The warehouse door groaned as Elara pushed it open, her flashlight cutting through decades of dust. Three days ago, her grandmother had died. Two days ago, she'd found the key taped beneath a loose floorboard. Yesterday, she'd traced the address scrawled on the envelope that held it.
Now she stood in the abandoned shipping yard, wondering if she'd made a terrible mistake.
The flashlight beam caught something metallic in the corner—a steel door, pristine despite the decay around it. Her grandmother's key fit perfectly. The lock clicked. The door swung inward on silent hinges.
Beyond lay a corridor lit by emergency lights that had no business working after all these years. The walls were covered in photographs. Not just any photographs—her grandmother at twenty, standing beside a woman who looked exactly like Elara, down to the scar above her left eyebrow. A scar Elara had received falling from a tree at age six.
"Impossible," she whispered.
The corridor stretched deeper. Each photograph showed the same two women at different ages, in different decades—sometimes the 1960s, sometimes the 1990s, once in what looked like Victorian England. Her grandmother never aged. The other woman—Elara's twin—appeared and disappeared across the timeline like a ghost.
At the end of the corridor, another door. A plaque read: "Project Recursion - Authorized Personnel Only."
Elara's hand trembled as she reached for the handle. Behind her, footsteps echoed in the warehouse. Heavy. Purposeful. Multiple people.
"Miss Chen?" A man's voice. "Your grandmother made us promise to give you a choice. You can leave now, and we'll explain everything. Or you can open that door and learn the truth yourself."
Elara's fingers touched the cold metal.
"But understand," the voice continued, "once you open it, there's no going back. You'll become part of something that's been running for seventy years. Something your grandmother died protecting."
The footsteps stopped. Waiting.
Elara thought of her grandmother's last words: Trust yourself. You've done this before.
She turned the handle.
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