Cassandra ran.
The alarm wasn't loud it was urgent. There was a difference. Foundation alarms didn't blare to panic people. They clicked and buzzed like a heartbeat trying not to flatline. Low, pulsing. A countdown disguised as a warning.
The sterile hallway twisted in the corner of her eye. She sprinted past a researcher with a clipboard who looked too calm to be sane, past an observation window now fogged over from the inside, past a reinforced door that clicked shut exactly three seconds too early for the person behind her.
She didn't look back. That's how you became part of the report.
Sector Echo-5 was sealed.Four-inch-thick bulkhead doors. Two guards missing. One posted camera—offline.The breach lights flickered red against the frost-covered walls.
Someone or something was screaming down the hall.
Not a person. Not quite.
She stopped near a keycard panel and scanned her Level 2 ID.
ACCESS DENIED.
Of course. Echo-5 required Level 3. And they hadn't meant to give her Level 3 for another week.
Then the panel glitched.
The screen scrambled. Symbols that looked like language but weren't flickered across the interface—like someone had force-fed it a dream. The door unlocked on its own.
There were rules here.Do not open doors that open for you.Do not follow paths that weren't on the map an hour ago.Do not trust technology that responds to you by name.
But rules didn't apply when your own reflection smiled first.
The corridor inside Echo-5 was different from the rest of the facility. Same layout, sure—but everything felt older. The walls were made of the same metal, but they remembered things. Like each one had watched something terrible, then stayed silent about it for decades.
Her boots echoed on the floor as she walked, the sound dampened by...something. Like the hallway itself was listening too closely.
Halfway down, she passed a room labeled "Containment 5-ECHO-09".
Inside was a desk, a chair, and a broken mirror leaning against the far wall.
No anomaly.
No personnel.
No lights.
But the mirror
Cassandra's breath caught in her throat.
In the fractured shards of the mirror, she didn't see her own face.
She saw the girl again.
The one from her reflection last night.
She looked seven. Or maybe not. Time didn't sit right around her.
Same eyes. Same shape of the mouth. Same burn mark along the jawline—a mark Cassandra had never seen on herself, yet felt like it should be there.
The girl tilted her head.
The shards trembled.
Cassandra turned away fast and didn't stop walking until the corridor ended.
There was another door. This one was open before she even touched it. Inside, the air buzzed with static like the room had a throat and was humming just below the range of human hearing.
A table. A single speaker. A headset. A file.
The file had no name. But the words burned red across the cover:
SCP-7329 VOCALIZATION EVENT #150CLEARANCE OVERRIDE: TEMPORARY RAYNE, C.
Who had cleared it for her?
She sat. Slowly. The headset was warm.
The speaker clicked once. Then silence.
Then words.
"You are not what they told you."
"The words inside your blood do not come from here."
"You remember things that never happened. We gave them to you."
"We gave you language before you were born."
"Speak it back."
She tore off the headset.
Sweat soaked her back, her hands shaking.
The voice wasn't in English.
Not fully.
Some words had no translation. She hadn't understood them with her ears she'd felt them. Like pressure behind her ribs. Like someone had reached into her lungs and made them hum.
She backed away from the table and turned.
The girl was standing in the hallway.
No mirror. No reflection. Just her.
She didn't speak. She didn't move. Just watched.
And Cassandra did something she hadn't done in years.
She froze.
Not out of fear but because something deeper than fear was moving inside her. Recognition.
This wasn't the first time she'd seen that girl. Not in mirrors. Not in dreams. Before. Long before.
There was a memory buried deep inside her mind, walled off like an old bunker sealed after a war.
But now the door was creaking open.
Suddenly, lights snapped back on.
The hallway flooded with blinding fluorescence.
When her eyes adjusted
The girl was gone.
"Rayne."
The voice in her earpiece snapped her back.
"Rayne, where the hell are you?"
It was Grumman.
She pressed the comm. "Echo-5. I don't know how I got in. Something—something let me through."
There was static. Then: "Get out. Right now. That sector's lockdown wasn't triggered by the breach. It was triggered by you."
"What?"
"There's a pattern in the security logs. It's matching your biometric code."
"That doesn't make sense"
"They think you're a hostile anomaly."
The lights dimmed again.
The air pressure dropped.
She heard footsteps. Fast. Echoing.
Not toward her from everywhere.
The intercom buzzed again.
"Cassandra... you have to listen to me carefully now."
His voice had changed. Less annoyed. More afraid.
"If you see it again her do not speak. Not in any language. Not even in your mind. Not even a thought."
"…Why?"
"Because you might accidentally finish the sentence."
The door slammed shut behind her.
Alarms resumed. But this time, not for the site.
This time, for her.
She wasn't just a researcher anymore.
She was part of the containment file.
FOUNDATION SECURITY ALERT
Subject: Cassandra RayneStatus: Under InvestigationPotential Class: Type Blue (Linguistic Anomaly / Host Embedded)Recommended Action: Surveillance | Containment Pending | Cognitive Scrub Prohibited Until Further Notice
Cassandra stood alone in the corridor, the warning lights painting the hallway red again.
Something deep inside her whispered.
A language without words.A sentence without grammar.A truth no one had permission to speak.
And it was waiting to be said.