DANCE WITH THE DARK

Mira didn't know how long she stood there. The walls had closed in around her, the hallway too quiet, too still. Even the building itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting for something. For her to fall apart. For the last thread of her sanity to snap.

Her body ached. Every bone felt heavy. She couldn't shake the weight of Jamie's face—the distortion, the hollow eyes, the mouth that had widened to swallow her whole.

But beneath the horror, beneath the grief, there was something worse. A sense of inevitability.

Jamie had become the hallway. She was a part of it now. A memory rewritten, swallowed by the machine that controlled this place.

And Mira?

What would she become?

The hallway didn't care about her pain. It didn't care about her resistance. All it cared about was rewriting. Absorbing. Feeding.

She could feel it deep inside. The same thing that had taken Jamie, that had shaped her into something new. It was calling her.

Whispers began to creep from the walls, seeping into her thoughts like wet ink.

"You will be a part of us too."

Mira pressed her palms to her ears, trying to block it out.

"We will rewrite you, until you are no longer you."

She couldn't escape. Every corner she turned seemed to bring her closer to the center of it all, the place where the rewrite machine lived—the Core. She could feel the pull of it, deeper and deeper, tugging at her mind, at her very sense of self.

Mira had always been strong. She had survived the hallway's twists, its horrors. But now? Now, she wasn't so sure.

Every step she took felt like walking on the edge of a cliff, a precipice she couldn't quite see. There was something here in the building—something waiting for her to fall.

And then, just as she thought she couldn't take it anymore, she heard it.

A voice.

Not the walls.

Not the machine.

A voice.

"Mira."

It wasn't Jamie.

It wasn't Garett.

It was something else.

Mira froze. The voice had come from behind her. She spun around, but saw nothing.

"Mira," it called again. This time, closer.

Her pulse quickened. Her breath caught in her throat.

It wasn't human. The voice was wrong—too smooth, too synthetic, like something that was trying to sound human but didn't quite manage.

She backed away slowly, her hand brushing the wall, but the wall didn't feel like stone. It felt… soft. Fleshy.

The hallway was changing again. The walls, once sharp and angular, had become rounded, pulsating, as if they were breathing. As if the building itself was alive. The walls had absorbed too much, too many stories, too many lives.

And it was hungry.

"Mira, come closer."

The voice whispered now, seductive. Drawing her in.

She tried to push forward, to resist, but the walls closed around her again, constricting, tightening like a grip around her throat.

The building was no longer a maze. It was a trap.

"Mira, don't run."

The voice was everywhere now. In her ears. In her mind. Every thought was drowned by it, every whisper that pressed her deeper into the walls.

And then she saw it.

A figure standing at the end of the hallway.

It was her.

But not her.

The figure was distorted, blurry, like it had been stretched and bent out of shape. The features were wrong. The eyes too large. The skin too pale. The face of someone who had been rewritten.

And that's when Mira realized—the voice she was hearing wasn't just a trick. It was her. The hallway had changed her. And now it was showing her what would happen if she didn't stop running.

She staggered forward, her breath shallow, but every step she took seemed to pull her further into the hallway's grip. The floor seemed to melt under her feet. The walls pressed in from all sides. The air thickened, became hard to breathe.

Her own voice—a whisper, barely audible—escaped her lips: "What do you want from me?"

The figure at the end of the hallway smiled.

It wasn't her smile.

It was the hallway's smile.

It stretched impossibly wide, the teeth jagged and sharp. The hallway had rewritten her, piece by piece. And now, it was rewriting Mira.

The walls began to pulse, as if responding to the figure's presence. They throbbed with a low, rhythmic hum. Mira could feel it deep inside her chest. She wasn't sure whether it was the building, or whether it was her own heart, beating in time with the walls.

Then the figure spoke, its voice like a thousand whispers, all overlapping and blending together into one sound: "You will become part of the story. Everyone does, in the end. You can't fight it. You can't stop it."

Mira took a step back. "No."

She wouldn't become part of the story. She wouldn't let herself be consumed by the machine.

She turned and ran.

Not away from the figure, but toward it.

She was done running.

She didn't know what she would find. But she was going to tear the hallway apart. She would not let it rewrite her.

Not yet.

Not ever.

As she sprinted down the corridor, the walls seemed to reach for her, but she was faster. She shoved them aside. Her hands tore through the flesh of the building. Her mind screamed in defiance.

And then—

A crack.

A tremor.

The hallway breathed in a new way. Not as a predator, but as prey. The walls shifted in a way that shouldn't have been possible.

The building writhed.

And something broke.

Mira stopped in the middle of the hallway.

She had done it.

The hallway was reacting to her, not the other way around.

It was afraid.

She wasn't sure how much longer it would last, but for now—just for this moment—she had turned the tables.

And that, more than anything, was the beginning of her escape.

The echo of Jamie's voice still lingers in Mira's mind, like a shadow stretching across the edges of reality. Every footstep she takes in the hallway is weighed down by the knowledge that what she just witnessed wasn't an illusion. Jamie is part of the building now, twisted into something unrecognizable by the hunger of the hallway.

It's time to feel the weight of that truth. Time to see how far Mira will go to confront it.

The echoes of Jamie's loss would be a slow burn in Mira's mind. She had always been haunted by her sister's absence, but now it was different. Jamie's shadow stretched through the hallway, woven into the fabric of the building. And Mira? She was starting to wonder how much of her own past could remain untainted by the rewrite.

The fallout wasn't just psychological.

It was real.