“That’s not what I asked.” She held his gaze. “You talk about Charlotte Lacroix the way people talk about someone they loved. Past tense but present feeling. Like she’s still somehow relevant to your life hundreds of years after her death. She was one of my ancestors; I think I deserve to know.”
He’d underestimated how well she read him. Or maybe he’d stopped being careful around her, stopped maintaining the distance that would have kept her safe from exactly this conversation.
“She was important to me,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Long enough that the details don’t matter anymore.”
“Try again.” But her voice stayed gentle. “Bastien, you’ve been asking me to trust you for months. About the investigation, about why certain artifacts matter, about patterns I’m not supposed to see. You can’t have it both ways—either we’re working together or we’re not.”
Rain intensified against the window. The glass reflected lamplight back into the reading room, multiplying their images across surface area too small to logically contain so many angles of the same two people.
“We’re working together,” he said.
“Then answer the question. How did you know Charlotte Lacroix?”
Before he could respond, their voices came from the window glass.
Not echoes. Not natural acoustic reflection. The window spoke their last exchange back at them in perfect reproduction—Delphine asking how long, Bastien deflecting about details not mattering, her challenge about trust. The voices emerged from the glass itself, emanating from reflection-space with clarity that made his teeth ache.
Delphine spun to face the window. “What?—”
The voices stopped. Their reflections stared back from the glass, synchronized now, showing nothing unusual except the tension visible in both their faces.
“Tell me that’s normal,” Delphine said.
“Nothing about you ever was.”
She laughed—startled sound that broke through the moment’s weight. “That’s either the worst deflection I’ve ever heard or the best compliment. I’m not sure which.”
“Both, probably.” He moved away from the window, putting distance between himself and the glass that had just proven it was listening. Recording. Learning to reproduce their conversations through techniques Charlotte had invented and Gideon had perfected. “We should go.”
“We should not. I’ve got four more manifests to catalog and you just witnessed something that clearly freaked you out. So either explain what just happened or stand there and watch me work until you’re ready to talk.”
She meant it. Bastien recognized the particular stubbornness in her stance—weight shifted forward, arms crossed, expression that said she’d wait all night if necessary. The same determination Charlotte had shown when she’d demanded hestop protecting her from knowledge she had every right to access.
“The mirrors are learning,” he said. “Not just reflecting what they see—storing it. Preserving conversations, replaying them when conditions align correctly. I call it Echo Speech.”
“Mirrors don’t store sound. Regardless of what Charlotte believed. They’re solid surfaces.”
“Some do. Charlotte designed them that way. Acoustic glass that could hold vibrations in the silver backing, preserve them like insects in amber. She meant it as a way to document confessions people couldn’t write down. Keep secrets safe from time and revision.” He gestured at the window. “What you just heard was the glass replaying our conversation back at us.”
Delphine processed his words. Her hand moved unconsciously to her throat—a protective gesture that drew his attention to the vulnerable line of her neck, the pulse point visible above her collar.
“So every mirror in this building is recording us,” she said.
“Every reflective surface in the city. Windows, car mirrors, puddles when rain falls. The network Charlotte built extends beyond what she could control. Someone finished her work and has activated it. Taught the mirrors to remember more than she ever intended.”
Lightning flashed. The reading room’s windows blazed white for half a second, illuminating every surface in brief sterile clarity. When the light faded and Bastien’s vision adjusted, their reflections had vanished from the glass. Every window showed an empty room, lamplight and furniture and rain beyond, but no trace of the two people standing at the examination table.
Delphine noticed the same time he did. She turned slowly, checking each window in sequence. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not—that’s not possible. Reflections don’t just stop working.”
“They do when the network decides to show you something else instead.”
