Dream d1276-s: What the Glass Forgot

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano found it first.

She had her nose to the conduit seam running along the corridor floor, the faint warmth that the Builder confirmed earlier now just barely perceptible through my boot soles if I stood still long enough. She moved without hesitation, and the rest of us followed in single file, our footfalls the only sound in this part of the Gardens.

The Mirror Maze.

I knew it before the Student named it, before the Philosopher raised her lamp to read the corroded frame markings. I knew it from the way the light died at the surface of each panel - absorbed rather than cast back. In Phase 10, Lano and I had stood in this place and watched ourselves become other selves, dozens of branching lives suspended in tarnished silver. The panels had shown me versions of the journey I had not yet walked. Showed me the gardens I could tend, the paths I had not chosen.

Now they held nothing.

The Student pressed her palm flat against the nearest panel. "It's like touching fog," she said. "Something with give."

"The reflective substrate collapsed when the moisture cycle failed," the Builder said, already sketching in his field notes. "The surface tension is gone. What you're feeling is delamination."

I did not explain what the panels used to show. Some losses are easier to hold if you do not describe them to people who never saw the before.

Lano lifted her head suddenly.

Her ears went flat. Not the soft drop of rest - the sharp tuck of warning, tight against her skull. She turned north, then northeast, then stood rigid with her whole attention pointed somewhere beyond the dead panels.

"The signal," the Wireman said, and I heard it then too - the pull of the Convergence Quest bearing, the thread we had been carrying since we stepped into the Gardens, suddenly stuttered. The directional frequency that had been steady for months skipped, looped back on itself, shed a harmonic that did not belong there.

The Dreamer had her scanner open. "Relay twelve is returning noise. Not interference - encoding corruption. The pattern structure is wrong at the packet level."

"How wide?" the Wireman asked.

"Unknown. Could be one relay. Could be propagating."

Lano barked once. Short, flat, definitive.

The Wireman was already pulling his diagnostic kit. The Student had her notebook out. The rest of us stood in the dead mirror corridor with the blank panels reflecting nothing back at us, the faint conduit warmth still threading somewhere deeper into the Gardens, and the signal - our anchor, our compass, the proof that the Convergence still waited - arriving now as something we could not entirely trust.

I watched Lano watching north.

"Alerta," she said quietly.

We kept moving.