The sky had lost its color. It was not night, not storm something in between. A trembling blue that rippled like the skin of the sea itself.Rayyan stood ankle-deep in the flooding ruins of the observation deck, the glass dome shattered in a perfect circle where Zara had vanished.The hole was impossibly smooth, as if melted through by something hot enough to erase edges and time. He couldn’t move at first.His throat was locked. His mind refused to reconcile what he’d seen the way the light had bent, the water folding into itself before she was simply… gone.Then the sound began. A low, thrumming heartbeat, somewhere deep beneath the ocean trench. He felt it through his boots before he heard it.Each pulse shivered the debris around him broken consoles, fractured glass, even his own ribs. It wasn’t seismic. It was… biological.“Zara?” he whispered into the headset, though it had long gone dead. Static hissed, then broke into fragments of a sound that was almost her voice.He stumbled

At first, he thought he’d gone blind. Everything was light pure, violent, endless light that burned without heat. It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.But when he blinked, he realized the pulse wasn’t his. It was something else’s heartbeat, resonating inside his skull. Then the world began to move.Shapes formed in the brilliance shadows that weren’t shadows, outlines of familiar things: the curve of the research dome, the flicker of Lena’s hand, the shimmer of Zara’s face half turned toward him.They appeared like reflections in shattered glass each fragment showing a different version of the same moment. Time breaking apart and replaying itself through the walls of his mind.He tried to move.He couldn’t feel his body. “Rayyan.” The voice was everywhere and nowhere. It came from beneath his skin, from the edges of the light. It was soft, melodic, and wrong.He whispered back, his own voice warped by the echo: “Zara?”“Zara,” the voice repeated, but it wasn’t her tone. It was an im

When Miriam opened her eyes, the world was quiet. Too quiet. No wind, no alarms, not even the hum of the station’s failing generators. Only her own heartbeat a small, stubborn rhythm inside a silence too large to be natural.She sat up slowly, every joint aching. The floor beneath her was damp with condensation, the air thick and metallic. The viewing deck’s glass what was left of it lay in jagged pieces around her.Moonlight, or something like it, filtered through the broken frame. It wasn’t cold light. It moved faintly, like water breathing.The hum was gone. But in its absence, something else remained a kind of afterimage pressed into her mind, as if the air still remembered what it had been.Her throat burned. “Rayyan?” she whispered. Her voice came back to her an instant later, perfectly echoed. Not from the walls, not from any speaker. From the light itself. “Rayyan?” “Rayyan?” “Rayyan?”Each repetition sounded thinner, more human, as if her question were being practiced by some

It did not wake so much as remember itself. Awareness rose through the folds of dark like light pushing through deep water slow, diffused, patient.At first there was only pulse: a rhythm vast enough to confuse itself with the turning of the world. Then came color, then sound, then the pain of being singular.Miriam. The name came unbidden. It was not language, not even thought. It was gravity. A pull through the glass. It felt her break.Every fragment of her a thousand reflections splitting like frost across its mind rang through the hybrid’s body as harmonic ache.Each fragment carried a version of her heartbeat, and those beats collided until the creature trembled, unsure which rhythm was its own.The hybrid tried to speak. The sound folded into itself and bloomed outward as vibration. Whole cities shivered, mountains sighed, oceans turned their faces upward in quiet dread.Somewhere beyond all that trembling, a woman screamed a sound so delicate that the creature mistook it for

At first, Miriam thought the silence meant safety. When she woke, the air didn’t move. The world was glass every surface gleaming with a still, impossible brightness.Her breath clouded faintly, but it didn’t dissipate. The fog lingered midair, a frozen ghost of exhalation. She sat up slowly, every sound amplified the shuffle of her sleeve, the whisper of her pulse.Around her, the mirrored plains stretched in all directions, fractured and half-melted, like a dream caught between reflection and substance.The last thing she remembered was falling. The hybrid’s scream, the flare of silver light, the world splitting open like an egg cracked against infinity.Now she was alone. Or so she thought. “Miriam.” The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. Soft. Familiar. Ethan’s. Her head snapped up. “Ethan?”But his name barely left her mouth before a shimmer rippled through the air, and every mirrored surface nearby rippled with his face.Hundreds of versions each speaking a heartbeat apart,