Time to seal this.
Bastien withdrew a piece of chalk and broke the stick to expose fresh powder. Ward marks in reverse, patterns traced right to left instead of following natural direction. Silver dust fell from his fingers in mirror image of the pattern above—binding rather than release.
He spoke three words backward. The wards on the door brightened, energy returning to patterns that had been temporarily suspended.
The climb back up took longer than descent. Fifty steps through narrow passage, one hand on the stone that had stopped pulsing, but his footsteps remained muffled in dead air. At the top, the door closed with sound like exhaling—metal striking wood, latch engaging, seal reforming as wards reactivated to full strength.
Bastien completed the exit warding in the courtyard. Chalk and salt in configurations that would alert him if anyone else attempted entry. Not prevention—he couldn’t stop Gideon from accessing spaces the man had already revealed—but detection. Warning would have to be enough.
He packed his materials. Three forty-seven in the morning. The Quarter had gone quieter, wind carrying moisture and distant music through empty streets.
Behind him, sealed beneath stone and water and warding, the Lacroix Vault sat and waited. Charlotte’s efforts preserved in glass, her intention bound to architecture, their love transformed into evidence.
And somewhere in the city, Gideon was watching. Through surfaces that remembered, through glass that had learned to speak, through observation that had become its own form of existence.
Bastien walked toward home. Fog rose from pavement—not natural condensation but deliberate manifestation, moisture that moved with purpose. It thickened behind him, tendrils reaching across intersections to obscure visibility.
Three blocks from Dauphine Street, he heard it.
Faint. Muffled by distance and fog and layers of brick. But unmistakable.
The door beneath the Rue, sealed and warded, exhaled once.
Not wind. Not wood settling. Breath. Inhalation and exhalation rendered audible through materials that shouldn’t transmit sound, least of all one akin to mortals.
Once. Then silence.
Bastien didn’t turn around. He continued walking at measured pace while fog closed behind him, white layers that would burn away with sunrise.
Beneath the street, in darkness and water and the company of warped glass, something had remembered how to breathe.
He’d carry this back to documentation and analysis—evidence that Charlotte’s work had succeeded beyond what he’d hoped or feared.
And with success came consequence. Always. Inevitably.
His reflection followed him home through fog-shrouded streets, visible in every window he passed, keeping pace with mechanical precision that suggested observation had become its own form of life.
Chapter
Seven
Bastien arrived home and showered, then changed into clean clothes that didn’t smell like the river and old stone. Laid out his sketches on the kitchen table and photographed each one with his phone, backing up the images to three separate locations. The kind of precaution that felt excessive until you’d lost evidence you couldn’t replace.
By eight in the morning, he was walking toward Rampart Street with everything he needed in a leather messenger bag. The Quarter was waking slowly—tourists emerging from hotels with coffee cups and cameras, street performers claiming their usual corners, artists setting up easels around the most popular areas for attracting tourists. Normal morning rhythms that should have been comforting.
Except Bastien was watching the mirrors.
A café window on the corner of St. Ann Street showed a woman raising her coffee cup. Her reflection raised it three seconds later, the movement precise and accurate but delayed. An artist arranging paintings near the cathedral cast two shadows—one following his movements, one lagging behind like an afterthought. A tourist taking a selfie checked her phone screen and frowned, tilting it toward better light. Bastienglimpsed the image as he passed. She appeared in a different position than she was actually standing, head turned the wrong direction entirely.
He cataloged each occurrence. The café window—Echo Imprint bleeding through. The artist’s shadow—temporal displacement of approximately two seconds. The selfie—spatial distortion suggesting the phone’s camera was recording from multiple points simultaneously.
It was spreading. Faster than yesterday. And nobody noticed except him.
A fortune teller’s table outside a souvenir shop caught his attention. She was staring at her own reflection in a small vanity mirror, head tilted, confused. Her lips moved in the reflection, saying words her actual mouth wasn’t forming. She touched her face, checking to make sure she was real.
Bastien kept walking. He couldn’t stop to explain. Couldn’t reveal what he knew to civilians who wouldn’t understand the danger they were in.
A street musician sat on a corner playing violin, case open for tips. His reflection in the shop window behind him moved differently—bow strokes that didn’t match the actual music, fingers pressing strings that produced no sound. The reflection was playing a different song entirely, though Bastien couldn’t hear what it might be.
