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)
Three blocks to Maman’s shop. He walked faster than his exhaustion wanted, driven by the need to see Delphine’s face when she looked at him. To know if she could sense what had shifted, or if the change was invisible to everyone except reflective surfaces.
The shop’s door was propped open when he arrived, morning light spilling across the threshold. Delphine stood just inside, her back to the street, studying something on the counter. She turned when his shadow fell across the doorway.
“There you are.” Relief and irritation mixed in her voice. “I was about to send out a search party.”
He stepped inside. Maman Brigitte sat behind the counter in her usual chair, a cup of tea steaming at her elbow. Her eyes found him immediately, traveled from his face down to his mud-streaked boots and back up again.
She saw it. He watched recognition move across her features—subtle tightening around her eyes, the way her fingers stilled against her teacup.
Delphine saw none of that. She crossed to him, her hand lifting toward his jacket. “You’re soaked. What happened? Your note said you were checking on Maman, but clearly you went somewhere else first.”
“The vault.” No point lying now. “The storm created flood conditions in the tunnels. I needed to stabilize the last anchor point before the water reached street level.”
“You went into flooded tunnels during a hurricane. Alone.” Her voice stayed level, but anger threaded through the words. “That was monumentally irresponsible, Bastien.”
“It was necessary.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive categories.”
Maman set her teacup down with a soft clink. “Come here, petit ange.”
He moved toward the counter. Delphine followed, staying close enough that he could feel her frustration radiating.
Maman stood. She was shorter than him by nearly a foot, but when she stepped around the counter and looked up at his face, he felt examined by something older than the city around them.
“Let me see your hands.”
He held them out. She turned them palm-up, studied the cuts from where he’d braced against limestone walls, the faint burn marks from channeling too much energy through sigils. Then she reached up and pressed two fingers against his sternum, just above his heart.
Energy pulsed. Brief and searching.
She exhaled slowly. “Oh, mon cœur. What did you do?”
“I integrated the network. Collapsed the lattice around a new anchor signature.” He kept his voice neutral, reporting facts. “It stabilized. The mirrors are no longer pulling energy from volatile sources.”
“And you became invisible to them.”
Delphine’s head turned sharply. “What?”
Maman’s fingers remained against his chest, reading something in his energy that required physical contact to interpret. “He’s woven into the foundation now. The network can’t observe what it contains.” She dropped her hand and met his eyes. “You can’t see yourself anymore, can you? Not in any reflective surface.”
“No.”
The word landed in the shop with weight.
Delphine stepped around to face him directly. Her expression had shifted from anger to something more complex—concern mixed with dawning understanding. “Your reflection is gone?”
“Completely.”
She looked past him toward the shop’s front window. Light caught her face, highlighting the faint circles under her eyes that said she’d slept poorly. “Show me.”
Bastien moved to the window. Stood before it with morning sun at his back. The glass reflected everything—the street behind him, the buildings across the way, Delphine and Maman watching from inside the shop. But where he stood, there was only empty space. A man-shaped absence in the world’s doubled image.
Delphine’s breath caught. A soft sound, barely audible, but he heard it.
She approached the window slowly and stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. Her reflection appeared perfectly—auburn hair pulled back in a loose knot, her shirt wrinkled from sleeping in it, and exhaustion written in the set of her mouth.
His space remained empty.
“This is what you meant,” she said quietly. “When you said Gideon couldn’t track you anymore.”
“Part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
Maman answered before he could. “He’s protected from observation, but vulnerable to distortion. Gideon can’t find him through mirrors, but if he suspects Bastien is near a reflective surface, he can manipulate what that surface shows to others.”
Delphine turned. “Meaning?”
“Meaning Gideon could make my reflection appear when it shouldn’t or place me somewhere I’m not.” Bastien kept his eyes on the window, watching Delphine’s reflection instead of meeting her actual gaze. Easier that way. “He lost his surveillance tool, but he gained a propaganda weapon.”
“That’s not a fair trade.”
“Gideon doesn’t trade fairly.”
Silence settled over the shop. Outside, a delivery truck rumbled past, its passage sending ripples through the puddles that still covered the street. Bastien watched those ripples in the window’s reflection, noting how water moved without him there to disturb it.
Delphine’s hand found his forearm. Warm pressure, grounding him to physical space when reflected space denied his existence. “Are you okay?”
The question surprised him. He’d expected anger about the lying, about going to the vault alone, about making decisions that affected them both without consulting her. Instead, she asked if he was okay.