Bastien finished his measurements and made notes in his book. The owner watched him work with the desperate hope of someone who wanted a simple solution to an impossible problem.
“Can you fix it?”
“I’ll file a report,” Bastien said. Which wasn’t a lie. He would document everything. Just not for the city.
He left the shop and stood on Royal Street, humidity making his shirt stick to his back. The messenger bag’s weight had grown familiar over the last three days—chalk, copper wire, his notebook filled with measurements and observations.
He’d visited four sites. Each one showed the same pattern. Lag time between action and reflection. Clarity of displaced images increasing. And the reflections responded to his presence, as if they recognized what he was.
Gideon had built something sophisticated. The pentagon amplified natural mirror properties without requiring active maintenance. It would grow stronger on its own, fed by every reflection in the Quarter, until the boundary between real and reflected became too thin to sustain.
Bastien walked back to his apartment, already planning the lattice’s construction in his head.
Night had fallenby the time Bastien set up his workspace for the actual construction. His apartment’s worktable waited, cleared of everything except the city map with its marked sites. Spools of copper wire and braided silver thread sat ready. Both measured against celestial harmonics he’d learned two centuries ago.
Someone knocked.
Bastien looked up. Past midnight. He wasn’t expecting anyone.
“It’s me,” Delphine called through the door. “I know you’re awake.”
He crossed the room and opened it. She stood in the hallway holding a paper bag that smelled like the Vietnamese place on Decatur, still open at this hour because the owner’s son worked nights.
“You haven’t eaten,” she said. Not a question.
“I’ve been working.”
“I know.” She walked past him into the apartment, set the bag on the counter beside his sink full of dishes, and pulled out a wrapped sandwich. “Bánh mì. The good kind with the pâté.”
“Delphine.”
“I was hungry. I bought two.” She unwrapped hers and took a bite, then looked at the worktable. The map spread across its surface, pins glowing faintly in the dim room. Wire connecting each marked site in a web of copper and silver. “That looks either very complicated or very dangerous.”
“Both.”
She nodded and sat in the chair by his bookshelf, the one that didn’t match anything else in the room because he’d found it onthe street three years ago. She ate her sandwich and didn’t ask more questions.
Bastien went back to the lattice.
He worked for another twenty minutes, adding the final connections, checking each node’s alignment. The vibration in the room grew stronger as the pattern completed itself. When he tied off the last strand of silver wire, the tone shifted, settled into something that felt stable.
Delphine had finished eating. She’d pulled one of his books off the shelf—the Durand family grimoire, the one written in Old French and Creole that documented three centuries of mirror work. She turned pages carefully, her fingers light on the aged paper.
“This will work?” she asked without looking up.
“It should.”
She glanced at him. “Should is not my favorite word from you.”
He almost smiled. “It’s the most honest one I have.”
“I know.” She set the book aside and stood, then came closer to look at the map. Her shoulder brushed his. “You’ve been at this for days.”
“Three.”
“You look tired and you were supposed to rest.”
“I’m not. And I did.” He smirked at her. Their banter warmed him.
