GlassFall

Blade Kann sat in his car outside the hospital for forty minutes without crying. He was counting that as a win.

Visiting hours ended at eight. At 8:22 p.m., his father was still asleep with his mouth open, the oxygen line taped to his cheek as if someone had tried to stick a flower on him and quit halfway through. The hands were the hard part. Forty years running a lathe, and now they lay on top of the blanket with nothing to do, swollen, a plastic hospital band where the watch used to sit.

"Just talk to him," the day nurse had said. "They hear more than you'd think."

So he talked. Traffic on the bypass. The drip under the kitchen sink he'd finally fixed, because somebody had to fix things now and it turned out that somebody was him. He talked about nothing until he ran dry, and then he sat with two fingers on his father's wrist, feeling for the pulse the way you feel along a wall for a stud. In there somewhere.

12:40 a.m. His kitchen. Cold rice out of the carton, standing up, because a plate would have made it a meal.

The bathroom light was going. One of those bulbs that hums and stutters for weeks before it dies, and he'd been meaning to change it for two of them. His father would have had it out in ten minutes and spent the next twenty on how they don't make bulbs the way they used to.

Nobody warns you about that part. The complaining stops. You'd hand over a year of your own life for one more long, wrong lecture about light bulbs.

His phone buzzed on the counter. Wrong number. Then nothing, and the apartment settled into the kind of quiet that has layers in it: the fridge, the radiator ticking as it cooled, a bus sighing to a stop two blocks over. Quiet fine enough that he could hear his own blood going round.

He hadn't slept properly in a month. Properly was generous. He slept in shifts, like he was guarding something. So he already knew how tonight went. Lie down. Surface around two from whatever that was. Quit around four and let YouTube run until the window went gray, then nine-thirty and the chair beside his father's hands again. In the meantime he thumbed through reels, which was its own kind of sleeping, and that was how a video about mirrors sent him back to an old thread he'd never closed.

Marco had sent it in June. dude I know youre gonna say its fake but my cousin swears a guy at his gym just vanished. Four hundred replies. Every one of them was somebody calling somebody else an idiot, except for maybe ten, from people who'd lost someone, and those all asked the same thing in the same flat voice. Did it work.

The thing itself was stupid. One in the morning. A mirror. Five minutes without breaking eye contact. Creepypasta his nephew would have laughed at. Blade had laughed at it in June, out loud, standing right where he was standing now with a fork in his hand.

It was 12:51 and he hadn't laughed at anything in a while. The tab remained open on the laptop, waiting.

If anyone asked, he would have said he didn't believe it. Not mirrors, not magic words, not some country behind the glass where the taken people go. He believed in machines and bodies. He believed a man could be eating lunch the day before Christmas and not be there Christmas morning, and that was about as much as he had room for.

But it was 12:53, and ten miles off his father was holding onto a pulse you had to hunt for, and Blade could not sit in this kitchen for one more hour doing nothing about it. Five minutes of staring at himself like an idiot was, honestly, the only plan he had left that he hadn't tried. And he was a man at the bottom of his own life. People down there try stupid things. That's what the bottom is for.

He wasn't hopeful. He wanted that on the record, if anyone asked later. He was not hoping for a door. He just needed to do something with his body that wasn't driving back to the hospital and sitting in the lot with the engine off, looking at a parking garage.

12:55. The bulb held a single note, like a tuning fork someone had forgotten about. He started the timer on his phone, propped it on the edge of the sink with the screen facing out, and looked up.

His face looked back. Tired in the ordinary way. Two days of stubble, eyes gone a little deep, thirty-one going on however long this took. His father's jaw coming through under his mother's eyes. That was the worst thing about mirrors lately. He could see his father in there, and the man didn't seem to mind.

Nothing happened in the first minute. Nothing happened in the second either, just him and his reflection in bad light, and he thought about how his dad would have called him the Romanian word that meant, give or take, weak in the head—and then would have leaned in the doorway to watch him do it anyway.

In the third minute his eyes started watering and he stopped blinking. That was the hard part, keeping the lids up when they wanted down, keeping his gaze planted. The bulb stuttered and came back. His reflection stuttered with it, a face in dropped frames, and he kept looking.

In the fourth minute something slipped, and he knew right away it was the kind of thing you don't get to unsee.

Small. The reflection's shoulders rose on the breath half a second late, or half a second early. He couldn't have said which. But the two of them were no longer moving together, him and it, and the hair on his arms stood up in a slow wave from wrist to neck, and the water standing in the basin shivered with no tap running.

He didn't look away.

He'd like to say that was nerve. Mostly it was that he'd decided, some time ago, that he was past the point where turning around does you any good. His father had said that about the diagnosis. The worst day isn't when they tell you. It's the two weeks after, when you keep acting like there's a version where they didn't. After that, his father said, mouth twitching, it's just work.

4:50. 4:55. 4:59. 5:00, in the timer's pleasant idiot font, and the mirror answered.

He wasn't smiling. His jaw was locked and his eyes were burned dry and his mouth was a line. The reflection's mouth spread anyway, slow and wide and lips closed, the smile you give customers at a job you hate, and it held. Blade's heart kept a steady beat, like someone knocking hard on a door at the far end of a hallway.

"Okay," he said.

His voice cracked on the second syllable. The reflection's lips shaped the word exactly, warm and amused around the crack, and he noticed, the way you notice the last thing before everything stops, that it had his father's crooked left canine. The one from the shipyard fight in 1979.

The bulb blew. The glass went black.

Black with weight to it, as if the mirror had been swapped for a hole in the world that happened to be mirror-shaped. His own features hung in it for a second and sank. Something leaned in from the other side, the way you lean toward a window to check your teeth.

He got out "no," and then "no" again in the voice of a man being killed.

The mirror took him.

Falling, if that was the word. It felt more like being suddenly and totally drunk, the floor peeled off from under him, a cold on the front of his body where he'd faced the glass, cold that went straight through to the middle of his chest like it had somewhere to be.

He didn't scream. He made one sound, later, a sharp hhuh when his back hit something hard and wet.

The sound came back to him. He knew echoes. He'd grown up under an overpass, the kind of childhood where trucks going over at night meant the city was still running and everything was fine.

This was an underpass echo. Wide, concrete, wet. He lifted his face out of the water. Ankle-deep, cold, black, smelling of rust and silt. Above him stretched a cracked concrete ceiling with a jagged tear down the middle, and through the tear were no stars, no moon, none of the orange sodium smear a city puts on the sky. Just black, and not the night kind.

He pushed himself up. The water moved around his hands with a sound like slow applause.

"Hello?"

It came out flat and came back doubled, and he stopped listening to the echo and started listening to what was under it. Water dripping. His own blood in his ears. And farther in, slow and heavy and deliberate, a splash. Then another. Something wading through the water with no particular hurry.

He went for his phone's flashlight. The phone was already in his hand. He didn't remember deciding to hold onto it. The screen was shattered in white flowers. Dead. He stood in a flooded tunnel somewhere near the bottom of the world holding a dead phone.

"Okay," he said, because apparently that was his word now.

And the air answered, a sentence laid across his vision rather than spoken to his ears. A light came up from nowhere and lit nothing, and letters hung a yard in front of his face, gold the way streetlights are gold.

REGISTERED SUMMONER

NAME: Blade Kann

"Summoner." He spoke it aloud to test the sound. It tasted like an arcade cabinet from a decade he was too young for. "Summoned from where? By whom?"

The letters changed. They didn't flicker or scroll. The gold rearranged itself without passing through the space between, text simply becoming what it was now, and that bothered him more than anything had since the smile.

EVALUATING.

CLASS ASSIGNED: FIGHTER (INITIATE)

He didn't ask why. He didn't know yet that asking was a thing you could do here, that the thing answered, that answers were how you got anywhere. He stood ankle-deep in black water with a dead phone and read.

SUMMONER STATUS: BLADE KANN

Class: Fighter (Initiate)

Level: 1

Health: 100 / 100

Stamina: 100 / 100

Mana: 20 / 20

Power: 10

Agility: 11

Endurance: 10

Vitality: 9

Perception: 10

Will: 12

Deaths Remaining: 100

Skills:

Brace (Rank 1). Planted footing reduces stagger. Cost: low stamina. Cooldown: 6 seconds.

Quick Draw (Rank 1). Weapons can be readied twenty percent faster from a carry position. Cost: none. Passive.

Gear: Road clothes. Damaged communication device. Basic System knife (hip).

Active Conditions: None.

Trait: Unlisted.

Titles: None.

He saw the deaths line and nothing else for a while. He read it again, one word at a time, as if taking them separately would change what they added up to. Deaths. Remaining. One hundred.

Nobody explained it. Nobody ever would, though he didn't know that yet. The thing could be perfectly accurate and never once tell you enough. That was how it was going to be from here to the end, and this was the start of it.

There was a weight on his left hip that hadn't been there. A knife in a plain leather sheath, the leather worn soft, six inches of steel with an edge someone had honed with care. He drew it. The most ordinary thing in the world, and the only ordinary thing, and he felt better with it in his hand and felt insane for feeling better, and then the gold came back.

QUEST OFFERED: SURVIVE

Objective: Survive the night. (0/1)

Reward: Continued existence.

Failure: Lose one (1) death.

ACCEPT (Y)

There was no N. He looked for it. Just the Y hanging in the dark, and the empty space beside it where the other choice should have been, and his scalp drawing tight.

"Accepted," he said. "By default, I guess."

The letters folded into nothing. The dark closed in again, and the water kept dripping.

He said it once more, out loud and clear, to hear it in a human voice. "Deaths remaining. One hundred."

It wasn't a rule for staying alive; it was an allowance.

The splashing had stopped. He didn't know when. The water around his ankles lay flat and silent, and the silence was worse than the splashing had been. Splashing was an animal moving in the dark, being stupid. This was a thing that had stopped on purpose, to listen.

So Blade Kann stood at the bottom of the earth with his father's crooked grin pressed into the back of his eyes like a thumbprint in film, a phone that would never call the hospital again, a knife, and a hundred deaths, and started backing toward the drip. Dripping meant water moving. Water moving meant it was going somewhere.

His first step splashed too loudly.

Somewhere out in the black, in no hurry at all, something turned toward the sound.