Mirror Breaks

He did not cross the bridge.

He stood at its foot for a long time, with his hand on the rusted rail, and watched the small dark figure reach the far side and sit down among the people who loved her. He thought of everything he might say. I was wrong. I read it. She never knew. I'm sorry. The words lined up in his head, each one reasonable and true.

He could not make his feet move.

It wasn't pride. He would have liked it to be pride; pride, at least, can be swallowed. It was something older and meaner, a coldness in the knees, a certainty that the instant he stepped onto that span the whole fragile thing would be destroyed. She would look up. She would see his face. She would see that he had already decided, once, to count her fingers. And whatever she said, kind or unkind, she would never be able to un-see it.

Not yet, he thought. Not like this. Not with nothing in my hands.

He turned and went back toward the building. He told himself it was a plan. He would find something. He would find some proof so large and so clean that when he finally laid it at her feet it would look like a gift, and not a confession.

He went back into the lab and down the stairs, alone.

…

The closet was as he had left it. The green lamp burned. The fountain pen lay across the page.

He stood in the doorway and, for the first time, saw the mirror.

It hung behind the desk, small and oval and old, in a frame of tarnished brass. He had not noticed it before. It was the sort of thing a woman might keep in a private room, to straighten her collar or check her eyes after a bad night. The glass was foxed at the edges. It showed him the room, and the desk, and a gray-faced man in a coat.

Then it showed someone beside him.

"You came back," said Zoe.

She did not look as she had at the window. This was a different one, he saw at once, quieter, and more terrible for it. She stood at his shoulder in the plain torn coverall she wore every day, with her hair pushed back, and her eyes red-rimmed and soft. She might have been the real one. She had the scar at her throat, and the bead of sweat on her lip, and the expression of a girl who has been awake all night.

"I read it," he said, to the glass. "I know what it says. She didn't know."

"I did, though."

"No."

"I knew." She said it very gently. "Don't be angry. I know you think you're brave, and sweet, and that you've stood in front of the worst version of yourself and survived. But you haven't, Archie. You've stood in front of the worst version of me. And she's far better at it."

"You're not her."

"I'm what's left of her. I'm the splinter." She smiled, ruefully. "I'm the thing that lives in the dark of a mirror and says what you wish you could say to her face. You can't ask her, can you? Not really. You'd have to look at her, and you'd have to hear. So I came instead. I can say anything. It costs you nothing."

"Stop it."

"She lied to you."

"She did not."

"She let you carry her mother's picture and said nothing."

"She saw it for the first time at the same moment I did!"

"Did she?" The soft face tilted. "She's a very good actress. She was at Parsons. She dressed beautiful people in beautiful lies. She would have to be."

He stood absolutely still.

It was the cruelty of it that he could not get past. It did not lie. It took a true thing, that Zoe had made clothes for a living, that she had a gift for the look of a thing, and it turned the thing a quarter-inch and held it to the light. It was not a falsehood. It was a possibility. A shadow of one.

And a shadow, he found, will do.

…

"I don't need this," said Archie.

He said it quietly at first. He said it to the room. He saw the lamp, the desk, the dusty books, the mirror in its tarnished frame, and the soft sorrowful face at his shoulder.

"I don't need any of you."

The face smiled.

"I don't. I never did." His voice rose. "I did this on my own for thirty-five years. I got up, I went to work, I took my coffee black and my blame cold. I didn't need Graham. I didn't need a funeral director. I didn't need her. I don't need a girl with a pendant who holds my hand on a bridge and then goes off and cries to a child!" He was shaking. "I never needed anybody. I don't need this!"

He had not meant to. He had not decided, or even known he was going to do it. But his arm swung, on its own, from the shoulder, in a long flat arc, and the heavy lamp in his hand went straight into the glass.

The mirror did not shatter.

It detonated.

A shock of silvery light slammed out of the frame in a ring, flinging the desk against the wall, scattering the books. The green shade shattered. The air rang. And the face at his shoulder, the beautiful soft sorrowful face, flew apart into a swarm of needles and spun away into the corners of the room like a flight of startled birds, shrieking, and was gone.

He stood in the ringing quiet, with the broken lamp still in his hand.

He was breathing like a runner. His ears sang. Under his boots, the floor had begun, very gently, to hum.

It worked, he thought, stupidly.

He had not expected it to. He had thought it would take what it took the others: the long slow truthful work of a man looking at himself. He had not looked at himself. He had not agreed to anything. He had only thrown a lamp. And the Mirror World, which responded to will as water responds to a stone, had felt the shape of his will, enormous and blind and frightened, and answered it.

He was not sure that was a good thing.

On the back wall, behind the place where the desk had been, a seam of white light was spreading across the brick.

…

It was a door.

It was a plain one, tall and narrow, with a latch of old iron. It had not been there a moment before. Now it stood quietly in the light with its edges glowing, and the faint warm smell of ozone drifting from the crack beneath.

He crossed to it with the broken lamp.

He had no key. The pendant was on a bridge, a quarter-mile away, round the neck of a girl who would not look at him. But the door did not seem to want one. At his touch the latch turned of its own accord, and the wood swung inward on a darkness that was not dark, and a soundless cold breath rolled over him, like wind from a deep well.

He should have gone back.

He knew it even as he stepped over the sill. The prudent thing, the loving thing, was to turn and cross the bridge and say what he had to say. The door would still be here. The Core would not go away.

But the anger was in him, rising and dull, like a tide in a pipe. It had a voice. It said, Not yet. When you have something in your hands. And he went through.

…

Beyond the door was a place with no walls.

It looked, at first, like a night sky: a vast black dome sprinkled with pinpoints of cold light. Then the points resolved. They were threads. Millions upon millions of fine bright filaments, silver and gold and blue, stretched in every direction, like a spider's web the size of a continent, anchored at nodes of glowing white. They trembled very slightly. They hummed.

Five thick cables of light came together at the center.

They twisted in a braid, tens of feet through, throbbing like a great artery. At their root, in a pool of pale radiance, a figure sat on the nothing with its back against a pillar of white fire.

He walked toward it.

It was a man. He was thin, wasted almost to transparency, in a ragged white lab coat. His hair was long and silvery, and hung in knots, and his beard was a gray tangle on his chest. He sat cross-legged with his head bowed and his hands, which were all bone, laid palm up on his knees. Light ran into the palms from the cables. It was pouring through him, in a steady current, from the five distant worlds to the pillar. His skin was lit from inside. He looked like a candle that has been burning for a very long time.

"Matteo?" said Archie.

The figure did not stir.

"Matteo Ferrara?"

The head lifted.

It rose slowly, the way an old man lifts his head from sleep. The face that looked out of the tangled hair was ravaged and kind and so like the face of the man in the photograph, the young man with his arm round his brother's neck, that Archie's breath caught. The eyes were enormous. They were dark, with a ring of silver round the iris, and they took a long time to focus.

"Who," said Matteo. His voice was a rustle. "Who is it?"

It came slowly, the faltering voice of a mind that has gone a long time without hearing another, and has to dig for the word.

"Who is there?" Matteo said again. "Is someone here? Is it, is it my brother?"

"No." Archie knelt, carefully, on the nothing. "My name is Archie. Luca sent me."

"Luca."

"He's looking for you. He never stopped."

The silver-ringed eyes brimmed. A single tear ran down the hollow cheek and glittered, and fell, and was swallowed by the dark.

"My brother," whispered Matteo, "is still looking?"

"Fifteen years."

"I told him not to," said the thin man. He was laughing, or weeping; it was hard to tell. "I told him to let me go. I said it a thousand times. He never heard."

"He couldn't."

"No." The ghost of a smile. "No, he could not. He is," he searched for the word, "he is stubborn."

He lifted one hand off his knee. It shook. The light rolled off it in sparks. Behind it, as he moved, Archie saw the whole shining web stir and bend, as though the effort of lifting a hand had pulled at five worlds.

"Sit," said Matteo. "Please. It has been a long time since I had company."