Chapter 12: 3:03 AM

Chapter 12: 3:03 AM

Three years.

Three years of quiet, meticulously constructed normalcy. Mason Carter had a life now, a real one, built brick by brick over the foundations of a buried hell. He was a senior analyst at a respectable logistics firm, a man known for his unnerving attention to detail and his preference for the night shift. He had a clean, minimalist apartment on the seventeenth floor of a new high-rise, a fortress of glass and steel suspended high above the chaotic city streets.

Lily was in remission. She was a sophomore at a university three states away, studying art history, her laughter over the phone the most beautiful sound in the world. The money from Black Hollow had not only saved her life, it had secured her future. He had won. By every conceivable metric, Mason Carter was a success story, a man who had walked through fire and emerged on the other side, whole.

But it was all a lie. His life was a performance, and the audience was the ever-present, watchful silence that had followed him home from the arctic. His normalcy was governed by a new set of rules, an unwritten, laminated card seared onto his soul.

Rule 1: Never be awake at 3:03 a.m. His sleep schedule was rigorously controlled. Heavy blackout curtains, melatonin, chamomile tea—a nightly ritual to ensure he was deep in unconsciousness when the witching hour of the station passed.

Rule 2: Any flickering light is a threat. He replaced bulbs at the first sign of weakness. He owned no fluorescent lights, only warm, steady LEDs.

Rule 3: Silence is the enemy. His apartment was never quiet. A fan whirred constantly in the bedroom. A white noise machine hummed in the living room. The low thrum of the city was a comforting blanket. He had chosen the seventeenth floor specifically so the sounds of the street were a distant, amorphous roar, not a collection of distinct, potentially mimicked noises.

Rule 4: Mirrors are liars. This was the most important rule. The mirror on his bathroom medicine cabinet was covered by a permanently affixed, tasteful art print. There were no other reflective surfaces in his apartment. No polished chrome, no glass tabletops. He shaved using a small, handheld mirror that he kept face-down in a drawer. Looking at his own reflection felt like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Tonight, the system failed.

A violent summer thunderstorm had swept across the city, a furious assault of wind and rain. At 2:58 a.m., a jagged spear of lightning struck a nearby transformer. The world outside his window flashed a brilliant, actinic white, and then his apartment plunged into darkness.

The building’s emergency power kicked in for the hallway lights, but his unit was dead. And with the power, went the noise.

His fan whined to a stop. The white noise machine cut out. The hum of the refrigerator ceased. In an instant, his carefully constructed wall of sound vanished, and the silence rushed in. It was a physical presence, a thick, suffocating thing that filled the room. It was the silence of Black Hollow, the profound, listening quiet of the tomb.

Mason’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. He wasn't asleep. He was wide awake. He fumbled for his phone on the nightstand, his thumb shaking as he pressed the side button. The screen flared to life.

The time was 3:02 a.m.

A cold, primal terror seized him. He had one minute. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying for sleep, for unconsciousness, for anything to carry him past the critical moment. But his heart was a frantic drum against his ribs, adrenaline surging through his veins. There would be no sleep.

The phone screen went dark. The minute passed in an eternity of breathless waiting. Nothing happened. No disembodied whispers, no glitching figures in the corner of his eye. Just the darkness and the oppressive silence, punctuated by the distant rumble of thunder.

He let out a shuddering breath. Maybe it was over. Maybe the distance, the years, had finally severed the connection. A wave of thirst, sharp and painful, hit him. His mouth was desert-dry. He needed water.

He swung his legs out of bed, his feet finding the cool wood of the floor. He moved through the familiar layout of his apartment by touch, a blind man in his own home. He made it to the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the tap, and drank it down in three long gulps. The mundane act was reassuring. He was just a man, in his apartment, during a power outage.

His bladder twinged. Another normal, human need. He navigated the short hallway to the bathroom. The door was ajar. A sliver of pale moonlight, piercing through a break in the storm clouds, cut through the small bathroom window, illuminating the sink and the medicine cabinet.

And the art print that covered the mirror.

He went to the toilet, his mind still on edge, listening to the silence. He finished and moved to the sink to wash his hands, his movements automatic. His fingers found the tap. And in that moment of thoughtless routine, driven by three years of carefully cultivated normalcy, he made the mistake.

He looked up.

He was staring directly at the art print of a serene Japanese landscape. But his sleep-addled, terrified mind had forgotten its own rule for a fatal half-second. He had looked up expecting to see a reflection. And in that moment, the thing that had been waiting for him looked back.

The art print wavered, like a heat haze on asphalt. The serene landscape of Mount Fuji dissolved, glitching like a corrupted video file, the colors bleeding into static. The static resolved itself, not into the silvered glass of a mirror, but into a perfect, real-time image of his bathroom, lit by the single, ghostly beam of moonlight. It was a window where a mirror should be. And standing there, staring back at him, was his reflection.

He looked older than he remembered. Deeper lines of exhaustion were carved around his eyes. A speck of gray threaded his temple. It was him, a perfect, weary copy. He stood frozen, his heart ceasing to beat, his breath caught in his throat. This was it. The final test he had been unknowingly running from for three years.

He stared, unblinking, into his own terrified eyes.

And the man in the mirror blinked.

It was a slow, deliberate motion. The eyelids of the reflection slid down, then up again, smooth and unhurried. His own eyes remained wide open, stretched with a terror so profound it transcended sound. He had not blinked. He was certain.

A single, horrifying truth dawned, crashing down on him with the weight of a collapsing mountain. The realization re-contextualized every paranoid moment, every sleepless night, every self-imposed rule of the last three years. It hadn't been PTSD. It hadn't been trauma. It had been an instinct. The instinct of a host animal sensing the parasite it carries within.

He had passed the test at the Northern Exit, refusing to let the mimic in. But he had misunderstood the nature of the enemy. They didn't just want to replace you from the outside. They could infect you from the inside. A single piece of their impossible, alien code—an echo, a fragment—must have latched onto him during that final, chaotic night. It had been there all along, dormant, hiding behind his own eyes, sleeping in his own skin, patiently waiting for a moment of weakness, a moment of silence. A moment when he would make the mistake of looking too closely.

He never escaped Black Hollow. He was the Northern Exit. He was the compromised vessel, the Trojan Horse that had walked out into the world.

He stared into the mirror, at the thing wearing his face. The reflection’s expression began to change. The corners of its mouth began to twitch, to pull back, stretching just a little too wide, revealing the barest hint of too many sharp, white teeth. It was the smile from Camera 6. A smile of final, absolute victory.

He had been relieved of duty after all.