The champagne was cold, which was a mistake, because the room was too hot and the air conditioning was humming a low, dying note that vibrated in the fillings of my teeth. We were celebrating the merger, or rather, the absorption, a polite word for the fact that our firm, a boutique consultancy with a history of quiet diligence, was being swallowed whole by a conglomerate that operated more...
The glass shattered. It did not break with a sound like a crash, but with a sigh, a long, thin exhalation that seemed to drain the air from the room. I stood in the center of the atelier, the shards of the great mirror scattered at my feet like frozen rain. My reflection was gone. Or rather, it was there, but fragmented, scattered, no longer whole. I looked down. My hands were trembling. They...
The glass was warm under my fingertips, a thin, trembling skin of silica that held the weight of the world without cracking, at least not yet. I stood in the center of the Grand Hall, the vaulted ceiling disappearing into the industrial haze of the gaslights above, and watched the liquid light shift across the surface of the artifact. It was not a map in the way the cartographers of the old...
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