The mirrors pulsed faintly under the sour red light, breathing like a living thing. Miles stood still for a moment, caught between a thousand wrong versions of himself. Each reflection moved just a hair slower, or too fast, or smiled when he didn't.
It was like looking into a graveyard where all the headstones bore his face.
The voice slithered back into the room, dripping like black ink.
"Truth has a weight, Detective Rennick. You carry it well... for now."
Miles swiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve, gun tight in his hand. He hated riddles. Hated games. Give him a murder scene, a suspect in cuffs, a cold cup of bad coffee — that was real. This was theater.
The kind of theater where you didn't get an encore if you screwed up.
Crack.
Glass strained somewhere behind him. He spun instinctively, catching the tremor just as a spiderweb fracture split across the mirror closest to his shoulder. Then another. Another.
He paced carefully across the room, every footstep muffled by the glass floor beneath. It wasn't normal flooring — he could see just a few inches down through the glass to blackness yawning underneath. An abyss. No end.
"No trapdoors, huh?" he muttered under his breath. "That's almost merciful."
A panel lit up on the far wall, above an unmarked door:
RULE #5: BREAK THE RIGHT REFLECTION.
A hiss of pressurized gas signaled the start of a new timer. 02:00.
Miles grunted. "No pressure."
He moved, scanning the mirrors. They showed twisted versions of his past. A girl lying limp in an alley — he knew her name once. Knew her mother's tears. He brushed past a reflection of himself, standing in a morgue, pulling a sheet over a teenager's face. That one he still dreamed about sometimes.
But others were different. Fantastical. Impossible.
One mirror showed him strangling a man in a cell. Another had him taking a bribe, stuffing a fat envelope into his coat.
Miles scowled. "Dreams, huh? Not facts."
He crossed the room fast, checking each reflection methodically, heart hammering against his ribs.
He caught it at the far end — a subtle one.
A bar. Him. Slouched over a chipped whiskey glass, badge turned face-down on the counter, gun half-out of its holster. No murder, no betrayal. Just the slow, everyday death of a man who didn't give a damn anymore.
Real.
That was the danger. Not blood. Not bullets.
Rot.
The timer flashed 00:30.
He didn't hesitate. Stepping back two strides, he raised the butt of his pistol and drove it into the mirror with a vicious snap.
The glass exploded outward, raining tiny knives across the room. The blast threw him backward, and he barely caught himself on the floor.
Everything went dark.
Then a metallic click — mechanical, inevitable — and the door to the next room sighed open.
A new message burned across the far wall:
YOU CHOSE CORRECTLY. FOR NOW.
Miles spat glass from his mouth, grinned humorlessly, and limped forward. "Well, at least you're consistent, you sadistic bastards."
He didn't glance back at the broken reflections. He didn't need to hear them whisper "Liar. Killer. Coward."
He'd been carrying those voices long before he ever entered this place.
---
Meanwhile...
Somewhere beyond the mirrors, in a dark, warm room filled with screens, someone laughed quietly.
The man leaned forward, studying the monitor.
"Still thinks it's about solving puzzles," he murmured to no one. "Still thinks he's got time."
Another figure moved in the background — thin, jittery, nervous. "What if he makes it out?"
The man smiled. "Then we start again. Until he understands."
He pressed a button.
The next room primed itself.
---
Miles' Timer: 50:32
(Or at least, what he thought was time. It was lying to him now. He could feel it.)
The corridor sloped downward, the walls slick with moisture. It smelled like rust and mold and sweat. No screens, no countdowns, just red emergency lighting that throbbed like a heartbeat.
His boots made wet sounds against the metal floor.
The heavy iron doors ahead were carved with runes — or something like them — and something about them stirred a buried instinct in him.
A plaque beside them read:
RULE #6: SOME DOORS SHOULD STAY CLOSED.
He paused.
Every nerve in him screamed Don't.
But he was a detective. A dead detective was still a detective.
He pushed the doors open.
---
And stepped straight into hell.