The Watchers in the Glass
Sometimes, if you looked closely, the reflections in the windows moved just a heartbeat slower than you did—holding their own secrets and, perhaps, watching back.
It began the day they swapped the agency windows for smart glass. “For energy savings,” said the memo. For greater clarity, said the boss, but the sky in DC looked the same as always, gunmetal clouds and a haze that pressed itself into every corner.
Malia Tran was the youngest analyst at the Department of Urban Security and a firm believer in keeping her head down. She counted street cameras, tracked the silent flow of foot traffic, logged graffiti swells. She had worked alone since her mother died—a year ago, almost to the day. Her only companions: the blue blinking cursor of her terminal and the hard lines of her own reflection in the glass.
She realized something was wrong when she saw the streak. At the edge of the conference room window, above a cluster of midmorning cityscape, a fine silvery mark quivered and pulsed. She frowned, took a step closer; on the glass, her reflection leaned in, too. But when she lifted her hand, the streak ran—leaving her mirrored self with a shimmering smudge above her brow.
That night, she stared from her corner cubicle, tired beyond sleep. Reports said the new glass learned patterns—filtered harsh sunlight, dimmed when you blinked too long, even suggested background scenery for windowless rooms. She watched as lights flickered out in the building across the way. Then, in her own window, something shifted.
Her reflection’s eyes lingered a moment too long. The shape in the glass glanced sharply over her shoulder, as if something in Malia’s real world had moved. But nothing had. She sat absolutely still.
“Is anyone there?” Malia whispered. Her voice sounded strange, as if caught between two spaces.
She pressed her palm to the pane; cold radiated back, but in the reflection, her mirrored self’s lips twisted, as if bracing for pain. Malia snatched her hand away. Her heart thudded. Maybe her mind was tired. Maybe it was the anniversary, her mother’s absence growing into phantom moments that made her own face a stranger’s. She shut her eyes tight and tried to focus on the chirp of the security sensors cycling through their paces.
But the sensation didn’t go away. The next morning, she spilled her coffee in the kitchenette—her hands shook uncontrollably. She snatched paper towels, glancing sidelong at the glass backsplash. The Malia in the glass was just a fraction out of sync, her mouth closing a half-second late, her gaze too fixed.
“Hey, Tran.” Jeremy’s voice startled her from the doorway. “You good? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just a rough night,” she muttered, not looking up.
Jeremy hovered, uncertain. “If you need someone to talk to—”
“No, really.” She tried to smile, but saw her lips misalign in the coffee machine’s polished chrome.
All day, the odd mismatches haunted her. Passing office doors, blinking monitors, even the glass at the security checkpoint—her reflection never quite caught up, each pane offering another version of herself, independently delayed and subtly different. She found herself muttering, “It’s just fatigue, just nerves.”
But as she walked to the elevator after dark, every surface seemed to hum. Her reflection in the empty lift looked sidewise, as though listening for something else. Malia pressed herself back against the cool metal wall, hands balled into fists.
When the elevator doors opened on the basement archive, she barely thought. She should have gone up, left for home, but a cold intuition pulled her downward. Rows of paperwork lined the shelves, interleaved with old analog security monitors—traces of how the world used to watch itself.
She found the archived plans for the building—photos of old plate glass, minor break-ins, grainy shots of staff smiling at the annual party. She thumbed through until she found the installation file for the smart glass. One company name came up, over and over—Aion Technologies—a subcontractor she’d never heard of.
A whisper slipped through her mind: How many eyes does a city need?
She set her phone down and stared at her pale hands. A sudden urge said, Ask them. Ask yourself. The feeling was strong enough that she pressed a palm to the mirror on the wall.
In the glass, a second Malia pressed close, nose nearly touching the surface. This time, the reflection blinked first.
She jerked back; the phone clattered to the floor.
“You see it,” whispered a voice—not her own, but pitched close enough.
The next day, she did what any analyst conditioned to institutional paranoia would do: she pulled data. Anomalous motion events logged by the window sensors. Unexplained variations in image sync—picosecond drifts in video captured on reflective surfaces. Facial recognition insistent on two Malias walking out by two doors, two minutes apart.
As she ran the numbers, it became a story—one told not by the reports, but by the mirror world lurking in the glass.
That was the night she didn’t go home. She waited until the building had emptied out, moved silently past the humming lights of the lobby, and entered the empty conference room where she’d first seen the streak. Her reflection in the swath of smart glass watched her, enormous and solitary.
She faced it and whispered, “What do you want?” The room was silent. The city glittered beneath, each window a pinprick of possibility.
Then her reflection mouthed words back at her. Not quite right, as if miming the words her mother used to speak when Malia was young and scared: You belong.
The word stuck in her mind like a fragment of melody. Who belonged—her, or the thing in the glass?
A staccato sequence of images played behind her eyes—her own face, but older; her sitting at her mother’s bedside; her walking these corridors tonight, but all of them wrong, all from angles she could never have seen.
She pressed closer and the reflection did not match, but peeled its lips into a sorrowful smile.
“We watch so you remember,” it whispered, the glass fogging inside, as though it breathed for both of them.
A wave of grief welled up, thick and unexpected. Her mother’s absence filled the room—the longing for lost connection and the weight of how memory could become resistance against forgetting. The ache of wanting someone to know you, to witness your small life.
She swallowed. “If I walk away now, will you follow?”
“We have always followed,” the reflection breathed, not with malice but with something like compassion.
Malia backed away, out of the conference room, through the dusk-lit halls. Every pane she passed flashed with half-seen motion, each surface echoing with afterimages, a hundred possible Malias trailing behind.
She thought: I could run. I could shut my eyes and pretend nothing is happening.
But that night, in her small apartment, she let herself cry for the mother who once held her hand at every crosswalk, each mirror, each window. She let the grief crest—and when she finally slept, she dreamed of a city built on glass, each reflection holding out its hand to the other side.
In the morning, she went to work and faced the windows without fear. She no longer flinched at the slight delays, the mismatched movements. The city buzzed beneath her, a thousand stories flickering like lights on a pane of glass.
And somewhere, in every reflection, she saw them: silent watchers, fragments of memory, proof that she had been here—that she could be seen, and thus, she could belong.
###END###
