His reflection moved when he moved. Everything synchronized. Normal physics doing what it should.
But the room felt wrong. His ears hurt like altitude change. The air tasted metallic—copper and ozone, the combination that came before storms. And below normal hearing range, vibration hummed through the building’s foundation. Deliberate. Purposeful.
This was the keystone. The point where all five sites connected.
Bastien put both palms flat against the reflective panel. It vibrated under his hands—energy that had built all evening while he’d grounded the other four sites. The glass trembled. Not breaking yet but developing stress fractures from the contact points. Hairline cracks spreading outward in the same five-pointed pattern Delphine had traced this afternoon.
The building hummed. Not just the panel. Every window, every bathroom mirror, every picture frame with glass. All of them vibrating at the same frequency. The whole structure had become one instrument playing a note just below human hearing.
Bastien pulled his hands away. The cracks stopped spreading. Fine white lines veining through glass, frozen lightning. The hum kept going, louder now, audible. Residents’ doors opened. People coming out to check.
He got the grounding compound out. The mixture hit the panel’s base and glowed bright blue. No words needed—the resonance triggered the effect on contact.
The hum cut off. Instant silence. Every vibrating surface went still at once. The salt and silver did their work, channeling excess energy into whatever dimensional space handled the overflow.
But the cracks stayed. The pentagon pattern in the lobby’s reflective panel was glowing. Five points, straight edges. Delphine’s map made visible in fractured glass.
He understood what he’d just done. Not grounding. Not sealing. Completing the circuit. Making the whole network acknowledge itself at once.
Across the city, glass cracked.
Not shattering. Just hairline fractures appearing in windows and car mirrors and storefronts. The same white lines, spreading through every reflective surface in the Quarter at once.
Gideon’s network, manifesting. Stress patterns becoming visible. The surveillance grid he’d built through contaminated glass was now impossible to miss. Hundreds of surfaces, all marked with the pentagon pattern. All acknowledging what they’d become.
His phone vibrated. Unknown number. Text without notification sound.
Unknown: Network tightening. Can you feel it yet?
Bastien closed his phone. Behind him, residents gathered in the lobby, staring at the cracked panel, talking about vandalism and police reports. He left through the front entrance while they were focused on the glass, none of them looking his way yet.
Outside, every window showed white cracks. Every parked car’s mirror. Every storefront. The whole Quarter had become a broken mirror, and he’d completed the circuit that activated it.
He walked back toward Prytania Street. Empty pouch in his jacket. Gideon’s message still on his phone, not forgotten. He’d thought he was grounding the network, containing it. Instead he’d made it acknowledge itself. Made it visible. Made it stronger.
Protection had become containment. The five doors hadn’t closed. They’d opened inward.
Chapter
Fourteen
Bastien made it three blocks before the mirror in a parked sedan’s side panel spoke to him in Charlotte’s voice.
“You always did try to solve problems by building better cages.”
He stopped. The street was empty—two A.M. on a Wednesday, residential block near Prytania, no one awake to witness him talking to his own reflection. The sedan’s mirror showed him clearly: dark coat, exhausted posture, hands in pockets because he didn’t trust what they’d do otherwise.
Except the reflection’s mouth moved when his didn’t.
“I’m not doing this,” Bastien said aloud. Kept walking. Behind him, every car mirror he passed continued the sentence his reflection had started.
“You sealed the Veil breach”—one mirror.
“Protected the amateur practitioner”—another.
“Reinforced the wards”—a third.
“And somehow made everything worse”—his reflection, synchronized across four mirrors simultaneously as he reached the intersection.
