Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Finally a reply.
Delphine:Good. Also—that line about nothing being normal about me? Smooth.
Despite everything, he laughed.
Bastien:I have my moments.
Rare ones.
Very rare.
Delphine: Get some sleep. Tomorrow we figure out how to stop mirrors from eavesdropping on our research.
Bastien: Tomorrow.
He set the phone down and drove the rest of the way home through rain that turned the Quarter into one vast reflecting surface, every drop holding images the network would preserve until it decided what to do with them.
In his rearview mirror, his reflection watched him drive. It looked tired. Concerned. Maybe even a little hopeful.
For the first time in two weeks, that felt honest.
Chapter
Nineteen
Bastien found the first failure at half past three in the morning.
The fountain in Pirate’s Alley should have hummed when he passed it. Should have shown the faint blue glow that meant his sigil work was holding, keeping mirror resonance from bleeding through every reflective surface in the Quarter. Instead, the chalk lines crumbled when he touched them. The copper wire lay cold against brick.
Something had drained the ward completely.
He knelt and examined the pattern more closely, flashlight beam tracking across stonework that showed no signs of tampering. No smudging. No evidence that anyone had deliberately disrupted his work. The sigil had simply stopped functioning, energy siphoned away by forces pulling harder than containment could resist.
His phone buzzed.
Maman: Check your nodes.
He was already moving to the second site.
Same result. Chalk lifeless, resonance gone. By the fourth location, the pattern was clear. The lattice he’d spent two weeks building was collapsing faster than he could shore it up.Not because of flawed construction, the math was sound, the materials were right. Something else was pulling power from his wards, learning how to counter them.
The fifth site sat in a narrow alley behind a restaurant that had closed hours ago. When he rounded the corner, the chalk sigil glowed violet instead of blue. Wrong color. Wrong frequency. The copper wire vibrated at a pitch that made his teeth ache.
The lattice wasn’t just failing. It was inverting.
Bastien pulled fresh chalk from his bag and started redrawing the containment pattern, adding layers that might buy him a few more hours before this site collapsed too. Sweat dripped from his temple despite the pre-dawn cool. His hands moved through ritual he could perform in his sleep, muscle memory freeing his mind to calculate how much time remained before instability became crisis.
Not much.
Footsteps echoed down the alley.
He stood and turned. Delphine approached, stopped a few feet away and studied the glowing sigil with the same focus she brought to Archive documents.
“Maman called me,” she said. “Told me you’d probably be here working yourself into exhaustion and could use another pair of hands.” Her gaze moved from the chalk pattern to his face. “Also that you’d try to send me home, and I should ignore you.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Neither is letting you handle this alone.” She crouched beside the sigil and examined the copper wire arrangement. “What a.m. I looking at?”
