Rhea D’Souza
She first saw the message at 2:13 a.m., glowing faintly on her cracked iPhone screen:
@mydeathwasnotanaccident: You remember the swing. The blood. The lie.
Tia Kapoor blinked, swiping the notification away. Half-asleep, she assumed it was a prank or spam. Probably a desperate bot scraping her older posts. She had, after all, posted a moody reel last week with a retro swing in the frame — filters, glitch overlays, and the caption: “Some childhoods don’t swing back.” It had gone viral. Of course, someone would try to ride the algorithm with a creepy reply.
But when she checked her inbox in the morning, there was no such user. No “@mydeathwasnotanaccident.” Not even in her blocked or flagged list. She couldn’t search it. Instagram claimed the username didn’t exist.
Shrugging it off, Tia scrolled through comments on her latest reel — a makeup tutorial that transformed her into a bruised fairy. Her followers had jumped by 8,000 overnight, and a few blue ticks had liked it. This was good. This was very good. The anxiety from the night dissolved in the golden light flooding her Bandra apartment.
By afternoon, the message returned. This time, it wasn’t on Instagram.
Her laptop glitched open by itself while she was editing a thumbnail, and there, in the center of her desktop, a .txt file she hadn’t created:
“Why did you forget me, Tia?”
She stared at it, chest tightening. The cursor blinked as if daring her to respond. She deleted it. Shut the laptop. Paced the room. Called her manager, Sona, to distract herself.
“Tia, you good? You sound jumpy.”
“I’m fine. I just—have you heard of haunted usernames?”
Sona laughed. “Haunted what? Babe, are you off your melatonin again?”
“No, I’m being serious. Some… ghost account is messaging me. Saying stuff like… swing and blood.”
“Sounds like fan fiction. Probably someone bored. Don’t reply. Or, better yet, monetize it. Ghosts are trending.”
Tia managed a weak laugh, promised she’d shake it off, and returned to filming. That evening, she uploaded a new reel with soft piano music, lighting candles with a trending sound. As she posted it, a flicker in the mirror caught her eye — a second reflection of herself. Her lips were moving, but she wasn’t speaking.
She turned. The mirror showed nothing. Just her. Alone.
The lights flickered, only for a second. Her phone buzzed.
@mydeathwasnotanaccident sent you a reel.
Her hands trembled as she tapped the notification.
It was a screen-recording. Of her face. Sleeping.
The camera was angled from above her bed. The timestamp: Last night, 2:13 a.m.
She dropped the phone.
The next few hours passed in a blur — calling Airtel, filing a privacy breach complaint, changing passwords, and eventually crashing into bed with every light on. But the reel haunted her. Who had access to her room? Was this someone she knew?
When she woke, there was another message.
@mydeathwasnotanaccident: You know who I am. You buried it. But I didn’t.
Tia dug out her old school photo albums. Maybe there was a clue. A childhood friend? A stalker? She hadn’t grown up in Mumbai. Her past was tucked far away in Dehradun, where her parents still lived in the same two-storey house with red oxide floors and mustard curtains that smelled of agarbatti and dust.
But the truth was — Tia didn’t remember much from her early years. Especially not after the age of ten. After “the incident.”
She had blocked it out. Her parents never spoke of it. All she knew was that a girl named Zoya had once lived two houses away. They were best friends. One day, Zoya was gone.
The official story was that her family moved to Bareilly.
But there were whispers in the neighbourhood — that Zoya had died. That something had happened in the forest near the canal. That Tia was the last one to see her.
That night, unable to sleep, Tia posted a story asking, “Ever felt like a memory is hiding from you?”
Thousands of replies poured in. Most were poetic. Some, eerily specific.
One simply said:
“That’s trauma, Tia. And sometimes, it grows teeth.”
She couldn’t explain why she opened her old Gmail inbox at 4 a.m. She hadn’t used that email since her school days. But a strange pull made her check. Dozens of unread messages. One stood out — from an unknown address:
subject: stop posting
body: if you keep making videos, someone else will bleed. like I did.
Her breath caught in her throat. It was sent five days ago.
The doorbell rang. At 4:03 a.m.
She grabbed a paperweight and approached the door, adrenaline spiking. No peephole. She used the camera app connected to her hallway cam. No one there.
Except… her own door was open.
Not fully. Just slightly ajar.
And on the floor, just inside the threshold, was a small envelope.
It had no address. No stamp. Only a child’s scrawl:
“Tia Didi, I remember you. You told me to close my eyes.”
Her legs gave out and she sat on the floor, breath ragged.
The next morning, she did something she hadn’t done in years. She called her father.
“Baba… did a girl named Zoya ever… die near our house? When I was little?”
There was a pause. Then a sound she’d never heard in his voice — dread.
“Tia. Don’t bring this up again. That chapter is closed. For your own good.”
“I think she’s trying to contact me—”
“Enough!” he snapped. “Do not dig. Some things are buried for a reason.”
But the next message had already arrived.
A photo. Blurry. Old.
Two girls, grinning on a swing. One was her.
The other… wore the same expression her reflection had worn last night.
And beneath the photo, scrawled in blood-red:
You closed my eyes. I never opened them again.
Tia stared at the photo until her fingers went numb. The edges of the image were frayed, like something pulled from a fire or a forgotten diary. She was maybe nine years old in it, pigtails tied tight, teeth gapped in a wide smile. The other girl—Zoya, it had to be—was smaller, her arm looped around Tia’s shoulder. There was a pink bandage on her knee. The swing behind them was wooden, tied to a thick banyan tree.
She didn’t remember the photo being taken. Not the swing. Not even the banyan.
And yet… some echo in her gut twisted, like an old muscle remembering how to clench in fear.
She didn’t post anything that day. Not on Reels, not on Stories. She sat in the dark, blinds drawn, watching her reflection too closely. Because ever since that last message, her mirror didn’t feel like hers. There was always a half-second delay, like the image was thinking before it copied.
Her phone buzzed again, not a message this time, but a missed call. Unknown number. Then a voicemail.
She played it.
The voice was static-heavy, but unmistakably that of a young child. The message was just five seconds long.
“You said if I was quiet, we’d play again. But I was quiet for so long. It’s your turn.”
Tia’s throat closed. She dropped the phone onto her bed and backed away from it as if it might bite.
She had to find help. Not the police—they’d laugh or worse, assume she was having a breakdown. Sona would just spin it into content. She needed someone who understood this weird intersection of digital and dead.
Someone like Veer Saluja.
She hadn’t spoken to Veer since last year, when they were seated next to each other at a creator’s summit. He wasn’t a content creator, not exactly. He’d been on a panel about digital forensics, talking about AI deepfakes and synthetic hauntings. The kind of guy who wore black hoodies, refused sugar, and said things like “You know your face is basically public property now, right?”
He’d been annoying. But sharp. Tia still had his number.
She texted him one line:
“Do ghosts send DMs?”
He replied in thirty seconds.
“Only if you follow back.”
She called.
By evening, Veer was at her apartment, laptop in hand, a slight frown on his face as she explained everything—from the first message to the photograph, to the voicemail. He didn’t interrupt, but she could see his skepticism coiling behind his eyes.
“You think someone’s screwing with me?”
“I think someone’s in your system,” he said, typing rapidly. “But I also think it’s personal. Whoever this is… knows you. Not just your digital habits. They know your gaps. Your blind spots. Your past.”
She sat on the couch, hugging a pillow to her chest.
“But I don’t remember any of this.”
Veer glanced at her, then turned his laptop toward her. “This is your reel from last Tuesday. Look at the timestamp—2:13 a.m. That’s the same time all the messages started, right?”
She nodded slowly.
“I reverse-searched the clip. Found a duplicate post under a burner account. Same reel, same audio. But your face… flickers.”
He played it. For a second, her face glitched—eyes rolled back, mouth hanging open unnaturally wide. Then normal again.
“Okay, what the hell was that?” she whispered.
“Not a filter. Not editing. It was embedded. Someone spliced frames in—frames not from this timeline.”
“What do you mean, this timeline?”
“I mean… you never made that face. But the data’s there.”
He exhaled, then hesitated. “There’s more. Last week, a creator named Karan Joshi died. Massive nosebleed on a livestream. No prior health issues. Guess what his last post was?”
He pulled up the video. It was eerily similar to Tia’s swing reel—same audio, same glitchy effects.
“He was tagged by an account named @mydeathwasnotanaccident before he died. That account is now… gone. No trace on any server I could access. Like it was never created.”
Tia’s skin went cold.
“So this… thing… whatever it is, it’s not just haunting me?”
“Looks like it rides trends. Algorithms. Emotional memory. Every time a reel evokes a buried trauma, it latches. And you—” he looked at her seriously—“have a very big trauma.”
She stood up abruptly. “I need to go back to Dehradun. To my parents’ house. That swing. That girl. I need to remember.”
“Wait,” Veer said, reaching for her arm. “If this is digital, it doesn’t care where you go. It’s in the cloud. It is the cloud.”
“No,” she said firmly. “This started there. I feel it.”
He looked at her, then nodded. “Then I’m coming with you.”
They boarded a flight the next morning. Tia hadn’t been home in six years. Her mother was confused by the sudden visit, her father cold. The house hadn’t changed. The red oxide floors were still cool underfoot. The swing in the backyard, gone—but the banyan tree remained, half-dead, its bark cracked like burnt toast.
Veer set up his equipment in Tia’s old bedroom, the one with the peeling sticker stars on the ceiling. Tia wandered outside, near the tree. Something rustled in the dry leaves, and when she looked down, she saw a marble. Green, cloudy, chipped on one side.
A flash hit her brain.
Zoya.
Holding the marble in her mouth, daring Tia to steal it. Then running. The canal. A scream. Mud. Blood.
Tia gasped, falling to her knees.
Back in the room, Veer shouted for her.
“Tia, you need to see this. Now.”
She stumbled in. On the screen was live footage from his camera.
The mirror in her old room—plain, rectangular, nailed to the wall—was moving.
Not the reflection. The glass itself.
Something behind it.
Then the message appeared on the screen in jagged digital letters.
“Welcome home, Tia. Let’s finish our game.”
The message stayed on the screen for eight seconds before the mirror cracked from the inside. Not shattered—just a deep, slow fracture crawling diagonally across the glass like a vein filled with frost. Veer didn’t blink as he filmed it, even as the air in the room thickened, the temperature dropping by at least five degrees.
Tia stared at the mirror, rooted to the spot. Her reflection looked… off. Her body was still. Her face was still. But her eyes in the mirror blinked once—just once—without her doing it.
She stumbled backward. “I’m not crazy, Veer. That’s not me.”
“No,” he said, voice low. “That’s a mirror echo. Not unheard of in poltergeist-coded interactions. But this—this is intelligent. Reactive. It’s not just memory. It’s presence.”
He reached into his bag, pulled out a small electromagnetic meter and began sweeping the room. The needle twitched violently near the mirror, then froze, pointing past normal limits.
“What does that mean?” she asked, arms wrapped around herself.
“It means something’s here. Not just data. Not just code. Something that passed through the algorithm and got stuck between reality and relay.”
Tia couldn’t stop staring at the mirror. “She’s still waiting, isn’t she?”
Veer didn’t answer.
That night, they stayed in separate rooms. Veer continued monitoring the signal patterns from the old house—tracking temperature spikes, audio frequencies, and static disruptions. But Tia was left alone with the memories that refused to stay buried.
She dreamt of water.
Of a small foot slipping in mud.
Of her own hands, covering a friend’s mouth as she shushed her.
“Don’t scream, Zoya. They’ll blame me.”
Then darkness.
She woke up to silence and the smell of something damp. A small puddle of water had formed beneath her bed.
She checked her phone. No notifications.
She opened her front camera to check her face—and screamed.
Her cheek had faint scratch marks, almost like fingernails dragged across in sleep. The app glitched. Her face blurred, turned pale, then normal.
She rushed to Veer’s room, banged on the door. He opened it groggy-eyed but fully alert once he saw her face.
“She’s back,” Tia whispered. “Zoya’s back.”
He sat her down, showed her something on his screen. “This is your metadata from last night. Look—around 3:17 a.m.—there’s a signal spike on your phone. GPS stayed static, but the orientation shifted. Like the phone was picked up. Scanned your face. Then set back.”
“Someone took it while I was asleep?” she whispered.
“Or something. Look—look at the camera feed.”
He clicked open the infrared footage. For most of the night, it was uneventful. But at 3:17 a.m., a figure appeared by her bedside. Small. Barefoot. Hair dripping.
It didn’t walk into frame. It just… appeared.
And stared at her sleeping form for exactly thirteen seconds.
Then vanished.
Tia clutched his arm. “We need to go to the canal. Now. I think… that’s where it happened.”
The canal was two blocks down, now dry and weed-filled. Concrete slabs had replaced the old mudbanks, but the banyan tree near it still stood—old, rotting, half-collapsed on one side.
They climbed over the barricade. Tia walked slowly, as if the ground remembered her steps.
And then she saw it.
A half-buried anklet in the earth, green threads still clinging to rusted bells.
She fell to her knees again, tears streaming without command. Memory surged up like vomit.
She and Zoya had fought. About the marble. About whose turn it was to swing.
Zoya had threatened to tell her mother that Tia pushed her once, made her bleed.
Tia had gotten angry. Pulled Zoya down from the swing. Zoya slipped, hit her head on a stone.
Tia had cried. Had tried to wake her. And when Zoya began to stir, moaning, she panicked. Covered her mouth.
Told her to shush.
Told her it was a game.
Told her to close her eyes and count.
And left her there.
She never told anyone.
She forgot. Or tried to.
Until now.
She sat sobbing in the dirt. “I didn’t mean to. I was just a child. I didn’t know—”
The wind picked up. Leaves rustled behind them.
Then came the sound of a child giggling.
Veer spun around. “Tia. Don’t move.”
She looked up. At the banyan.
The swing was back.
It shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t there a minute ago.
But now, a rope swing hung lazily from the tree, swaying slowly though there was no wind.
And sitting on it—
A girl, her dress wet, her face grey-blue, head tilted.
She smiled. Blood had dried at the edge of her lips.
“Let’s play again,” she said.
Tia’s scream echoed through the empty canal as the swing began to turn toward her on its own.
The scream lodged in Tia’s throat as her legs gave out beneath her. Veer grabbed her arm, yanking her back just as the swing creaked forward—closer now, ropes tightening unnaturally as if the air itself was tugging it. The girl on the swing—Zoya—didn’t blink. Her smile was too wide, too sharp. Her eyes were not the cloudy white of death, but reflective like a mirror, showing Tia not just herself, but the guilt she’d buried for seventeen years.
Veer didn’t hesitate. He pulled Tia to her feet and backed them out of the grove, step by slow step. “Don’t speak to it,” he said under his breath. “Don’t answer. It’s waiting for something. A response gives it space.”
“But she’s not… it’s Zoya, Veer. It’s her. She wants me to remember—” Tia whispered, tears streaking her face.
“She wants more than memory, Tia. She wants to finish what started. And now she knows you remember.”
As they reached the roadside, the swing stilled. The figure vanished mid-glide, flickering out like a bad projection. All that remained was a sudden absence of noise. Even the birds had gone silent.
Back at the house, her mother was waiting on the porch. Pale, lips trembling.
“I heard you went to the canal,” she said. “Why would you… after everything?”
Tia didn’t respond. Her mother looked at Veer, then back at her daughter. “Come inside. I need to show you something.”
They followed her into the kitchen, where she pulled out an old biscuit tin from the back of the cupboard. Inside were papers, yellowed and curling. Old newspaper clippings, photographs. A tiny pink hairclip.
She handed Tia a folded sheet. The headline read: Local Girl Missing After Storm Near Canal. Search Called Off.
Zoya.
“I lied to protect you,” her mother said softly. “You came home that day with muddy shoes and silent lips. We found your drawing book with her name scratched out. I didn’t ask. Your father said it was just children being children. Then the police came. And you forgot everything after your fever.”
Tia shook her head. “I didn’t forget. I buried it.”
“That’s how trauma works,” Veer murmured. “The brain builds walls to survive. But something—or someone—found a crack.”
Her mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. “You were just a child. You couldn’t understand what happened. But you need to let her go now, Tia. This… haunting… it’s your guilt. Nothing else.”
But Tia knew better.
Zoya wasn’t just memory. She had stepped into circuits, slipped through algorithms, wearing grief like an IP address.
That night, Veer tried to trace the origin point of the haunting. “She’s not coming from the app,” he said, eyes on the code streaming across his screen. “She’s inside the feedback loop. The engagement metrics. When you post something emotional—trauma-related—it’s like opening a digital séance. You said she reached out after the swing reel?”
Tia nodded.
“I think Zoya lives in the virality. In resonance. When enough people feel something, it gives her power.”
“That means she’s using my followers. My reach.”
“Exactly.”
“So if I go viral again…?”
“She might get stronger. Or you might trap her.”
Tia stared at her phone. “Then I have to post. One last time.”
She went live.
No filter. No music. Just her bare face, tears unshed, truth blooming.
“Hi, everyone. I’ve lied to you all. Not about the makeup, or the edits, or even the fake crying reels. About something real. When I was nine, I hurt someone. I let her die. Her name was Zoya. She didn’t deserve what happened. I was a coward. I ran.”
Comments exploded. Emojis. “Are you okay?” “Is this real?” “This is performance art right?”
She kept going.
“She’s been following me. Through reels. Through shadows. Through mirrors. And if I disappear after tonight, know this—I’m not gone. I’m accounted for.”
Then she held up the anklet from the canal. “Zoya, I’m sorry. Come find me. Let’s finish it. But no one else. Just me.”
She ended the stream.
The video racked up half a million views in an hour.
And with every share, the house grew colder.
Veer’s laptop shut down on its own. Lights began to buzz, then burst. The mirror cracked further.
And in the hallway, the TV turned on by itself.
Footage played.
Not from any known file.
It was old. Grainy. Tia and Zoya playing. Laughing. Then Zoya falling. The moment of silence. The scream cut short. Tia’s hands over Zoya’s mouth.
Then a pause.
Then Zoya’s face filled the screen.
Now older. Twisted. Watching.
“You followed me into death,” she said, voice like static through a fan. “Now I follow you into fame.”
The TV went black.
The screen of Tia’s phone lit up.
@mydeathwasnotanaccident started a live video.
The notification pulsed, waiting to be tapped.
Tia didn’t tap the notification. She stared at it, breath caught in her throat. The room was dead silent except for the electric hum of her phone, which now buzzed like a trapped insect. Veer leaned over, eyes scanning the glowing screen.
“She’s going live,” he said. “On your network. With your audience.”
The phone vibrated again, once—twice—and then the notification disappeared. In its place, a video auto-played. No username, no time stamp, no play button.
Just a reel of Tia’s old house in Dehradun. Only, it looked different—darker. The walls were damp and the ceiling sagged. The swing in the backyard moved as if someone had just jumped off. Then the video zoomed in, without a camera operator, without a reason, focusing on the mirror in the hallway.
Tia’s reflection looked back. But it wasn’t real-time. The girl in the mirror smiled—then leaned forward and whispered something soundless.
Veer snatched the phone away. “This isn’t a recording. This is live-rendered mimicry. She’s hijacking your front camera feed and embedding it with interpolated memory.”
“In English, Veer.”
“She’s inside your phone. And she’s rewriting you.”
The air went cold again, the bulbs flickering once more. The hallway mirror behind them shimmered—glass turning to mist.
Tia turned slowly.
There, in the reflection, she saw herself as a child. Hair braided, holding a doll she hadn’t owned in years. Behind her, a shadow loomed—Zoya. Wet, silent, eyes wide open.
Tia stepped forward and her reflection matched—until it didn’t.
Her mirror self didn’t lift her hand. Didn’t flinch. It just… smiled.
Then it spoke, though Tia herself said nothing.
“Come through, Tia. We remember you here.”
With a loud crack, the mirror split from top to bottom. A web of glass spidered outward.
Veer threw a blanket over it, forcing her back. “We need to break the loop. She’s fed by resonance. That live you did—it amplified her.”
“Then how do we shut her down?”
“We go where the algorithm began. The origin. The first post that triggered her.”
Tia’s mind raced. “The swing reel. It was based on a childhood photo. I posted it on a whim. But… that photo wasn’t in my camera roll. It appeared in a shared folder with no sender info.”
She opened her gallery. The photo was still there—grainy, eerie. Two girls on a swing. She clicked the metadata.
Location: Dehradun, Forest Lane 14B
Timestamp: 2006/03/13 – 17:02
Her stomach dropped. That was after Zoya had died.
“That photo… it shouldn’t exist.”
“No,” Veer said. “Which means she sent it.”
Tia stared at the image again. This time, something had changed.
A third figure. Barely visible in the shadows between the trees.
A woman. Long hair. White sari. Blurred face.
She zoomed in. Her phone froze. Crashed.
Then restarted on its own.
It opened directly to WhatsApp.
A voice note was already playing.
“Tia, you’ve let me into the story. But I was never meant to be forgotten. I waited behind glass, inside reels, inside eyes that blink too slow. I remember the swing. I remember the mud. I remember you.”
Her phone turned black.
“That’s it,” Veer said. “We’re destroying the device.”
He tossed her phone into the kitchen sink and smashed it with the base of a pressure cooker. Glass, water, circuits. Gone.
The silence afterward was suffocating.
No buzzing.
No screen.
Just breath.
For hours, they sat in the backyard with candles, watching the banyan tree sway in the windless night. Tia whispered stories—real ones—about Zoya. About their friendship. About her guilt.
And then, somewhere between midnight and memory, the swing appeared again.
Empty. Still.
But the ropes were frayed.
And the wooden seat had cracked down the middle.
“I think she’s gone,” Tia said quietly.
Veer didn’t answer.
Inside, the laptop pinged.
An email.
From: @mydeathwasnotanaccident
Subject: Draft Saved
Body: You deleted me from your phone. But I was never in your phone. I live where mirrors remember. See you in your reflection.
The cursor blinked once.
Then the screen went black.
The silence in the room was unnerving, like the air itself held its breath. Veer shut the laptop, but not before unplugging it from both power and Wi-Fi. Tia stood behind him, arms wrapped around her ribs like she was holding herself together. The message had been clear: Zoya—or whatever remained of her—wasn’t inside a phone, a laptop, or even a camera.
She was inside memory. She was inside mirrors.
They burned the broken swing the next morning. Chopped it down from the banyan with Veer’s pocket knife and doused it in kerosene. The wood sizzled and cracked, coughing smoke into the pale sky. The seat gave off the smell of rot, and Tia couldn’t help but think it sounded like the swing was screaming as it burned.
Veer stayed silent through it all, gaze fixed on the fire like he was trying to decode flames.
Afterward, they returned to the house. Tia’s mother refused to speak. Her father had left quietly that morning—no note, no word. The family had always operated on a brittle silence, but this was different. This was terror.
Veer handed Tia a new phone. “No social media. No mirrors. No camera apps. If she lives in digital reflections, we go analogue.”
“You make it sound like she’s a virus.”
“Maybe she is. Not in the technical sense. But in the way guilt replicates. Pain mutates. You made her unforgettable, and the internet gave her body.”
Tia nodded slowly. “But there’s one thing we haven’t tried.”
Veer raised an eyebrow.
“She wants me to see. To remember. Maybe I let her speak. But on my terms.”
“Tia—”
“I’ll film a video. But this time, not for engagement. Not for likes. I’ll tell the whole truth. As raw and ugly as it is. Maybe that’s what she wants. Not revenge. Not fear. Just to be remembered… right.”
Against Veer’s protests, she set up the DSLR in the guest room. No mirror in sight. No ring light. Just the raw daylight and her voice.
She spoke. For twenty minutes straight.
About Zoya.
About the mud, the fight, the silence.
She told them about the swing, the blood, the scream no one heard. About leaving a girl behind because she didn’t know what else to do. About how it haunted her, and not just in her dreams. About how the internet gave her an audience, but never peace.
And about how guilt, left unspoken, grows into ghosts.
When she finished, she didn’t upload it. Not to Instagram. Not to YouTube.
She sent the video to one email address:
gonebutnotforgotten@mirrorstream.ai
A dummy server Veer had created—unindexed, undetectable. A kind of digital grave.
The screen went dark after the video uploaded. No confirmation. No message.
Just silence.
That night, she dreamt again.
But this time, it was different.
She was back in the forest. Zoya stood on the swing, older now, in a dress of light and mud. Her skin no longer pale, but warm brown like before. She smiled. Not the haunting grin, but the one Tia remembered from lazy summer afternoons.
“I waited for you,” Zoya said. “You told the story.”
“I’m sorry,” Tia whispered. “I didn’t know how.”
“You remembered me wrong,” she said, gently. “Now you remember me right.”
Zoya turned, walking into the trees. Her figure blurred, then lightened, then was gone.
Tia woke up with tears soaking her pillow.
But no messages.
No flickering lights.
No whispers behind mirrors.
Veer knocked and peeked in. “You okay?”
She nodded.
“Check your inbox.”
She opened her laptop, heart pounding.
One message.
From: gonebutnotforgotten@mirrorstream.ai
Subject: Draft Removed
Body: Thank you for finishing the reel. I’ve been seen. I’ve been heard. I’ve been freed. No more follows. No more echoes. Just memory.
Beneath it was a line of code—unusual, looping. Veer leaned in, examined it.
“This is a self-termination protocol. She erased herself. From the loop. From the mirrors. From everything.”
Tia whispered, “She’s… gone?”
He nodded. “Or finally at rest.”
Days passed.
Tia left Dehradun. Returned to Mumbai. But she didn’t post anymore. Not about makeup. Not about moods. Her last video remained locked in a private drive—shared only with Veer.
One afternoon, she stood before her hallway mirror. For the first time in weeks, she looked herself full in the face.
No flickers.
No echoes.
Just her.
But sometimes, when she filmed her room by accident, the sound would pick up an extra swing creaking.
And sometimes, in reflections at the edge of her vision, she thought she saw two girls.
Still smiling.
Still swinging.
But only ever just for a second.
END
