“Exactly. But here’s what’s interesting.” She adjusted the angles slightly. “The reflections don’t just repeat. They store. Like a library where every book is a copy of the same book, but each copy remembers what’s been read.”
“Mirrors don’t remember.”
“Don’t they? Look at old glass. Really old glass. Doesn’t it seem…heavier somehow? Like it’s holding more than reflection?”
He examined the thirteenth-century mirror fragment she handed him. “That’s just imperfections in the glass. Air bubbles. Metallic degradation.”
“Or,” she countered, “it’s every face that ever looked into it. Not visually stored but impressively stored. Like how buildings remember violence, how battlefields remember death. Objects absorb emotional resonance.”
“That’s just theory.”
“Test it then.” She picked up another old mirror. “Tell me what you feel.”
He humored her. Held the mirror. Opened his senses the way he rarely did anymore—celestial awareness that he’d learned to keep locked down after the Fall.
And there: faint emotional residue, layers of it. Decades of people checking their appearances. Moments of vanity and insecurity and hope. All of it absorbed into the glass like water into cloth.
He looked up. “It’s there.”
Her smile was triumphant. “I know. Now imagine if we could connect mirrors intentionally. Create a network where each one reinforces the others. Where memory in one mirror could be accessed through another.”
“Why would you want to?”
“Communication. Storage. Preservation.” Her eyes were bright. “Think about it—letters can be intercepted, documents burned, memories forgotten. But a mirror network? Distributed storage where destroying one node doesn’t destroy the information. It would be revolutionary.”
“It would also be dangerous. If mirrors can store memory and communicate, what stops them from storing the wrong things? From becoming contaminated?”
“That’s where you come in.” She touched his hand lightly. “Your wards. Your understanding of celestial and infernal frequencies. If I provide the mirror theory and you provide the protection framework, we could build something that actually works. Something safe.”
He wanted to explain why that was impossible. That his wards couldn’t protect against human ambition, against knowledge becoming obsession. That everything brilliant eventually became a weapon when the wrong hands found it.
But she was looking at him with such excitement.
“Show me your full plans.”
Charlotte spread more drawings. An underground mirror network using the city’s drainage system as infrastructure. “Water is already reflective. If we place mirrors at key points where water naturally flows, the network would be self-sustaining. Storm runoff would activate it, creating perfect conditions for mirror communication.”
He studied the drawings. Pentagonal design. Five primary nodes with countless secondary connection points threading through the city’s foundations.
“Charlotte, this is?—”
“Brilliant?”
“Ambitious. Maybe too ambitious.”
Her confidence never wavered. “Nothing’s too ambitious if you have the right partner.” She looked at him meaningfully.
The moment stretched.
He deflected. “I’ll help you with the theoretical framework. The ward structure. But Charlotte—this has to stay theoretical. Promise me you won’t actually try to build this.”
“Why not?”
“Because mirrors that remember everything would eventually remember things better forgotten. And a network that connects all of them would amplify that memory until it became louder than the present.”
She dismissed his concern with a wave. “You worry too much.”
“Someone has to.”
