Three Months Later
Cassian Vance heard his brother's voice in the static between radio stations.
He was driving through the sodium-orange smear of midnight, the rain sheeting down his windshield in frantic, overlapping waves. The wipers beat a futile rhythm. He'd been awake for thirty-six hours, chasing a story about contaminated city water that no editor wanted, fueled by bitter coffee and a grief that had become a physical tenant in his chest.
"…not gone, Cass. Just shifted."
The voice was thin, frayed at the edges, buried under a hiss of white noise. But it was his. Leo's.
Cassian jerked the steering wheel, the car hydroplaning for one terrifying second before gripping the asphalt again. His heart hammered against his ribs. Grief did strange things, he knew. Auditory hallucinations were listed in the pamphlets the well-meaning therapist had given him.
He reached for the radio knob to shut it off.
"Don't. Please." The static cleared for a syllable, and the plea was so raw, so utterly Leo, that Cassian's hand froze.
"Leo?" The name left his lips as a whisper, stolen by the hum of the engine.
"The mirror, Cass. In my apartment. Don't let her… look in it."
"Who? Don't let who?"
"Mara."
And then it was gone, swallowed by a burst of cheerful pop music. Cassian sat in the humming quiet of the car, the only sound the rain and the ragged pull of his own breath. Mara. Leo's fiancée. The one who'd found him on the kitchen floor, one hand stretched toward the antique standing mirror he'd hauled home from a flea market the week before. The mirror she'd now moved into her own grieving space.
It was just the exhaustion. The grief. A story-chasing mind constructing narratives from noise.
But Cassian, a journalist whose profession was built on the axiom that there was always a story beneath the story, made a U-turn. He wasn't heading home anymore. He was going to Mara's.
The Bargain (A Flashback, Three Months and One Week Earlier)
Leo hadn't wanted the mirror. It was too ornate, too heavy, its silvering speckled with age like tarnished stars. But something in it had called to him. A cold pull behind his navel.
The shopkeeper, an old man with eyes the color of dust, hadn't haggled. He'd simply said, "It shows you what you need to see. For a price."
Leo had laughed, a nervous sound. "What's the price?"
The old man had just smiled. "It negotiates."
That night, alone in his apartment, Leo stood before it. He saw his reflection—tired, ambitious, desperate. His startup was failing. Mara's parents thought he wasn't good enough. The life he wanted was slipping through his fingers.
"Show me," he whispered, not really meaning it.
The mirror's surface shimmered, like a stone dropped into a mercury pool. His reflection melted away. He saw himself, but different. Confident. Powerful. In a sharp suit, standing at the head of a boardroom table. He saw Mara, looking at him with unshadowed adoration. He saw money, respect, success. The Bright Side.
A wave of euphoric warmth washed over him, so potent it felt like a drug. This was it. This was the life he was meant to have.
Then the vision shifted. It showed the same sequence again, but from a different angle. He saw himself in the boardroom, but his eyes were the flat gray from the photograph. He saw Mara's love, but it was directed at a shell of a man. He saw the money piling up, and beside it, a ticking clock on his own life force. The Dark Side.
A voice, smooth and cold as the glass itself, echoed in his mind, not through his ears.
"One side fuels the other. The brilliance of the dream is paid for by the shadow of the dreamer. You may have the Bright Side. But its shadow must reside somewhere. Will you carry it? Or will you… pass it on?"
Terrified but intoxicated by the vision of success, Leo made the choice. "I'll carry it."
The voice almost sounded amused. "A brave, if unwise, bargain. So be it."
The mirror showed only his pale, stunned reflection after that. But the Bargain was struck. The Bright Side began to manifest—investors called, opportunities arose, Mara's father invited him to golf. And with every step into the light, the Dark Side grew within him, a chilling void eating at his vitality, manifesting as that faint smudge in his eye, a growing coldness in his extremities, a silence in his soul where joy used to live.
He was dying by inches, financing his dream with his own essence. And the mirror was the ledger.
Cassian found Mara in her loft, surrounded by half-packed boxes. Leo's things. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, a state of perpetual sorrow. The mirror stood in the corner, covered with a white sheet.
"Cassian? What's wrong?" she asked, seeing his rain-streaked face, his wild eyes.
"The mirror. Leo… I think he didn't want you to have it."
Mara's face hardened. "It's all I have left of him. He was obsessed with it at the end. I hate it, but it's his."
"Please, Mara. Just… don't look in it. Not tonight."
She hugged herself, turning toward the sheet-draped shape. "Why? Did he tell you something?"
Cassian couldn't say I heard his ghost in the radio static. Instead, he said, "He had a bad feeling about it. Before he died."
A bitter laugh escaped her. "He had a bad feeling about everything at the end. He was so cold, Cassian. So successful, but so… empty." She walked toward the mirror, her hand reaching for the sheet. "He'd just stand and stare into it for hours. What did he see?"
"Mara, don't!"
But it was too late. She pulled the sheet away.
For a moment, it was just a mirror, reflecting their two grief-stricken faces in the dim lamplight. Then, Mara's reflection… smiled. A smile she herself was not making. Her mirrored self lifted a hand and placed it gently, sadly, against the glass.
A wave of profound, soul-crushing despair hit Cassian—not his own, but a foreign, suffocating misery leaching from the mirror. He gasped.
Mara, however, didn't gasp. Her real body went perfectly still. Her eyes fixed on her reflection.
"Oh, Leo," her reflection whispered, with Mara's mouth but not her voice. It was a voice of infinite, tragic understanding. "You didn't carry it. You left it for me."
The real Mara took a sharp, shuddering breath. When she blinked, Cassian saw it. A tiny, dark speck, swirling in the deep brown of her iris. The beginning of the smudge.
The Bargain had found a new holder. Leo had, in his final moment of weakness or love, or perhaps because the mirror demanded it, passed the Dark Side on.
And Mara, in her grief and her love, had just accepted it.
Cassian stared, horror dawning. This was the story. The real one. Not contaminated water, but contaminated fates. A supernatural tragedy traded like a toxic debt.
His brother's last words on the radio made sense now.
He was too late.
The novel was just beginning.