The Photo

[PREVIOUSLY ON...] In a copy of the Institute made of glass and memory, Archie Moran found a photograph of Dr. Diana Chen at the side of Luca Ferrara, and a prototype key that was Zoe's pendant. Zoe had known nothing. Jin pointed out that a flyer, a mother, and a key made a convenient pattern. Zoe held out her hand for the pendant, and looked at Archie. He looked at the girl, and at the ledger that said I could not turn her away. He chose to be careful.

…

"Keep it, Jin," said Archie.

He heard his own voice say it. It was a calm voice, an even voice, a voice that might have been reading out a schedule. It came from a long way down. He had used it before, in conference rooms, in the minute after Graham had said something that was a lie and everyone had agreed to treat it as the truth.

"Just for now. Until we know."

Zoe's hand was still held out. It did not drop. It stayed there, palm up, in the air between them, with the fingers a little curled, and he saw the exact moment she understood. It was very small. A pulse jumped in her throat. Her lips parted and shut. Then she drew the hand back, slowly, and folded it with the other against her stomach, and stood with her head bowed like a girl in a headmaster's office.

"Okay," she said.

"It's not that I think—"

"No. It's fine." She smiled. It was an awful smile, bright and brittle, like a crack in a windowpane. "It's logical. I'd do the same."

"Zoe—"

"Honestly. It's fine."

Venn made a small sound. He had opened his mouth, and shut it, and glanced at the others for support, and found none. He looked at Archie with an expression of wretched bewilderment, and Archie looked at the floor.

It's temporary, he told himself. It's sensible. It costs nothing. If she's clean, we'll know in a day, and I'll hand it back, and apologize.

He did not look up. He knew what he would see.

…

The days in the Mirror World were not like other days.

They had no sun to mark them, and no night. There was only the pewter sky, which thickened and thinned in a slow tide, and the bell, which struck late. They had made their base in the third-floor offices of the copied Institute: a long room with a dozen desks and a bank of dead monitors, a kettle that boiled a thin gray water, a sofa with the stuffing coming out. The locals brought them bread. A girl with a fox's face had taken to leaving flowers on the sill.

Archie ate his bread in silence and kept to the far end of the room.

It was the oddest thing. He had not planned it. He only found that when Zoe came in he went out; that when she sat down he stood up; that when she asked him, in her ordinary way, whether he'd seen the map, his answer was a single polite word, and a look at some point over her left shoulder. It was like walking around a hole in the floor. He knew it was there. He chose, each time, to put his feet somewhere else.

"Why are you avoiding me?" she said once, very quietly, in the corridor.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm busy."

"Archie."

"I'm busy, Zoe." It came out with an edge he did not intend. "There's a lot to go through. The ledgers, the files. I can't just drop everything."

She looked at him for a long moment.

She had a way of looking, he had learned, that was like being weighed. She never rushed it. She stood there in the grey strip light with her arms crossed and the shadows pooled under her eyes and he saw her, very clearly, decide not to press. She nodded once.

"Okay," she said. "Busy."

She walked away.

He stood in the corridor with his hands at his sides, and the pendant, in Jin's pocket, seemed to hum in the bones of his skull.

…

"You're doing it again," said Jin.

It was late, or what passed for late. They were alone in the long room. Venn was asleep on the sofa with his coat over his face. Zoe had gone down to the bridge to see Eli, as she did each evening. The lamp on the nearest desk made a small circle of light, and Jin sat in it with a thick ledger in front of him and his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

"Doing what?"

"Hiding."

"I'm reading."

"You haven't turned a page in forty minutes."

Archie did not answer.

"I know that look." Jin closed the ledger. "I saw it on you in the Hall of the Fallen, and in Gregor's kitchen. You decide something, and instead of saying it you put it in a cupboard. And then you go around the house with the door shut."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?"

"I asked you to hold the pendant. That's all. Because you said," Archie hesitated, "because you made a good point."

"I made a point. I didn't ask you to do this." Jin's face was drawn. "I said someone should know. I didn't say that the someone should be you, in secret, with a face like a closed door. I meant: ask her. Sit down with her. Say it plainly. Zoe can take plain."

"She's been through enough."

"Which is precisely why."

Archie turned a page he had not read.

"I'm not accusing her," he said at last, in a low voice. "I want to be clear about that. I don't think she'd do it. I don't think she could. But I can't," he swallowed, "I keep going back to the flyer. I keep going back to the key. I can't make them not be there. I've been the only one in an office who didn't know before. I'd rather be wrong now than wrong later."

"I see."

"You said it yourself."

"I did." Jin rubbed the bridge of his nose. "God. I did." He sounded tired. "I was thinking aloud. That is a vice of mine. I forget that when I think aloud, other people do something with it."

"What?"

"Believe it."

Silence.

"Archie," said Jin, very gently, "she is looking at you the way you looked at her in Thornkeep, when she pulled the sword out of the stone. It is a look that wants to be trusted. And I do not think that anything you will find in a ledger will be worth what it costs, if you spend it unwisely."

Archie said nothing. His hands lay on the desk, thick-knuckled and still. After a moment Jin rose, and put a hand briefly on his shoulder, and went to the sofa. He lay down, and put his glasses on his chest.

The lamp ticked. The Institute, around them, hummed with its borrowed life.

…

In the window, a woman was waiting.

Archie didn't see her at first. He had gone to the window of the long room at last, to ease his neck, and stood with his forehead against the cool glass looking down on the dark river and the lit concrete drive. Behind the glass, in the black, was his own reflection: a thin tired man in a torn coverall with a shadow of beard.

Then the reflection moved.

It wasn't his. It was a woman's, slighter, with short dark hair and a tilted head and a bruise-colored shadow under each eye. She had come up behind him silently, and stood in the glass at his shoulder, in the red dress she'd worn in Ashmore. She smiled.

He did not turn.

"Hello, Archie."

"You're gone," he said. "We broke you."

"You broke a mirror." The voice was soft, amused, with a ghost of Zoe's own laughing music. "She's rather like a hydra, isn't she? Lose a head, grow two. I'm not her. I'm only what's left. The little splinters in the corners." She tilted her head. "You've been feeding me for days."

"I haven't."

"You've been so careful. So reasonable. And every time you look away from her, I get a little bigger."

Archie closed his eyes.

"Listen to me," said the thing in the glass. "I'll tell you the truth. It's what I'm good for. I knew about my mother. I've always known." The voice dropped, soft and confiding, almost kind. "Luca told me before I went in. He told me he needed someone he could trust. Someone sweet, and frightened, and lovely, who'd get close. I was glad to do it. I was flattered, honestly. It's not every day a girl is asked to save the world."

"That's a lie."

"Is it?" A low delighted laugh. "You can't tell. That's the beauty of it. I'm saying exactly what you were afraid of. You've been waiting for it for a week."

"Stop."

"You were right. You were so right. You always are, aren't you? That's what makes you so lonely." The voice had come very close. It was breathing, almost, in his ear. "I've never loved anyone, Archie. I only watched. I was there to watch. And you were so easy. You were so, so easy to hold."

He opened his eyes.

The woman in the glass was smiling at him. He saw the curve of her cheek, and the clever dark eyes, and the beautiful unreadable mouth. He saw Graham in her. He saw the man at the bank. He saw every well-meant hand that had ever been laid on his shoulder and taken something away.

He knew it was a mirror. That was the dreadful part. He knew it as he knew his own name. It was a sliver of a broken thing, in a copied building, saying what he was most afraid to hear.

But knowing was not the same as not believing.

He stepped back from the window. His heart was going like a hammer. The woman in the glass gave him one small, sweet, satisfied smile, and faded into the dark of the night as gently as breath from a pane.

Behind him, on the sofa, Jin turned over in his sleep.

In the doorway, with a loaf of bread in one hand and the cold of the river on her coat, stood Zoe.

She had come in without a sound. Her face was white. She looked at Archie, and then at the window, and then at Archie again, and he saw that she had heard enough of it, or enough of him, to know what he was thinking.

She did not say a word.

She set the bread down on the nearest desk with enormous care, as though it might break. Then she turned and went quietly out of the room.