Maybe this would be enough. Maybe Gideon’s network could be dampened without confrontation, stabilized through careful intervention and technical precision. Maybe?—
The lattice began to vibrate.
Not the steady hum from before. This was erratic, building in intensity. The reflections in the water fractured. Some showed synchronized images. Others showed the three-second lag. Both states existing simultaneously, competing for dominance.
The water itself seemed to resist the stabilization.
Bastien tightened his grip, but the vibration grew stronger. The copper nodes were heating up, the wire warm against his palms. The network had learned to recognize the threat. His intervention had made it stronger by teaching it what to defend against.
He pulled the lattice back before it overheated completely.
The reflections settled back into their lagged pattern, triumphant in their wrongness.
Bastien packed the lattice away, jaw tight with frustration. The technical solution had failed. Gideon’s network was more sophisticated than he’d anticipated. It didn’t just exist—it learned, adapted, and evolved in response to attempts to control it.
He walked back to his car and slid into the driver’s seat.
His phone lit up.
Unknown number: A photo message.
The screen showed Delphine through a window, photographed via reflection. Her face unaware and peaceful, caught in a moment she didn’t know was being observed. The angle was wrong—too high, too distant. Taken through glass. Through a mirror.
Unknown number:Anchors don’t know they’re anchors.
Bastien’s hand tightened on the phone. He forced himself to breathe, to maintain control. The message wasn’t random. Gideon knew he’d identified Delphine as a stabilizing factor in the network. This wasn’t a threat—it was an announcement. Gideon wanted him to know he was always three moves ahead.
Bastien deleted the photo.
He drove home with hands steady on the wheel and mind racing through contingency plans.
Protection had just become exponentially more complicated.
Back in his apartment, he set the phone on the worktable beside the disassembled lattice. Copper and silver wire lay in loose coils, representing his attempt to build safety through craft.
He sat, elbows on his knees, looking at the wire.
He’d spent centuries learning how to fight threats he could see. Direct combat, strategic planning, force applied at the right angle to break an opponent’s structure. Divine warfare followedclear rules. You identified the enemy. You assessed their capabilities. You struck before they could strike you.
But Gideon’s genius was making the threat invisible—woven into everyday reflections, impossible to combat without destroying normalcy itself. Every mirror in the Quarter was now a potential weapon. Every window, every polished surface, every piece of glass that could hold an image. How did you fight something that existed in the space between real and reflected?
Even divine beings couldn’t protect mortals from everything. Some dangers required mortal solutions, and this was one of them. The lattice had failed because he’d approached it like an angel, trying to impose order from above. But mirrors existed in the mortal world, followed mortal rules, required mortal touch.
He thought of Delphine. Her laugh earlier that week when she’d found a typo in a century-old ledger, triumphant at catching a mistake that had persisted for decades. The way she tucked hair behind her ear when concentrating, a habit she didn’t know she had. The trust in her eyes when she looked at him, complete and unguarded, the kind of trust that could be weaponized by someone who knew how to exploit it.
She wouldn’t know he’d designated her an anchor. Gideon wouldn’t get to use that knowledge against her. The lattice had failed, but failure was just information. It told him what wouldn’t work, which meant he could eliminate that approach and move to the next one.
He always did.
The copper wire caught lamplight, still beautiful despite its failure. He’d spent hours building something precise and purposeful, and it hadn’t been enough. But the work itself had taught him something about Gideon’s network. It adapted. It learned. It responded to threats by becoming stronger.
Which meant he needed to stop treating it like something to be fixed and start treating it like something to be understood.
The work had always been about prevention. Identify the failure points, reinforce them before they spread. But the failures were multiplying. Every site he secured led to two more beginning to fray.
The phone’s screen lit on its own.
He didn’t reach for it.
