And then, from the blackness of the unpowered secondary screen, a shape pressed forward. A boy. Younger than Elias. No—it was Elias. But not him. A version that had been deleted from every family photo, every official record, every memory except the one he’d buried so deep he’d convinced himself it never existed.

“Odd,” he whispered. The mirror’s lips moved three frames too late.

Elias tried to eject the crystal. The slot hissed shut, locked. The room temperature plummeted. Frost spiderwebbed across the monitors.

He slotted the crystal into the 4K playback array. The screen flickered—not with a menu, but with a live mirror of his own face. His tired eyes, his unshaven jaw, the flickering emergency light behind him.