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)
“Brilliant?”
“Ambitious. Maybe too ambitious.”
Her confidence never wavered. “Nothing’s too ambitious if you have the right partner.” She looked at him meaningfully.
The moment stretched.
He deflected. “I’ll help you with the theoretical framework. The ward structure. But Charlotte—this has to stay theoretical. Promise me you won’t actually try to build this.”
“Why not?”
“Because mirrors that remember everything would eventually remember things better forgotten. And a network that connects all of them would amplify that memory until it became louder than the present.”
She dismissed his concern with a wave. “You worry too much.”
“Someone has to.”
“Is that someone you? My worried angel?”
“I’m not an angel.”
“No?” Playful challenge. “Then what are you?”
“Someone who knows what happens when innovation outpaces wisdom.”
“Then help me make it wise. That’s what partners do.”
The final image burned into memory was both of them bent over the drawings, her hand on his wrist, neither knowing that her theoretical network would become someone else’s weapon a century later.
Present day. The tunnel. Water rising higher, now past his knees.
Bastien blinked. Charlotte’s ward was still visible on the wall, her signature cross marking it as unmistakably hers.
She’d built it anyway.
And now he was standing in proof of her genius and her folly.
He followed the wards deeper. The tunnel narrowed to shoulder width. Limestone walls slick with algae, tool marks visible where chisels had shaped rock. The marks ran horizontal instead of vertical—wrong direction. The passage had been carved from below, not excavated from above.
The current strengthened. Water now mid-thigh, pulling at his legs with serious force. He had to brace against the walls to keep his balance.
Then the transition point.
Old brick gave way to a section that shouldn’t exist. The wall surface changed—not quite brick, not quite stone. Something else. Something crystalline.
Bastien ran his hand across it. Smooth. Cold. Slightly reflective even in the flashlight’s beam. His palm came away dry despite the moisture everywhere else.
Glass.
The walls were partially glass. Charlotte had somehow integrated mirror material into the city’s infrastructure. Not just placed mirrors at key points—she’d literally woven reflective material into the Quarter’s foundations.
He followed the glass-veined walls. They formed channels, pathways, rivers of potential reflection threading through ordinary stone. The engineering required would have been extraordinary. The vision behind it even more so.
The tunnel opened into a wider chamber.
Here, Charlotte’s main work became visible. Mirrors set into the walls at strategic points, each one connected by glass veins running through the mortar between bricks. Some of the mirrors had cracked over time. Others remained intact, their surfaces dark but unmarred. The network she’d designed—not destroyed, just forgotten, buried beneath a century of urban development that had built on top of her creation without realizing what lay beneath.
Gideon hadn’t created this system. He’d discovered it. Charlotte had built the machine. He’d merely found the ignition switch.
“Oh Charlotte, what have you done,” he whispered to himself.
Bastien drew the mirror shard from his pocket. Held it near one of the glass veins.
Immediate resonance. The shard hummed in his palm, vibration climbing up his arm. The vein lit with inner glow—gold light threading through the glass like phosphorescence in deep water.
For three seconds he saw through the network. Brief flash of other nodes, other mirrors, a web spanning the entire Quarter. Connection points at Jackson Square. The Archive. St. Louis Cemetery. Maman’s shop. His own apartment building.
He pulled the shard away. The light faded but didn’t quite extinguish.
Connected. All of it connected. Not Gideon’s creation but Charlotte’s legacy, waiting dormant until someone activated it again.
The storm intensified above. He could feel it through the stone—pressure changes, water surging through the tunnels in waves. The flood was creating perfect reflection conditions. Every surface becoming mirror. Every pool of standing water turning into a potential network node.
The glass veins activated fully.
Light ran through them now, constant instead of brief. Gold and silver intertwined, pulsing in rhythm with the storm’s assault. The veins showed more than simple reflections.
Bastien moved closer to one of the larger veins embedded in the chamber wall.
Jackson Square fountain. Visible in the glass as clearly as if he were standing there. Water features, streetlamps, the cathedral beyond.
He shifted to another vein.
The Archive reading room. Empty at this hour, but he could see the exact layout. Display cases. Delphine’s desk. The window where they’d stood together last week.
A third vein showed Delphine’s apartment. Her bedroom. The quilt her grandmother had made. The stack of books on her nightstand.
His stomach turned.
The network wasn’t just citywide. It was invasive. Every mirror in every location, all feeding into Charlotte’s underground infrastructure. Surveillance she’d never intended. Violation she’d never imagined. Exactly what he’d been afraid of two hundred years ago.
More reflections appeared as the storm fed more power into the system. Maman’s shop. The werewolf den near the river. The vampire court’s meeting hall. His own apartment.
The network showed everything. Cataloged everything. Remembered everything.