Forever sitting in that garden. Forever waiting for courage that came only weeks too late.
Mirror Bleed wasn’t limited to reflections anymore. Gideon’s network was degrading the boundary between memory and matter, pulling past into present through locations charged with emotional weight, creating breaches in reality itself.
He forced himself to look away from the garden. From Delia’s memory-ghost, forever waiting for truth he’d never given.
The gate itself. He examined the ironwork with new attention, looking for marks.
Found it at eye level. Small enough to miss if you weren’t looking. Burned into the metal—Gideon’s signature glyph. A mirror with cracked frame.
Recent. The metal still held warmth from the burning.
Below it, message written in ash that shouldn’t remain on iron.
Every memory is a doorway. How many are you willing to walk through?
Bastien stepped back.
Gideon wasn’t just contaminating mirrors. He was contaminating space itself, using memories as anchor points. Every place Bastien had loved, every moment he’d treasured—all of them potential breach points in the network.
He looked up and down Dauphine Street. How many other locations? How many other private griefs had been mapped and weaponized?
The strategic horror crystallized. Gideon had been watching long enough to learn what Bastien kept hidden. Long enough to identify which memories would cut deepest. The emotional geography of a century compiled and converted into ammunition.
His mental inventory: Archive—Delphine still working, lights on in the reading room. Maman’s shop—closed but warded. His apartment—safe, protected.
But Delia’s garden. The one place he’d let himself mourn privately for almost a hundred years. Until he’d found Delphine.
Gideon had found it.
He photographed the glyph with his phone and took one last look at the garden—Delia’s memory-ghost turning toward him now, starting to smile in that moment before he’d failed her.
Some doorways were meant to stay closed.
Bastien walked away.
Forcing his feet to move, one boot after another on flagstone he’d walked for decades, he stepped away from a garden that shouldn’t exist containing a moment he couldn’t change.
Back toward busier streets. Putting distance between himself and the garden, between present and past, between what he’d lost and what he stood to lose again if he wasn’t careful.
The jasmine scent faded with each block. By the time he reached the corner, it was gone entirely, replaced by normal Quarter smells—garbage waiting for pickup, flowers from window boxes, river mud carried on the breeze.
He’d asked her to wait. To trust him. To love him without understanding what he was.
She’d done all three.
And he’d let her die still waiting. Still trusting. Still loving someone who’d been too afraid to love her back properly—fully.
Now he was doing the same thing to Delphine. Same careful distance. Same protective lies. Same certainty that loving him would destroy her, that proximity meant danger, that the responsible thing was to keep her at arm’s length.
But the difference—and it was crucial, had to be crucial or he was just repeating the same failure in a new century—Delia never knew what threatened her. Had died confused, looking to him for answers he couldn’t give fast enough, smoke filling her lungs while he tore through burning theater trying to reach her.
Delphine was actively investigating the threat. Her knowledge made her more vulnerable, yes, but also more capable. She understood Mirror Bleed and Echo contamination and the way Gideon’s network spread through reflection. She’d identified Processional Geometry, had found the pentagon pattern, had stabilized the Archive’s mirrors through sheer proximity.
She was anchoring Gideon’s network whether Bastien acknowledged it or not.
The question wasn’t whether to tell her. The question was how long he could maintain the illusion that keeping her distant kept her safe.
And the answer—walking past closed shops, past tourists stumbling drunk between bars, past street musicians packing up their instruments—the answer was that the illusion had already shattered.
