Bastien moved closer to one of the larger veins embedded in the chamber wall.
Jackson Square fountain. Visible in the glass as clearly as if he were standing there. Water features, streetlamps, the cathedral beyond.
He shifted to another vein.
The Archive reading room. Empty at this hour, but he could see the exact layout. Display cases. Delphine’s desk. The window where they’d stood together last week.
A third vein showed Delphine’s apartment. Her bedroom. The quilt her grandmother had made. The stack of books on her nightstand.
His stomach turned.
The network wasn’t just citywide. It was invasive. Every mirror in every location, all feeding into Charlotte’s underground infrastructure. Surveillance she’d never intended. Violation she’d never imagined. Exactly what he’d been afraid of two hundred years ago.
More reflections appeared as the storm fed more power into the system. Maman’s shop. The werewolf den near the river. The vampire court’s meeting hall. His own apartment.
The network showed everything. Cataloged everything. Remembered everything.
Then the reflections started moving independently.
Jackson Square wasn’t showing now. It was showing yesterday. Last week. Tomorrow morning when the sun would rise over cleaned streets.
The Archive with Delphine from two weeks ago, shelving the Lacroix ledgers.
His own apartment with him sleeping—a view from tonight, hours from now, after he returned.
Temporal bleeding. Not just spatial connection but temporal. Past, present, future all stored in the same crystalline network. Charlotte’s distributed memory system had become something far stranger. A city that remembered not just what had happenedbut what would happen. What could happen. Every possibility reflected and stored and accessible through the right node at the right moment.
He backed away from the veins. Water was waist-deep now, the current strong enough to make walking difficult.
This was bigger than he’d understood. More complex. More dangerous.
And more useful.
The tunnel continued ahead, leading toward what the blueprints had marked as the primary convergence point. The altar chamber.
The chamber formed where three passages converged. Twentieth-century brick layered over Charlotte’s original limestone—municipal expansion incorporated into the system’s design. Water pooled here instead of flowing, dark and still despite the rain above.
The walls crawled with reflected light. Glass channels thick as his wrist threaded through brick and mortar, branching at intervals. Through all of them, light pulsed—gold and silver intertwined.
The altar rose from the water’s center.
A stone platform bearing the Lacroix crest in tarnished silver—two symbols intertwined that he’d last seen in the vault beneath Rue Chartres. But here the metal had begun to fracture, hairline cracks spreading from the crest’s center toward its edges.
The network was tearing itself apart.
Not just from Gideon’s interference. The fundamental instability ran deeper. Charlotte had designed the network to stabilize her resonance—the specific frequency of her will merged with celestial energy. Delphine carried that same signature but it was filtered through a century of separation. Thenetwork recognized her. Tried to anchor to her presence. But the match wasn’t perfect.
And Bastien’s attempts to stabilize the lattice had made it worse. Each sigil he’d drawn imposed his frequency over Charlotte’s pattern until the network couldn’t distinguish between them.
The walls whispered. Breath expelled through glass, vibration shaped by throat and tongue but stripped of meaning. Charlotte’s confession chambers had sounded similar—surfaces that remembered speech without retaining language.
Then one voice cut through clear and deliberate.
“Freedom is love without choice.”
Gideon’s creed, repeated through glass that had absorbed it from mirrors across the Quarter. The words echoed through the vein’s channels, amplified by acoustics Charlotte had never intended.
Bastien waded toward the altar. The water grew warmer with each step. Heat gathered at the chamber’s heart. Steam curled from the surface.
