Their mouths had not moved. The words had come from the walls, the air, beneath the mirrored floor.
Gemma stumbled back, and the mirror cracked beneath her. Webs of alien glyphs splintered out from her boots, their shimmering violet symbols pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
Above her, the galaxy twisted. Stars spiraled outward like water down a drain. The temple’s walls stretched higher, the carvings in them slithering like ink in water, reshaping themselves into new patterns—code she didn’t recognize but somehow understood.
The maze began to dissolve. And then came the heartbeat. It thudded beneath the floor, slow and seismic, like the temple itself was breathing.
Her own breath caught. Fog curled from her lips despite the heat.
“Gemma . . .”
She jolted at the sound of someone speaking her name. She turned.
And faced herself.
Except this version was taller, weightless, and radiant. Her skin was laced with faint lines of starlight. Her eyes burned with violet flame, and her hair floated like it had forgotten gravity. She didn’t walk but hovered. And around her, space distorted as if reality itself obeyed her presence.
Gemma’s own hands began to shimmer, and her pulse skipped a beat.
“Look at what you’re becoming,” Other-Gemma said, her voice echoing without sound. “You’ve been given a gift.”
Gemma stumbled backward, but the air trailed ribbons of light behind her arms, bleeding stardust.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she tried to say, but the words slipped from her mouth in the wrong language—the same one that haunted her dreams.
Her heart thrashed. Her mouth clamped shut.
Other-Gemma titled her head, eyes unreadable. She lifted a hand, and the temple responded.
Runes ignited across the walls. The glyphs at her feet lifted into the air, swirling around her like orbiting moons. One pressed to her sternum. Another to her eye. Gemma tried to swat them away, but her limbs felt heavy, distant.
The runes reshaped, and in them she saw herself walking through fire. Fighting, collapsing, kissing Christian, screaming, kneeling . . . transforming.
“Gemma?” Christian’s voice.
She spun and looked at him with wild hope, but he seemed afraid, stunned. He backed away.
She ran toward him, her hand outstretched, violet light flickering from her fingertips like sparks. But the more she moved, the farther away he became.
“Christian!” she called, in a voice that was both hers and not. It was ancient, alien, and terrifying.
His face crumpled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
The chamber exploded into echo. A hundred voices, all his, repeating that sentence over and over.
Gemma screamed, clapping her hands over her ears. Even her scream was foreign. It shook the walls, split the floor, spun the glyphs faster.
Inside her skull, Other-Gemma whispered, “You were never meant to be saved.”
The heartbeat stopped.
And the light went out.
Gemma snapped awake with a strangled gasp, clothes sticking to her like another layer of skin. She flung her hands in front of her face. They were normal. Human. Not glowing.
She covered her sweaty face with her arms and tried to slow her heart rate. Her chest ached with the weight of the nightmare. She hadn’t died when the orb rewrote her, but something inside her had been replaced or . . . awakened. And that might be worse.
Was she still Gemma Proctor? Or was she just a shell now, built around potent power and rewritten code?
