The mirror wouldn't lie.
It couldn't.
Callum stood shirtless before the bathroom mirror on the second floor, staring at the pale skin over his collarbone. The white blotch had grown—spread across his shoulder like a splash of chalk dust, but deeper. Beneath the skin, the bone had raised into a ridge, a second arc forming beside the original. Like a collar within a collar.
He pressed his fingers into it.
No pain.
Just a dull, solid wrongness.
A sense that this wasn't something added.
It had been there all along.
Dormant.
Waiting.
---
He hadn't left the estate in three days. Food was minimal—canned beans, dry oats, and what little he could stomach between shakes. Sleep came in bursts, and each time he woke, it was harder to tell what time it was. Sometimes the sun hung too long in the sky. Sometimes it vanished too quickly.
Worse than that were the dreams.
He saw himself in them—naked, skeletal, but with bones that shifted and grew as he moved. Ribs that expanded into antlers. Joints that reversed themselves like someone had twisted them inside-out. No flesh, just a voice echoing inside the skull.
> "The others failed."
"We are still forming you."
---
He had started recording the changes.
Photos.
X-rays.
The small medical scanner he'd brought with him to document the archive's contents now sat beside the fireplace, turned toward his own body. Every image confirmed what he feared:
Additional bone segments forming along his spine
A bifurcation beginning near the base of his skull
New cartilage fusing around the sternum
But there was no infection. No cancer. No trauma.
Just... evolution.
Or reversion.
---
On the fourth day, Callum returned to the archive again.
He didn't even try to stop himself now.
He passed the shelves like an old priest walking through catacombs—carefully, reverently. He no longer pretended he was studying them. The bones weren't specimens.
They were instructions.
And they were speaking louder.
---
At the back of the archive, behind the skull wall, the door reappeared. Narrow, bone-colored, just as before. But this time it was open. Inside, the warm chamber glowed brighter. The air smelled like burnt hair and old photographs.
A new book lay on the table.
No title.
He opened it.
Inside were journal entries. Not Greaves' handwriting—but something almost mechanical. Straight lines. Perfect spacing. Like a machine had carved the words rather than inked them.
> Subject 14: Re-entry successful. Tissue adaptation at 43%. Psychological resistance minimal.
Specimen exhibits previous-cycle memory interference. Monitor closely.
Host shows early signs of phase collapse. Prepare alternate cognitive structure.
Reintegration forecast: 17 days.
Callum blinked.
Re-entry?
Previous cycle?
There were diagrams attached. One showed a human head split open like a flower, with the brain spiraling outward. Another displayed two ribcages interlocked like folded wings.
He slammed the book shut, breathing hard.
But when he turned to leave, something was standing in the doorway.
---
It looked human. Mostly.
A man in a tattered lab coat, tall and thin, but wrong in the joints—too many bends in the arms, a neck that tilted without tension. The eyes were completely white. Not blind—watching.
Callum froze.
The thing lifted one long-fingered hand and pointed toward him.
Then toward the book.
Then… to its own chest.
There, on its ribs, Callum saw etched letters burned into bone:
> SUBJECT 3
"FAILED HOST"
The figure spoke without sound. Its mouth moved, slowly, lips pale and cracked. Callum could almost read the words:
> "We do not die here."
"We become."
Then it vanished—simply ceased to be there. No fade. No step.
Just gone.
---
Callum ran.
Up the stairs.
Through the study.
Into the bathroom again.
And vomited until nothing came out but air.
---
That night, the walls began whispering.
Not loudly. Not even audibly, at first. Just on the edge of sleep. Like words trapped behind the drywall.
"Thirteen before you."
"You wore this shape once."
"It is fitting itself back to you."
He began to tear the pages from Greaves' journals. Trying to match them to the diagrams in the white book. Trying to track when the transformations began. When his mentor knew. When he had known.
He found a line from one of Greaves' final notes:
> "We are not made of flesh. That was only the first skin. Beneath it is the truth. Beneath that, the archive."
---
On the seventh day, Callum passed out in the archive.
When he awoke, something had changed.
He was still lying on the cold stone floor, but the bones had been rearranged. Not by his hand.
By theirs.
The double-spined skeleton was no longer in its glass case.
It was gone.
In its place, written in dark, dry scrawl across the case interior:
> YOU ARE NOW SUBJECT 14.
---
The next 48 hours bled together.
Callum stopped writing.
Stopped sleeping.
He opened every cabinet. Read every label. Found dozens of drawers with the word "MERCER" etched inside them. Each holding small bone fragments. Baby teeth. Finger joints. A sliver of mandible.
He was being assembled. Slowly. Piece by piece.
He held a molar between his fingers—one clearly from a child's mouth.
And remembered something.
He had lost that very tooth at age six. In a public pool. It had fallen through the grate and never been found.
And yet...
Here it was.
Waiting.
---
At midnight, he stood before the mirror again. He hadn't looked in two days.
Now he did.
And gasped.
His reflection smiled back—
before he did.
---