“Thought so.” Roxy pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “You want my advice? Stop protecting her from the truth. Tell her what’s coming. Because when this thing escalates—and it will escalate—she’s going to figure it out anyway. And she’ll hate you more for lying than for whatever danger you were trying to keep her safe from.”
“That’s not your call to make.”
“No. It’s yours. But you’re making the wrong one.” She took a drag and exhaled smoke that curled in the humid air. “I’ve watched you dance around her for months. Watched you pretend everything’s normal while the city falls apart aroundyou. And I get it—you love her, you want to keep her safe. But safety’s an illusion, Durand. Especially now.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that Gabriel’s seeing himself die because the mirrors learned pack bonds and started showing him every possible future where things go wrong. And you’re doing the same thing with her—running through seventeen scenarios where telling her the truth ends badly, paralyzed by possibilities that haven’t happened yet.” She flicked ash into the water. “Maybe you should answer some of her questions. Before the mirrors do it for you.”
Bastien turned back to the river, watched his reflection watch him back. The lag was still there—half a second between movement and mirror, between action and consequence.
“The network’s getting smarter,” he said. “Every surface it infects teaches it something new. It learned visual delay first. Then spatial distortion. Now it’s learning language, relationships, the connections that hold people together. If it learns enough—” Bastien ran his hand through his thick, dark hair and sighed.
“It could tear us all apart from the inside.” Roxy finished the cigarette and ground it under her heel. “So what do we do?”
“I keep mapping the network. I’m trying to find the central node, the anchor point where Gideon’s coordinating everything. Cut that, and the rest might destabilize enough to break the pattern.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we figure out a plan B.”
“You don’t have a plan B.” Roxy rolled her eyes.
“Working on it.”
Roxy laughed—short, sharp, the kind of sound that had nothing to do with humor. “You know what Tib said when I told him I was coming to meet you? He said, ‘Durand’s good atimprovising. Let’s hope that’s enough.’ High praise from a wolf who doesn’t trust anyone outside the pack.”
“I’ll try to live up to it.”
“Do that.” She started walking back toward the treeline where she’d parked. “And Durand? About your archivist. I know you think you’re protecting her by keeping secrets. But from where I’m standing—as an objective observer, and a woman who would be pissed if the man I cared for was lying to me all this time—all you’re doing is making sure she’s unprepared when everything goes to hell. Think about that.”
She disappeared into the shadows before he could respond.
Bastien stood at the levee for another ten minutes, watching the river that wasn’t moving and the reflection that lagged behind reality by margins small enough to miss and large enough to matter. The water had learned to hold still. The mirrors had learned to speak. And somewhere in the city, Gideon was teaching glass to understand connections it had no business comprehending—pack bonds, soul tethers, the threads that held people to each other across time and separation.
His phone buzzed.
Delphine:Found something in the 1763 records. You need to see this.
He looked at his reflection one more time. It smiled at him—expression that never touched his actual face, emotion manifesting in mirror-space while his physical form stayed neutral.
Then the reflection’s lips moved, forming words without sound:
She’s already asking the right questions. How long before she asks them to the right surface?
Bastien turned away from the water and headed for his car.
Behind him, the Mississippi stayed perfectly still, reflecting the predawn sky like a mirror someone had laid flat across Louisiana, waiting for something to shatter it.
Chapter
Eighteen
Bastien found Delphine in the Archive’s reading room the same evening, three ledgers spread across the examination table and a cold coffee at her elbow. She’d pulled her hair back with a pencil—the kind of improvised solution that meant she’d been working too long to care about proper tools.
“You said you needed to see this,” he said from the doorway.
She looked up. “Finally. I texted you hours ago.”
