The mirror pulsed.
Not in a visual way exactly. Not with light or sound. It was more like pressure. Like the moment before a storm when every hair on your body stands up and even your molars feel staticky.
Klic’s fingers twitched violently. He blinked hard. Still there—CANDIDATE—flashing like a warning or a promise. His heartbeat quickened, tapping in time with the rhythm he only noticed when he was on the edge of something big.
“What did it show you?” Jennifer asked, quiet and careful.
She always asked things that way. Like she didn’t want to scare the truth out of you.
Klic hesitated. His brain flared with options. Tell them. Lie. Dodge. Crack a joke. Run. Pull a prank to distract them. But none of those felt right. Not this time.
“It said I’m a… candidate.”
“A candidate?” Reya repeated, already flipping open her gadget journal. “For what? The Infiniverse? That’s impossible. No one under thirteen—”
“Unless…” Dan’s voice cracked. “Unless the rumors are true. About early selection.”
“No,” Jennifer said sharply. “That’s a myth. Kids disappearing because they were ‘chosen’? That’s conspiracy garbage.”
“Is it?” Ty said, trying to mask his nervous energy with a shaky grin. “’Cause if I disappear, I want it to be in a blaze of glory. Fireworks. Drones. My name in the sky. Like ‘TY: CHOSEN AND EXPLOSIVE.’”
Klic barely heard them. His eyes were still locked on the mirror, even though it now showed only their reflections—distorted, warped, too-tall or too-short. Except Sirius.
Sirius’s reflection didn’t warp at all.
It didn’t even blink.
“Wait…” Klic said slowly. “Sirius. Why doesn’t the mirror glitch for you?”
Six heads turned in unison.
Sirius didn’t move. “Because it is calibrated to neural irregularity. My cognitive pattern is within normal bandwidth.”
“No offense,” Ty said, “but that’s the creepiest way anyone’s ever said ‘I’m totally average.’”
Reya stood. “Sirius, that’s not just a mirror. That’s admin tech. Level Five or higher. How do you even know what it’s calibrated to?”
Sirius didn’t answer.
Jennifer stepped forward. “Sirius… we trust you. Mostly. But this? This is a lot.”
“You knew about the code,” Reya pressed. “You knew this mirror existed. And you didn’t say anything.”
“I was observing,” Sirius said evenly.
“Dude,” Dan said. “You’re always observing. Sometimes it’s like you’re studying us.”
Silence.
Klic’s brain spun in a hundred directions at once. He looked at Sirius—at his too-steady breathing, his too-precise posture, the way he always arrived just when they needed him but never said why he was there.
“Are you spying on us?” Klic asked, voice low and sharp.
Sirius didn’t flinch. “Define ‘spying.’”
That did it.
Ty threw up his arms. “OH GREAT. We’ve got a walking math textbook who may or may not be Big Brother in a twelve-year-old skin suit!”
“Sirius,” Jennifer said, slower now, choosing her words like they were weapons or shields. “Do you work for someone?”
A long pause.
“I am monitored,” Sirius said at last. “Like all minors with elevated IQ and restricted access waivers.”
“WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?” Reya exploded, half-laughing, half-panicking.
“It means I have a proximity chip for sensitive data centers,” Sirius said calmly. “Because sometimes I wander into them.”
“Sometimes?” Dan echoed. “Like how often is sometimes?!”
“Eighteen recorded incidents.”
Ty held up a finger. “Okay, but like… if you were evil, would you even tell us?”
“I do not understand the relevance of that question.”
“That’s what an evil genius would say!” Ty howled, dramatically hiding behind Dan.
Klic was quiet. Too quiet.
Everyone noticed.
Jennifer put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He wasn’t. Not really. His brain was short-circuiting, like too many programs open on a dusty processor. He wanted to trust Sirius. He had trusted him. But now the lines didn’t match up.
It was like a puzzle with pieces that almost fit but not quite.
“I think we should go,” Klic said finally.
Chapter Three: Ghost Files
The next day, they met at the Node again. Tension hovered like a low-level magnetic field.
Reya was already neck-deep in a disassembled holo-projector, muttering. Ty was trying to juggle three cans of hyper-soda while standing on a moving hover crate. Jennifer kept glancing at her watch. Dan sat beside Klic, chewing a protein bar shaped like a velociraptor.
Sirius arrived precisely on time. Everyone noticed, but no one said anything.
“So,” Reya said, without looking up. “We agree no one touches the mirror until we know more?”
“Agreed,” Jennifer said. “And Sirius—no more secrets.”
Sirius nodded once. “I understand.”
Dan leaned close to Klic. “You believe him?”
“I believe he thinks he’s helping.”
“Which is not a yes.”
Klic’s fingers twitched. He opened his holo-tab, synced it to the mirror’s signal (covertly copied yesterday), and brought up a visualizer. Data spilled across the screen in spirals and bursts.
There were patterns. Hidden timestamps. A trail of previous activations.
“This mirror,” Klic said slowly, “has shown the word candidate before.”
“How many times?” Jennifer asked.
“Six.”
“Six other kids?” Dan asked, horrified.
Reya jumped in. “We could track them! Cross-check the town database with school entries. Look for kids who went poof.”
“Already on it,” Klic said. “But here’s the weird part. All six were from Cobalt Pines. All twelve years old. All… gone.”
“You mean missing?” Ty asked.
“No. Their school records still exist. But their names aren’t on any social feeds. No photos. No mentions. It’s like someone hit delete on everything but attendance.”
Silence.
“I don’t want to disappear,” Dan whispered.
“You won’t,” Jennifer said firmly. “None of us will. Because we’re going to figure this out. Together.”
Ty sniffled. “I like existing.”
Sirius, quiet until now, finally said, “I believe the Infiniverse is recruiting for something. But not everyone. Just those with… anomalies.”
“Neurodivergent kids,” Reya said flatly.
Jennifer frowned. “That’s… messed up.”
“It is strategic,” Sirius said. “They want minds that see differently. Think outside norms. Break patterns.”
Klic blinked. “They want glitch brains.”
He didn’t mean it cruelly. He said it the way someone might name their own superpower for the first time. Softly. With awe.
Chapter Four: The Glitch and the Graffiti
The group split to investigate. Jennifer talked to teachers. Dan pretended to be doing a snack blog so he could interview cafeteria AI for memory logs. Reya hacked into the school’s forgotten subservers. Ty used his chaos as cover to snoop.
Klic wandered.
Sometimes he solved problems by not solving them. He let the noise of the world wash over him, filtering patterns naturally. He passed a construction site where smart-bricks argued with their blueprints. He watched pigeons follow magnetic trails only he seemed to notice.
And then he saw it.
A wall in the alley behind the arcade. Covered in graffiti.
But not random tags.
Symbols.
The same as on the mirror’s code.
He took a photo and ran back to the Node.
“Look!”
Reya’s eyes widened. “That’s the candidate code language!”
“But how—who—why would someone spray this on a wall?” Jennifer asked.
“Because it’s a warning,” Klic said. “Or a trail. For the next kid.”
“They’re leaving signs,” Reya said slowly. “Breadcrumbs.”
Ty looked nervous. “We’re not following breadcrumbs, are we?”
Klic grinned. “Only if you’re brave.”
Ty immediately stood straighter. “I am very brave. Statistically. Probably.”
Chapter Five: Trust Issues.exe
That night, they met in Klic’s backyard, under the glitched old smart-tree that looped through a season every few hours.
Klic looked at his friends. All of them. Even Sirius.
“I’m scared,” he admitted.
Everyone looked up.
“I joke a lot. And prank. And test stuff. But I don’t really want to go somewhere no one comes back from. Even if they picked me.”
Jennifer stepped forward. “Then we stop it. We break whatever system is doing this.”
“We can’t do that,” Sirius said. “It’s larger than we know.”
“Maybe,” Jennifer said. “But we’re larger together.”
There was a pause.
Sirius looked at them, head tilting slightly. “Then I will not let you go alone.”
Klic smiled. “Still don’t trust you fully.”
“That is… acceptable.”
Ty threw a pretzel at him. “That’s as close to love as he gets. Take it.”
They laughed.
The first real laugh since the mirror.
And above them, a drone circled—its signal intercepted, just briefly. A whisper in the static:
“CANDIDATES. STATUS: AWAKE.”