The Room Behind the Mirrors

By midnight, the Hall of Mirrors had become a palace of teeth. Splinters glittered in every corridor, set into the carpets and lodged in the velvet coats of fleeing patrons. The chandeliers still burned, though their light no longer found anything smooth enough to return it.

Isaac stood beneath the great rotunda with blood on one palm. He had cut himself on a fragment no larger than a fingernail, but the shard had not reflected his face. It had shown an older boy crouched beneath a table, one hand clamped over his mouth while smoke curled along the ceiling.

Isaac dropped it.

“Appraiser,” called the Hall’s director from the balcony. “Find the source. Find the fraud. Find someone to blame.”

The director’s voice trembled beneath its garment, a magnificent coat woven from the lie that he had never been afraid. Its gold threads were loosening.

Isaac looked across the wreckage. Among the broken mirrors, something gray ran like a vein toward the service stairs. It was not cloth exactly. It was rough, fibrous, and stubbornly dull. He followed it before he could decide not to.

The strand led beneath the public floors, past locked wardrobes and rooms where unfinished lies hung from hooks like skinned animals. At the bottom of the stairs, Isaac found a door that had never appeared in any reflection. Its brass plate read: UNDERLININGS—DISCARDED TRUTHS.

The lock had been torn open.

Inside, the air smelled of dust, wool, and rain. Bales of truth-cloth crowded the walls, each stamped with the name of a customer who had paid to have their honesty hidden. In the middle of the room, the silent jester sat on an overturned crate.

His costume was still bright with childish lies: a mother who always came back, a king who loved his smallest son, a moon that listened when spoken to. Yet the jester’s hands were bare. Between them he held the gray strand.

Isaac drew the small appraisal knife from his sleeve. “You brought this here.”

The jester tilted his head.

“Why?”

He pointed at Isaac’s bleeding palm, then at the nearest bale of underlining. Finally, he touched two fingers to his own chest and shook his head.

Not mine, Isaac thought. Or not only mine.

The jester rose and pressed the strand against a wall of discarded truth. Threads stirred inside the bale. A seam appeared, then widened. Through it came the smell of smoke.

The room lurched.

Isaac was beneath the table again. He was smaller, perhaps eight years old. Across from him crouched the older boy from the mirror, his face streaked with soot. Somewhere above them, adults shouted that the fire had been an accident. The older boy shoved a bundle into Isaac’s arms—a coat, torn down the front, its lining exposed.

“Say you saw no one,” the boy whispered. “Then they can’t take you too.”

The memory broke before Isaac could see the boy’s face.

Far above, a bell began ringing. Not the Hall’s alarm, but the thin brass bell used when a garment arrived for appraisal. The sound descended through the floors, impossibly clear.

The door opened.

Maeve stood on the threshold, carrying a coat with a pale, visible seam running from collar to cuff. Her expression hardened when she saw Isaac, then changed when she saw the gray thread in the jester’s hands.

“That seam,” Isaac said. “You made it.”

“I repaired what was already there.”

The jester stepped between them and pointed to the coat. Beneath Maeve’s seam, something moved as though a second lining were trying to get free.

From the garment came a boy’s muffled voice.

“Isaac?”