But his fingers curled, tight into the blanket.
Just once.
And then relaxed.
Selene sat up.
The crack in her chest widened a little.
It could mean nothing.
Or everything.
By morning, she was different.
Not colder. Not crueler. Just certain that something was wrong.
She didn't run. Didn't flee.
Instead, she watched. Waited.
Planned.
Because if she was wrong, Alpha would forgive her.
But if she was right...
She would need a way to bring him back.
Or end what came out wearing his face.