Page 59 of Hemlock & Silver
Javier looked at me, then away, a smile ghosting across his lips. Even that lit up his face and made him briefly handsome. “Yes,” he admitted. “It’s pretty amazing.”
I could feel myself beaming.
After a long moment, he asked, “Do you really think the whole world is in here? If we walked to Four Saints, would we find the whole city empty like this?”
Empty except for gray people clustered around the mirrors, I thought, but didn’t say. “I think it’s likely.”
“Couldn’t it just be this building?” I detected a plaintive note in his voice. As calm as Javier seemed, apparently the idea of an entire mirror-world was a lot to take in.
“Afraid not. I went outside earlier, and the desert’s there.”
“And it looks like…?” He swept his arm in a broad arc, indicating the cold, gray galleries. “All of it?”
“Yeah. And there’s the apple, too.”
“Eh?”
“The apple had to come from somewhere. I didn’t find any in the kitchen, so where did Snow get it?”
“Maybe one of the people in the king’s retinue brought an apple here and she got hold of it somehow?” He shrugged. “If all mirror-food has the same effect, then it could have been anything, couldn’t it? A mirror-sandwich would work just as well.”
“Y-e-e-e-s…” I said slowly. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, but I hada feeling there was more to it than that. Gut feelings aren’t very scientific, but they’re often the result of a lot of observations that you don’t know that you’re making, so I wasn’t ready to discount mine entirely. Still, I didn’t have any way to argue the point.
Javier lapsed back into brooding silence for a few moments, then seemed to come to some decision. “I’m on shift in half an hour,” he said. “How can we find out if an assassin could come through any mirror in the villa?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “We’ll test it in my washroom.” I pushed open the door to my mirror-bedroom and waved in the direction of the washroom. “I’ll go out into the real world. You put your hand through the mirror in there, and if it comes through, I’ll see it, and we’ll know it works.”
He nodded. I stepped out of the silver and was slightly relieved to see that no one else had turned up in the interim. Explaining everything to Javier was draining, and he didn’t seem nearly as thrilled by it as I was.
I heaved a sigh.Nobody’s ever excited by the right things,I thought mournfully.
Javier’s reflection was already in the washroom mirror. I turned and looked over my shoulder involuntarily, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. The reflex was just too strong. Like just this morning, when I had taken a bath and seen someone, and turned—
Except there wasn’t anyone there that time. It was a trick of the light. Not everything you see out of the corner of your eye is real.
I stepped to one side so my mirror-self wouldn’t be blocking the looking glass on the other side. If Javier had to jostle my gray shadow reflection out of the way in the mirror-world, I wasn’t sure what would happen to me here. One experiment at a time.
He reached toward the mirror, and for a moment nothing happened. I pointed to my face and closed my eyes. I opened them again in time to see him close his eyes and push his hand forward.
His fingers emerged from the glass.
“It worked!” I said. I reached out and clasped his hand, giving it a quick squeeze.
His eyes snapped open again. An expression crossed his face for just a moment, but long enough for me to drop his hand as if I’d been burned.
Disgust. It had been pure, lip-curling disgust. He hid it quickly, pulling his hand back, but I’d seen enough. Through the mirror, Javier had looked like a man standing knee-deep in pig shit.
What the hell was that? I squeezed his hand, I didn’t kiss it. It was friendly, that was all.
I mean, yes, fine, I had been excited to share the mirror-world with him. And sure, it’s hard to stay stiff and professional with someone who has draped a bathrobe around you while you’re sick and who immediately jumps between you and a perceived threat. And maybe I was secretly glad that it had been Javier who found me out, because he kept his mouth shut and, let’s face it, wasn’t bad looking. But I’d barely moved to theoh, hmm, you’re interesting, aren’t you?stage of attraction. I wasn’t expecting him to fall to his knees and swear undying fealty to me. I would have been horribly embarrassed if he had. But he didn’t need to look so revolted that I’d touched him.
Javier emerged from the main mirror a moment later. “It worked, then,” he said.
I nodded coolly, not trusting myself to speak.
He was holding one hand up, palm cupped. “I found something odd on the floor,” he said. “I think it may be from the real world.”
Surprise loosened my voice. “Oh? What is it?”
