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)
Then the reflections started moving independently.
Jackson Square wasn’t showing now. It was showing yesterday. Last week. Tomorrow morning when the sun would rise over cleaned streets.
The Archive with Delphine from two weeks ago, shelving the Lacroix ledgers.
His own apartment with him sleeping—a view from tonight, hours from now, after he returned.
Temporal bleeding. Not just spatial connection but temporal. Past, present, future all stored in the same crystalline network. Charlotte’s distributed memory system had become something far stranger. A city that remembered not just what had happened but what would happen. What could happen. Every possibility reflected and stored and accessible through the right node at the right moment.
He backed away from the veins. Water was waist-deep now, the current strong enough to make walking difficult.
This was bigger than he’d understood. More complex. More dangerous.
And more useful.
The tunnel continued ahead, leading toward what the blueprints had marked as the primary convergence point. The altar chamber.
The chamber formed where three passages converged. Twentieth-century brick layered over Charlotte’s original limestone—municipal expansion incorporated into the system’s design. Water pooled here instead of flowing, dark and still despite the rain above.
The walls crawled with reflected light. Glass channels thick as his wrist threaded through brick and mortar, branching at intervals. Through all of them, light pulsed—gold and silver intertwined.
The altar rose from the water’s center.
A stone platform bearing the Lacroix crest in tarnished silver—two symbols intertwined that he’d last seen in the vault beneath Rue Chartres. But here the metal had begun to fracture, hairline cracks spreading from the crest’s center toward its edges.
The network was tearing itself apart.
Not just from Gideon’s interference. The fundamental instability ran deeper. Charlotte had designed the network to stabilize her resonance—the specific frequency of her will merged with celestial energy. Delphine carried that same signature but it was filtered through a century of separation. The network recognized her. Tried to anchor to her presence. But the match wasn’t perfect.
And Bastien’s attempts to stabilize the lattice had made it worse. Each sigil he’d drawn imposed his frequency over Charlotte’s pattern until the network couldn’t distinguish between them.
The walls whispered. Breath expelled through glass, vibration shaped by throat and tongue but stripped of meaning. Charlotte’s confession chambers had sounded similar—surfaces that remembered speech without retaining language.
Then one voice cut through clear and deliberate.
“Freedom is love without choice.”
Gideon’s creed, repeated through glass that had absorbed it from mirrors across the Quarter. The words echoed through the vein’s channels, amplified by acoustics Charlotte had never intended.
Bastien waded toward the altar. The water grew warmer with each step. Heat gathered at the chamber’s heart. Steam curled from the surface.
He drew the shard from his pocket. Its light answered the chamber’s pulse, gold brightening until he had to squint. The fragment had been his diagnostic tool for weeks. Now it would serve as anchor. One final node placed at the network’s heart, grounding resonance in artifact rather than living will.
He would collapse what remained of the lattice. Withdraw his frequency from the pattern. Let Charlotte’s design operate as she’d intended—incomplete, unstable, but no longer torn between competing signatures.
The shard pressed against the altar’s crest.
Metal met glass. Silver touched black. The chamber’s light flared white. His arm went hot from palm to shoulder, celestial resonance recognizing its own kind.
The cracks in the crest began to heal. Silver flowed, filling gaps, sealing fractures. The metal reformed around the shard, incorporated it into the design until fragment and setting merged.
The whispers stopped. Not gradually. Just ceased.
Then, from the walls, one final voice.
“Every rescue is a cage.”
Gideon’s philosophy, delivered as judgment.
Bastien ignored it. Kept his hand pressed against the altar. The stone was warm. The light that ran through the vein’s channels pulsed in steady rhythm—his frequency, channeled through the shard, distributed across Charlotte’s network.
Not interference now. Integration.
Light steadied. Pulse slowed from frantic to even. The network held.
Water lapped against the altar’s base, draining through channels that led back to the river. Temperature dropped degree by degree. Steam thinned until air cleared.
Somewhere above, Delphine would be waking in his apartment. Finding him gone. She would check her phone for messages he hadn’t sent. Would study the maps he’d left, trying to piece together where he’d gone and why he’d lied about it.
Safe, though. Breathing regular air. Seeing stable reflections. Untouched by the resonance that had threatened to anchor through her bloodline.
He’d preserved her. Again.
You preserve her. You never protect her.
His doppelgänger’s accusation, delivered through glass. Words he’d dismissed as Gideon’s manipulation.
Standing in Charlotte’s chamber with the network stabilized around a sacrifice he’d made without consulting anyone, he wondered if the reflection had been right.
The water was back to reaching his ankles. He waded toward the nearest passage, following current that would guide him to street level.
Three options.
Destroy the network—risk unknown cascade effects through the Quarter’s infrastructure. Charlotte had integrated her work too deeply. Ripping it out might collapse buildings, fracture foundations, cause sinkholes that would swallow blocks.