Chapter 5
859 Words
The Stranger in the Mirror
From that encounter in the rain, Lin Wan began shying away from Chen Mo on pure reflex.
He himself seemed a mute looking glass, casting back all she labored to conceal. She no longer risked seats near the back; during breaks, she glued herself to her desk, dodging even the brush of a glance. Chen Mo, for his part, showed no inclination to press—lost as ever in his sketches or the vacant stare out the window, as if those words in the downpour had been some fleeting murmur of the moment.
But deliberate evasion couldn't halt the exchange's stealthy creep.
The shifts were subtle, like water wearing at stone: imperceptible at first, until one day the rock gaped hollowed through.
Lin Wan noticed it first in the eight-hundred-meter run—no longer gasping to the brink of rupture, lungs aflame. She even held the pack's middling flow, enough to draw a double take from the PE teacher and a gruff "You're improving." Word came, too, that Su Xiao had faltered in the latest fitness drill—lagging the group for once, singled out for a few sharp words from the coach.
Her grip on the pen would drift, unbidden, toward Su Xiao's performative grace—a flourish of the wrist she caught and snapped back, palms slick with sudden sweat.
Worse, far worse: in math one day, as the teacher scrawled a thorny geometry proof across the board, those lines hooked into her mind. Unwittingly, Su Xiao's favored auxiliary strokes bloomed clear and sure. Her own logic? Smothered under some pall, muddied to haze.
She was harvesting Su Xiao's edges, however slender the slice.
And Su Xiao, shedding them.
No thrill came of the theft—only the visceral horror of invasion, body and spirit colonized by the alien. She felt less vessel than vessel for, conscripted to harbor what wasn't hers.
True dread detonated on a Wednesday dawn.
Overslept, she scrambled through ablutions—toothbrush clamped in her teeth. Steam fogged the bathroom mirror; she swiped a clearing arc and peered in.
Pale from skimped sleep, hair a tangle: the usual disarray.
She spat the froth, bent to rinse. Rising, her gaze snagged the glass anew.
In that breath.
The face staring back—those eyes forever edged with flinch and flight—sharpened. A blade's glint: impatient, arched in lofty disdain.
The corner of her mouth twitched, the barest quirk upward—a sneer she knew to her bones, Su Xiao's signature curl of contempt.
Not hers. Not her expression!
Blood in Lin Wan's veins turned to slush.
She froze rigid, pupils pinpricks, locked on the reflection.
The image held, then thawed: the edge in those eyes ebbed like a receding wave, yielding once more to her default bewilderment, her terror.
What... what had that been?
Hallucination? Fatigue's cruel mirage?
Her heart thundered to escape its cage. She lurched closer, nose to glass, fingers quaking as they traced her cheek, her lip.
It was her—Lin Wan's face. Yet that flicker had lashed quick as lightning, searing true onto her retinas.
No illusion.
The exchange.
Not just scores or stamina—these surface spoils. It clawed deeper now: her bearing, her tells... the stuff of "Lin Wan" overwritten by Su Xiao's imprint.
She yanked the brace from her left wrist.
The blue-black mark had slithered to mid-forearm—a grotesque live tendril, coiled possessive across her skin, staking claim in silence.
Chen Mo's caution landed at last, full weight.
"The more you gain, the more you stand to lose."
She was unraveling herself.
The diary lay dormant, unscribed—yet the cursed trade churned on autopilot, toward... what? "Lin Wan" effaced entire, supplanted by a mongrel stitched from Su Xiao's scraps? Or Su Xiao hollowed to husk, stripped barren?
Either end chilled her to the core.
"Wanwan, hurry! You'll be late!" Her mother's voice pierced from the hall.
Lin Wan jammed the brace back, yanking so fierce the elastic near snapped. In the mirror loomed a girl ghost-white, eyes wild with alarm; she willed a soothing smile and found her mouth locked like poured cement.
Bag slung, she fled the threshold.
Sunlight poured generous, streets hummed with traffic's pulse—life vivid and teeming.
But cold gripped Lin Wan absolute.
She wove the throng like a shade adrift, pilfering glances at shopfronts, car windows: any gleam to trap her silhouette. Dreading the unguarded beat when that gaze—Su Xiao's—might flare again.
For the first time, the frontier of self blurred stark and sure.
Who was she?
Lin Wan still?
If the mirror betrayed her, what anchor held?
This marrow-deep fright dwarfed any overt cruelty. Bullying bruised flesh and pride; this mute barter erased her outright.
She tipped her chin to the vast, slate-blue vault above.
The sky vouchsafed no reply.
Only the relentless creep at her wrist—that glacial tattoo—and the fading echo in her depths, the last frail thread of "Lin Wan," warned her true: she teetered a precipice's lip, abyss yawning below, styled "fate's swap" and ravenous for all it touched.
- Writer
