The glow didn’t ripple.
In the physical world, six thousand deep-water lengths beneath the swell of the Southern Ocean, the water was churning with cold-seep upwellings and the settling silt of the dredged trench. But inside the eight-sided frame of the Speculum of Forfeited Paths, the silvered plane was motionless, flat as an autopsy slab.
The three gold-silver metal foundation plates had welded themselves into the frame with terrifying permanence. The ancient tarnish was gone. The greasy, yellowed film that had obscured the deeper tiers of the mirror for four hundred years had boiled away into nothingness. That left the upright descent of the voids exposed in total, razor-sharp definition.
Ren Vale knelt on the drowned dark rock terrace. His sodden apron was heavy against his thighs, his gloved fingers white where they gripped the cold metal rim. Through his vulcanized gum mouthpiece, his breath hissed in a ragged, rhythmic cycle: intake of dense, stone salt water, pause, wet exhaust.
“Ren,” Mira whispered.
Her voice hummed through his time bone, thin and sharp. Her left hand had dropped her linen embroidery. Her fingers gripped his shoulder, her boxwood thimble pressing hard against his collar bone. Beside her, her right arm—the smoky, many-sided quartz that stretched from her collarbone to her fingertips—was glowing with a wild, pulsing violet. The crystal-clear inclusions within her stone-hard ribs chimed at a hum so high it set Ren’s back teeth to aching.
