The first drops hit his window at half past midnight. Then sheets of gray that turned Dauphine Street into a waterfall. Cars pulled onto sidewalks. Shop owners were stacking sandbags against their doors. The Quarter was in full preparation for what it had survived a thousand times before.
Bastien grabbed his coat and headed into the storm.
The access point was industrial. No tourist would wander there—only warehouses and storage facilities along the river, and street lights few and far between. Bastien had scouted it a few days ago while Delphine worked her shift at the Archive.
Rain hammered the pavement. Water was already six inches deep at the intersections, storm drains backing up faster than they could handle the runoff. His headlights caught the access panel—heavy iron set into concrete, marked with faded warnings about authorized personnel only.
He parked and killed the engine. He sat for thirty seconds watching rain drum against the windshield.
Stupid. Dangerous. Necessary.The trinity of his decision-making process.
The panel fought him. Rusted hinges, decades of weather damage making it stick. He pried it with a crowbar he’d brought for exactly this purpose, the metal shrieking as it finally gave. The sound vanished beneath the storm’s assault.
First look down he found the ladder descending into darkness. The sound of water was already rushing below,echoing off brick and stone. The void smelled like river silt and century-old construction.
Flashlight between his teeth, waterproof bag strapped across his back, and hands on wet metal rungs that wanted to slip out from under his grip, he began the decent.
Thirty feet down. The sounds from above muffling—storm becoming distant percussion, city becoming memory. Just him and darkness and the ladder that descended into spaces the surface world had forgotten.
His boots hit water at the bottom. Ankle-deep current moving fast toward the river, pulling at his legs with insistent pressure. He played the flashlight beam across his surroundings.
Nineteenth-century drainage infrastructure. Brick archways tall enough to stand in, groined vaults overhead that spoke of French colonial engineering. But grafted onto the old work: newer concrete sections, twentieth-century repairs, municipal upgrades that had incorporated the original tunnels into modern systems without fully understanding what they’d built upon.
Everything was reflective. Water. Moisture condensing on walls. Even the bricks seemed to hold light longer than they should, surfaces gleaming with something beyond simple wetness.
The wrongness was immediate.
Bastien moved his light across the tunnel walls. The reflections were too bright for ambient illumination. Too sharp. They lingered after the beam passed, afterimages that faded slowly instead of disappearing at the speed of light.
He started wading upstream. Against the current, water rising to his knees as the storm fed more runoff into the system. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees from surface level. The air tasted mineral, ancient, like breathing the city’s oldest memory.
Graffiti marked the walls. Recent tags from kids who’d explored where they shouldn’t. But beneath the spray paint—older marks. Protection wards drawn in what looked like charcoal but had lasted over a century. Containment circles. Binding sigils.
His light caught on one particular symbol.
He stopped. Moved closer. The ward was exactly Charlotte’s style—the specific way she curved her binding circles, her habit of adding a small cross at the bottom left as her signature.
The memory hit before he could brace against it.
New Orleans,February 1762.
Charlotte’s workshop occupied the second floor of a building on Chartres Street, rooms her family used for storage before she’d claimed them for her experiments. Mirrors propped against every wall—dozens of them, all sizes, some still in frames and others just bare glass resting on makeshift easels. Her workbench held glass-cutting tools, metal frames in various stages of assembly, sketches weighted down with smooth river stones.
She looked up when Bastien knocked. “You’re just in time. I need to explain something brilliant I’ve realized, and you’re the only one who might understand it.”
“Only one who might?”
“Well, you’re the only one who won’t have me burned for witchcraft. Everyone else would.” She gestured him closer. “Come look.”
He’d visited often those months. Ostensibly to check the protection wards he’d placed around her building. Really because she asked questions no one else thought to ask, because her mind moved in directions that surprised him, because?—
He didn’t finish that thought.
Charlotte spread drawings across the worktable. Sketches of mirror networks, lines connecting multiple reflection points in patterns that looked almost anatomical. “Watch.”
She positioned two mirrors facing each other. “What happens when mirrors face each other?”
“Infinite recursion. The reflection reflects the reflection reflects the?—”
