Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
The next two hours passed in mechanical repetition. Check site. Catalog status. Attempt reinforcement if possible. Move to next location. His hands cramped from drawing chalk patterns. His shoulders burned from crouching over sigils that resisted every attempt at repair.
By the time he reached his apartment, his hands cramped and his vision kept blurring at the edges. The stairs felt steeper than they should. He climbed to the third floor and found Delphine already waiting outside his door, two coffee cups balanced in one hand while the other held her phone displaying a detailed spreadsheet.
“You beat me here,” he said.
“I walk fast when I’m nervous.” She offered him one of the coffee cups. “Thought you might need this.”
The cup was still warm. She’d timed her arrival perfectly, stopping at the all-night place on Decatur to get coffee right before meeting him. A small consideration that mattered more than grand gestures.
He unlocked the door and gestured her inside. The apartment looked the way it always did; maps covering the main table, books stacked on every horizontal surface, morning light just beginning to filter through windows overlooking the Quarter’s rooftops. She’d been there before, but usually during daylight hours when visits could be framed more friendly, casual. Something about her presence in pre-dawn darkness felt different. More intimate, despite their clothes staying on and their focus remaining on work.
Delphine set her coffee on the table and pulled up the data she’d collected. “Good news. Most of your sites are still functioning. Bad news? Three more have inverted since you started checking, and two show early warning signs.”
He moved to stand beside her, examining the spreadsheet over her shoulder. Her hair smelled like the lavender hand lotion she kept in her office. Familiar. He made himself focus on the data instead of proximity.
“The pattern’s accelerating,” he said.
“I noticed.” She zoomed in on the map section showing the Garden District. “These three sites formed a triangle. When the central one inverted, the other two started destabilizing. It’s spreading through geometric relationships.”
“Which means the entire network could collapse if enough nodes invert simultaneously.”
“Yes.” She met his eyes. “What do we do?”
We. Not you. She’d claimed partnership in this without asking permission. Two people against city-scale forces wouldn’t make much difference mathematically, but mathematics had never accounted for stubbornness.
“We shore up what we can,” he said. “Reinforce the sites showing early warning signs before they flip completely. And we figure out what’s causing the inversion so we can stop it at the source instead of playing defense.”
“I might be able to help with that.” Delphine pulled a leather-bound journal from her bag. “After Maman called, I went to the Archive before coming to you. Found this in the restricted collection—Lacroix family records from the 1780s. It mentions mirror networks and containment protocols that used geometric anchoring.”
He took the journal carefully, aware of its age and fragility. The pages opened to reveal Charlotte’s handwriting, notes about reflection theory and the way bloodline resonance could stabilize forces that resisted external control. Bloodline resonance. That meant Delphine really could help.
Charlotte had built systems designed to work across generations, preparation for threats she’d known would outlast her mortal span. She’d written this knowing Delphine would find it, trusting her descendant to understand instructions that looked like historical curiosity to anyone else.
“What does it say?” Delphine’s voice pulled him back to present concerns.
“That geometric networks need emotional anchors as well as physical ones.” He scanned the text, parsing Charlotte’s deliberately obscure phrasing. “The physical sigils provide structure, but they’re vulnerable to corruption unless someone with bloodline resonance stabilizes them from within.”
“Someone like me.”
“Yes.”
She absorbed this without visible reaction. “All right. What do I need to do?”
The question should have prompted immediate refusal. Should have triggered every protective instinct that made him maintain distance between danger and the people he cared about. But he was tired, and the network was failing, and Charlotte’s journal made clear that bloodline anchoring wasn’t optional—it was the only method that would work.
“First, we catalog everything properly,” he said. “All the sites, their current status, the geometric relationships between them. Then we test whether your presence stabilizes the inverted nodes.”
“And if it does?”
“Then we build you into the network structure. Make you a deliberate anchor instead of an accidental one.”
She nodded slowly. “That sounds like it might be dangerous.”
“It is.”
“But necessary.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She pulled out her laptop. “Then let’s get organized. You look like you’re about to fall over, so I’ll handle data entry. You tell me what I need to record.”
They worked through dawn and into morning, coffee going cold while they mapped the lattice’s geometry and tracked its deterioration. Delphine asked questions that cut straight to core mechanics. Made intuitive leaps that saved hours of explanation. Organized information with the efficiency that made her exceptional at her actual job.