Alice Cassill—a name that swam in Nina's mind from the moment she'd seen the picture that accompanied it. Her green eyes were brought to the forefront of Nina's mind every time the name occurred to her. It was the impassive gaze of a dead woman—the thought alone sent a chill down Nina's spine.

She'd been shocked at first, barely registering whatever it was that the newscaster was talking about. By the time Nina was able to focus, it was too late. The reporter moved on to a different story and Nina was left wanting for answers. For a while, she sat there, staring in shock at the screen without truly seeing the images playing across it. Her mind was whirring with all sort of thoughts, some more morbid than others. None of them were reassuring.

Once Nina managed to calm herself, one thing was clear—she needed answers.

". . .Is rumored to be the top pick for the new Commissioner of the FDA. . . ."

Despite the myriad of feelings still swirling inside of her, she knew she needed to find out more about the woman named Alice. Nina sat there, gathering herself. By the time she stood from the couch, she had convinced herself that it was all just another story. One more article she needed to research. The thought served to calm her for only as long as she didn't think about it too deeply.

After that, Nina merely followed her instincts as a journalist. She sat at her desk, the news having ended long ago and a new show playing on the television, with the voices streaming over to her as only a faint series of murmurs that were largely ignored. Dinner time had come and gone with Nina hardly feeling even the smallest pang of hunger. The exhaustion she'd felt from the painfully early start of her day was momentarily forgotten. It was swept away by Nina's thirst for answers.

Alice was not a difficult woman to find information on. She was a prominent researcher, despite her young age. The woman was a scientist, specializing in neuroscience. Nina was only mildly surprised to learn that Alice worked at the research center where Nina had sought treatment. After all, the place was the largest of its kind in the area and renowned for having some of the best specialists in their respective fields.

What came as a shock was the knowledge that Alice had also been working on neural prosthetics before her death. More specifically, she'd been working on hippocampal implants.

Nina felt her mouth go dry as she read over the information, her eyes staring at the words displayed on the overly bright screen. Something inside her, some instinct she had developed after years of working as an investigative journalist, told her that was it—that was a key detail in the mess that her life had become after the accident. It was something that was necessary if she wanted to understand what was going on with her mind.

Still, that didn't explain why it was Alice that occupied the mirror in her dreams. Nina sat back in her chair, once more feeling the exhaustion of the day after what seemed like hours of managing to ignore it. Her back ached nearly as much as her head, a dull throbbing building up and making her close her eyes in an attempt to quell the pain as it slowly increased.

Against her will, her mind slowly wandered away from thoughts of Alice, drifting off with Nina hardly noticing.

And then, she was standing in the hall once more. The polished hardwood floors and cream colored walls looked the same as always, the lighting warm and soft—almost inviting. As always, Nina moved calmly down the hall, the sound of her steps sharp, nearly too loud in the sparsely furnished space. A melody, different from the past ones, rang in the air. It was the sound of strings accompanied by piano notes that set a steady tempo. There was the scent of wet earth and damp wood, vivid enough that Nina could nearly picture it.

Just ahead of her, the familiar frame hung on the wall. Despite her calm movements, there was a spark of panic in Nina's mind at the thought that she might just see a face that didn't belong to her. The sense of wrongness returned as it always did, something that didn't belong to that memory, Nina knew.

To her great relief, it was not a pair of green eyes that stared back at her when she reached the frame. Instead, Nina found a painting. Warm hues of red, orange and bright yellow brought to life the woods surrounding a sparkling river beneath a hazy blue sky. Nina stared at the picture through a stranger's eyes, studying each vivid detail.

And then, there was a break in the patter of Nina's usual dreams. A hand that was not her own, pale and thin, reached out to the picture. A slim finger pointed at a spot in the painting. It was a small thing, nearly hidden in the back and obscured by the brightly colored details surrounding it, but Nina saw it all the same. There, beneath the brightly colored leaves, was a bridge.

At that moment, Nina awoke, still sitting on her chair. The harsh light from the computer in front of her hurt her eyes, while the darkness that had settled around her felt oppressive, the room feeling colder than it should have. Nina ignored it all along with the rapid beating of her heart. Instead, she pulled out a notepad from a drawer of her desk and hurried to note as much of her dream as she could recall with a slightly shaking hand.

The details, she knew, were likely to fade over time, and something told her they mattered too much to be allowed to leave her mind. Nina's mind might have been fractured, her memories a mess that she was still trying to repair, but she knew there was work that needed to be done. With as much detail as she could recall, Nina jotted down all of the visions of the hallway she'd had. The scents, sounds, and pictures were ever changing and Nina knew there was something there that she wasn't seeing. Something in all those images that made them so vivid.

"Almost like a memory," she muttered thoughtfully, pen halting with the tip hovering right above the paper as the realization hit Nina.

She was looking through Alice's eyes, after all. In every single of the so-called visions, Nina had been but a spectator looking through those green eyes that had come to haunt her. It was so obvious that Nina wondered how she hadn't seen it before. But how?

Nina supposed that it could be possible. After all, the very implant that she'd received had once been considered an impossibility. The science behind memories was a complex one, but it was advancing. It wasn't unreasonable to think that a way to truly implant someone's memories into another would someday be possible. Nina had just never thought it would be so soon.

". . . Fearnley's trial for the slaying of Alice Cassill is set for November 21st. . . ."

Nina's thoughts shifted—the newfound revelation of what those visions and dreams really were pushed back for the time being—the sounds from the television in the living room carried over and the name of the woman from her dreams claimed her attention. This time, though, there was another name that stood out. All on their own, Nina's feet led her back to the living room, where she stood and watched the now painfully familiar image of Alice on the screen for a second before the news anchor moved on to another story.

"Fearnley," Nina said in a near whisper, back to ignoring what the woman narrating the daily news was saying.

Nina set aside the notebook and turned back to her computer, fingers deftly moving across the keyboard. A moment later, she was looking at a picture of Christopher Fearnley on the screen. He was thin, pale, and with a look of total exhaustion in his blue eyes that was all too clear even in a photograph.

Fearnley, she knew, was accused of killing Alice in her home, but the details of the crime were still a mystery to Nina. As she read about the crime the man was said to have committed, there was one thing that Nina couldn't help but think was missing. For all the coverage Fearnley had received, his motives remained as unclear as they'd been on the day he was arrested.

Maybe it was because he'd confessed, or maybe it was because the image Nina had of Fearnley from what she'd learned of the man didn't match up with the crime.

The man who'd taken Alice's life was about as average as anyone else. He was a mild looking middle-aged man with a job at an electronics company and not even so much as a parking ticket on his record. His wife had divorced him years earlier and there was no mention of any later relations. Not a single detail stood out to Nina, despite a part of her saying that there had to be something else, something she wasn't seeing. Still, by all accounts, he was the last person one would suspect of murder. But there it was, on every article Nina had read—Fearnley had confessed.

". . . New studies find that the treatment could potentially be used to help those with psychological disorders. . . ." The news anchor looked steadily at the camera, her expression impassive. It was unsettlingly reminiscent of Alice's face staring back through the mirror. Enough so that Nina changed the channel without truly thinking about it.

The news anchor disappeared, replaced by a stern faced man. Nina recognized the movie playing as one of murders, spies and conspiracies the likes of which Nina had never thought she would be involved in. She nearly laughed at how wild her life had turned out, even without the conspiracy theories and other nonsense. The only thing holding her back was the migraine that was just starting to fade and the feeling of being trapped in a life that no longer seemed like her own.

Instead Nina yawned and looked at the time, near midnight. She'd been sitting at her desk for hours, searching for information in a nearly obsessive way. The start of the day seemed like a distant thing. The memory of cloyingly sweet coffee coating her mouth and Nat sitting across from her with a crimson smile and mismatched eyes felt like too simple a memory for a life as complicated as Nina's currently was.

Slowly, Nina stood, her back protesting the movement after having spent so long sitting. Her head ached only the slightest bit, the pain faint enough so that Nina could ignore it in favor of getting some rest. Sleep came easy to her that night, more so than Nina had expected. She found herself falling asleep quickly and suddenly instead of the gradual shift that was so usual for her. One minute she was staring up at the ceiling and the next she was once again standing in the hallway.

Against her will, Nina found herself walking down the hall. The sound of her steps seemed deafening in the uncharacteristic silence. No song was playing, the only sounds those of Nina moving down the hall, heels clicking against the floor, and her soft breathing. There was a scent that seemed familiar, though nothing as soothing as the jasmine and spices that had wafted through the air the last time she'd found herself walking down that particular hall. This was a harsher smell, the memory of what it could be just out of reach of Nina's mind.

Before she could think of what it could be, she found herself standing before the mirror. Alice's face stared back, as impassive as ever—pale and sickly looking. Even then, her green eyes blazed with what Nina thought could only be unflinching determination. Something, however, was different this time. On top of the casual shirt Alice had worn every other time, there was a lab coat of a pristine white color. The change stood out to Nina immediately.

Alice gazed back into the mirror, unmoving, for a second. Then, she raised her hand and, with a single finger, tapped a rectangular nametag on the lab coat. There was no name on it, nothing but the name of the research center where Alice worked: SEIN.

Nina awoke a moment later, puzzled as always by the strange visions of Alice in that silver mirror. Without a moment's thought, Nina got up, intending to note down as much of the dream as she could recall. Her covers were tossed to the side, and her bare feet slapped against the floor as she moved to her desk and searched for her notebook. She did not intend to get any more sleep that night.

It was just past five and Nina had much to do.

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Hey everyone! Looking forward to reading your thoughts on this chapter, so please comment if you can and thank you all for reading! New chapter will be up on Friday.