Paris, 1893. The city breathed through its lungs like a living thing, exhaling fog from the Seine and inhaling the perfume of a thousand Parisian courtesans. Henri de Valls moved through it like a ghost, his aristocratic bearing the only thing that marked him as belonging to a world that was dying.

He was thirty-one, heir to a title that had lost its meaning, a fortune that had been siphoned away by men he had once called friends, and a mind that was slowly poisoning itself with questions that had no answers.

The first question came from a letter, slipped under his door on a Tuesday in March: "Your brother's death was not an accident. The answers lie with Le Miroir."

Henri's brother, Philippe, had been a minister in the Waldeck-Rousseau government. Three months ago, he had been found dead in his study, a revolver in his hand, a note on the desk that read: "I see everything, and it is too much."

Henri spent six months investigating. He discovered that Philippe had been compiling a dossier on a corruption network that reached from the Elysee Palace to the banks of London. He discovered that the dossier had been stolen. He discovered that three of Philippe's associates had died in "accidents" within six weeks of each other.

And then he discovered Le Miroir.

Le Miroir was not a machine. Henri had expected a machine—a massive computer, like the one he had read about in America, with gears and punch cards and humming tubes. Instead, he found something far more unsettling: a network.

Le Miroir was a group of approximately forty-seven people, scattered across Europe, each one an expert in a different field. Psychologists in Vienna who studied the suggestibility of crowds. Chemists in Zurich who designed compounds that altered mood and compliance. Mathematicians in Cambridge who developed algorithms for behavioral prediction. Journalists in Paris who controlled the flow of information.

Together, they formed a system that could predict—and influence—human behavior with extraordinary accuracy.

Henri found their headquarters in the basement of an abandoned theater in Montmartre. The man who received him was called "The Curator." He was middle-aged, bald, and wore a monocle that Henri was certain was purely decorative.

"Le Miroir is not what you think," the Curator said, pouring Henri a glass of absinthe that was so green it looked radioactive. "We do not control people. We suggest. We influence. We create conditions under which certain behaviors become more likely than others."

"That is control," Henri said.

"Is it?" The Curator smiled. "If I plant a rose seed in my garden, and it grows into a rose, have I controlled the rose? Or have I merely created the conditions under which a rose is more likely to grow than a weed?"

Henri drank the absinthe. It tasted like anise and sin.

The Curator showed him Le Miroir's most recent "garden." A series of psychological profiles, each one corresponding to a member of the French cabinet. The profiles predicted, with remarkable accuracy, how each minister would respond to various political pressures. "We feed these profiles to our journalists," the Curator explained. "They write articles that trigger specific responses. A minister reads an article that suggests his opponent is weak, and he overcompensates, making a rash decision. A minister reads an article that flatters his ego, and he becomes compliant. These are not mind control, M. de Valls. These are gardening."

Henri felt nauseous. "And Philippe? Did you garden him too?"

The Curator's smile faded. "Philippe was a tragedy. He discovered too much. And when a man discovers the mechanism of his own manipulation, he cannot unsee it. The mind cannot contain that knowledge and remain functional."

Henri left the basement and walked through the Parisian streets until dawn. The city was waking up, and the streets filled with the sound of shutters opening and milk carts rolling over cobblestones. He thought about the Curator's rose seed. He thought about Philippe's suicide note. He thought about his own investigation, his own hunger for truth.

And for the first time, he wondered: had he chosen to investigate his brother's death, or had Le Miroir chosen it for him?

He found the answer three weeks later, in a book he borrowed from the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was a psychology treatise from Vienna, and on page 247, the author described a phenomenon called "self-fulfilling suggestion": the tendency of human beings to act in ways that confirm the predictions made about them.

Henri sat down on a bench in the reading room and read the sentence three times. Then he closed the book and walked home.

On his desk, he found a new letter. It was written in the same handwriting as the first: "You are doing exactly what we predicted you would do. Welcome to the garden."

Henri picked up a pen and wrote, on the back of the letter: "Then predict this."

He burned the letter in his fireplace and watched the ashes rise like black butterflies. Outside, Paris breathed its thousand-breathed breath, and Le Miroir continued its work, planting rose seeds in the gardens of human hearts, knowing that roses would grow, knowing that roses would die, knowing that the garden had no end.