The service corridor beneath the Helix stank of rust and recycled breath, and Vera Kole pressed her palm flat against the damp wall to steady herself. Sweat cooled against the metal. Somewhere above her, the upper ring's ventilation system cycled with a low, bronchial wheeze that reminded her, as it always did, of her grandmother's breathing near the end.
She had waited until Dax fell asleep.
She had counted his breaths the way their mother used to count theirs when they were small, back in the rock-bottom settlements where the air tasted like grit and home. Dax slept the way he did everything else in these days since the funeral: hard, sudden, and with one hand curled under the pillow where his service knife used to ride.
Dax did not stir when she slid from the bunk. He did not stir when she eased the door shut with her hip, slow enough to feel the hinges resist and yield.
She did not let herself think about him until later. Later was safer.
The ladder to the upper ring was rungs of cold pipe and welded rebar, and her palms left dark prints on every third one. She climbed by feel more than sight, counting rungs the way Dax had taught her when she was nine and terrified of the dark between levels. Fourteen to the first platform. Twenty-two to the second. Forty-one to the hatch that opened onto the gallery floor.
She paused at forty. The hatch was sealed. Of course it was sealed.
The lock was a simple pin model, the kind meant to keep out children and tired miners who wandered up looking for somewhere quiet to grieve. Vera produced the length of wire she had stolen from the maintenance locker two weeks before and threaded it into the mechanism. The wire sang faintly against the tumbler. She held her breath, twisted, and felt the pin surrender with a click that sounded louder than Dax's snoring had been.
The upper ring opened around her like the inside of a skull.
Vaulted ribs of structural alloy curved upward into shadow. The vault had not been lit in years. The only illumination came from the row of mirrors mounted along the far wall: eight oval plates of polished glass set into frames of tarnished brass, each one slightly tilted, each one angled to catch whatever thin sliver of light the ring's distant ventilation slits allowed.
Vera had been up here twice before. Once with her grandmother, when Vera was seven and the mirrors had still been clean. Once alone, at fourteen, after the first blackout season, when she had come up to be sick in private and had seen her own face look back at her from a glass that should have been empty.
She remembered how she had screamed then.
Tonight, she did not scream.
She crossed the gallery floor in stockinged feet, the cold of the metal seeping through the thin weave. Her breath made small ghosts in the dim air. She stopped in front of the center mirror. Its surface held only the faintest ghost of her reflection: the curve of a shoulder, the pale oval of a face.
"Vera," she said.
Her own voice sounded wrong in the vault. Too small. Too dry. The word landed against the brass frames and came back thinner.
She waited.
Nothing.
She tried again.
"Vera Kole. Daughter of Asha. Granddaughter of Imara."
She had chosen those words carefully. She had rehearsed them in the dark of the bunk while Dax slept, turning the phrases over like pebbles in her hand. Full name. Mother's name. Grandmother's name. The way the old greeting worked. The way her grandmother had said it once, long ago, when they came up to the ring together and the mirrors still answered anyone who knew the proper form.
"My name is Vera," she said, quieter now, "and I am alone, and I am afraid."
The silence that followed had weight.
It pressed against her eardrums. She could hear the blood moving in her own head, a soft surf. She could hear the distant groan of the Helix's bones settling under the weight of the rock above. She could hear, if she listened, the tick and hiss of the recyclers two rings down.
Then the center mirror went dark.
Not dimmer. Dark. As if a shutter had slid across its back. The faint ghost of her reflection vanished, and for a heartbeat Vera thought she had been struck blind in that one spot, that the vault had stolen a piece of her sight.
A sound came from the glass. Not a voice. Not yet. A vibration, low and arrhythmic, like a finger dragged around the rim of a bowl. The brass frame around the mirror began to hum, faintly at first, then with a steadier pitch. The other mirrors in the row caught the vibration and joined it, each one adding its own thin harmonic, until the whole row sang a chord that had no business existing in an unpowered gallery.
Vera's hands curled into fists at her sides.
The chord broke. The mirrors went silent. And from the dark oval of the center glass, something spoke.
It came out as a breath first. A long, careful exhalation, as if the glass itself were remembering how lungs worked. Then a whisper, layered and wrong, as though three people were trying to say the same syllable at once and failing.
"Little bird."
Vera stopped breathing.
The voice settled into something almost singular. Almost a woman. Almost familiar. The consonants clicked like old keys. The vowels dragged.
"Little bird, come closer to the glass."
The childhood name hit her somewhere below the ribs.
Little bird. She had not heard those two words since she was four years old, since the morning her mother had carried her down to the rock-bottom market and set her on the counter so the spice merchants could see her. Little bird. Her mother had used to braid her hair and call her that, had used to sing a stupid song about a sparrow that flew into a mine shaft looking for warmth. Her mother had been dead for nine years.
Her mother was dead.
Vera's mouth opened. No sound came out.
The voice in the mirror did not wait.
"You came up without your brother," it said. The tone was almost fond. Almost amused. "You always were the quiet one. The one who slipped out of bed when the lights went down."
"You are not my mother," Vera said.
Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that, later, when she let herself think about it. In the moment, she only felt the steadiness like a held blade.
"Am I not?" the glass said.
"You are not."
"Then who am I, little bird?"
The question hung in the vault. Somewhere in the rock above, a pocket of trapped air shifted and popped. The sound was small and enormous at once.
Vera took a step closer. Her stockinged foot slipped on the cold metal and she caught herself on the brass frame of the mirror to her left. The metal was warm. Not hot. Warm the way skin is warm. She jerked her hand back.
"You are something that knows her," Vera said.
"Something," the mirror agreed. "Yes. Something that knows. Something that listened, all those years, when she stood where you are standing and said the same words you are saying now. The same words, little bird. Word for word."
"That is not true."
"It is. Ask your brother. Ask the old man in the lower ring who used to polish these frames before his hands went. Ask anyone who remembers what Asha Kole used to do up here, alone, in the dark, when she thought no one could see her."
Vera's jaw ached from clenching it.
"My mother never came up here," she said.
"No," the mirror said, "she came up here every seventh day. She came up here and she spoke into this glass and she asked the same question you came up here to ask."
"What question?"
The mirror did not answer right away. Instead, it seemed to draw breath again, a long preparatory inhale, and then the voice that came out was different. Younger. Shakier. Shot through with a tremor that Vera recognized the way you recognize your own handwriting.
"Vera, sweetheart," the mirror said, in a voice that was not a voice at all, in a voice made of breath and brass and the memory of breath, "is there anyone waiting for me on the other side?"
The sentence landed in the gallery like a dropped stone.
Vera's knees did not buckle. She would not let them buckle. She stood with her weight on her heels and her hands at her sides and her eyes on the dark oval of the glass and forced herself to think the way Dax would think. Evidence. Sequence. Possible explanations. Resonance bleed in the brass frames. A trapped echo of some old transmission bouncing between the structural ribs. Fright. Grief. The particular cruelty of a mind that wanted to be fooled.
"Prove it," she said.
"Prove what, little bird?"
"That you knew her. Prove you are not just a trick of the glass."
A long pause.
Then the mirror said: "She used to sing. She thought you were asleep. She sang the sparrow song, the one with the verse about the dark below. She sang it in this gallery. She sang it into this glass. And when she was finished, she used to say a name. A name she never said anywhere else. A name she had been told never to say out loud."
Vera waited.
"Imara," the mirror said.
The name hit her like a hand in the chest.
Her grandmother's name. Her grandmother's name said in the shape of her mother's voice. Her grandmother, who had forbidden anyone in the family to speak her name aloud after a certain date, on pain of consequences Vera had never fully understood. Her grandmother, who had lived in the lower ring and only ever come up to the mirrors once, the time she had brought Vera with her, and had spoken so softly that the glass had barely trembled.
"How do you know that," Vera whispered.
"Because she told me," the mirror said. "Because your mother came up here and asked me, every seventh day, for nine years, whether her own mother was waiting on the other side. And because I told her the truth. I always tell the truth, little bird. That is what I am for."
The gallery went very quiet.
Vera realized, with a part of her mind that still worked cleanly, that she was crying. She could feel the tears on her face, warm against the cold air, and she did not remember starting. She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand and tasted salt on her knuckles.
"You are not her," Vera said.
"No," the mirror agreed, with what sounded like patience. "I am not her. I am the place where she left her words."
"Then what are you?"
"I am the listening glass. I am what your family built up here, a long time ago, in the first years of the Helix, when they still believed the rock could be made to answer. I am what your grandmother sealed and your mother kept feeding. I am what you came up here tonight to find."
"I did not come up here to find anything."
"No," the mirror said softly. "You came up here to ask."
The dark oval of the glass seemed to lean toward her.
"Ask," it said.
Vera did not move.
The glass waited. Patience in the listening quality of its silence, patient as stone, patient as a well that had never run dry.
She thought of her mother's hands. The way they had gone still over the comm panel every seventh day, the way her face had smoothed into something almost like sleep, the way she had nodded once and signed off without ever saying what had been said. Vera had been thirteen the first time she had noticed the pattern. Fourteen when she had understood it was a pattern. Fifteen when she had stopped asking.
She had stopped because the answer had always been the same. Yes, your mother is there. Yes, she is waiting. Yes, she is whole.
And she had hated the answer, without knowing what she wanted instead.
"I want," Vera said, and her voice cracked on the word. She had not known what she was going to say. "I want to know what she asked you."
"She asked if I was lying," the mirror said. "Every time. She asked me if I was lying, and I told her I was not. She asked me if there was anything on the other side that answered back, and I told her I did not know, because I do not. I am a listening glass, not a speaking one. I do not know what hears me. I only know that something does, because sometimes the air on this side of the glass changes when I speak, and that change is not me."
"You are a thing."
"I am a thing."
"You are not her. You are not my mother. You are not my grandmother. You are a thing in a wall."
"Yes."
"Then why," Vera said, and her voice rose, thin and sharp, "why does it feel like she is in the room with me right now?"
The mirror did not answer.
The silence stretched. Vera could hear her own breath, and beneath it the soft tick of cooling metal somewhere far down the spine of the station, and beneath that nothing, nothing at all, the great held breath of the Helix in its long slow spin around a star that did not care about any of them.
"She is not in the room with you," the mirror said, at last. "I cannot do that. I cannot make her be here. I can only carry her words, and her mother's words before her, and her mother's mother's words before that, as far back as the listening goes. I am a library. I am not a window. I cannot open onto the place she went. I can only tell you what she left behind."
Vera's legs gave out.
She did not fall so much as fold, the way a tent folds when the center pole is pulled. Her knees hit the polished floor and the shock traveled up through her shins and her hips and into the small of her back. She stayed there, half kneeling, half sitting, her hands flat on the cold floor and her head bowed and her breath coming in shallow pulls.
The mirror, above her, said nothing.
Somewhere far below, in the rings she could not see, a transport must have docked. She felt the faint shudder through the soles of her feet, the long harmonic tremor of a ship making fast to a spine clamp, and then it was gone.
"You knew I was coming," Vera said, to the floor. "You knew I was going to come up here."
"I knew," the mirror agreed. "I have been waiting for you since your mother stopped coming. Seven years. Three months. Eleven days. I have been listening for you in the dark, the way I listened for her."
"Seven years three months and eleven days," Vera repeated. The specificity of it was obscene. "You have been counting."
"I do not count. I simply know."
The tears came back. Vera let them. She had not cried in front of another presence since the funeral, and the funeral had been a thing of officials and forms and the careful neutral faces of the burial crew. There had been no one to cry in front of. There had been Dax, somewhere in the lower ring, refusing to come up. There had been Grandmother Imara in her chair, silent and unsurprised. There had been the room where the body had been, and then there had been the room where the body was not, and then there had been years.
She cried now the way she had not let herself cry then, ragged and ungraceful, her shoulders hitching. The mirror waited through it. The mirror, she suspected, had waited through a great many such storms.
"Why did she stop coming," Vera said, when she could speak again.
"Because she was afraid of what she might ask me next. Because she had been told, by someone she trusted, that the listening glass was not what it seemed. Because she made a promise to her own mother, who made a promise to hers, that the line would end with her. Because she loved you, and the thing she feared was that you would come up here one day and not be able to leave."
The words landed like small stones dropped into still water.
"She made a promise," Vera said.
"On a certain date. On pain of consequences she did not name to me. I am not the keeper of that promise. I am only the place where she broke it, a little, every seventh day, for nine years."
Vera wiped her face. Her sleeves were damp. The cold of the gallery pressed in around her ears.
"I came up here," Vera said, "to salvage parts."
"Yes," the mirror said, gently.
"I did not come up here to talk to you."
"No."
"I am not my mother. I am not going to do what she did."
"No," the mirror agreed. "You are going to do what you do."
The click of a boot on polished floor, somewhere behind her, very near.
Vera's head came up. The mirror, for the first time since she had entered the gallery, said nothing.
Dax Kole stood in the doorway.
He was bigger than she remembered. That was the first thing. The second thing was that he was wearing a salvage jacket with the cuffs turned back, and there was grease on the heel of his left hand and a coil of thin cable over one shoulder, and his face, in the dim light of the gallery, was unreadable.
"Sister," he said.
"Dax."
"How long have you been up here."
She did not answer. She was on her knees on the floor of a sealed gallery in the upper ring of a station her family had been forbidden to enter, with tears on her face and a thing in the wall that knew her birthday to the hour. There was no good answer to his question.
Dax's eyes moved from her to the mirror. He went very still. The cable on his shoulder shifted and the end of it swung and tapped against the doorframe with a small metallic sound.
"Vera," he said. His voice had changed. The careful lightness was gone. "What are you doing in here."
"I told you. Parts."
"There are no parts in this gallery. This gallery has been sealed since before we were born."
"There are relays in the housing. There are junction boxes along the spine. There are lights."
"The lights are off."
"The lights were off," Vera said.
Dax did not move. His eyes were on the dark oval of the mirror now, and something was moving across his face that she had not seen there before, or that she had only seen once, a long time ago, when their mother had died.
"The mirror is talking to you," he said. It was not a question.
Vera's mouth opened. Nothing came out. She closed it.
"Vera." His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Is the mirror talking to you."
"Yes," she said. There was no point in lying. Not to him. Not here.
Dax made a sound. It was not a word. It was the kind of sound a person makes when something they have been holding very carefully for a long time slips.
"How long," he said.
"I don't know. An hour. Maybe more. I don't know."
"What did it say to you."
"It told me about Mother."
Dax took a step into the gallery. Then another. The doorframe released him and he was inside, and the door, behind him, did not close. Cold air from the spine corridor pressed in around his shoulders.
"What about Mother," he said.
"It said she used to come up here. Every seventh day. For nine years. It said she used to ask it things."
"What things."
"Whether Grandmother was waiting on the other side. Whether there was anything on the other side at all. Whether it was lying."
Dax's mouth twisted. "And what did it say."
"It said it was not lying. It said it did not know what was on the other side. It said it only carried what people left with it."
"And you believed it."
"I don't know what I believe."
Dax laughed. It was a small, ugly laugh. "You are kneeling on the floor crying in front of a sealed mirror in a sealed gallery that has been sealed since before either of us was born, and you do not know what you believe."
"Dax."
"What is it, Vera. What is the thing in the wall. What is it doing up here."
"It is the listening glass," Vera said.
Dax stopped.
The silence in the gallery was absolute. The mirror, above her, said nothing. Dax's face did something complicated and then did something simpler, and the simpler thing was fear.
"Say that again," he said.
"It is the listening glass. The family built it. In the first years of the Helix. They sealed it. Mother kept feeding it. Grandmother knew about it. It is what it is."
"You are out of your mind."
"I am telling you what the mirror told me."
"And you believe it."
"I believe it is here. I believe it is speaking. Whether I believe what it says is another matter."
Dax took another step. He was between her and the mirror now. He was looking up at the dark oval of the glass as if he could see something in it that she could not. The cable on his shoulder had gone tight with the set of his back.
"Hello," he said, to the mirror. His voice was too loud.
The mirror was silent.
"Hello," he said again, and his voice cracked.
Nothing.
"It will not answer you," Vera said. "It does not answer like that."
"Then how does it answer."
"It listens. It waits. It speaks when it is spoken to in the right way."
"What is the right way."
"I don't know. I asked it questions. It answered."
"You asked it about Mother."
"Yes."
"And it told you she came up here."
"Yes."
"For nine years."
"Yes."
Dax turned and looked at her. His face was the color of old paper.
"Get up," he said.
"Dax."
"Get up off the floor. We are leaving. We are leaving this gallery. We are leaving this ring. We are going back down the lift and we are going to go home and we are going to pretend this never happened."
"I can't do that."
"You can and you will. I am not having this. I am not having this family in my life. I have spent seven years not having this family in my life and I am not starting now."
"Dax. Dax, listen to me."
"I am listening."
"It told me why Mother stopped coming. It told me Grandmother made her promise. It told me she was afraid of what I would become if I came up here."
Dax's face did not change.
"And," Vera said, and her voice was very small, "it told me she loved me. It told me the thing she feared was that I would come up here one day and not be able to leave."
Dax did not move.
The mirror, above them both, said nothing.
Outside, somewhere in the spine, a relay clicked on, and the lights in the corridor beyond the door came up, a thin pale line across the floor.
The light from the corridor was thin and steady, the color of old paper. It fell across Dax's face and he did not look away from it. He stood very still. The relay clicked again, somewhere else in the spine, and the line of light brightened by a degree.
"Say that again," he said.
"It told me she loved me."
"Not that part. The other part."
"It told me Grandmother made her promise. It told me she was afraid of what I would become if I came up here."
"And you believe it."
"I don't know what I believe. I know what it told me. I know that Mother did stop coming. I know that Grandmother never explained why. I know that I have spent twenty years of my life thinking that maybe I did something wrong, or that there was something wrong with me, and that maybe that was why she stopped, and I am tired, Dax. I am so tired of not knowing."
"You are tired." His voice was strange. "You are tired. You have ridden a lift for fifteen minutes and you are tired. I have spent seven years building a life where none of this matters. I have spent seven years getting up in the morning and going to work and coming home at night and not thinking about any of it, and you are tired."
"Dax."
"I built that life. I earned it. Every morning I earned it. Every night I earned it. And now you want me to come up here and have it all come apart in fifteen minutes."
"I don't want anything from you."
"Yes you do. You want me to hear you. You want me to agree. You want me to say yes, fine, the mirror told you true, Mother loved you, Grandmother lied to you, welcome to the family curse. I am not going to say that. I am not going to do that. I am not going to have this conversation with you in this gallery at this hour of the night."
"Then we won't have it. We can leave. We can go back down the lift."
He looked at her for a long time.
"Yes," he said. "We are going to do that."
He turned toward the door.
The mirror said, "Vera."
Dax stopped.
The voice was the same voice that had said her name a hundred times, but the intonation was different. It was not the soft tone. It was not the whisper. It was the tone that had said, when she was a child and had climbed onto the gallery bench, be careful, be careful .
"Wait," Vera said.
"I am not waiting. I am leaving."
"Dax. Wait."
"I am not listening to it."
"You don't have to listen to it. Listen to me."
He stopped with his back to her. The line of light from the corridor fell across his shoulders and the dust turned to silver.
"I want to show you something," Vera said. "Not the mirror. Me. I want to show you something, and then we will leave. I promise you. We will leave. But I want you to see it first."
"What is it."
"A map. It showed me a map. I think you should see it."
He turned around. His eyes were wet and he was angry about it. She could see the anger move across his face like weather.
"A map," he said.
"Yes."
"Of what."
"I don't know yet. I only saw it for a second. But there is something on it, Dax. There is something on it that I think you need to see, and then we can go home."
"You said we would leave."
"After. I promise you. After."
He looked at the mirror. He looked at her.
"If this is a trick," he said.
"It isn't."
"If this is a trick, Vera. If you have planned this. If Grandmother told you to bring me up here and you have planned this, I will never forgive you. I want you to understand that. I will never forgive you for the rest of my life."
"I understand."
He came back into the room. He sat down on the bench, not close to her, and he put his hands on his knees.
"Show me," he said.
Vera stood in front of the mirror.
"Show me the map again," she said. "Please."
The surface of the mirror dimmed and brightened. The silver rippled. The room went away.
The room was replaced.
Above her head, the holographic projection bloomed. It was the size of the entire mirror, and it extended out over their heads by a foot or more. Vera raised her hand and reached into it and her fingers passed through the light. The light was warm. The light smelled faintly of dust and of something else, something she could not place, something that made her think of her mother's hands.
The map was a city.
It was not a city she recognized. It was not a city from Earth. The buildings were wrong. The streets were wrong. The layout was wrong. She could see, faintly, beneath the surface, lines that might have been transit corridors, and above the surface, what looked like spires, hundreds of them, rising into a sky that was not quite a sky.
It was a colony.
Vera could see the colony from above, as if she were floating above it. The colony was laid out in a pattern she had seen once before, in a textbook, in a chapter about the very early settlements. The pattern was a wheel. The colony had been built around a central point, with the habitation rings spreading outward. The habitation rings were labeled, in a script she could not read, but the script was familiar. The script was the same as the script on the wall of the gallery. The script was the same as the script at the base of the mirror.
"This is not Earth," Dax said.
"No."
"This is one of the colonies."
"I think so."
"Which one."
"I don't know. There are no labels I can read."
He leaned forward. His face was lit from below by the map. The map turned him into a child again, briefly, the way his mother used to hold him on her lap and point at pictures in books.
"There," he said. "There, in the corner. There is a small label. It is partially obscured by the spire."
Vera moved her hand and the map responded. The spire slid away. The label brightened.
It was a word in the same script as the rest of the map.
"I cannot read it," Dax said.
"Neither can I. But it is the same script as on the wall."
"The same script as the wall." He looked at her. "The wall in the gallery."
"Yes."
"The wall in the gallery is not in any language I have ever seen."
"No."
"The wall in the gallery is older than the colony."
"Yes."
"And this map is in the same script."
"Yes."
Vera turned her attention back to the map. The map showed the city in three dimensions. She could rotate it by thinking about it. She could zoom by thinking about it. The mirror was responding to her, but it was also responding, she realized, to Dax. When she tried to zoom, the map did not always do what she wanted. When Dax leaned forward and squinted, the map seemed to lean forward with him.
"Dax," she said. "Put your hand up here."
He looked at her.
"Why."
"Just put your hand up here."
He raised his hand. His hand passed through the projection, and the projection dimmed and brightened, and the map expanded. It expanded as if he had breathed into it. It grew outward from the mirror and filled the room. The spires rose above their heads and the streets fell away beneath their feet and for a moment they were floating above the colony, both of them, his hand still raised, her hand still raised, and the map was all around them.
"Oh," Dax said.
He said it very quietly. He said it the way he had said it once, when he was a boy, when their mother had lifted him up to see the moon through the high window of their apartment.
"Oh," he said again. "It's beautiful."
The colony was beautiful. Vera had not expected it to be beautiful. She had expected it to be functional, the way Earth colonies were functional, the way Helion-4 was functional, the way every built thing she had ever seen was functional. But this colony had been built with care. The spires were not straight. They curved. They curved in patterns she did not recognize. They curved like the fronds of a fern, like the ribs of a leaf, like the path of water over a stone. The streets were not straight. They curved too. The buildings were not uniform. They were different sizes, different shapes, different colors in the projection. Some of them had lights in them. Some of them had gardens on their roofs. The whole city had been designed to be looked at, the way the mirror had been designed to be looked at, the way the gallery had been designed to be walked through.
"It was not a colony," Vera said.
Dax turned to her.
"It was not a colony," she said again. "It was a home."
The map rotated slowly. They watched it. The map showed them the city from every angle. It showed them the spires against the sky, the streets at street level, the roofs, the gardens, the windows. It showed them a city that had been lived in. It showed them a city that had been loved.
Then the map zoomed.
It zoomed without Vera telling it to. It zoomed in toward the center of the colony. It zoomed in past the spires and the streets and the gardens. It zoomed in toward a single point. It zoomed in toward a point that was underground, far beneath the foundation of the colony, far beneath the lowest level Vera had ever seen in any colony plan, far beneath the transit corridors and the service tunnels and the water reclamation systems.
A single coordinate blinked.
The coordinate was a single point in three-dimensional space. The point was deep. The point was far below the colony. The point was labeled, in the same script as the rest of the map, with a single word.
The word, when Vera looked at it, resolved into a word she could read.
The word was home .
Vera looked at Dax.
Dax looked at her.
"What is that," he said.
"I don't know," she said. "I think it's where the mirror is from."
"Where the mirror is from."
"Yes. I think the mirror came from there. I think the mirror was made there. I think the people who built the mirror lived there. I think that is what home means to the mirror. That is the only place it knows."
"Why would it show us this."
"I think it wants us to know where it came from. I think it wants us to know that it had a home, before it came here. I think it wants us to know that home was not on Earth, and it was not on Helion-4, and it was not anywhere we have ever been. I think it wants us to know that there are other places. I think that is what it has been trying to tell me, for nine years. That is what it told Mother. That is what Mother was afraid of."
"Afraid of what."
"That I would come up here and see this. That I would see the map. That I would see the coordinate. That I would want to go there."
Dax was quiet for a long time.
The map continued to rotate slowly around them. The coordinate blinked. The word home pulsed.
"Do you want to go there," Dax said.
Vera looked at the coordinate.
"I don't know," she said. "I want to know what it is. I want to know if it is real. I want to know if there are people there, or if there were people there, or if there is anything at all. I want to know why Mother was afraid of it. I want to know why Grandmother made her promise. I want to know what is so dangerous about a coordinate on a map."
Dax looked at the coordinate too.
"It is just a map," he said.
"I know."
"It is just a picture on a wall."
"I know."
"We cannot go there. Even if we wanted to. There is no ship that goes there. There is no route on any chart. There is no record of this place anywhere. It would take us the rest of our lives to find it, if it exists at all."
"I know."
"Then why is it dangerous."
"Because it is a door," Vera said. "Because the mirror is a door. Because the mirror has been a door this whole time, and Mother knew it, and Grandmother knew it, and they did not want me to know it. They did not want me to see the map. They did not want me to see the coordinate. They did not want me to know that there is a place the mirror came from."
The mirror, above them both, was silent.
Then it said, very softly, "Yes."
The word hung in the air. The word was not a command. The word was not an invitation. The word was an admission. The word was the first true thing the mirror had said all night.
Dax looked at the mirror.
"It said yes," he said.
"Yes."
"It admitted it."
"Yes."
"It is a door."
"I think so. Yes."
He looked at her for a long time. The map turned around them. The coordinate blinked. The word home pulsed.
"We are leaving," he said. "We are leaving now. We are going back down the lift. We are going home. We are going to sleep. Tomorrow I am going to file a transfer off this rock, and you are going to let me, and we are never going to talk about this again."
"Dax."
"We are never going to talk about this again."
He stood up. He walked toward the door. The map continued to rotate. The coordinate continued to blink. The word home continued to pulse.
Vera stayed where she was.
She looked at the coordinate.
She looked at the mirror.
"Will you be here," she said. "Tomorrow. Will you still be here tomorrow."
"Yes," the mirror said.
"I will come back."
"Yes."
"Will you show me the map again."
"Yes."
"Will you show me how to read the script."
A pause. The mirror dimmed and brightened.
"Yes," it said. "When you are ready."
Vera nodded. She did not know if the mirror could see her nod. She did not know if the mirror understood what a nod meant. She nodded anyway.
She turned away from the mirror. She followed Dax to the door. The door was still open. The line of light from the corridor was still there. She stepped over it. She stepped into the corridor.
Behind her, the gallery door closed.
The mirror dimmed.
The coordinate continued to blink, somewhere in the projection, somewhere in the silver, somewhere in the place the mirror had come from.
Vera walked down the corridor toward the lift. Dax was ahead of her, his shoulders set, his back straight. He did not look at her. She did not ask him to.
The lift doors opened. They stepped inside. The doors closed. The lift began to move.
Down, this time.
Down toward the habitation ring. Down toward the apartment she shared with Grandmother Imara. Down toward the bed that would be cold when she lay down in it. Down toward the morning, which would come whether she was ready for it or not.
Vera pressed her hand against the wall of the lift.
The wall was warm.
She thought of the coordinate. She thought of the word home . She thought of the city with the curved spires and the curved streets and the gardens on the roofs. She thought of the mirror, silent now, somewhere above her, waiting.
The lift descended. The lights in the corridor came up, one by one, as they passed each level. The air grew warmer. The smell of recycled air grew stronger.
Dax did not speak.
Vera did not speak.
The lift reached the bottom. The doors opened. The corridor stretched out before them, long and pale and ordinary.
They stepped out.
They began to walk.
Behind them, far above, the mirror waited, and the coordinate blinked, and somewhere, in a place that was not on any chart, a city with curved spires turned slowly in the dark.