GHOSTWARE

The world was a frantic, glittering blur of crimson and gold. It was Christmas eve at grand celestia mall, and the air was thick with the suffocating scent of expensive pine perfume and over-sweetened lattes. Most people were lost in te festive chaos. A sea of frantic shoppers clutching silk-ribboned bags, but Aarohi was elsewhere.

She moved through crowd like Predator in a velvet coat, her confidence acting as silent command for the masses to part before her. Aarohi wasn't just another college student home for holidays; she carried herself with the effortless, sharp-edged beauty of someone who knew exactly how mch space she occupied in a room. Her dark hair fell in polished waves over her shoulders, and her eyes, framed by a presice flick of eyeliner, remained fixed on the path ahead.

She adjust her noise-cancelling headphones sliding the worlds volume down to zero. Immediately, the screeching toddlers and the tinny, repetitive ring of Jingle Bells vanished. In their place rose the heavy, thrumming bass of a dark synth-wave track. It was her sanctuary. The rhythm pulsed in her veins, matching the rhythmic click of her boots against the marble floor.

She stepped into the glass elevator at the heart of the atrium. It was emptya rare sanctuary of solitude in the middle of the madness. As the lift began its ascent, the mall fell away beneath her. Aarohi leaned back against the glass, crossing her arms. From this height, the shoppers looked like ants in a labyrinth. She watched her own reflection in the polished metal of the lift door the sharp line of her jaw, the faint, bored smirk that played on her lips. She looked stunning, and she knew it.

The lift passed the third floor. Then the fourth. Aarohi turned her gaze outward, looking through the glass at the opposite side of the atrium. That was when the music in her ears seemed to warp. A low, digital hiss scratched at the back of the track, like a record skipping on a broken needle.

Across the vast, open space of the mall, something was falling. It wasn't a decoration. It wasn't a stray balloon. It was heavy. It was human. Aarohi’s breath hitched, her lungs suddenly feeling like they were filled with crushed ice. The figure was dropping from the top-tier balcony, tumbling through the air with a terrifying, silent grace.

The falling woman passed directly level with Aarohi’s glass cage. For one heartbeat one impossible, agonizing second the two of them were eye-to-eye. Aarohi felt the blood drain from her face, leaving her skin like paper.

The girl in the air wasn't just a stranger. She was wearing the same forest-green trench coat Aarohi had bought in London last month.

She had the same gold hoop earrings. The same mole just beneath the arch of her left brow.

It was her. It was Aarohi.

The girl’s eyes were wide, twin mirrors of the horror reflecting in Aarohi’s own. Her mouth was open in a silent, jagged scream that Aarohi could almost hear through the noise-cancellation. The impact was a dull vibration that Aarohi felt in the soles of her boots more than she heard it. Below, the festive sea of red and gold was suddenly stained with a blossoming, violent crimson. The music in Aarohi’s ears died completely, replaced by a high-pitched, piercing whine.

She lunged for the emergency button, her fingers trembling. "No," she whispered. Then, the lights went out.

The festive glow of the mall vanished in an instant, plunged into a darkness so thick it felt like a physical weight.

The elevator lurched, the cable groaning with a sound like grinding teeth, and then it stopped.

The darkness in the elevator didn't just end; it shattered. One moment, Aarohi was encased in a tomb of silent glass; the next, the world roared back to life with a violent, flickering strobe of neon and screams.

The power surged.

Then, she looked down.

The "real" world had returned, but it was a nightmare painted in candy-cane red. The other Aarohi had been caught in the jagged, skeletal branches of the mall’s sixty-foot centerpiece Christmas tree. It was a sight of pure, unadulterated carnage.

The body was draped across the middle tier like a discarded rag doll. One arm was bent backward at an impossible, sickening angle. Her legs hung limp, broken in multiple places, the expensive leather boots dripping dark, rhythmic stains onto the white faux-snow below.

The girl’s head was tilted back, her neck snapped. Her eyes were wide and glassy, staring directly up at the glass lift. One was clouded with a burst vessel, a dark crimson pooling in the socket. Below the tree, the festive chaos had turned into a stampede.

And then, the second glitch happened. It was like a frame of film being ripped from a reel. The screams cut out. The people vanished. The blood, the body, the tree all of it blinked out of existence. When the world snapped back, the mall was empty.

The shops were dark. The elevator, suddenly freed from its paralysis, didn't go down. It lurched upward.

The doors slid open with a hiss of pressurized air. Aarohi stepped out into the freezing night air of the city. In the center of the terrace, the air was bleeding blue. A man stood at the very edge of the precipice. From behind, he looked like a statue carved from midnight and electricity.

He wasn't stable. His form flickered, his edges blurring into digital artifacts, emerald lines of code racing across his skin like glowing veins.

He was holding someone.

It was Kabir her ex-best friend. He was suspended in mid-air, his boots dangling over a three-hundred-foot drop. The glowing stranger had him by the throat, a single hand lifted with effortless, terrifying strength. Kabir’s face was a mask of purple-bruised agony, his fingers clawing uselessly at the man’s arm.

The stranger turned his head. As his face came into the light, Aarohi felt a jolt of recognition. He was handsome unhumanly so. His features were too symmetrical, his jawline too sharp, his skin a pale, luminous porcelain that pulsed with a faint, sapphire glow. His eyes were the color of a dying star, swirling with data and darkness.

He didn't drop Kabir. Instead, he tightened his grip, his head tilting to the side as he studied Aarohi. "Aarohi," he said.

The voice was a multi-layered harmony of a thousand digital whispers. "You’re late. The system has already logged the error."

He stepped closer to the ledge, Kabir’s muffled pleading growing frantic.

"Wait!" Aarohi screamed, taking a desperate step forward. "What are you? Put him down!"

The man’s lips curved into a smile that was beautiful and cold. "I am what you called for," he whispered. "I am the glitch in your life, Aarohi. And he is a file that needs to be deleted."