Fry didn't speak for a long time.
After the mirror cut off—after Zero had seen the bleeding version of himself looking down at someone he knew—an awful, sticky silence filled the chamber.
Patch didn't crack a joke. Even the flickering glyphs on the walls seemed subdued.
Zero kept staring at the mirror's dead surface. He hadn't even realized his fists were clenched.
"Is that… really going to happen?" he asked.
Fry exhaled, finally breaking the silence. "It's a fork. A might-be. Karnyx-seers don't show certainties—they show tension. Points in time where the universe doesn't know what decision will win."
Patch leaned against a broken control panel. "And sometimes they lie, just to mess with your head. That one's probably 10% data and 90% psychological terrorism."
Zero looked down at his hands. The faint glow of Karnyx symbols had faded, but the sensation hadn't. He could still feel it under his skin. The bleed. The possibility.
"Is that what I become?"
"Depends," Fry said, crossing her arms. "Do you want to?"
They stayed in the room for a while. No running. No shouting. Just sitting with it.
Patch told a story about once getting trapped inside a recursive joke protocol—every time he said a punchline, time reset by four seconds. He claimed it lasted five weeks.
Fry pulled out a small toolkit and began fiddling with her glove's fingertips, replacing what looked like miniature fusion capacitors with glittery thumbtacks.
Zero watched them. The strangeness of this world—the absurdity of it—was starting to feel real in ways he didn't want it to.
"Do either of you…" he started, then trailed off.
Fry looked up.
"Ever wonder if there was a version of you that didn't end up here?" he finished.
Patch smirked. "Buddy, I'm counting on it."
Fry's expression shifted. She didn't answer right away.
Then she said, "My brother. His name was Alec. He and I used to dig through mirror shards for fun. The reflective kind. Trying to decode echoes. Dumb, dangerous. We thought we'd be able to map a stable exit path out of the recursion loops."
Zero stayed silent.
"One day, he looked into a shard and didn't blink. Not once. Then he smiled. Told me he figured it out. That he could see the pattern."
She closed her toolkit. Clicked it shut.
"And he walked straight into the mirror. No safety net. No anchor glyph. Just... gone."
A long pause.
Patch looked like he was about to say something flippant, but even he didn't.
Fry smiled faintly. "He always said I was the cautious one. Guess I proved him wrong."
Zero opened his mouth, then closed it.
Instead, he simply nodded.
They moved on eventually.
Not into another chase. Just into the corridors. Fry led the way through what she called a "lower anchor line"—an old emergency system between recursion layers. The passage was littered with fragments of broken doors, scorched terminals, and collapsed bulkheads etched with half-burned runes.
It was the kind of place that felt like it used to matter.
Patch lit a pale green torch that made the walls ripple. "You ever notice how none of the old systems ever echo back when you ping them?"
"Because they're listening, not talking," Fry said.
"Creepy."
"Efficient," she corrected.
Zero drifted to the back of the group. His eyes still burned faintly. Every so often, glyphs flickered along the walls only he could see.
And each time, he swore he saw words flash within them—brief, impossible fragments:
Cycle 7 termination suspended
Fragment stability: undetermined
Karnyx anomaly breach at 4.6%
"Are these... monitoring me?" he asked aloud.
Fry glanced back. "Not you. What you carry. The Karnyx bleed is alive. It's... curious."
Patch leaned over. "It's basically a nosey neighbor, but for space-time."
"Wonderful," Zero muttered. "So I'm both a walking anomaly and an entertainment system."
"You forgot fashion icon," Patch said. "That glow is very avant-garde."
They reached a fork.
Fry stopped, brow furrowed.
"Wasn't here last time."
"Left or right?" Zero asked.
"Left leads toward Archives. Right shouldn't exist."
Patch's grin widened. "So naturally, we go right."
Fry groaned.
Zero hesitated.
Something called to him from the right.
Not like a voice. More like… gravity.
He took one step that way.
The hallway shimmered.
A room flickered into view—just for a second. Inside it: a table, a lamp, and a photo.
His mother.
Smiling.
Alive.
Then it was gone.
Zero staggered.
"Did you guys see that?"
Patch looked confused. "See what?"
Fry was quiet. Watching him.
"You saw a memory construct," she said slowly. "The Karnyx is starting to test you. If you follow that path, it'll pull more of your past into this layer. Real or not."
"Why would it do that?"
"To see what breaks you."
Patch clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, kid. I once fought my evil twin in a hallucination maze. We made up afterward."
"Made up?"
"Yeah, he runs a mirror deli now. Best ethereal bagels this side of the recursion."
Zero raised an eyebrow.
Patch winked. "You think I'm joking."
They took the left path.
But Zero glanced over his shoulder one last time.
The hallway to the right was empty again.
And yet, for just a second, he could still hear her voice.
Calling his name.
Softly.
Like she was waiting.
Like she remembered him.