Break the Glass

POV: Dex

The door closed, and Dex discovered that he had stopped breathing.

It was a small round door of dark wood banded in silver, and it had shut with a sound like a hand tidying a drawer. It had no handle on this side either. He stood in the passage with his palm flat against the wood, and the wood was warm, strangely, as a living thing is warm, and he said, in a voice that did not sound like his, "Viv."

Nothing.

"Viv. Open the door."

"It doesn't open from the outside," said Josiah quietly, behind him.

"Then it'll open."

"Mr. Hallam."

"It will open," said Dex, and hit the door with the heel of his hand. The sound went up the passage and was swallowed. He hit it again. Pain flared in the wrist. He did not care. There was a hum in his ears like a hive, and a high white light at the edge of his vision, and the cold, bright, neat machine that usually lived in his head, the one that counted and weighed and held, had not so much stopped as come loose from its bolts, and was rolling round the floor of his skull, ringing.

She's in there alone.

Rule one. No one goes alone. I wrote the rule.

He heard himself gasp. It was an ugly, wet, dragging sound, and it appalled him. He had not made that noise since he was nine years old. He had not made it in the dark under Number Nine, with a leg full of broken glass, with the rock sifting down. He had not made it for a debt, or a knife, or a man with a pistol. He had made it, evidently, for a girl in a gray cap, and a door.

"Dex."

It was Roz. She had come up on his other side, and she wasn't touching him, but her voice was low, steady, close. "Breathe out. Six."

"I can't—"

"You can. Out for six."

He breathed out. It shook.

"She's alive," said Roz. "I can hear her. Her heart's going slow."

"Slow?"

"Slow and, and easy." She frowned. Her head was tilted, her eyes unfocused. "It's like she's, she's sitting down. It's the heart of a woman by a fire. It's not afraid." A pause. "That's not good."

"Why not?"

"Because she ought to be afraid."

…

He did the arithmetic.

It was the only thing that came. He stood with his forehead nearly on the door and said it to himself, as he had said it in the dark. The Room is circular. Forty feet across. Josiah said it opens for those who wish to see. Viv went in at the third minute past midnight. It is now the seventh. Four minutes. He had given himself two when he sat down at the ledger and wrote the plan. He remembered the page. Mirror Room, est. 90 sec. He had underlined it.

He had been wrong by a factor of three.

"Captain," he said, "what does it mean, wish to see?"

"It is a phrase from the Founders' Oath. It means that the door will admit anyone who truly desires to look upon the thing they came for." Josiah's voice was level. "Most men's desires are mixed. The Room sorts them. It lets in those who are honest with themselves, and keeps out the rest."

"And if you want to look for someone?"

A pause.

"It might," said Josiah. "I do not know."

Dex shut his eyes.

It's a lock, he thought. A lock that opens on the truth. I'm the best liar in Ash Docks. It would have been funny at any other moment. He opened his eyes again. He put his palm flat on the wood and pressed, with all the stripped honest weight of him, with everything he had stopped telling himself: the foolish, bare, indefensible fact of it. I want to see her. I want to see her alive. I don't care about the Stone. I don't care what's in the vault.

I want her out.

The door opened.

It did not swing. It simply was not there anymore. It drew back into the wall like a breath, and a long cold silver light fell out across the passage floor, and from somewhere inside, thin and sweet and very far off, a woman began to sing.

…

He did not remember going in.

He remembered the floor. It was mirror. It had not looked like a floor from outside, and for a moment he thought he was stepping off a cliff. A broad dim path of polished tiles, each the size of a hearthstone, laid in a pattern of rings, silver and black, spreading out toward the center of the Room. The walls were glass. The ceiling was lost in the dark. And in every tile, as he looked down, stood a thin young man in a black coat, with a face that did not look like his own.

He put the cane down. The ferrule rang.

One.

A tile lit.

It was not an illusion, exactly. It was a window. He saw into it as he would have seen into a well. There, in the glass beneath his foot, in a flood of soft gold light, a woman stood in a doorway. She had a long gray skirt and a white blouse with the sleeves pushed up, and dark hair coming loose from its pins. She was laughing. She was holding something in her arms, a bundle in a blue shawl, and bending her face to it. She looked up.

He looked away.

Two.

Three.

He kept his eyes on the cane. It was a habit. In the first year at Ma Tilly's, when the fevers had come in the night, and the dreams had been nothing but light and sound and a smell like warm bread, he'd taught himself to look away. You didn't chase them. You didn't turn your head. You kept your eyes on the thing in front of you, the table, the lamp, the cold iron of the bedstead, and counted, until it passed.

Four.

Another tile. A man's hands. Large square hands, brown from the sun, working a small knife along a block of walnut. Shavings curled on the table. A voice, deep, warm, amused: Steady, Nate. Don't force the grain. Let it show you where it wants to go.

Five.

He closed his eyes for a step, and went on.

…

His leg gave out at the ninth tile, and he did not fall.

That, afterward, was the part that astonished him. He felt it go: a white-hot snap in the thigh, a sick swing in the knee. He felt the tile come up to meet him, black and shining, with a woman's face in it. And somehow his hand had found the head of the cane, and his weight went down through it, and he stood, shaking, in the middle of a ring of mirrors, with the sweat running into his eyes.

Count.

He counted. He had no ledger out; he had it in his head, the long black-bound book with its three columns. He ran down the pages, sum by sum, in his small ordered hand. The Mulrooney debt. The widow Brannigan. The boarding house rents. Eleven hundred and forty dollars owed, three hundred and eighty paid. A hundred and sixty-two forged signatures. The price of a girl's indenture, four hundred and nine dollars and sixty cents, written in his own hand in a margin, with the note Interest, and a small neat line beneath.

Interest.

He had written that. He had told her it was a fair rate.

Ten. He walked. Eleven. The cane rang. Twelve.

"Dex!"

It was so faint. He thought he had imagined it. It was a girl's voice, broken and thin, and it came out of the glass to his left like a voice calling from the bottom of a river. He turned his head. He could not see her. The wall swam with other people's mornings. A kitchen. A quay. A table set for six.

"Viv!" He was shouting. His voice was cracked. "Viv, don't touch the glass! Whatever it is, it isn't real! Do you hear me? It's a, it's the Room. It's feeding. Listen to the cane!"

He struck the stone. Tap. And again. Tap. Tap. He didn't know why. He knew only that a sound was a thing, that it had weight, that it traveled. That a cane on stone was a clock, a pulse, a hand in the dark that said: this way.

"Come back," he called. "Come away. I've got a ledger. I've written down everything you've lost. You don't have to keep it. I'll keep it."

He had not known he would say that. It came out of him like a thing from a wound. He stood in the glittering dark with his heart going like a drum and the bad leg screaming, and heard the words fall away across the floor, and thought: She will think I'm mad.

Come out.

…

He saw the center at the fifteenth tile.

It was a tall oval mirror on a pedestal of black stone, perhaps eight feet high, set in a frame of tarnished silver. It was the only thing in the Room that stood by itself. The whole floor ran toward it in rings, like ripples toward a stone, and the walls leaned in, panel on panel, as though in worship. It was dark. It was very still. It had no light of its own, no scene, no kitchen or quay, only a perfect, polished, bottomless black.

He knew what it was without being told.

That is the heart of the thing.

Everything else was the lure. This was the hook. It was the glass that all the other glass had grown from, the first mirror, the oldest, which had been set in the stone by someone who understood exactly what a person would pay to see the face they'd lost.

He could hear Viv now, close by, a little to the right: a murmur, a sob, a fumbling. He could hear a woman's voice, warm, speaking Italian. He could hear her say Va bene. He could feel the whole chamber lean, like a held breath, toward a single point.

She's saying goodbye, he thought. She's got there on her own.

And it'll take her for it.

He knew it with a clean cold click. The Room was a trade. It gave what you wanted and took what it chose. She was about to pay for her own release. And whatever it took, whatever lay at the end of that last word, he could not stop it from the wrong side of the glass.

Unless I break the thing that's trading.

He stopped before the pedestal.

The oval mirror hung before him, black and tall. He had expected to see himself. He did not. The black was not empty. It was deepening, slowly, rising toward him from a great distance, the way a face rises out of dark water: a pale curve, a darker eye. A dim shape, forming. A woman's silhouette, in a blue shawl, bending toward a child.

Do you want to see? it said. It did not say it in words. It said it with the whole weight of the chamber, tender, patient, endless. You can. You have only to look. Look, and I will give you her face.

His heart stood still.

He had never seen it. That was the thing. He had never, in eleven years, seen her face. Ma Tilly had said she had no pictures. Ma Tilly had said she'd never met the woman. In the dreams there was a blue shawl, and a hum, and a smell of jasmine, and then a light so bright it hurt, and always, always, the face turned away.

Look. You could know.

You could know what she looked like.

He lifted his cane.

It was a good cane. Ma Tilly had had it made the winter his leg knit, a stick of seasoned walnut with a small carved rattlesnake fixed to the head, coiled, its eyes two chips of dark glass, its tail a row of tiny notched rings. The snake was older than the stick. It was the one thing he had been holding when she dug him out of Number Nine. He'd carried it for eleven years. No one had ever told him who carved it. He knew only that his hand fit it, and that it was the only thing from before.

Look, said the mirror.

No, said Dex.

He swung.

The snake's head struck the glass at the exact center, dead on, with all the weight of his shoulder behind it, and the sound that came back was not the sound of a blow. It was a note. A single clear tone, pure and bell-like, that rang up and out into the high dark and spread through the walls and floor and the very bones of the chamber. The glass did not break at once. It sang. A line of white light opened in the black, from top to bottom, with a thin fine tearing sound, and the face in the dark flinched, and turned, and was gone.

Pain went up his arm to the shoulder. He felt something give in the cane.

He hit it again.

…

The shattering was extraordinary.

It was not a crash. It was a tide. The cracks ran from the oval outward, racing across the floor, and every ring of tile blazed white from the inside as the fractures traveled. The walls took it up. Panel by panel, pane by pane, the Room broke open, each shard flashing as it fell, until the whole chamber was ablaze with a trembling shower of light, as though a chandelier the size of a cathedral had come down. Somewhere in the din, high and sweet and bright, a woman laughed. He felt it go through him like a warm wind.

Then it was over.

He was standing in a drift of glass, up to his ankles, in a plain round chamber with a stone floor. A single lamp burned in a bracket on the wall. The air was cool and smelled of dust. At his feet lay what remained of the oval mirror, a heap of black, harmless shards, dull as slate.

He did not look at them.

He turned, with the cane shaking in his hand, and there she was.

She was standing a few paces off, in the glitter, with her cap askew, one hand held out in front of her with the wet silver drying on it. She was very pale. Her eyes were enormous. She looked as though someone had picked her up out of a deep sleep and set her down in the cold.

"Dex," said Viv.

He crossed the floor without knowing he'd done it. He took her face in both his hands. It was cold, and wet, and real. He felt the shape of the jaw under his palms, the pulse in the throat, the lashes against his thumbs. He held on. And then, because it seemed the only thing to do, and because there was no one in the Room to see, he pulled her against him.

She stood stiff for half a second. Then she folded. She put her face in his shoulder and her hands in his coat, and he felt her shake, and he held her up. He had never held anyone. It was extraordinarily simple.

One second. Two. Three.

Then he made himself let go.

…

"Don't," he said, "ever make me do that again."

His voice was hoarse. He stepped back, and straightened his coat, and busied himself with the cane. She was staring at him. Her eyes were red, but there was a gleam in them.

"You were frightened."

"I was calculating."

"You panicked."

"I recalculated under pressure."

"You hit a mirror with a cane."

"It was a very large mirror."

Something in her face cracked. It was not a smile, quite. It was the thing that happens to a girl's mouth when she has been very near tears, and is not going to cry, and has remembered that she is allowed to be rude. "You were frightened," she said again, with immense satisfaction. "You said please. I heard it. Through the glass. You said please come out. You, Dex Hallam."

"I did not say please."

"You said it twice."

"There is no record of it."

"I am the record," said Viv.

The door at the far end of the Room had opened. In it stood Josiah, with a bloodstained handkerchief wrapped round one hand, and Roz leaning on his arm with her bad leg bandaged, and Felix, and Hollis, who looked at the wreckage of the chamber, and the glass, and the heap of shards, and finally at Dex, with a face of grave delight.

"Four minutes," said Hollis. "I make it four minutes and twelve seconds, Maestro. For the record."

"Thank you, Mr. Quade."

"I'd say that's a personal best."

"Is there a particular reason," said Dex, "that you are still talking?"

"No, sir."

"Then I suggest we proceed."

He turned, with great dignity, and began to walk toward the far door, and found that his right hand, the one on the cane, was trembling. It was a fine fast tremor, like a plucked string. He looked at it. He changed hands. The left was trembling too.

He put both on the stick and kept walking.

On the far side of the doorway, in the darkness, a low ponderous grinding began.

It started somewhere deep in the stone. It was slow, mechanical, enormous, the sound of chains being drawn through blocks, of weights shifting, of a thing that had been waiting for a century and had at last been woken. The floor trembled underfoot. Dust sifted from the lintel. Beyond the doorway, where there had been only black, a long narrow corridor was slowly appearing, lit from within by a dim red light.

"That," said Josiah, in a very quiet voice, "is the last of the traps."