A Thousand Reflections

POV: Viv

The light came down through the roof like rain, and Viv opened her arms and caught it.

She stood in the center of the ring of mirrors, in a pool of absolute shadow, on a floor of cold black stone. Twelve tall brass shapes surrounded her, nine feet high, spaced as evenly as the hours of a clock. Each one was burning. The faint silver glow of the corona, spilling through the oculus from a sky gone black, had caught on the brass and kindled it, and a ring of cold light closed round her like a crown.

She had been standing there since ten. She had stood so long that her feet had gone numb. She had counted her breaths to keep herself from counting the seconds, and had said the names of her friends, one at a time, as another woman might say a rosary. Dex. Roz. Josiah. Hollis. Felix. Ma Tilly. She had held the scope-lens in both hands so tightly that the rim had printed a ring in her palms.

Now she laid it down on the stone, at her feet.

She did not need it. She was inside the glass.

…

It was not like anything she had done before.

She had walked through mirrors all her life. She had stepped through windows and spoon-backs and the dark glass of a bank clerk's spectacles. She had always thought of it as moving. A body crossing a threshold from here to there, through a skin of silver and out the other side. She'd thought she understood it.

She had understood nothing.

The twelve mirrors did not take her anywhere. They opened. She felt it as a loosening in her bones, a deep, strange, quiet unfolding, like a hand uncurling after a long sleep. Her edges blurred. Her breath went out of her in a long sigh and did not come back. And the glass was no longer a thing she stood before. It was a thing she was part of: a vast, still, silvered lake, with the sky in it, and herself at the bottom.

Oh, she thought. This is what it's for.

Overhead, the Heart began to beat.

She felt it as a vibration in the stone. A deep, rolling boom, from far above. Then another. Then, with a sound like a sheet of ice breaking on a pond, the first thread of light came falling down.

…

It was silver. It was thinner than silk.

It came out of the roof of the Dome, out of the open lamp-chamber at the crown, in a slow bright cascade. A single strand first, drifting through the dark, trailing and twisting like a ribbon in water. Then a second. A tenth. A hundred. They fell in a shower, a glittering veil, thick as snow in the beam of the corona, and each one of them hummed.

She could hear them. Each had a note.

A child's laughter. A kitchen with the smell of bread. A fiddle tune at a wedding. The way a certain woman's hair fell across her cheek in 1879. A man's footstep on a stair. The name of a dog. A first kiss under a bridge on a rainy night, a bad word said in anger and never taken back, a baby's weight, a prayer, a face at a window. Ten thousand things. Ten thousand lives. The small, humble, precious, daily stuff of being a person, that someone had taken from a stranger in a lane and corked in a bottle and put away.

They're all here, she thought. They're all coming home.

She lifted her hands.

…

The mirrors drank them.

She had known they would. She had calculated it with Felix, on the back of a bread-sack, for three nights: how a ring of twelve, set at the proper angles, would catch a falling light and fold it back upon itself. A lens. A loom. She could not have said how she knew to do the next thing, any more than she could have said how she knew to breathe. She only put her palms together, and thought of the sky, and pushed.

The silver threads caught in the ring.

They gathered. They wheeled. They went spinning round the twelve brass faces in a great slow gyre, brightening, thickening, tightening into a column of light, and the mirrors burned white-hot and sang. She felt it pass through her. It filled her like water filling a jug. She was a pipe, a channel, a window, and the whole city's lost life was pouring through her body at the speed of thought.

She tipped her head back.

She let it go.

…

It rose.

It went up through the oculus in a single blinding pillar, straight into the black sky, where the ring of fire hung around the dark disc of the moon. She did not see it. She was inside it. But she felt it spread, and she heard, from far below, from the streets of the Terrace and the roofs of the Docks, the beginning of a roar.

They were looking up.

All of them. The thousands in the road, the Longshoremen in their wall, the washerwomen on the stoops, the children on their fathers' shoulders. Every smoked glass in Merrick Bay was lifted. And on the great black bowl of the sky, where the sun had been, a picture was forming.

She did not need to see it. She felt it, the way she felt her own hands.

It began as a smear of light, a pale shimmer on the dark. Then it sharpened. Colors came: a gold, a green, a deep and burning red. A shape resolved. A woman with a basket, going up a hill. A boy on a bicycle. A table laid for supper. A house at dusk with the lamps lit. Another. Another. The sky was a vast silver screen, and on it, flickering, faster than eyes could follow, ran the memories of every soul in Ash Docks, flung upward by the Heart and thrown across the heavens by a girl in a ring of mirrors.

They can see, thought Viv. They can see it all.

And it's theirs.

She heard a woman's voice raised in the street, high and cracked with amazement. That's my husband. That's Tom. That's our wedding. She heard a man shout. She heard a thousand voices. They were coming down out of the sky, in streams, in ribbons of silver, finding their own faces, as water finds its level. Each one fell upon the person it belonged to like a hand upon a shoulder.

And she heard, mingled with it, something she had not expected.

They were laughing.

…

Then the sky went dark, and something else came.

It was a different light. It was not silver. It was a dull, thick, bruised yellow, like old lamp-oil, and it did not fall. It dragged. It came down slowly from the lamp-chamber, as a heavy thing comes down a chimney. It was the last strand. The one that had not wanted to come.

She felt its note, and her skin crawled.

It was a low, harsh, held chord. It sounded like a man grinding his teeth. It sounded like a door being nailed shut. She caught it in the ring, because she could not do otherwise, and it spun, and it brightened, and with a lurch of horror she understood what she was holding.

This one is his.

She had been told. Dex had said it, in the vestry, in the dark. Whitcomb Tithed himself. Not a little. The one thing he couldn't bear. He put it in the Heart, to keep it, and to forget it. It's in there still.

She had not believed him. She had not understood what he meant.

The light struck the sky.

…

It was a night.

It was a night in October, eleven years gone, on Crown Hill. The picture burned on the black overhead in colors so clear she could have counted the leaves. A long low house of gray stone, with lamps in every window. A drive, lined with elms. Beyond the trees, a line of men on horseback, in blue and brass, with torches. At their head, on a tall gray, a younger man. His hair was dark. His face was lean and handsome and quite expressionless. He wore a charcoal coat. In his waistcoat pocket, a gold watch ticked.

He dismounted. He walked up the drive.

Viv felt the crowd draw in its breath.

She could not see their faces. She heard them. A ripple went across the city, from hill to harbor, like wind in wheat. They were seeing it in the sky. All of them. The Terrace and the Docks, in a single instant.

The man in the picture mounted the porch. A tall, lanky, dark-haired figure came to the door, in his shirt-sleeves, with a candle. A big slow-spoken man, with scarred hands. He was laughing at something over his shoulder. His wife stood behind him, in a blue shawl.

Tom, said the man in the charcoal coat. His voice, thin and distorted, came out of the sky like a bell under water. Thomas Aldridge. By order of the Council of Merrick Bay, you are charged with the possession of the Heart.

Augustus, said the big man, amused, tired. Don't be a fool.

The picture shuddered.

She would not describe the rest of it afterward, not to anyone. She would never be able to. It went on for a long time. The sky played it out in silence and flame: the torches, the door, the stair. A woman's voice, once, raised in a scream that cut off. A child's face at an upper window, nine years old, pale and wide-eyed, with a cane in his fist. And a man in a charcoal coat standing in the garden, in the heat of the fire, turning a gold watch over and over in his palm.

Not the boy, he said, to a soldier, quite calmly. Number Nine. There's a shaft. Put him down it. Tell the Archivist to take the mind.

He's a child, sir.

He is an Aldridge.

And then the picture changed, and showed another hall, another year, a council table, a ledger, a pen. A man in a charcoal coat signing his name, slowly, on a warrant for seven hundred and twelve children. Efficiency, he said. Mercy. A young woman in a gray dress screaming, as a hollow needle slid behind her ear. A priest with a ladle. A copper urn. A vast cold room with a black glass sphere in the middle, a crack in its side, and the same pale man laying his hand upon it and murmuring, in a low unhappy voice:

Take this too. Take it. I cannot carry it.

Viv stood in her ring of fire, and wept.

…

The cost came when she was not looking.

It crept up on her softly. She had been braced for pain. She had thought that when the toll fell due it would hurt, a sharp quick cut, a tearing. It did not. It was gentle as snow. It was a warmth at the edge of her mind, a lightness, and a faint, faraway sound.

Water.

She went still.

The wave of the memories was passing through her. Each one burned a little as it went by, a fine hot spark, a pinprick. She had thought she could bear that. She had felt a thousand. But there were so many. They were passing through her in a flood, and she realized, slowly, that every spark was taking something. A grain. A mote. A tiny irreplaceable piece of her own life, scraped off by the passing light and flung into the sky with the rest.

They are paying me, she thought. All of them. I'm the toll.

And then she saw what was going.

It came to her very clearly. She was standing on the black stone with her arms upraised, and in the silver glass in front of her the whole of her life ran by in a rush. The Wick Street room. The ledger. The garlic and bay leaf. The pianist with her cane. The back of a man's head at a window. A hand on a sleeve. A boy with a cane, counting in threes.

And at the very beginning, shining, small, a little girl in a shawl.

A deck. A cold gray dawn. A smell of salt, and tar, and wet rope. A voice in her ear. Guarda. Look.

The sea.

No, thought Viv.

She tried to hold it. She felt it slipping, not torn but loosened, like a thread drawn gently from a hem. The pearl-colored sky. The long gold bars of the sun. The blue. The loud, the vast, the endless blue. It was drifting away from her into the silver stream. It was going up with the rest, to light a sky for a stranger.

She could stop it.

She knew that, quite clearly. She could pull her hands down. She could break the ring. She would lose nothing more. She'd stand in the dark in a circle of cooling brass, and the memories would stop falling, and the sky would fade. And Dex would sing alone, to a Heart that could not carry it. And every child in the Archive would stay in the bottle.

Mama said, "Look."

I'm looking, Mama.

I'm looking. I'm looking. I'm—

She heard his voice, then. Far off, over the thunder, through twelve hundred pounds of brass and six hundred feet of sky. A thin cracked boy's voice, holding a note.

Wake now, little rattler.

He was singing. He was singing for her.

I'd rather lose the sea, thought Viv, than lose him.

She let it go.

…

She felt the exact moment it left.

There was no pain. There was a very small click, like a latch closing in another room. A tiny sigh. A sense of something enormous, bright, and blue passing out of her hands like a kite released on a long string. It rose. It rose. It was a speck. It was gone.

The column of light went on pouring.

She stood there until the last strand fell. It took a long time. The Heart's great beat slowed, and slowed, and began, by degrees, to quiet. The silver thinned. The gyre of light round the mirrors dwindled to a thread. The brass cooled. And over the Dome, through the oculus, at the edge of the dark moon, the first thin line of the returning sun lay along the sky like a drawn knife.

Her arms fell to her sides.

She opened her eyes.

For a moment she did not know where she was. The ring of mirrors stood round her, dull again, faintly warm. The air smelled of hot metal. Somewhere above her an organ-pipe shivered, a long way off, and was still. She was very tired. She was standing on a floor of black stone, and she could not remember what she had been looking at.

There had been something.

She reached for it, with a kind of puzzled tenderness, the way you reach for a word on the tip of the tongue. A thing she had always had. A thing so large that she had never thought of it as a thing at all. Something very blue. Something very loud. Something that was bigger than the room, and bigger than the sky, and had once, a long time ago, been hers.

She could not think what it was.

She put her hand to her chest. Her heart was beating.

Well, thought Viv. I am still standing here.

It was an odd thing to find comforting. But it was true. She was here. She had paid, and she was still here, and she could feel her own feet on the stone. Many people never got to say that.

She turned her face to the light.