After a strange reflection pulls Lena through the surface of a puddle, she enters the City of Mirrors, where a stranger seems to know exactly who she is.
Lena had spent years with the uneasy sense that the world was only a skin stretched thin over something vast and hidden. The feeling came hardest at three in the morning, when the dark pressed against her window and even her own breathing sounded out of place.
That night she was walking back alone after a long evening with friends on the old campus. The streets were empty, the lanterns casting amber pools over the wet cobblestones. Lena kept her eyes on the ground, on the broken reflections trembling in the puddles, when one of them flared with a cold, impossible light. She stopped.
In the water beside her shoe, her own reflection was gone. In its place was another street entirely, washed in blue light and lined with tall silver shapes that moved like people and did not quite look human. Lena crouched, holding her breath, and reached out. Her fingertips skimmed the surface as if it were a film drawn tight over deep water.
The ground gave way beneath her hand.
She sank in without a splash, dropping through layers of light and shadow while whispers brushed past her in languages she had never heard. Then, just as suddenly, her boots struck stone. She lurched forward, caught herself, and stared.
She stood in the middle of the City of Mirrors.
Towers of polished metal climbed into the dark, catching her image from a hundred angles and fracturing it into strangers. Narrow streets ran off between the buildings, alive with shifting reflections and moving silhouettes. Some of them looked almost familiar. Others made her skin tighten with warning.
A man stepped out of the shadow beside her, tall and severe in a long coat that seemed stitched from the city’s own darkness. His face was blurred by the glare of the walls around him, as if the light refused to settle on his features. He looked at Lena with unnerving certainty.
“I knew you would come one day,” he said. “Now it’s all up to you.”
Before Lena could speak, something shattered somewhere deep in the city. The sound rang out like breaking glass, sharp and far too close, and every reflection around her shivered at once.