The next chamber tried a new kind of joke: a mirror that wasn't a mirror. It was a tall, foggy sheet of glass stretched across the far wall of a perfectly square room. When I took a step inside, a pale outline of myself appeared in that fog—not my reflection, but just my bones and joints, like a chalk drawing made by someone who knew all my bad habits. As I breathed in, the drawing was still. As I breathed out, little red dots of light blinked on wherever my body was leaking the secret that I was about to move.
"That's rude," I told the wall.
Valeria hummed, a bright, dangerous sound along my forearm. "It's honest. Honesty is the knife you carry inside your pride."
Erebus tapped once on the pact-line. 'Proceed.'
