“Is that someone you? My worried angel?”
“I’m not an angel.”
“No?” Playful challenge. “Then what are you?”
“Someone who knows what happens when innovation outpaces wisdom.”
“Then help me make it wise. That’s what partners do.”
The final image burned into memory was both of them bent over the drawings, her hand on his wrist, neither knowing that her theoretical network would become someone else’s weapon a century later.
Present day. The tunnel. Water rising higher, now past his knees.
Bastien blinked. Charlotte’s ward was still visible on the wall, her signature cross marking it as unmistakably hers.
She’d built it anyway.
And now he was standing in proof of her genius and her folly.
He followed the wards deeper. The tunnel narrowed to shoulder width. Limestone walls slick with algae, tool marks visible where chisels had shaped rock. The marks ran horizontal instead of vertical—wrong direction. The passage had been carved from below, not excavated from above.
The current strengthened. Water now mid-thigh, pulling at his legs with serious force. He had to brace against the walls to keep his balance.
Then the transition point.
Old brick gave way to a section that shouldn’t exist. The wall surface changed—not quite brick, not quite stone. Something else. Something crystalline.
Bastien ran his hand across it. Smooth. Cold. Slightly reflective even in the flashlight’s beam. His palm came away dry despite the moisture everywhere else.
Glass.
The walls were partially glass. Charlotte had somehow integrated mirror material into the city’s infrastructure. Not just placed mirrors at key points—she’d literally woven reflective material into the Quarter’s foundations.
He followed the glass-veined walls. They formed channels, pathways, rivers of potential reflection threading through ordinary stone. The engineering required would have been extraordinary. The vision behind it even more so.
The tunnel opened into a wider chamber.
Here, Charlotte’s main work became visible. Mirrors set into the walls at strategic points, each one connected by glass veins running through the mortar between bricks. Some of the mirrors had cracked over time. Others remained intact, their surfaces dark but unmarred. The network she’d designed—not destroyed, just forgotten, buried beneath a century of urban development that had built on top of her creation without realizing what lay beneath.
Gideon hadn’t created this system. He’d discovered it. Charlotte had built the machine. He’d merely found the ignition switch.
“Oh Charlotte, what have you done,” he whispered to himself.
Bastien drew the mirror shard from his pocket. Held it near one of the glass veins.
Immediate resonance. The shard hummed in his palm, vibration climbing up his arm. The vein lit with inner glow—gold light threading through the glass like phosphorescence in deep water.
For three seconds he saw through the network. Brief flash of other nodes, other mirrors, a web spanning the entire Quarter. Connection points at Jackson Square. The Archive. St. Louis Cemetery. Maman’s shop. His own apartment building.
He pulled the shard away. The light faded but didn’t quite extinguish.
Connected. All of it connected. Not Gideon’s creation but Charlotte’s legacy, waiting dormant until someone activated it again.
The storm intensified above. He could feel it through the stone—pressure changes, water surging through the tunnels in waves. The flood was creating perfect reflection conditions. Every surface becoming mirror. Every pool of standing water turning into a potential network node.
The glass veins activated fully.
Light ran through them now, constant instead of brief. Gold and silver intertwined, pulsing in rhythm with the storm’s assault. The veins showed more than simple reflections.
