CHAPTER ONE: The Sky That Flickered

    South Ridge Middle School, 3:42 PM – Earth-Alpha

The bell rang like a gunshot through the halls of South Ridge, and instantly, the floodgates opened. Students poured out of classrooms, backpacks slapping, sneakers squeaking, and voices rising like birds startled from a wire.

“Freedom!” Malik yelled, pumping his fist as he darted down the stairs, board tucked under one arm.

“Don’t trip on your dreams,” April snorted, dodging a teacher and joining him in the courtyard. Jules followed, her eyes squinting at the sky.

“Did either of you see that?” she asked, pointing upward.

Malik and April glanced up. The sky was a flawless spring blue, but… something shimmered.

“Like... a glitch,” Jules whispered.

“You’ve been watching too much Star Wars,” April said, rolling her eyes.

“No,” Jules insisted. “There’s a flicker in the sky. Right above the tree line. It happened again at lunch. And it’s not a cloud.”

Malik shielded his eyes. “Yeah. Okay. It’s kinda like—like the sky hiccupped.”

April’s sarcastic grin faltered. “Wait. You saw it too?”

“Only when Jules pointed it out,” he said. “But yeah, I see it. Just for a second.”

April’s expression tightened. She tapped her tablet, pulling up a file marked Project Tunnel_42. “I found this last week while digging through the school’s Wi-Fi. I thought it was garbage… but it mentions something called ‘LHB Breach Points.’ One of them’s right near us. Local Hot Bubble, I think.”

“You hacked the district servers again?” Jules said, scandalized.

“Define ‘hack,’” April muttered, flipping her tablet around. “Anyway, you’ll want to see this.”

On-screen, a faded satellite image showed an energy signature stretching from their town toward the stars - like a glowing vein through space.

“There’s a tunnel, Jules,” April said, eyes narrowing. “A real one. Scientists think it’s connected to some kind of plasma channel that links Earth to somewhere else. Another star system. Maybe…”

“Another Earth,” Jules breathed.

“Another grounding if we’re caught sneaking out,” Malik muttered.

But they all knew that wasn’t going to stop them.

  That Night – Bellwood Observatory

Jules’ father was the night technician at Bellwood, and she'd snuck in more times than she could count. The others crouched behind the silver dome while Jules typed the access code.

“You know,” Malik whispered, “if we get vaporized by aliens, I’m blaming you two.”

“You’ll be too vaporized to talk,” April replied.

Inside, the air smelled of metal and ozone. The dome’s telescope hummed as it rotated.

Jules climbed up to the platform, pointed the scope toward the strange flicker she’d seen, and adjusted the lenses. What she saw stopped her breath.

“There’s a breach,” she said. “Not in space. In the sky. Like - like a door, barely open.”

The lights flickered.

Something crackled in the air. A pressure. A pull.

Then the telescope’s screen blazed white.

WAAAAHHHHHMMM

A sound like a thousand airplane engines roared from nowhere - and everywhere. The floor shook.

April’s tablet blinked, then displayed a new message:

“BREACH SYNCHRONIZED.”

Then there was a bright light that blinded them.

??? – Earth-Beta

When they were able to open their eyes again the observatory was gone.

The three were standing in a field of purple grass beneath a dusky yellow sky. The stars above were wrong constellations twisted into unfamiliar patterns.

Jules blinked. “Is this a dream?”

April’s voice was quiet. “Look at the town.”

They turned. Where South Ridge used to be, a small city glowed beneath an orange-tinted sun. Cars floated above roads on silent magnetic pads. Giant, angular birds flapped between glass towers. People moved in synchronized flows, dressed in silver-gray uniforms.

But strangest of all?

Posters on every corner read:

“Welcome to Ridge Prime – Remember: Only the Originals Know the Code.”

Malik swallowed. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

April’s hands trembled as she checked her tablet - it still worked, but the files had all changed to something called THE GLASS CODE.

Jules’ eyes widened. “This isn’t our Earth.”

“No,” April said. “It’s… another Earth. And it knows we don’t belong here.”

    CHAPTER TWO: Ghosts with Faces

The air on Ridge Prime smelled… wrong. Like metal and flowers. Like ozone soaked in perfume. The wind whispered in tones they couldn’t name.

Jules, Malik, and April stood together in the tall purple grass, staring at the distant silver city glowing under the pale amber sun. A pair of enormous dragonfly-like machines zipped overhead, their wings reflecting rainbow streaks across the sky.

No one said anything at first.

“I feel like I just glitched through reality,” Malik muttered, voice barely above a whisper.

“You did,” April said, eyes scanning the skyline. “We all did.”

Jules’s mouth felt dry. “But the question is… can we glitch back?”

April didn’t answer. Her fingers danced across the screen of her tablet, trying to regain access to the files. They’d been rewritten - corrupted, maybe, or overwritten by whatever strange protocols ran this place. All she could find were references to something called “Node 7: South Gate Quantum Echo” and a repeating line of text in a new file:

“UNVERIFIED INSTANCE – ORIGINALS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.”

“It keeps calling us… unverified,” she said, frowning.

Jules stepped back, the grass crunching under her feet like broken snowflakes. “Guys. What if they can see us?”

“Then we gotta move.” Malik turned. “Standing out in a purple field beside a giant space telescope crash site is not how I want to start our alien abduction story.”

Behind them, the Bellwood Observatory - or what had once been it—was now just a twisted metal sculpture, half-melted and rooted into the dirt like a forgotten fossil. It had transformed, just like everything else.

Or maybe it had been reinterpreted by this world.

Whatever this dimension was, it didn’t just copy Earth.

It edited it.

South Ridge... Reimagined

The walk into town took over an hour, and nothing they saw made them feel better.

Ridge Prime’s streets weren’t paved - they hummed beneath their feet like conveyor belts, subtle magnetic pulses responding to passing people and transport pods. Roads were quiet. The sky glowed like a cloudy fishbowl, always twilight but never dark.

People moved with eerie coordination, eyes glowing faintly as they scanned walls and signs that shifted in real-time. The group noticed something quickly: No one was talking.

Not aloud.

Only soft finger taps. Subtle gestures.

Data streamed into wrist bands and circular devices on people’s necks—implanted screens, maybe.

“What are they doing?” Malik whispered.

“Maybe talking to each other,” Jules replied, trying to mimic their pace. “Digitally. Like mental texting.”

April scowled. “Yeah, well, if anyone looks into our signals, we’re going to light up like an error code.”

The buildings looked like melted glass and bone. Every surface moved slightly, adapting to touch and light. And above every door, flashing symbols in sharp geometric fonts shimmered:

“REGISTERED ENTITIES ONLY. UNVERIFIEDS MUST REPORT TO A WARDEN.”

April froze. “Okay, that’s - super creepy.”

“We need a plan,” Jules said.

“I vote run and hide forever,” Malik offered.

“No,” April said after a long pause. “We try to blend in.”

They both stared at her.

“Blend in with what?” Malik hissed. “We don’t have creepy neck-screens or glowing eyeballs or… telepathic Snapchat!”

April raised an eyebrow. “Not yet.”

She turned her tablet around. Somehow, despite being rewritten by this place, it had synced with a low-frequency network running through the city. It now displayed a simplified interface with options:

[Request Identity]
[Generate Avatar Shell]
[Imprint Local Protocols]

“I'm going to fake a digital identity,” she said. “A clean one. Something that'll register as native. Then I’ll spoof yours too.”

“That's…” Jules blinked. “Terrifyingly smart.”

April smiled. “That’s why I’m in charge now.”

Faking Humanity

They ducked into an alley lined with walls made of chrome mesh and flickering glass. At the far end, a mirror-like surface bent reality inward. Jules caught a glimpse of her own reflection - but her face was warped, twisted into a thousand versions of herself.

“Don’t look at the mirrors,” she said, pulling Malik’s arm.

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

April knelt and connected her tablet to the back of a wall node that pulsed like a sleeping heartbeat.

“I think this world runs on a quantum identity system,” she said. “Like an internet of people. You can’t just exist - you have to be verified, like software. I’m gonna piggyback a protocol. Basic access only.”

Lines of code crawled across her screen as she linked them to something labeled "Echo Instances – Layer 4-Prime."

Jules leaned closer. “You’re creating synthetic versions of us?”

“Exactly,” April said. “They’ll register as real people in this system, but without drawing too much attention. Think NPCs with basic permissions.”

The screen flickered - and then a low beep echoed in her tablet.

IMPRINT ACCEPTED. WELCOME, CITIZEN.

Each of them felt a slight pop behind their eyes.

And just like that, the whispering ceased.

The people walking by no longer turned their heads.

“We’re ghosts with faces now,” April said, standing. “Nobody sees us as intruders—yet.”

“What if we mess up?” Malik asked, nervous.

“Then we stop being ghosts,” Jules said. “And we start being hunted.”

The Hollow Café

To test their cover, they entered a nearby café.

It had no front door.

Instead, a shimmer passed over them as they walked through a liquid-like entrance, their bodies scanned in real time. Inside, dozens of citizens sat around silent tables, staring at floating glyphs above cups of steaming neon liquid.

No one spoke.

Instead, each table glowed with holograms - memories, maybe, or broadcasts from somewhere else.

The trio sat cautiously in a back booth.

A small screen blinked to life in front of them:

SELECT THOUGHT-FORM: NOOSPHERE A | B | C | D

“What the heck is a noosphere?” Malik whispered.

Jules whispered, “A kind of thought field. Philosophers used to talk about it—mental energy shaping the world.”

April touched Option A.

Instantly, a soft voice filled their ears - only theirs.

“Welcome, Citizens. Please review the latest strain reports for deviation activity. Unity ensures survival.”

“What strain reports?” Malik said. “Deviations from what?”

April turned pale. “From their reality,” she said. “Their version of normal.”

Jules’ fingers trembled. “I think… we’re the deviation.”

Outside the Dome

By the time they left the café, night had started to fall - but here, that only meant the sky turned deep violet and the city began to sing.

Not music. Not speech.

Just… a vibration, like every building was tuned to a shared harmony.

The city was alive in a way Earth-Alpha had never been.

But it was also watching.

From rooftops and glass towers, dark figures stood still - like statues, except their eyes flickered white and red. They didn’t move. They didn’t speak.

But the moment the trio stepped into the main square, three of the figures turned their heads.

“April,” Jules whispered. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

“I know,” April said, clutching her tablet. “Our cover’s temporary. That scan back there? It logged us as ‘probable Echo's.’ That means they think we’re artificial backups of real people from this world.”

“But we’re not,” Malik said.

“And if they find out,” she said, voice flat, “they’ll ‘purge the anomaly.’ That’s what their system does to corrupted echoes.”

The three of them stared up at a giant tower that pulsed red at the top - labeled NODE 7 – ECHO REPOSITORY.

Malik clenched his fists. “Then we find whoever’s in charge. We ask - beg - whatever. We find the real versions of us. The ‘originals.’ And we get back to our world.”

April looked at him.

“No,” she said. “We find the Glass Code first.”

  CHAPTER THREE: The Echoes That Breathe

The city shimmered under its artificial twilight, and Jules, Malik, and April stood before the towering monolith labeled NODE 7 – ECHO REPOSITORY. The tower was unlike any other building in Ridge Prime. It didn’t hum. It didn’t glow.

It pulsed, like a living heart.

As they stared up at it, a low vibration spread through the ground beneath their feet, and for the first time since arriving in this world, the illusion of safety began to crack.

“I really don’t like the way it’s watching us,” Malik muttered.

Jules turned her head slowly. “That tower has no windows.”

“No windows,” April echoed. “No doors, either.”

“How do people get in?”

“They don’t,” April said. “Only ‘verified Originals’ are allowed inside. Anyone else gets locked out - or deleted.”

Jules glanced at her. “You keep using that word. Deleted. You mean, like… killed, don’t you?”

April didn’t answer.

A Whisper Inside the Repository

Despite the risk, April had pulled another signal from the tower - something weak, stitched into the lowest bandwidths of the city’s wireless ecosystem. It wasn’t encrypted. It didn’t need to be. No one outside the system was supposed to be listening.

But April listened.

She always listened.

“I’ve cracked part of the Glass Code,” she whispered as they crouched beneath a stairwell across the street. Her eyes were wide with barely restrained panic. “This whole city - this whole world - it’s mirroring ours. But it’s not a perfect copy. It’s watching for us.”

Jules leaned in. “The Glass Code isn’t a program. It’s a signal, isn’t it? A living one.”

April nodded slowly. “It evolves. It reacts. I think it even… dreams.”

She turned her tablet around and played back the most recent audio file she’d downloaded from the Repository:

“THREE ECHOES… UNACCOUNTED FOR.
INITIATE INTEGRATION PROTOCOL BETA-FIVE.
LOCATE ORIGINAL INSTANCES.
LOCATE ORIGINAL INSTANCES.”

The voice was female. Hollow. Like glass cracking in cold water.

Malik stood slowly. “They know we’re here.”

“Worse,” Jules said. “They’re not just looking for us. They’re looking for our other selves.”

April exhaled. “And they think we’re the echoes.”

“Then what are the real us doing here?” Malik asked.

Jules looked up at the top of Node 7. “I think we’re about to find out.”

The Repository Maze

April found a side entrance - not a door, exactly, but a shimmering panel of black light that parted when she swiped her tablet through it.

It was like walking into someone’s bloodstream.

The walls inside were translucent, pulsing with a liquid-like glow. Tubes lined the corridors, filled with light instead of fluid. Faces drifted in the walls. Not people. Just imprints. Memories.

Or warnings.

“They’re storing identities,” Jules whispered. “Not just data. Lives.”

“Echoes,” April said. “They copy people when they glitch. Backup versions.”

Malik pointed to a figure drifting inside one of the glowing walls - it looked like a teacher from South Ridge. Mrs. Blanton. Except her eyes were pure white, and her mouth moved in silence, repeating something over and over:

“I remember the wrong sky. I remember the wrong sky. I remember the wrong sky - ”

April stopped walking.

Jules grabbed her shoulder. “We should go. Now.”

“No,” April whispered. “We need to find the Originals. If we can find them, maybe they can help us reverse the breach.”

“Or trap us here,” Malik said.

They continued deeper into the Repository until they reached a vaulted chamber. Inside, dozens of hovering capsules hung like floating coffins. Screens beneath each one listed names.

Most were unreadable. Glitched out. Repeating fragments.

But three of them glowed steady.

And on each one, a name.

HAN, JULES
DAWSON, MALIK
REED, APRIL

Unseen by the Mirror

They stared at the capsules in stunned silence.

“Are those… us?” Malik asked, backing up.

April moved closer. “They’re them,” she said. “Our counterparts. The real people from this world. And they’re asleep.”

Each capsule emitted a slow, dull beep. Medical vitals? Simulated consciousness?

Jules leaned in close - and suddenly her capsule’s eyes opened.

She staggered back. The Jules inside didn’t scream, didn’t thrash. She simply stared at her counterpart with a look of calm understanding.

Then she mouthed something.

April was the first to decode it.

“She said… Don’t wake us.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Malik asked.

Jules trembled. “Maybe they’re keeping this world stable. Maybe we’re the virus.”

“But we didn’t come here on purpose!” Malik snapped. “We’re not trying to destroy anything!”

“Doesn’t matter,” April whispered. “To this world, we’re not part of the plan. We’re unauthorized echoes. Unstable. Dangerous.”

A low siren echoed through the Repository.

Then the lights changed - from soft blue to red.

“DEVIATION DETECTED. PURGE IMMINENT.”

The capsule room began to shimmer.

“Run,” Jules hissed.

The Running Glass

They sprinted through corridors as the Repository closed behind them, the walls folding in like jaws.

From the shadows, Wardens began to appear - tall, faceless creatures in black ceramic armor. Their movements were silent, but their presence made the air go cold. Each one held a staff that crackled with flickers of fragmented light - like broken mirrors held together by sound.

Malik was the first to trip.

Jules caught him and yanked him up as April overrode the wall gate with her tablet, fingers flying faster than thought.

“Come on, come on!” she muttered.

The wall shimmered open just enough.

They leapt through—and hit the ground outside hard, rolling into a back alley. The air outside was thick with static. The city knew what they had done.

The Decision

They hid for hours in the mechanical underbelly of Ridge Prime, among rusted machines that hummed old Earth music on loop - jazz, oddly enough. It was like someone here had remembered Earth-Alpha, imperfectly.

Jules wrapped her arms around her knees, staring at a flickering old vent that blew warm, recycled air across the tunnel.

“Those versions of us,” she said. “They’re like… anchors. This world uses them to hold itself together. But if we’re here too”

“It can’t support both,” April finished. “One set has to go.”

Malik stood in the corner, fists clenched. “Then we find them. Not just the sleeping ones—we find the ones outside. The ones living our lives in this place.”

April raised an eyebrow. “You think there are active versions of us walking around Ridge Prime?”

“Maybe,” Malik said. “What if those aren’t the real Originals? What if this world copies versions across dimensions? What if it’s been doing this for years?”

A long silence followed.

Then Jules nodded. “He’s right. Maybe the ones in the capsules were early echoes. Maybe the real ‘us’ are hidden somewhere else - survivors, rebels… something.”

April glanced at her tablet. The Glass Code pulsed at the edge of its data stream.

A new message appeared.

“TO KNOW THE CODE, FIND YOURSELF.”

They all stared at it.

And then, slowly, April smiled.

“Okay,” she said. “Next step: we find ourselves.”

The tunnels beneath Ridge Prime stretched forever—humming with static, haunted by the mechanical sighs of the city's breathing systems. They ran through networks of glowing pipes and gravity-defying corridors, following a pulse only April’s device could sense.

The Glass Code was leading them.

Each flicker on her tablet was like a heartbeat - blinking faster the closer they got.

Jules kept pace, adrenaline surging through her legs, lungs burning. Malik grunted behind her, nearly slipping on a curved floor panel that tried to right itself beneath his feet.

April suddenly threw her arm out, stopping them.

“Signal just spiked,” she said. “It’s here. They’re here.”

They turned a corner.

And froze.

Echo in the Flesh

He was standing in the center of a circular chamber lined with hollow display mirrors—each one showing warped versions of Ridge Prime, other possible cities, infinite versions of a world they didn’t know.

He was taller than Malik, leaner, with short-cropped hair and a longer coat that shimmered like oil. But his eyes - his eyes - were exactly the same.

Malik stared.

And the other Malik stared back.

“Oh hell no,” Malik whispered. “That’s - me. That’s me.”

The other Malik tilted his head and smiled. A cold, confident smile.

“You’re slower than I expected,” he said, voice smooth. “Sloppy footsteps. No shield. No protocol masking. You’re lucky I found you you before the Wardens did.”

Jules stepped forward. “You knew we were coming?”

Other Malik smirked. “I felt you coming. This world doesn’t like anomalies, and when a version of me starts broadcasting wrong signals across three layers of reality, I get an alert.”

He stepped closer.

Malik stepped back. “This is so weird. I feel like I’m watching a version of myself that skipped middle school and went straight to being a Bond villain.”

“Close,” the other Malik said. “But I’m not the villain.”

He pointed upward toward the mirrored walls. The images shifted - showing shadows of what looked like battles, riots, masked rebels launching attacks on glowing towers.

“I’m the one trying to keep this world from devouring what’s left of yours.”

Fire and Mirrors

April’s device blinked rapidly.

“Wait,” she said. “You're not from Ridge Prime.”

The other Malik’s eyes flared for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I’m from somewhere in between. We call it The Layered Divide. One level above the surface sim, but far enough beneath the Originals that we can still move freely. There are others. Some of them are like you - Echo's who escaped deletion.”

Jules narrowed her eyes. “Then why show yourself now?”

“Because,” he said, “if the Glass Code led you here, then time’s almost up.”

Before they could speak, the chamber's mirrors shattered.

Each one exploded outward - not with glass, but with light, scattering echoes of cities and screams through the room like a hundred different timelines colliding at once.

Other Malik spun and threw up his hand.

A thin blue wall erupted in the air, shielding them from the worst of it.

From the flickering light stepped two Wardens - gliding across the ground, eyes blazing white.

“RUN!” the other Malik shouted.

The Chase Through Layers

They sprinted again—now with two Maliks side-by-side.

Wardens moved like nightmares, slipping between walls, phasing through surfaces, adapting faster with each second.

“They’re learning from you!” Other Malik shouted. “Your Echoes don’t stay hidden forever. They resonate! That’s how they track us!”

“How do we shut it down?” April gasped.

“You don’t. You drown it out.”

He tapped the wall and a side corridor blinked open - a tight gravity coil that launched them through a magnetic tunnel.

They twisted through space sideways, flipping end over end until they landed in a collapsed simulation - someplace older, rawer.

A playground. Bent. Decayed.

Jules recognized the swing set first.

“This is South Ridge Elementary,” she breathed. “Or… what’s left of it.”

Other Malik looked around. “Your world’s version of this place burned down five years ago, didn’t it?”

Malik’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”

“Because this world remembers everything,” he said. “Even the pain.”

From behind them, more lights shimmered.

The Wardens had found a new way in.

“They won’t stop,” the other Malik said. “They’ll chase you until you destabilize. Until you become too real.”

Jules blinked. “What does that even mean?”

“It means,” he said, “you’re not just echoes anymore. The longer you stay here, the more solid you become. The city can’t let that happen.”

Decision at the Divide

Panting, backs against the rusted jungle gym, the trio stared at their strange double.

Other Malik pulled a small shard from his pocket - a triangle of glass, flickering with light.

“The Code is fractured,” he said. “Scattered across dimensions, buried in the minds of those who survived the first collapse. If you want to get home, or stop this place from rewriting you completely…”

He held out the shard.

“…you’ll need to find the rest.”

April hesitated.

Jules took the shard.

It pulsed the moment she touched it—projecting a map across the sky. The stars above twisted, folding into a spiral of coordinates, places, names.

Three of the lights shone brighter than the others.

And each one bore a familiar name.

REED
HAN
DAWSON

April gasped.

“They’re not asleep,” she said. “They’re alive. The real versions of us… they’re out there.”

“Then we find them,” Jules said. “All of them.”

Malik stood, fists clenched. “We find ourselves.”

Other Malik smiled faintly.

And then he turned to leave - slipping between cracks in the air like he was never there at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Fractured Mind

The sky above Ridge Prime bent like a mirror under pressure.

Jules, Malik, and April stood beneath the glow of the glass-map - its constellations spinning into coordinates and whispering names in a voice only April’s device could hear. The stars began to dim, their energy flickering, leaving behind a single burning point on the map.

TARGET LOCKED: REED.A0-V3

April stared at it.

Malik read the designation aloud. “Reed… Alpha-Zero, Version Three?”

Jules raised an eyebrow. “So you’re not just one April here. There’s at least three.”

April swallowed hard. “That one... it’s me. Or it was me. Version Three was part of the first signal split. She was the prototype for the code-binding protocol. She's not… stable.”

The shard pulsed again. A line of light curved downward through the city’s underlayers—guiding them down into a place even the Wardens didn’t go.

April tightened her grip on her tablet and whispered, “She’s in the Dead Circuit.”

Descent into the Dead Circuit

It took hours to reach it—through collapsed sky rails, hidden tram lines, and magnetic tunnels lined with static-shredded advertisements. The city became quieter the lower they went. Too quiet.

No people.

No drones.

No lights - just bio-luminescent strips of fading language bleeding down cracked walls like forgotten prayers.

The entrance to the Dead Circuit was nothing more than a rusted door behind a false market stall, buried under decades of fake dust.

Inside, the temperature dropped ten degrees.

Malik breathed into his hands. “Feels like a place you go to die, not meet a version of yourself.”

April didn’t laugh.

She led the way, following pulses on her tablet that echoed her heartbeat.

The Hall of the Broken Reed

They entered a domed chamber with a ceiling of shattered glass - shards frozen mid-fall in a magnetic suspension field. Underneath it stood a cracked, upright mirror with cables snaking out from its base into a black throne of wire and bone.

And sitting in that throne… was her.

April’s alternate self.

Older. Colder. Taller.

Her skin was pale, laced with silver veins. Her eyes were hidden behind obsidian lenses. Dozens of cables fed into her spine, and the air around her shimmered like heat distortion.

April froze.

 The figure stared at them as she spoke:

“I dreamed you’d come.”

Her voice was hollow, like it had passed through too many frequencies to be human anymore.

“You’re me,” April said quietly.

“No,” the figure replied. “I’m what you could be. If you stayed.”

“Why are you here?” the older April asked.

“To find a way back.”

The figure tilted her head. “And what makes you think there’s a way back?”

Jules stepped forward. “We saw the capsules. The other versions of us. The ones asleep in the Repository.”

The figure’s eyes narrowed.

“You saw them.” Her voice sharpened. “Then you’ve seen too much.”

The throne flared with a pulse of light - and behind them, the doors slammed shut.

Truth and Terror

“She’s not going to help us,” Malik said, raising his fists.

“I didn’t say that,” April’s other self replied. “But if I help you… you won’t be the same when you return.”

April stepped forward, trembling. “You hacked the Glass Code, didn’t you? You understood it.”

The figure nodded.

“And it rewrote me,” she said. “Just like it’s rewriting you. Piece by piece.”

She tapped the side of her head.

“Dreams, hallucinations, bleeding timelines. You’ve seen them already, haven’t you? Forgotten memories, misplaced words. Like the world’s running through you now, not around you.”

Jules flinched. She had.

So had Malik.

April’s voice cracked. “Can we stop it?”

“Yes,” the figure said. “But the cost is high.”

She stood - unplugging herself from the throne.

Around the room, shards of glass lit up like dying stars. Each one showed different versions of April: laughing in a classroom, sobbing in a lab, standing in a burning city holding a smoking rifle.

“You need to locate the Central Node. It’s buried in the Rift Sea, at the edge of the Data Trench. That’s where the original code pulse was triggered. If you can send a return signal—one that matches your exact frequency signature - you can create a reversal loop. Tear the path back open.”

“But…” Jules asked. “What happens to this world if we do that?”

The figure didn’t answer right away.

Then she looked up, and whispered, “It collapses.”

Hard Choices, Hollow Futures

“No way,” Malik said. “We’re not going to destroy an entire world just to save ourselves.”

“This world isn’t real,” the alternate April replied. “It’s a defense mechanism. A shell. A recursion system built to process dying timelines. If you don’t leave, you become part of it. But if you force the exit… you burn the shell.”

April stepped forward, closer to her older self.

“Then help me. Help us.”

The figure paused.

Then she pulled something from her chest - a small, glowing crystal wrapped in glass-thread.

“Take this. It’s your frequency imprint. The other two have theirs, buried in their own echoes. Once you have all three, the Glass Gate will open.”

She handed it to April. Their fingers brushed - and a jolt of images surged through both their minds.

April gasped, eyes wide—suddenly seeing a hundred versions of herself at once, stretched across timelines. Some of them alive. Some not. Some monstrous.

The older April stepped back, staggering.

“I forgot what it felt like… to hope.”

A Way Home

They left the Dead Circuit quietly, with the map updating in April’s hands.

Two new coordinates lit up.

HAN.V2 - GLASS FOREST
DAWSON.V1 - DEEP VOID NODE

Malik and Jules exchanged glances.

“Guess we’re next,” Jules said.

“Guess we better not screw it up,” Malik replied.

April looked back once - at the fading light behind them, where her other self still stood beneath the cracked glass sky.

Then she whispered: “We’re going home. No matter what it takes.”

And the map pulsed again.

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Forest and the Void

The map pulsed again.

Above the rooftops of Ridge Prime, the stars twisted into new constellations - one shaped like a tree of glass, the other a spiral black hole.

TARGET 2: HAN.V2 - GLASS FOREST
TARGET 3: DAWSON.V1 - DEEP VOID NODE

April stared at them both. “Two coordinates. Opposite ends of the city.”

“Then we start with the one closest,” Jules said.

Malik squinted at the tablet. “That’d be yours, Glass Girl.”

Jules rolled her eyes. “Let’s go before I decide you’re the alternate I leave behind.”

The Glass Forest

They boarded a solar tram with no conductor and followed a tunnel that turned sideways midway through, like the laws of gravity had been scribbled out. As the city gave way to distant districts, the buildings thinned, replaced by twisted structures that resembled trees - tall, transparent stalks stretching into the sky.

The Glass Forest was real.

Its leaves shimmered in colors not visible in the normal spectrum - ghost-light reds and blues that flickered through the fog like memories trying to take shape.

Jules froze just outside the tree line.

Her heart thumped harder with each step closer.

“I’ve dreamed about this place,” she whispered.

April nodded. “Then it’s a memory echo. This place is tied to your consciousness.”

Malik muttered, “Great. We’re inside Jules’s brain now. We’re all gonna die.”

The forest swallowed them whole.

Echoes of Jules

Every tree reflected different versions of Jules.

Some were climbing trees in a playground.

Some were sitting alone in an empty classroom.

One was older - standing in a black uniform, flanked by a row of soldiers, blood spattered across her collar.

“Uh… guys?” Malik said, eyes narrowing at that version. “Please tell me that’s not you in ten years.”

Jules didn’t answer.

A faint humming sound drifted from the center of the grove - musical, like wind chimes and whispered secrets.

And then… she appeared.

Another Jules.

Floating above the ground, eyes glowing silver, hair loose and crackling with static. Her skin shimmered, flickering in and out of phase with the environment.

Jules reached for her knife out of habit, but April put a hand on her arm.

“She’s you. She’s… projecting.”

The other Jules slowly descended, landing with barely a sound.

“I thought I’d never wake up,” she said, voice echoing. “But you kept pushing. Kept remembering. That kept me alive.”

Real Jules stared at her double. “What are you?”

“I’m the anchor,” she said. “The piece of you that survived the reboot. I stayed behind when the first glass wave hit. You ran.”

“That wasn’t a choice.”

“It never is.”

The echo Jules walked forward and pressed a hand to the real one’s chest.

“You want to go home? You need to take it all. Even the parts of yourself you left behind.”

A flash of white - blinding.

Jules cried out, knees buckling as memories surged into her skull—lost friends, her father’s funeral, the quiet scream of a world ending. She saw herself split across ten timelines.

And then… quiet.

A small glass shard lay in her hand. Her frequency imprint. It pulsed warm.

“I remember now,” she whispered.

Malik helped her up. “One down.”

April glanced at the map. “One to go.”

Descent into the Deep Void Node

The Deep Void Node wasn’t a place.

It was an absence.

They took a vertical lift made of wire and light that dropped them through Ridge Prime’s foundation. Beneath the city was a black sea of code—liquid algorithms drifting in real time, like whale-song in a vacuum.

They floated inside a transit capsule wrapped in psychic shielding. Outside, lights danced like things alive, watching them.

April looked pale. “We’re entering a logic-dead zone. No physics. No math. Just… consciousness.”

Jules held her shard tight. “And Malik’s alternate is in there?”

“He’s not in it,” April said. “He is it. This node was written using his signature frequency.”

Malik frowned. “You’re saying I coded a chunk of this reality?”

“You didn’t,” April said.

“Then who did?”

A new voice echoed inside the capsule.

“I did.”

The God at the Edge

He appeared in the dark like a silhouette burned into film.

Another Malik - but larger, older, his form composed entirely of lines of light and language. He had no face, but they felt his smile.

“You reached the source,” he said.

“Are you… me?” Malik asked.

“I’m what you’d be if you stopped pretending to be afraid.”

Malik stepped forward, defiant. “I’m not afraid.”

“Oh yes,” the echo said. “You’re afraid of being forgotten. Of never mattering. That’s why you’re loud. Why you fight. Why you crack jokes when your world collapses.”

Silence.

The echo Malik lifted a hand, and the capsule melted away into code.

They stood inside a sphere of nothingness - just a floating platform of shifting symbols.

“Take it,” he said, holding out a shard.

But when Malik reached for it, the echo pulled back.

“Not yet. First - look.”

The space around them twisted.

A thousand versions of Malik bloomed across the void - some brave, some lost, some monstrous.

One was strapped to a table, screaming.

One was commanding a fleet in a war across galaxies.

One… wasn’t breathing.

“I don’t want this,” Malik whispered. “I don’t want to see this.”

“But you need to,” his alternate replied. “Because the world doesn’t remember who you are. You have to remember.”

Malik’s hands curled into fists.

He stepped into the center of the spiral, heart pounding.

The shard dropped from the sky like a tear.

He caught it just before it shattered.

And all at once - everything went silent.

Reunited

They emerged from the void gasping.

April checked the map.

Three pulses.

Three imprints.

The Glass Code was complete.

“We’re ready,” she said.

“Ready for what?” Jules asked.

April looked at her—eyes glowing faintly.

“To go home.”

  CHAPTER SIX: Gate of the Fractured Star

The chamber was alive.

Hidden deep beneath Ridge Prime’s collapsing center, it pulsed with raw frequency. The Glass Gate stood in the middle like a shivering monument - dozens of curved panels forming a ring that spun on its own axis, each one humming with code and memory. The shards glowed in April’s hand, resonating with the other two frequencies from Jules and Malik.

April moved fast, her hands flying across the interface tablet.

“This is it. The loop code is built. One pulse through the gate and we get a tunnel home.”

Jules adjusted the pulse harmonizer on her wrist. “You sure we won’t end up in a worse version of Earth? Like one with - giant spider cops or a planet made of teeth?”

Malik frowned. “That’s oddly specific.”

April grinned nervously. “I did my best. But there’s a ninety-seven percent chance we land back in our own timeline.”

“...And the other three?”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

They stood in a perfect triangle around the platform. The gate vibrated faster now, shards rising like petals. The air twisted, forming a crackling spiral of refracted light.

Just as April reached to press the final key…

Screeeeeeeeeeeee

The world screamed.

The Collapse Arrives

The ground buckled beneath them. The walls of the chamber shook as if something monstrous was clawing its way up through the city’s foundation. Lights blinked out. The gate stuttered.

“Something’s coming,” Jules said, voice tight.

“It’s the recursion,” April whispered. “The system realized we’re leaving.”

Malik looked around. “I thought you said this place was a dead timeline.”

April’s face paled. “It is. That’s what’s wrong.”

The recursion wave tore through the chamber like a sentient virus—black static, peeling through the air, devouring the structure from the outside in.

And out of that darkness… something rose.

A malformed creature of code and memory. A shifting, hulking shape wearing thousands of faces, screaming in every voice that had ever lived in Ridge Prime.

Jules staggered back. “That thing’s made of… everyone.”

“It’s the Echo Mass,” April said. “All the failed consciousnesses that were deleted to stabilize the recursion. They were never erased. Just buried.”

The creature howled and charged.

All Versions United

“Scatter!” Malik shouted, diving behind a fallen panel.

April grabbed Jules and dove the other way. The Echo Mass slammed into the platform, shattering two of the stabilizing arms. The Glass Gate flickered violently, threatening collapse.

April scrambled for her tablet - when a voice rang out behind her.

“Don’t move.”

April spun.

Standing just beyond the gate - were their alternates.

Reed.A0-V3.
Han.V2.
Dawson.V1.

The older April raised her arm, lightning crackling between her fingers.

Jules’s echo dropped to one knee and pulled a blade of pure light from her arm.

Malik’s echo stepped forward—no longer made of code, but now in a body, burning with controlled energy.

“We’re not letting it end like this,” older April said.

“We’re you,” Dawson.V1 added. “And we want to go home, too.”

They charged the Echo Mass.

The Final Stand

The fight was chaos.

The three alternates moved with uncanny precision—each one dancing with echoes of power the kids didn’t even know they could possess.

Jules and her other self fought side-by-side, their moves mirroring. April’s older version stabilized the core interface, shouting instructions even as she deflected frequency spikes from the monster.

Malik’s echo hurled quantum bolts into the creature’s gut, laughing like a man finally facing down his nightmares.

The Echo Mass writhed and screamed.

It struck Jules hard, sending her flying - but her echo caught her mid-air.

“You’re stronger than you think,” the older Jules said. “Just remember who you are.”

April linked the three shards together and pressed them into the gate core.

The entire platform shuddered.

REACTIVATING GATEWAY: 5%... 16%... 39%...

But the Echo Mass began collapsing in on itself - pulling the chamber into a swirling implosion.

Malik screamed, “It’s sucking the gate!”

“We can’t hold it off forever!” Jules shouted.

Older April turned to the kids. “Go. This is your window.”

April looked at her. “What about you?”

“We’re echoes. We were never meant to last.” She gave a smile that almost reached her eyes. “But you? You’re real.”

The Leap

The Gate screamed with energy - white, bright, infinite. The entire world crumbled behind them.

Jules grabbed Malik’s hand.

April punched the last command.

They ran.

The moment their bodies hit the threshold, the recursion collapsed completely.

A flash.

A silence.

A tearing of memory, light, and gravity.

And then - 

Home

They landed hard.

On real dirt.

Under real stars.

And the sky wasn’t fractured anymore.

A highway hummed in the distance.

Cicadas chirped.

The sign next to them read:

"Welcome to Bramble Hollow. Population 4,289."

Malik sat up slowly. “Is this…?”

Jules looked around, eyes wide. “It’s home. It feels like home.”

April stared at her tablet. The signal was dead. The map gone.

The Glass Code was finally silent.

She smiled. “We made it.”

Epilogue Pulse

Back in Ridge Prime - beneath a dead sky - a fragment of the Glass Gate continued to spin, forgotten.

A single spark hovered in the void.

And then… flickered once.

Signal Reboot Detected.

Version 4 Initializing…

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Reflections in Glass

Bramble Hollow was just how they left it.

The playground near the school still creaked in the wind. The food trucks still parked crooked near the gas station. And Mr. Brennan still yelled at squirrels from his porch like they were plotting something.

But everything was different.

Because they were different.

Back to School

Monday came too fast.

Malik stared at the hallway like it was a dream. Kids laughed, lockers slammed, and someone was playing “Baby Shark” on loop from a phone hidden in a backpack.

Jules leaned over. “We survived a recursive dimension, and now this.”

April smirked. “Don’t worry. This version of Earth still allows vengeance.”

Their old classroom was still there. So was their teacher, Mrs. Whitlow, who eyed them with a vague, unsettled kindness, like she was seeing ghosts and couldn’t place their names.

They sat in their usual seats.

Malik watched the light filter through the window and thought: we could’ve died there.

Jules thought: we didn’t.

April thought: something followed us.

Something Slightly Off

The week passed, mostly normal.

Until the streetlamp outside April’s house flickered in a pattern that looked like Morse code.

Until Malik’s phone briefly displayed a weather report from Ridge Prime before returning to normal.

Until Jules found a tiny shard of glass in her backpack—shimmering faintly.

“I think we brought something back,” she whispered one night, sitting on the swings after sunset.

April nodded. “Not just memories. Residual code. Pieces of that reality.”

Malik leaned back. “So we’re haunted?”

April shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe we’re just… upgraded.”

The Pact

The three of them met again, beneath the old oak tree where this had all begun.

April brought the tablet, now completely inert.

Jules had her frequency shard - dead and dull, but still warm when she held it.

Malik brought snacks.

They sat in silence for a while.

Then April broke it. “We need to agree. No one tells. Not parents, not teachers, not Reddit.”

Jules raised an eyebrow. “Reddit, really?”

Malik shrugged. “Heard a guy on there claims he married a dimension.”

“Exactly my point,” April said. “No one would believe us. But more than that… I think talking about it weakens it. Makes it... smaller than it was.”

They sat a moment longer, and then raised their hands in a silent pact.

Three fingers touching.

Three versions of themselves who would never be the same.

Final Glimpse

Later that night, April stood at her bedroom window.

The sky was clear.

The stars still burned.

And in the distance - just for a second - one moved.

Not like a shooting star. Not like a satellite.

It turned.

And pulsed.

Like a beacon waiting to be answered.

She didn’t smile.

Didn’t speak.

Just pressed her palm to the window.

And whispered, “Not yet.”

THE END

(for now...)

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