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)
Everything was reflective. Water. Moisture condensing on walls. Even the bricks seemed to hold light longer than they should, surfaces gleaming with something beyond simple wetness.
The wrongness was immediate.
Bastien moved his light across the tunnel walls. The reflections were too bright for ambient illumination. Too sharp. They lingered after the beam passed, afterimages that faded slowly instead of disappearing at the speed of light.
He started wading upstream. Against the current, water rising to his knees as the storm fed more runoff into the system. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees from surface level. The air tasted mineral, ancient, like breathing the city’s oldest memory.
Graffiti marked the walls. Recent tags from kids who’d explored where they shouldn’t. But beneath the spray paint—older marks. Protection wards drawn in what looked like charcoal but had lasted over a century. Containment circles. Binding sigils.
His light caught on one particular symbol.
He stopped. Moved closer. The ward was exactly Charlotte’s style—the specific way she curved her binding circles, her habit of adding a small cross at the bottom left as her signature.
The memory hit before he could brace against it.
New Orleans, February 1762.
Charlotte’s workshop occupied the second floor of a building on Chartres Street, rooms her family used for storage before she’d claimed them for her experiments. Mirrors propped against every wall—dozens of them, all sizes, some still in frames and others just bare glass resting on makeshift easels. Her workbench held glass-cutting tools, metal frames in various stages of assembly, sketches weighted down with smooth river stones.
She looked up when Bastien knocked. “You’re just in time. I need to explain something brilliant I’ve realized, and you’re the only one who might understand it.”
“Only one who might?”
“Well, you’re the only one who won’t have me burned for witchcraft. Everyone else would.” She gestured him closer. “Come look.”
He’d visited often those months. Ostensibly to check the protection wards he’d placed around her building. Really because she asked questions no one else thought to ask, because her mind moved in directions that surprised him, because—
He didn’t finish that thought.
Charlotte spread drawings across the worktable. Sketches of mirror networks, lines connecting multiple reflection points in patterns that looked almost anatomical. “Watch.”
She positioned two mirrors facing each other. “What happens when mirrors face each other?”
“Infinite recursion. The reflection reflects the reflection reflects the—”
“Exactly. But here’s what’s interesting.” She adjusted the angles slightly. “The reflections don’t just repeat. They store. Like a library where every book is a copy of the same book, but each copy remembers what’s been read.”
“Mirrors don’t remember.”
“Don’t they? Look at old glass. Really old glass. Doesn’t it seem…heavier somehow? Like it’s holding more than reflection?”
He examined the thirteenth-century mirror fragment she handed him. “That’s just imperfections in the glass. Air bubbles. Metallic degradation.”
“Or,” she countered, “it’s every face that ever looked into it. Not visually stored but impressively stored. Like how buildings remember violence, how battlefields remember death. Objects absorb emotional resonance.”
“That’s just theory.”
“Test it then.” She picked up another old mirror. “Tell me what you feel.”
He humored her. Held the mirror. Opened his senses the way he rarely did anymore—celestial awareness that he’d learned to keep locked down after the Fall.
And there: faint emotional residue, layers of it. Decades of people checking their appearances. Moments of vanity and insecurity and hope. All of it absorbed into the glass like water into cloth.
He looked up. “It’s there.”
Her smile was triumphant. “I know. Now imagine if we could connect mirrors intentionally. Create a network where each one reinforces the others. Where memory in one mirror could be accessed through another.”
“Why would you want to?”
“Communication. Storage. Preservation.” Her eyes were bright. “Think about it—letters can be intercepted, documents burned, memories forgotten. But a mirror network? Distributed storage where destroying one node doesn’t destroy the information. It would be revolutionary.”
“It would also be dangerous. If mirrors can store memory and communicate, what stops them from storing the wrong things? From becoming contaminated?”
“That’s where you come in.” She touched his hand lightly. “Your wards. Your understanding of celestial and infernal frequencies. If I provide the mirror theory and you provide the protection framework, we could build something that actually works. Something safe.”
He wanted to explain why that was impossible. That his wards couldn’t protect against human ambition, against knowledge becoming obsession. That everything brilliant eventually became a weapon when the wrong hands found it.
But she was looking at him with such excitement.
“Show me your full plans.”
Charlotte spread more drawings. An underground mirror network using the city’s drainage system as infrastructure. “Water is already reflective. If we place mirrors at key points where water naturally flows, the network would be self-sustaining. Storm runoff would activate it, creating perfect conditions for mirror communication.”
He studied the drawings. Pentagonal design. Five primary nodes with countless secondary connection points threading through the city’s foundations.
“Charlotte, this is—”