Chapter 3 Mirrors

The seam was a hairline crack in a shop window no larger than a thumbprint. Calder found it the way he found seams—by pressing where the world might, by habit, give. He slid a nail into the fissure and the street blinked away.

He arrived in a city of glass that smelled of lacquer and old perfume. Buildings rose like silvered cliffs; reflections multiplied until edges dissolved, and you could stand inside an idea and lose the shape of yourself. Alleys were lined with stalls where glassmakers sold looking-glasses that promised the face you deserved, mirrors that kept what you would give them, panes that remembered names you had not yet learned to hate. Light here came tempered, held back like breath.

The moth rode low against his sternum, its wings leaving a suit of other towns on the lining of his coat. He had kissed in a harbor and paid a price that echoed inside him like a missing bell. The city felt like another test: what would you trade to see yourself whole, and would seeing be the same as having?

The first mirror he passed did not show his face. It showed the small room he once slept in: plaster cracked where a fist had struck the wall, a sailor poster peeling at the corner, a wooden chair with a toothless smile carved into its back. He stepped close; his breath fogged the glass, and the tenderness it stirred nearly undid him.

He kept walking.

A vendor with fingers silver-stained leaned over a tray of hand-polished discs and offered Calder a palm-sized mirror wrapped in velvet. “This shows you what you are willing to lose,” the vendor said, smiling like someone who sold sorrow by weight.

Calder took it because curiosity had the same stubbornness as hunger, and because he told himself he could bargain better than most. The mirror’s surface breathed like water. For an instant he thought he saw the lost laugh bobbing under the glass like a gull; the image slipped and resolved into a cold pane that returned to his profile, precise and judging.

Mirrors here were not impartial. They asked and they took. In a shop on a quieter lane one mirror kept a marginal list of names; another offered a face without its earned marks, then, with mirror-cruelty, showed that face bearing someone else’s scars.

He found Liora among latticeworks of panes, a shop that smelled of paper and river mud. She arranged glass with small, exacting movements. The scar across her palm—thin as a dried creek—caught the streetlight when she turned. This time she was a keeper of mirrors: she polished rims with a rag so threadbare it folded around glass like a familiar hand.

“You find the loud ones first,” she said, half a smile at the corner of her mouth. Her voice scraped a place in him, he had not known was raw.

“You make it easy,” he said. She made nothing easy. She made moments precise and therefore more exacting.

Not only that, but she handed him a small mirror the color of old rain. When he looked, he saw himself bent over a table he had never known, hands stained with ink he had not yet spilled. Above his head, the moth loomed, pinned like a specimen. On the table lay a ledger whose handwriting might once have been his and might never belong to anyone. The vision was a ledger falling open: accounts arranging themselves.

“Mirrors collect,” Liora said. “They keep what we refuse to hold inside. They remember trades you thought you’d made in silence.” Her fingertip traced the frame as if reading Braille. “What would you trade to take something back?”

He thought of the laugh, the card his mother had pressed into his hand, the warmth that had bled out of him like water left on low heat. He imagined paying with a scar taken from his palm, a name surrendered to the sea. The question moved in him like something waiting to be fed.

Before he could answer, a woman in a shop across the street opened a pane and stepped out of her reflection as easily as stepping from one room to another. She moved with the simple confidence of someone who had surrendered enough to leave a lighter self behind; in the angle of her jaw there was the wrongness of someone who had traded too much. Liora watched her with a tightened expression.

“It pulls,” the mirror-woman said, voice like glass in a quiet room. “It takes what is not nailed down. You do not always know which part of you will wake missing.”

Her reflection remained in the frame like a passenger left on a platform. Liora’s fingers tightened on the rag. “They teach sinners here to call themselves saints,” she said. “They think if they can name the loss, they can own it like property.”

Calder folded that to the harbor’s jars in his mind—the careful lids, the neat slips of paper—and felt the seams stitch together: trade, balance, an economy of absence. He was a ledger in motion, a man who kept signing his own name in the blank spaces and promising, always, that the next line would be the end.

He carried a small, messy ledger in his inside pocket: receipts, scrawled numbers, a joke crossed out. Furthermore, he thought of adding the mirror’s vision to it and, with the practiced caution of someone who habitually cheats warning, laughed—a brittle sound—and set the disc back on the vendor’s tray.

“Not everything can be reclaimed,” Liora said first, blunt and unsoftened. Then, softer: “Not everything should be.”

He left the shop with the moth heavier against his chest, wings dusted like an old map. The city of mirrors slid behind him and folded shut with a sound like slow, polite applause. The seam narrowed to a chalk line beneath his shoe; the glass stitched back into the street. He walked on with two truths sharpening in him: every world wanted its due, and their ledgers had a way of reading him into a stranger.

At the corner he checked his hands; they looked the same—pale, careful, a little frayed at the nails. He pressed the bird-matchbox into his palm and felt its roughness. The moth stuttered and, for the first time since he had carried it, Calder wondered whose hands had last held such a creature and what they had given away to keep the memory of it.

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