Chapter 28: What Destruction Actually Looks Like

They were twelve steps into the corridor when the mirrors woke.

It was not a sound. That was the first thing Elias registered and would not stop registering afterward — the absence of any audible alarm, no bell, no siren, no enchanted voice speaking in calm procedural tones the way the Ministry's public notification charms did when a Trace-Wand flagged a Level Three violation. There was only the light: every mirror surface in the corridor flaring simultaneously to a flat, sourceless white, the particular white of a blank examination page held up to a lamp, a white that had nothing behind it and watched everything in front of it.

Sera put her hand on his arm. He had already stopped moving.