He started to object. She cut him off with a gesture somehow both gentle and absolute. “Not a request. You’re no good to anyone if you collapse. Go home. Eight hours. Come back when your eyes can focus.”
She was right. His eyes had been losing focus for an hour.
“Eight hours,” he agreed.
“I’ll text when I’m finished. Don’t come back before then.”
He gathered his notes and phone and the silk wrapping. Delphine walked him to the door. At the threshold he paused, looked back at her among examination tables and controlled lights and centuries of preserved materials.
“The gold leaf in Charlotte’s mirrors,” he said. “It’s not just conducting resonance. It’s a signature. Every piece she gilded carries her handwriting in the brushstroke patterns. Anyone who understands the technique can read her intentions directly from the application.”
Delphine absorbed this. “So even if all documents were destroyed, the mirrors themselves would testify.”
“Exactly.”
“Then Gideon’s already lost. He can corrupt reflections but can’t rewrite the gold. The evidence is embedded too deep.”
Bastien left as afternoon shifted toward evening. The walk home passed in half-noticed segments—his mind still in the conservation room, still seeing Charlotte at her bench applying gold with patient devotion, still hearing her voice explaining that love and control weren’t the same.
Gideon had miscalculated. Had assumed isolation would make him vulnerable to philosophical manipulation. But Delphine’s research had revealed the foundation Charlotte built—testimony sealed in craftsmen’s records, intentions encoded in gold leaf, evidence that couldn’t be corrupted.
The question was whether that evidence would counter the contamination already spreading through every reflective surface in the city.
He reached his apartment as streetlights warmed. Inside, he set down his notes and stood in the quiet that smelled of old wood and river air and yesterday’s coffee.
Then he lay down without removing shoes or jacket and let exhaustion take him into dreamless dark.
Chapter
Eleven
Bastien spread the photographs Delphine had taken for him across his desk, each one documenting a reflection that had lasted too long or moved wrong. The coffee beside his elbow had gone cold an hour ago, forgotten while he mapped the pattern.
Jackson Square fountain: three-second lag between tourists walking away and their reflections fading. St. Louis Cathedral: afternoon light creating desynchronized images on polished pews. The shop window on Royal where yesterday’s customers still appeared in the glass.
Five sites. All of them forming a loose pentagon across the Quarter.
He picked up a red pencil and connected the points on his city map. The shape was deliberate. Gideon’s sophistication showed in every angle. Five points created a standing wave. The standing wave would amplify existing mirror resonance. Elegant. Dangerous. Exactly what Bastien would have designed if he wanted plausible deniability.
He pulled some of Charlotte’s notes from the bottom drawer—the pages she’d written about mirror theory in her slanted and precise handwriting. She’d once told him that mirrorsremembered violence better than love. That glass held trauma in its crystalline structure, reflecting it back whenever someone looked.
They’d been sitting in her courtyard when she explained it, afternoon light filtering through magnolia leaves. “You can cleanse a mirror of blood,” she’d said, “but you can’t cleanse it of what the blood meant. The fear. The betrayal. Glass remembers the emotion longer than the stain.”
He’d asked her how to teach mirrors gentler frequencies.
She’d smiled, sad and knowing. “The same way you teach anything. Repetition. Patience. And accepting that some memories never fully fade.”
Bastien set her notes aside and reached for his own notebook. He began annotating the photographs with colored pencils—red for high-activity sites, blue for moderate, green for stable. The pattern formed a pentagon, each point marked in red.
Copper for the framework. Silver for the connections. Copper conducted emotion—raw, unfiltered, the kind that bled through reflections and made them linger. Silver held memory, preserved it without amplifying. The combination would create interference patterns, dampen the resonance without erasing what the mirrors had recorded.
Theory only worked if the execution was precise.
He checked his watch. Mid-morning. Enough time to visit each site and measure the resonance frequencies before starting construction.
The fountainat Jackson Square caught morning light, water bright and tourists already gathering around its edge. Bastienstood twenty feet back, watching a family throw coins. The father. The mother. Two children who shrieked and ran.
Their reflections stayed in the water three seconds after they walked away.
