The mirror above the sink was exactly as Rule 7 described: reflectionless.

  David stood directly in front of it. The glass showed the tiled wall behind him, the stall door (now hanging off one hinge), the flickering fluorescent tube. It showed everything in the room except David himself—as if the rendering engine responsible for generating his reflection had been disabled.

  The effect was deeply disorienting. David’s brain, wired by two decades of experience to expect its own image in a mirror, fired a continuous stream of error signals. The visual cortex insisted something was wrong. The proprioceptive system, which used reflections as a secondary position-check, flagged a mismatch. Even his balance wavered slightly, his inner ear confused by input that contradicted what his eyes were reporting.

  This was a designed psychological weapon. Prolonged exposure to the absence of your own reflection degraded your sense of self—your conviction that you existed as a distinct entity in physical space. In a dungeon where mental pollution was the primary kill mechanism, this mirror was a slow-acting virus targeting the user’s core identity files.

  But Rule 7 also contained an implicit clue: If a reflection appears, wash your face with cold water until it disappears.

  The rule assumed the reflection would appear. Which meant there was a trigger condition. And the reflection, once manifested, contained information worth the risk of seeing it.

  David turned on the faucet. Ice-cold water gushed out—genuinely cold, cold enough that it stung his fingers. He cupped his hands, filled them, and waited.

  One second. Two. Five. Ten.

  At twelve seconds, the temperature in the bathroom dropped so sharply that the water vapor from the faucet condensed into visible fog. The fluorescent tube sputtered, dimmed, and stabilized at a fraction of its normal output.

  The mirror rippled.

  Not like glass cracking—like water. The surface developed a concentric ring pattern, as if something beneath had been dropped into it from the other side. The rings expanded, overlapped, and resolved into an image.

  David’s reflection materialized.

  It was him. Same coat, same face, same posture. But the reflection-David was wrong in ways that were subtle and therefore more disturbing than anything overtly monstrous. His skin was the color of old paper. His eyes were open, but the irises had been replaced by something dark and wet. And from every orifice—eyes, nose, ears, the corners of his mouth—black fluid seeped with the steady patience of a slow leak.

  The reflection was not looking at David.

  It was looking over its own shoulder, its head turned at an angle that suggested extreme fear. Its mouth was open—not in a scream, but in the frozen gape of someone who had seen something behind them and had been unable to look away in time.

  David needed to know what it was looking at. But he couldn’t turn his head to follow the gaze—the reflection existed only in the mirror, and whatever it was staring at existed only in the mirror’s world.

  One deduction. He could afford one, maybe. His mental reserves had been slowly replenishing, but a 3-Star dungeon’s ambient pollution was eating into the recovery rate. He estimated four deductions remaining until brain death. Using one here was expensive.

  But the information was worth it.

  "Infinite Deduction: Analyze the reflection’s focal point."

  The needle. The pain. The frozen world.

  In the white void of the simulation, David didn’t simulate an action—he simulated a perspective. He placed his consciousness inside the mirror world, behind the reflection’s eyes, and followed the line of sight.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The mirror-bathroom extended beyond its physical counterpart. Behind the reflection-David, the tiled wall opened into a corridor that shouldn’t exist—a passage of rusted metal and bare lightbulbs leading to a heavy iron door. The door was painted red. Not decoratively—functionally, the red of a biohazard warning.

  Stenciled on the door in characters that dripped and reformed continuously, as if the paint itself was alive:

  [CAR 13: MEAT PROCESSING / NURSERY]

  And standing in front of the door, her hands flat against the metal, her distended belly pressing against the steel—the Weeping Mother. Her empty belly. David could see, from this angle, that the impossible distension was an illusion maintained by the entity’s own grief. Underneath, her abdomen was hollow. Scooped out. Whatever had been inside her had been taken.

  She was hitting the door. Clawing at it. Her nails broke against the metal and regrew and broke again. Her mouth was open in a continuous, soundless howl.

  Her baby was behind that door. Taken from her by the train’s management. Taken and processed into the food that the entities consumed, that the food cart distributed, that Rule 4 prohibited players from buying—not to protect them from poison, but to prevent them from participating in the supply chain of a slaughterhouse.

  [Simulation complete.]

  David opened his eyes. Blood was running from his left nostril. The deduction had cost him, but the return was enormous.

  The entire Ghost Train’s architecture collapsed into clarity:

  The train was not transportation. It was a factory. A closed-loop production system in which player deaths were the raw material, the entities were the consumers, Car 13 was the processing plant, and the Weeping Mother was the only entity on the train who hadn’t consented to the arrangement.

  She wasn’t a threat. She was a weapon waiting to be aimed.

  If David could reach Car 13—which his Master Key couldn’t open—and find the baby, he could return it to the Weeping Mother. And a mother reunited with her stolen child, in a system that had tortured her for god knew how long, would not respond with gratitude. She would respond with the kind of rage that restructured local reality.

  The pregnant woman was a nuclear option. David just needed the launch codes.

  In the mirror, the reflection-David suddenly snapped its head around. Its black, wet eyes locked onto the real David with a focus that carried physical weight. Its mouth opened. Pale hands began emerging from the glass surface—

  David splashed the cupped water onto his face.

  The cold was savage, a thermal shock that reset his nervous system like a hard reboot. The reflection dissolved. The hands retracted. The mirror returned to its empty, reflectionless state.

  David dried his face with a strip of paper towel. His hands were steady. His mind was calm. In his pocket, the conductor’s brass key was warm against his thigh.

  He had a map of the dungeon’s architecture now. He had the conductor’s key for Cars 1 through 12. He had a nuclear weapon in the form of a grieving mother. And he had a storage ring full of food in a dungeon designed to starve its players into compliance.

  The only thing he didn’t have was access to Car 13.

  But that was a problem for the next chapter of the evening. Right now, he had a cabin mate who was armed, experienced, and terrified enough to be useful.

  David unlocked the bathroom door, stepped back into the corridor—checking both directions, confirming the Weeping Mother had not yet circled back—and walked to the cabin.

  Razor was exactly where David had left him: pressed against the wall, knife in hand, sweat on his face.

  "You’re alive," Razor said, as if stating a theorem he didn’t believe.

  "I have a key that opens every car on this train except one," David said, pulling the brass key from his pocket and letting it catch the dim cabin light. "And I have a plan that ends this dungeon with a rating higher than either of us is currently qualified for."

  He sat on his bunk and reached into the space where his storage ring interfaced with local physics. His hand disappeared into a pocket-sized void and emerged holding two vacuum-sealed packets: premium wagyu beef, pre-cooked, still warm from the stasis field.

  He tossed one to Razor.

  "Eat," David said. "Then I’ll tell you about Car 13."

  Razor caught the packet. He stared at it. He stared at David. His scarred face cycled through suspicion, confusion, disbelief, and finally something that looked almost like hope.

  "Who the hell are you?" Razor whispered.

  David opened his own packet. The smell of perfectly seared beef filled the cabin, a scent so aggressively normal that it seemed to push back the formalin and the blood and the ambient dread.

  "I’m a computer science student," David said. "I find bugs in systems. This system has a lot of bugs."

  He took a bite. The steak was excellent.