All of it reflected in windows, mirrors, polished brass, chrome fixtures.
All of it watched.
Chapter
Ten
Bastien found the mirror fragment where he’d left it, wrapped in silk at the bottom of his research bag. It had been a couple days since Gideon’s messages in the hand mirror and he still hadn’t cataloged this piece properly. Sloppy. But exhaustion made everything take twice as long.
He spread the silk on the Archive’s conservation table and unwrapped the glass carefully. Delphine had given him access to this room when he went to see her—better light than his apartment, and she could check his work. It made her feel useful, and made him feel less like he was lying to her, which was its own kind of useful.
The room smelled like old leather and lemon oil. Afternoon sun cut through the high windows, giving him maybe two hours before the angle got bad. He positioned the fragment on black velvet and adjusted the examination lamp.
Charlotte had built warps into this mirror deliberately. Not flaws—features. The distortions would amplify certain resonances, make the glass remember what ordinary reflection forgot.
He turned up the lamp’s intensity and watched patterns emerge in the silvering. Hairline striations radiating from athickened center point. Typical of her work from the 1770s, when she was refining the techniques that would eventually?—
The reflection shifted.
No transition. One second his face rendered in lamplight. The next, someone else occupying the space where he stood.
Delphine appeared in the glass. Her expression intent, focused, the way she looked when tracking connections between documents. Her hand moved like she was tracing text on an invisible surface.
Then her features blurred. Precise transformation—not optical error but deliberate alteration. The mirror reshaping what it showed him.
Charlotte materialized. Twenty-three, positioned at her workbench in the atelier she’d kept in her family’s home.
Echo Bleed. The fragment triggering, showing him what Charlotte had sealed into it during creation.
The conservation room vanished.
He stood in her workshop—not watching through glass but present in the scene itself. Air thick with gold dust catching afternoon light through shutters. Candle smoke pooling in corners. He could smell heated wax, fresh-ground pigment, and iron tools warming near a brazier.
Charlotte worked at her bench. Tools arranged in patterns that suggested ritual as much as craft—brushes by bristle count, files by tooth fineness, pigment pots positioned according to celestial correspondences. A mirror frame waited, glass already silvered and set, wooden edges bare.
She held a brush loaded with gold leaf, the metal beaten thin enough to tear under breath. She applied it to carved rosettes in the frame’s upper corner with strokes that looked more like prayer than decoration.
She hummed while she worked. Barely audible over the scrape of bristles on wood.
He knew the tune. Had heard it dozens of times when she worked late, thinking herself alone. Two hundred years collapsed between hearing it then and hearing it now.
“If love leaves its mark on glass,” Charlotte said without looking up, “every mirror in this city will remember you.”
She spoke like she was stating fact. No hesitation, no speculation.
The gold caught candlelight and multiplied it. Each completed section blazed where bare wood had been. Twelve sheets of leaf beaten together would still be thinner than paper. She worked with focus that excluded everything else.
“Every reflection carries intention,” she said. “What I put in these materials outlasts the moments they preserve. This mirror will remember us. The ones who come after will see what we were.”
Bastien tried to speak. Tried to tell her the cost of what she was building—payment measured in centuries, in separation neither of them could prevent. But he had no voice here. Echo Imprint meant witness only. Displaced observer trapped in the scene she’d sealed during creation.
Charlotte set down her brush and lifted the frame, examining her work. The completed sections held depth that shouldn’t exist in flat metal. Illusion created through layering precise enough to bend light.
She smiled. Small, private curve of her mouth. “You’re watching. I feel you even when I can’t see you.”
She was right. He’d watched this moment two hundred years ago from his celestial position above her. But he was present in ways he couldn’t measure, in overlap between what he’d been and what she was.
“I’m making permanence,” she said to him, to the presence she sensed. “When I’m gone and you remain, this will last. What we were to each other. The materials won’t forget.”
