Chapter 3: A Shattered Loop

The silence stretched between them like a chasm, filled only by the soft tinkle of glass settling into new configurations on the hardwood floor. Alex stared at Clara—this girl who looked like his sister, sounded like his sister, felt like his sister in his arms—and tried to process what she'd just said.

"What do you mean, 'like your sister'?" His voice came out as a croak. "Clara, you're right here. You're my sister."

Clara's face crumpled, and for a moment she looked far younger than her eighteen years. Her hands trembled against his arms, and Alex could feel her pulse racing where her wrists pressed against his skin.

"Am I?" she whispered, and the question hit him like a physical blow. "Alex, how long have I been acting... different?"

The question triggered a cascade of memories Alex had been unconsciously suppressing. Clara coming home from summer camp three years ago, just a little too perfect, a little too composed. The way she'd stopped leaving her room messy, stopped arguing with their parents about curfew, stopped stealing his leftover Halloween candy. Small changes, barely noticeable individually, but together they painted a picture of someone trying very hard to be the person she used to be.

"No." Alex shook his head violently. "No, you're Clara. You're my sister. You just saved me from that thing in the mirror."

"Did I?" Clara's laugh was bitter, broken. "Or did I just eliminate competition?"

Before Alex could respond, she stepped back and did something that made his blood turn to ice water in his veins. She pulled out her phone—the same model as his, in the same black case—and showed him the screen.

It was cracked. The exact same spiderweb pattern as his own phone, which he'd damaged weeks ago when he'd dropped it in the school parking lot.

"This isn't my phone, Alex." Clara's voice was steady now, matter-of-fact in a way that was somehow worse than her earlier panic. "I took it from my room when I heard the mirror break. But it's not mine, because I don't have a room. I don't have anything that's really mine."

Alex's phone was still in his pocket. He pulled it out with numb fingers, staring at the cracked screen that matched his sister's perfectly. Two identical phones. Two identical cracks.

"When did you drop your phone?" he asked, though part of him already knew the answer.

"I didn't. But Clara did, three weeks ago in the school parking lot. She was rushing to get to her car because she was late for her job at the bookstore." The words came out flat, recited like lines from a play. "She was worried about getting her first written warning from Mr. Henderson, the manager. She'd been working there for eight months, saving up for a car of her own because she was tired of borrowing Dad's Toyota."

Every detail was perfect. Every detail was something only Clara would know, would remember. But the way this Clara was reciting them—like someone reading from a script—made Alex's skin crawl.

"Stop," he whispered.

"She dropped the phone trying to juggle her keys, her backpack, and the latte she'd bought from the coffee cart by the main entrance. The latte was a vanilla cinnamon swirl, extra foam, because she'd developed a taste for fancy coffee drinks after her friend Jessica introduced her to the café downtown." Clara's eyes were distant now, looking through Alex rather than at him. "The phone landed screen-first on the asphalt, and she said 'shit' so loudly that Mrs. Patterson heard her from across the parking lot and gave her a disapproving look."

"Clara, please stop."

"But I wasn't there for any of that." Clara's gaze snapped back to him, sharp and present. "I watched it happen from the other side of her car window. I learned about it later, when I was learning to be her. When I was studying how to move through the world wearing her face."

Alex stumbled backward, his heel crunching on broken mirror glass. "You're not making sense. You're scaring me."

"Good. You should be scared." Clara began walking toward him slowly, carefully navigating the debris field. "Because if I'm not Clara—if I'm just something that learned to pretend to be Clara—then where is she?"

The question hung in the air like a sword suspended over Alex's head. He thought of all the covered mirrors, all the birthday traditions, all the inexplicable rules their family had lived by for as long as he could remember. He thought of his great-grandmother's stern face in the old photographs, the way she seemed to be staring out at him with knowledge too heavy for her eyes to hold.

"The real Clara," he said slowly, pieces clicking into place with awful clarity, "she's stuck in the mirror. Like you said I would be if you hadn't been here."

"Three years, two months, and sixteen days ago," Clara confirmed. "The night of her fifteenth birthday. Mom forgot to cover the bathroom mirror—just like she forgot to cover the dining room mirror tonight. Clara went to brush her teeth before bed, and..."

"And something that looked like her came out the other side."

"Something that had been watching her, learning from her, for weeks before her birthday. Something that knew exactly how to move, how to speak, how to love her family just enough to avoid suspicion." Clara's voice broke slightly. "Something that saved her little brother tonight not out of love, but out of self-preservation."

Alex's legs gave out. He sank down among the glittering shards, not caring that the glass was cutting through his jeans, drawing thin lines of blood on his skin. The physical pain was nothing compared to the psychological devastation of what he was learning.

"So you're not my sister," he said numbly.

"No."

"You're one of those things. An Echo."

"Yes."

"But you saved me. Why would you save me if you're one of them?"

Clara crouched down in front of him, careful to avoid the larger pieces of glass. When she spoke, her voice held a complexity that surprised him—not the flat affect of someone reciting learned behaviors, but genuine emotion. Regret, maybe. Or something close to it.

"Because if another Echo had been created tonight—if that thing had successfully replaced you—it would have disrupted the balance I've spent three years building." She reached out as if to touch his face, then stopped herself. "Your parents can't lose two children, Alex. They're barely holding together as it is, even though they don't consciously know what happened to Clara. On some level, they sense it. They know something's wrong."

Alex thought of his parents' forced cheerfulness during birthday preparations, the way they sometimes looked at Clara with confusion in their eyes, as if they couldn't quite reconcile the daughter in front of them with their memories.

"They know you're not her."

"Part of them does. The part that recognizes the uncanny valley, that senses when something is almost but not quite human." Clara's hand hovered in the air between them, trembling slightly. "But they've convinced themselves it's just teenage growing pains, natural changes. Because the alternative—accepting that their daughter is gone and something else is wearing her face—would destroy them."

"So you're protecting them by pretending to be Clara."

"I'm protecting myself by maintaining the illusion." The honesty in her voice was brutal. "If they figured out what I really am, they'd try to find a way to get their real daughter back. And that would mean exposing me, trapping me, possibly sending me back to the Glass Realm."

Alex looked up at her, studying the face that had comforted him through nightmares, celebrated his achievements, taught him to drive last summer. Every expression was perfect, every micro-expression exactly what Clara's would have been.

"The Glass Realm," he repeated. "That's where you came from? Where the real Clara is now?"

"It's..." Clara paused, and for the first time since he'd known her—either version of her—she seemed to struggle for words. "Imagine being trapped in a photograph. You can see out, you can observe, but you can't affect anything. You can't speak, can't move, can't even think properly. You just... exist, watching the world go on without you."

"Is she suffering?"

"I don't know." The admission seemed to cost Clara something. "Echoes aren't connected to our originals once the replacement is complete. I know what Clara knew up until the moment I crossed over, but after that..." She shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea if she's conscious, if she's in pain, if she even understands what happened to her."

Alex closed his eyes, trying to process the magnitude of what he'd learned. His sister—his real sister—had been trapped in some hellish mirror dimension for over three years, while a supernatural duplicate lived her life, ate her food, slept in her bed, and fooled everyone who loved her.

"Can she be saved?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Have you tried?"

"No." Clara's voice was small. "Because trying would risk exposing what I am, and I'm not... I can't..." She struggled with the words, and Alex realized he was seeing something remarkable: an Echo experiencing what might be genuine conflict between its survival instincts and something approaching conscience.

"You're afraid," he said.

"Terrified." The word came out as a whisper. "The Glass Realm is empty, Alex. Not just physically empty—existentially empty. No thoughts, no feelings, no dreams. Just endless, static observation. I remember what it was like before I crossed over, watching Clara live her life from behind the mirror. The hunger, the desperate need to be real, to exist in a world with color and warmth and possibility."

She looked at her hands, flexing her fingers as if marveling at their solidity.

"I can't go back there. I won't."

Alex stared at this creature who wore his sister's face, who carried his sister's memories, who was capable of something that might be fear and might even be guilt. She had saved him tonight, but not out of love. She was protecting a lie that had consumed his family for three years, but she was also the only person who knew the truth about what had happened.

"So what now?" he asked.

"Now you have a choice." Clara stood up, brushing glass dust from her knees. "You can try to expose me, try to find a way to rescue your real sister. But that would mean convincing your parents that the daughter they've been living with for three years is a supernatural imposter, and even if you succeeded, there's no guarantee Clara can be saved. You might just end up destroying the family entirely."

"Or?"

"Or you can keep my secret. Let me continue being Clara, let your parents continue believing their daughter just grew up a little. Let everyone stay safe and comfortable in their illusion."

Alex felt the weight of the choice settling on his shoulders like a lead blanket. Save his sister and possibly destroy his family, or protect his family by abandoning his sister to whatever fate awaited her in the Glass Realm.

"That's not a choice," he said bitterly. "That's emotional blackmail."

"That's survival." Clara's voice was matter-of-fact again. "For all of us."

Alex pushed himself to his feet, glass falling from his clothes like deadly confetti. He looked at the destroyed mirror frame, at the scattered shards that had once held his reflection prisoner, at the girl who looked like his sister but wasn't.

"I need time to think."

"You don't have time." Clara's tone was urgent now. "Your parents will be down here soon—they must have heard the mirror break. We need a story. A cover explanation for what happened."

As if summoned by her words, Alex heard footsteps on the stairs above. His father's voice, groggy with sleep: "What was that noise? Kids, are you okay?"

Clara moved quickly, kicking the compact mirror under a fallen chair and positioning herself near Alex. When their parents appeared in the dining room doorway, she was helping him pick glass out of his hair, playing the role of concerned older sister with practiced ease.

"We're fine, Dad," she called out. "Alex was getting some water and tripped into the mirror. Just clumsy teenage stuff."

Alex met her eyes as she said it, saw the warning there. The story was simple, believable, and gave him no room to reveal what had really happened.

His father surveyed the damage, shaking his head. "Well, I guess we can finally get rid of that ugly thing. Your mother never liked it anyway."

As his parents fussed over him, checking for cuts and muttering about calling someone to clean up the glass in the morning, Alex felt the weight of Clara's secret settling around him like chains.

He was now complicit in the disappearance of his real sister.

And he had no idea what he was going to do about it.