I looked instead at the walls. They were lined, at intervals I could not at first parse, with tall mirrored panels in narrow black frames, and behind every panel was a further suggestion of corridor, of room, of something receding, so that the architecture did not, in any direction my eye took, agree to end. There were doors. I assumed there were doors. There must have been doors. I could not, in the moment, find one.
I looked down at myself.
I had been putting it off, but no longer. I could feel the sigils on my body, marking me as his, marking me as changed. They hummed with power, with need, with want.
It did not feel like a tattoo, or a scar, or even a burn, because it did not belong to the epidermis. It belonged to the layer after that, the deepest layer of me.
They were inside, but I could see them, too.
The sigils ran along the inside of my left forearm, as I had seen them begin to do on the silver plain, but now they were not content to remain only there. They climbed. Up the web of veins at the crook of my elbow, up the hollow beneath my biceps, up the slope of my shoulder and along the left side of my neck.
My knees went.
They went only an inch. But he felt it—Ifelthim feeling it. His hand at my hip tightened—not a grab, nothing performed, the small precise increase of pressure of a person taking up the slack on a line he had been holding loose—and the inch did not become two. The hoodie pulled taut where his palm pressed it. Through it I felt the heat of him, distinct from the cold seam of cold-water sigils still living along the inside of my left wrist, as though the two halves of my body had been wired to two different houses and only one of them was paying its bill.
He did not speak for a long count.
He was waiting for me to have my own first look at the place I had landed in. He was letting the architecture be looked at. Hewas letting himself be looked at. He was letting himself look at me.
I had been lifted out of one room and set down in another, and the second room had not been built tonight.
“Now, Little One, walk,” he said.
Something in me ignited—a flame of desire, so different to the pilot light.
Little One.
It felt right.
I walked.
Thestepscamedownto the gallery in a long shallow flight, fifteen of them, each one wide enough that I had to take it in two paces, and each one a perfect black mirror under my feet. I went down them with his hand still at the small of my back. The hand did not push. The hand did not even, exactly, guide. It was just there.
I noticed.
We came down off the last step onto the gallery floor.
The floor took us into itself. I do not know any other way to describe what happened, in the first half-second of standing on it, except to say that a polished black mirror that ran the length of a cathedral floor took us into itself, and we walked, from then on, on the topside of a long quiet conversation between every surface in the room. The pool of mercury water lay to our right. The mirrored colonnade rose to our left. Between the two, the floor went on in front of us in a perfect uninterrupted plane, and at the limit of my vision—where, in any honest building, a wall would have appeared to give the eye somewhere to rest—the gallery declined to end and gave instead onto a further gallery, and beyond that, a further.
I tried, at first, to keep my eyes on the floor in front of my feet.
It was the small old protocol. Eyes down. Don’t take in more than the next step. It had served me at parties and at funerals and at the quarterly meetings at which the publisher’s CEO discussed her career, and it ought, by all rights, to have served me here. It did not. The floor in front of my feet was a black mirror, and it made me feel dizzy to look at.
I lifted my eyes to the colonnade.
This was no better. The colonnade was mirrored. Every column was a tall narrow mirror set in a black frame. Every column gave me back the full length of myself, and beside me the full length of him, and behind us both the full length of the gallery we had just walked down, and behind that, fainter, the full length of the gallery we had walked down before that, a long polite procession of selves stretching back into a place I was not, just now, ready to look at.
I lifted my eyes to the wall behind the colonnade.
The wall behind the colonnade was made of further mirrored panels, set deeper, framing the gallery beyond, and in the gallery beyond there was a woman in a grey hoodie walking with a tall man in a long black coat, exactly the way there was a woman in a grey hoodie walking with a tall man in a long black coat in the gallery I was in.
I closed my eyes.
It was a mistake. With my eyes closed, his hand at my back arrived in my body with a sudden private clarity I could not afford. The heat of it. The exact pressure. The slight unhurried adjustment of his fingers across the small of me with each step, the way a pianist’s hand adjusts on a chord it intends to hold for longer than the score had indicated. The cold seam of sigils along my left wrist became, against my will, the answering line of him—as though my body had decided that the place where his hand touched my back and the place where his magic touched my armwere two ends of a single circuit, and the circuit was, just at this moment, live.
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me in a panel.
